I reply to Houston Craighead, who presents two arguments against my version of the cosmological argument. First, he argues that my arguments in defense of the causal principle in terms of the existence being accidental to an essence is fallacious because it begs the question. I respond that the objection itself is circular, and that it invokes the questionable contention that what is conceivable is possible. Against my contention that the causal principle might be intuitively known, I reply to (...) his contention that again I have begged the question. Begging the question is not applicable in that I have not argued that a denial of the principle it possible, only that if it be denied, other endeavors likewise become impossible. Second, against my contention that the causal principle is really necessary, he asserts that the necessity predicated of propositions is solely logical necessity. I reject his contention that a really necessary proposition must either be logically necessary or else a plain contingent factuality. (shrink)

In Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Ethnography, Paolo Magagnoli has undertaken the complex task of linking different aesthetic contexts through a study of experimental documentary audiovisual projects, treating the work of contemporary artists such as Hito Steyerl, Joachim Koester, Tacite Dean, Matthew Buckingham, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ilye and Emilie Kabakov, Jon Thompson and Alison Craighead, and Aniri Sala. In what follows, I wish to develop three critical arguments that I hope will illuminate the book's central claims. (...) Magagnoli's main goal is to understand how these artists' utopian vision has undergone a temporal shift that is more preoccupied with remembering the past than... (shrink)