My goal is to reflect on the phenomenon of inadvertent creation and argue that—various objections to the contrary—it doesn’t undermine the view that fictional characters are abstract artifacts. My starting point is a recent challenge by Jeffrey Goodman that is originally posed for those who hold that fictional characters and mythical objects alike are abstract artifacts. The challenge: if we think that astronomers like Le Verrier, in mistakenly hypothesizing the planet Vulcan, inadvertently created an abstract artifact, then the (...) “inadvertent creation” element turns out to be inescapable yet theoretically unattractive. Based on considerations about actually existing concrete objects featured in fictional works (as Napoleon is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace), I argue that independently of one’s stand on mythical objects, admitting fictional characters as abstract artifacts is enough to give rise to the challenge at hand; yet this very point serves to undermine the challenge, indicating that inadvertent creation is not nearly as worrisome as Goodman suggests. Indeed, the inadvertent creation phenomenon’s generality extends far beyond objects of fiction and myth, and I will use this observation to counter a further objection. Taking fictional characters (and mythical objects) to be abstract artifacts therefore remains a viable option. (shrink)

The views of myth advanced by Eliade, Jung, and Campbell are as flawed as they have been influential. Despite differences, all three concur in granting myth the status of a product of natural signification. The result is an obscurantist representation of myth, which in fact abets myth’s aim to represent itself as timeless, noncontingent, apolitical fact. Barthian analysis of myth exposes this aim by identifying its semiotic structure. This study applies that analysis to the myth of Pandora as an instance (...) of how myth insinuates itself into ordinary signs in order to pass as elementary and also elemental truth. (shrink)

Many who think that some abstracta are artefacts are fictional creationists, asserting that fictional characters are brought about by our activities. Kripke (1973), Salmon (1998, 2002), and Braun (2005) further embrace mythical creationism, claiming that certain entities that figure in false theories, such as phlogiston or Vulcan, are likewise abstracta produced by our intentional activities. I here argue that one may not reasonably take the metaphysical route travelled by the mythical creationist. Even if one holds that fictional characters (...) are artefact one ought not further hold that mythical objects are, too. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1843) thought that proper names denote individuals and do not connote attributes. Contemporary Millians agree, in spirit. We hold that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its referent. We also think that the semantic content of a declarative sentence is a Russellian structured proposition whose constituents are the semantic contents of the sentence’s constituents. This proposition is what the sentence semantically expresses. Therefore, we think that sentences containing proper names semantically express singular propositions, which (...) are propositions having individuals as constituents. For instance, the sentence ‘George W. Bush is human’ semantically expresses a proposition that has Bush himself as a constituent. Call this theory Millianism. Many philosophers initially find Millianism quite appealing, but find it much less so after considering its many apparent problems. Among these problems are those raised by non-referring names, which are sometimes (tendentiously) called empty names. Plausible examples of empty names include certain names from fiction, such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’, which I shall call fictional names, and certain names from myth and false scientific theory, such as ‘Pegasus’ and ‘Vulcan’, which I shall call mythical names. I have defended Millianism from objections concerning empty names in previous work (Braun 1993). In this paper, I shall re-present those objections, along with some new ones. I shall then describe my previous Millian theory of empty names, and my previous replies to the objections, and consider whether the theory or replies need revision. I shall next consider whether fictional and mythical names are really empty. I shall argue that at least some utterances of mythical names are. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars' conclusion in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" that "the Given" is a "Myth" quickly elicited philosophical opposition and remains contentious fifty years later. William Alston has challenged that conclusion on several occasions by attempting to devise an acceptable account of perception committed to the givenness of perceived objects. His most recent challenge advances a "Theory of Appearing" which posits irreducible non-conceptual relations, ostensibly overlooked by Sellars, e.g., of "looking red", between the subject and the object perceived, (...) that can playa justificatory role vis-à-vis the corresponding beliefs, e.g., that the object is red. I argue that Alston undermines his positive plausibility arguments by first blurring and then ignoring crucial differencesamong various looks-concepts, and that his own putative "phenomenal" looks-concept demonstrably cannot play the justificatory role that he envisions for it. Both his critique of Sellars' arguments and his own alternative proposal thus fail on all fronts. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ conclusion in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” that “the Given” is a “Myth” quickly elicited philosophical opposition and remains contentious fifty years later. William Alston has challenged that conclusion on several occasions by attempting to devise an acceptable account of perception committed to the givenness of perceived objects. His most recent challenge advances a “Theory of Appearing” which posits irreducible non‐conceptual relations, ostensibly overlooked by Sellars, e.g., of “looking red”, between the subject and the object perceived, (...) that can play a justificatory role vis‐à‐vis the corresponding beliefs, e.g., that the object is red. I argue that Alston undermines his positive plausibility arguments by first blurring and then ignoring crucial differences among various looks‐concepts, and that his own putative “phenomenal” looks‐concept demonstrably cannot play the justificatory role that he envisions for it. Both his critique of Sellars’ arguments and his own alternative proposal thus fail on all fronts. (shrink)

In recent years, the relationships between systems of symbolic representations and cities have given rise to an often rich and stimulating consideration among various specialists in human sciences, namely, historians, anthropologists, semiologists and sociologists, among others. Urban conglomerates can no longer be conceived as simple assemblages of more or less functional constructions. The city is as much a mental concept as it is a physical reality. It is made up of images that give it a meaning. It does not exist (...) independently of the sum of subjective interpretations that are continually made by its inhabitants. Our Western perception of the city may be influenced by romanesque literature or the memory of a painting, in other words, by imaginary worlds. It varies according to individual memory: each of us is attached to the different urban spaces of his souvenirs, emotions arising from family history or the duration of a lifetime. These personal projections are all the more important because they command a certain number of daily actions and furnish a framework of orientation to every citizen. They contribute to giving a moral quality to urban space and transform physical objects into concepts, into more or less determined signs. (shrink)

In several papers, Petr Koťátko defends an “ontologically modest account of fictional characters”. Consider a position (which I have been defending) that is anything but ontologically restrained: positing fictional characters like Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace as abstract artifacts. I will argue, first, that such a position turns out to offer a nice fit with Petr Koťátko’s proposal about narrative fiction, one that fares better than an alternative pretense-based theory that doesn’t posit Bolkonsky as existing in any sense. Second, (...) I will explore a recent challenge by Jeffrey Goodman—which I will call the inadvertent creation challenge—that is originally posed for those who hold that fictional characters and mythical objects alike are abstract artifacts. The crux of the challenge is this: if we think that astronomers like Le Verrier, in mistakenly hypothesizing the planet Vulcan, inadvertently create an abstract artifact, then the inadvertent creation” element turns out to be inescapable yet theoretically unattractive. Third, based on considerations about actually existing concrete objects being featured in fictional works (as Napoleon is in War and Peace), I argue that regardless of where one stands on mythical objects, admitting fictional characters as abstract artifacts is enough to give rise to the inadvertent creation challenge; yet this very set of considerations serves to undermine the challenge, indicating that inadvertent creation is not nearly as worrisome after all as Goodman is suggesting. Taking fictional characters (and mythical objects) to be abstract artifacts therefore remains a viable option. -/- . (shrink)

The mythical scientist in early twentieth-century America cut a lone figure, “impersonal as the chill northeast wind” and “oblivious of everything save his experiment.” He toiled through the night in his laboratory, “a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs,” as if working in the lab were a prayer that promised illumination—“alone, absorbed, [and] contemptuous of academic success and of popular classes,” he knew all about material forces, but he was (...) blind to the vital force that created all others. Accustomed to the “beautiful dullness of long labors,” he remained “illimitably ignorant” of literature, art, and music. He believed that unerring techniques in experimentation, impartial observations, and exquisitely minute calculations would bring progress—a steady march toward the truth. He chose the highest calling in the world because he was “intensely religious—so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.” He was “so devoted to Pure Science . . . that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong. Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.” This autocratic figure, brilliantly insane and tyrannically honest, embodied the cult of science and objectivity. (shrink)

What is the semantic contribution of anaphoric links in sentences like, ‘A physicist was late to the party. He brought some bongos’? A natural first thought is that the passage entails a wide-scope existential claim that there is something that both (i) was late to the party and (ii) brought some bongos. Intentional identity sentences are counter-examples to this natural thought applied to anaphora in general. Some have tried to rescue the thought and accommodate the counter-examples by positing mythical (...) objects. I present a new intentional identity sentence that cannot be so accommodated. I then propose a new account of intentional identity and other anaphoric sentences that does not appeal to mythical objects, but instead draws on traditional accounts of definite descriptions. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

Nathan Salmon appeals to his theory of mythical objects as part of an attempt to solve Geach’s Hob–Nob puzzle. In this paper I argue that, even if Salmon’s theory of mythical objects is correct, his attempt to solve the puzzle is unsuccessful. I also refute an original variant of his proposal. The discussion indicates that it is difficult (if not impossible) to devise a genuine solution to the puzzle that relies on mythical objects.

Cosmogonic myths, also referred to as creation myths, are theological and philosophical explanations of ancient myths of creation within a religious Homo sapien hamlet. In the context of this article, the word myth is attributed to the extravagant quixotic interpretation in anecdote of what is accomplished or ceased as a key or essential phenomenon. The terms or language concepts of cosmogonic or creation invoke the start of things, whether by the desire and action of a surpass Actuality, by emergence from (...) some eventful Actuality or by an additional alternative process. Mystics, scientists, philosophers and theologians of today set forward a method, to my mind, of pluralistic interpretation of the whole understanding and interpretation of a cosmogonic and creation myth that includes a variety of Actualities, in the world, according to basic Western and Eastern religious and rational classifications. These rational classifications have a phenomenological epistemic impact and even a certain righteousness of whoever wants to believe whatever of creation. Let it be …, as it should be ontological and epistemological and be positive for theologians as objects and religious sapiens as subjects. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

This review article examines the late agnostic New Testament scholar Maurice Casey’s criticisms of the so-called mythicist position, which argues that Jesus did not exist. Casey’s volume Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? is viewed along with Bart Ehrman’s critique of similar ideas in his text Did Jesus Exist? We will highlight important objections raised by these agnostic scholars against those in the mythicist movement, including topics such as various idiosyncrasies leading to historically deficient methods, egregiously latedating the canonical (...) Gospels, claiming inspiration from earlier mystery religions, and positing textual interpolations. (shrink)

With the emergence of man from nature art emerged among the objects. There was nothing to distinguish or exalt it in the beginning. Art did not separate one kind of thing from the others but was rather a quality common to them all. To the extent to which things were made by human beings, art did not necessarily call for the skill of specialists. All things took skill, and almost everybody had it.This is the way an essayist in the (...) eighteenth century might have begun a treatise on our subject. By now his recourse to a mythical past would sound naïve and misleading, mainly because we have come to pride ourselves on defining things by what distinguishes them from the rest of the world. Thus art is laboriously separated from what is supposed not to be art—a hopeless endeavor, which has more and more disfigured our image of art by extirpating it from its context. We have been left with the absurd notion of art as a collection of useless artifacts generating an unexplainable kind of pleasure.Rescue from this impasse of our thinking is not likely to come primarily from those of us who, established on the island of artistic theory and practice, look around at what else there is in the world to see; rather it will come from those who are curious about what human beings meet, make, and use, and who in the course of their explorations run into objects prominently displaying the property we call art. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have been driven to view art in the context of nature, ritual, shelter, and the whole furniture of civilization. As a characteristic recent example I mention a thorough interview study, The Meaning of Things, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, in which three generations of families from the Chicago area were questioned about their favorite possessions.1­ Pictures, sculptures, and all sorts of craft work turned up at a more or less modest place in the inventory of the home, and the reasons given for their value make wholesome reading for specialists in aesthetics. 1. See Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Symbols in the Development of the Self . Rudolf Arnheim retired from Harvard University as professor emeritus of the psychology of art. He then taught as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1983. His most recently published book is New Essays on the Psychology of Art. At present he is preparing a new edition of The Power of the Center, a theory of visual composition first published in 1982. (shrink)

The concept of value is so wide that could be considered as synonymous with human life and existence. The human being is engaged in the evaluations of being by doing every act. Life is a value that even its ascetic denial is a kind of valuation. When the human being enters the world, in fact he enters a pre-valued world and many values weighed upon him. To what extent is man capable of emancipating from pre-existing values and to what extent (...) can he succeed in creating value? The complex world today is very similar to the mythical world in which the blind and deaf valuing forces have overwhelmed and conquered human choices. It is here that human choices show a confusing and algebraic procedure, and freedom is as s chain that human being wrap around himself. (shrink)

In this reply I defend Kripke’s creationist thesis for mythical objects against Jeffrey Goodman’s counter-argument to the thesis, 35–40, 2014). I argue that Goodman has mistaken the basis for when mythical abstracta are created. Contrary to Goodman I show that, as well as how, Kripke’s theory consistently retains the analogy between creation of mythical objects and creation of fictional objects, while also explaining in what way they differ.

In my “Creatures of Fiction, Objects of Myth” (2014), I present and defend an argument for thinking that mythical creationism—the view that mythical objects like phlogiston and Vulcan are abstract artifacts—is false. One intriguing sort of objection to my argument has been recently put forth by Zvolenszky (2016); she claims that a crucial premise is seen to be unjustified once one considers the phenomena of inadvertently created abstracta—specifically, inadvertently created fictional characters. I argue here that even (...) if we admit inadvertently created abstracta into our ontology, my argument survives. I ultimately defend a view on which fictional characters (if real) may be countenanced as created abstracta whether purposefully created or not, yet mythical objects are best taken to be discoverable, Platonic abstracta (if real). We can see that such a hybrid ontology is justified once we take proper note of the nature of the sorts of authorial activities involved in fictional storytelling and scientific hypothesizing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection of Chinese Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars' ObjectsGraham ParkesSpirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection of Chinese Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars' Objects. Edited by Stephen Little. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago in association with University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 112.Let me introduce Spirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson (...) Collection of Chinese Stones, Paintings, and Related Scholars' Objects (edited by Stephen Little) with this quotation:The purest essence of the energy of the heaven-earth world coalesces into rock. It emerges, bearing the soil. Its formations are wonderful and fantastic. Some with cavernous cliffs, revealing their interior; some with peaks and summits in sharp-edged layers.... Within the size of a fist can be assembled the beauty of a thousand cliffs. Rocks large enough to be set up in great courtyards, small enough to be set upon a stand. Like gazing upon the peaks of Song Shan, or facing the entire range of the Meng mountains; sitting quietly, your imagination purified.... The Sage [Confucius] once said, "the humane man loves mountains," and the love of stones has the same meaning. Thus, longevity through quietude is achieved through this love.This passage articulates the very different understanding of stone—as "essential energy" rather than mere matter—that underlies the traditional Chinese passion for rock collecting and appreciating, for which even the terms "petromania" and "litholatry" seem too weak. It comes from the preface to the earliest surviving Chinese manual on the topic, Du Wan's Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest, compiled in the early twelfth century, and is quoted by Stephen Little in his erudite and informative introduction to this magnificent catalog for a unique collection of "spirit" or "strange stones" (guai shi) and other scholars' articles. This essay nicely complements and amplifies ideas set forth some fifteen years ago by John Hay, in his now classic introduction to the catalog Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China House Gallery, China Institute in America, 1985).Most cultures appear to begin with a natural reverence for stone in its natural state—one thinks of the Druids, the Indian tradition, the Polynesians, Native Americans, and Australian aboriginal culture—and many seem to retain that reverence as they develop. Indeed, when seen in a global perspective, the general lack of interest in (or respect for) rock in its unhewn state that characterizes the European and Anglo-American traditions seems idiosyncratic. But Chinese culture definitely has the longest and most enthusiastic tradition of collecting stones and arranging rocks in gardens: "strange stones" figure among articles of tribute offered to the mythical emperor Yu (mid-second millennium B.C.E.), and the emperor Wu Di (second century B.C.E.) is recorded as having had rocks arranged in the gardens of his palace. [End Page 306]Stephen Little's essay gives an eloquent account of the development of the practice of stone collecting in China, delineating its relationships with poetry and painting and other arts and practices, and containing numerous translations of passages from primary sources otherwise inaccessible to the non-reader of Chinese. Most of the rocks in the catalog are of the well-known Lingbi (sonorous) and Ying types, but other kinds are represented, too. The editor also supplies a context for appreciating the paintings, scrolls, and other articles from scholars' desks that are in the catalog: brush rests, inkstones, brush holders, and so forth. The sixty-six items from the collection are represented in excellent black-and-white photographs.The book is beautifully designed and produced—and is indeed a work of art in itself with its handsome, dark blue Chinese-style case. All in all, this a stylish and informative contribution to the growing literature on a philosophically fascinating topic. [End Page 307]Graham Parkes University of Hawai'iCopyright © 2001 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

Consider predicates like 'is a fictional character' and 'is a mythical object'. Since their ascription entails a corresponding Negative Existential claim, call these 'NE-characterizing predicates'. Objectualists such as Parsons, Sylvan, van Inwagen, and Zalta think that NE-characterizing properties are genuine properties of genuinely non-existent objects. But how, then, to make room for statements like 'Vulcan is a failed posit' and 'that little green man is a trick of the light'? The predicates involved seem equally NE-characterizing yet on the (...) surface fail to mark a genuine property o f things. Instead, the truth of such predications strongly supervenes on types of referential failure. Kendall Walton's anti-objectualist account of talk about fiction provides a neat solution to this supervenience problem by invoking special games of make-believe. The present paper claims that while Walton's view thereby gains an important advantage over objectualism, the solution faces problems of its own. The rest of the paper desribes another solution, one that assigns a large role to the idea of metaphor. (shrink)

In a remarkable development, I have constructed a new definition for a self-delimiting universal Turing machine (UTM) that is easy to program and runs very quickly. This provides a new foundation for algorithmic information theory (AIT), which is the theory of the size in bits of programs for selfdelimiting UTM's. Previously, AIT had an abstract mathematical quality. Now it is possible to write down executable programs that embody the constructions in the proofs of theorems. So AIT goes from dealing with (...) remote idealized mythical objects to being a theory about practical down-to-earth gadgets that one can actually play with and use. (shrink)

It is no accident that the book Benjamin wrote as a reader of himself, A Berlin Childhood, also begins with the description of a park, that of the Tiergarten zoo. However great the difference may seem between this collection of short prose pieces and Proust's three-thousand-page novel when viewed from the outside, Benjamin's book illustrates [his] fascination... A sentence in his book points to the central experience of Proust's work: that almost everything childhood was can be withheld from a person (...) for years, suddenly to be offered him anew as if by chance. "Like a mother who holds the new-born infant to her breast without waking it, life proceeds for a long time with the still tender memory of childhood" . Also reminiscent of Proust is the description of the mother who, on evenings when guests are in the house, comes in to see her child only fleetingly to say good night; so, too, is that of the boy attentively listening to the noises which penetrate into his room from the courtyard below and thus from a foreign world. The studied elevation of the newly invented telephone to the level of a mythical object is anticipated in Proust as well. And the relationship to and influence of the earlier work can be demonstrated even in the use of metaphor. But little is gained by this approach, and it would not be easy to refute the objection that such similarities lie in the authors' common raw material: childhood, the fin de siècle epoch, and the attempt to bring them both into the present. Peter Szondi was professor of comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin at the time of his death in 1971. His many influential works include Theorie des modernen Dramas , Versuch über das Tragische , and a five-volume collection of his lectures. Harvey Mendelsohn is the principle translator of the fourteen-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography; he is currently working on translations of a French commentary on Heraclitus and a selection of Szondi's essays to be published by Yale University Press. (shrink)

The aim of present paper is to introduce the concept of ‘expressive perception’ in Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical mythology. Having Cited Dorothy Emmet’s methodological objection, the author, by recalling Kantian aspect of Cassirer’s thought and referring to the concept of ‘expressive perception’, would make an attempt to reply on his part: according to Cassirer, this level of perceptive experience is the origin of the mythical form of thinking as a whole and, at the same time, is the original and irreducible (...) altogether. Thus, taking ‘mythical thought’ as an independent form of thinking, beside the ‘critical-empirical’ form of thinking, is, for one thing, completely cogent; for another, due to its dependency upon expressive form of perception, mythical thought would never be quite omitted, rather, keep living latently beneath the skin of mental life. In addition, author explains how much Cassirer owes, regarding to the concept of ‘expressive form of perception’, to Max Scheler. Avoiding to elaborate on Scheler’s detailed argument, Cassirer relies strongly on the consequences Scheler draws from his considerations in his work ‘Wesen und Formen der Sympathie’. Restating Scheler’s argument briefly should help in understanding Cassirer’s idea. (shrink)

Peter Geach's puzzle of intentional identity is to explain how the claim ‘Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob's sow’ is compatible with there being no such witch. I clarify the puzzle and reduce it to the familiar problem of negative existentials. That problem is a paradox of representations that seem to include denials of commitment , to carry commitment to what they deny commitment to, and to be true. The best proposed (...) solutions can be understood through this paradox; I evaluate them, and defend a new solution. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the question of whether Wilfrid Sellars has a notion of non-conceptual perceptual content. The question is controversial, being one of the fault lines along which so-called left and right Sellarsians diverge. In the paper I try to make clear what it is in Sellars' thought that leads interpreters to such disparate conclusions. My account depends on highlighting the importance of Sellars' little discussed thesis that perception involves a systematic form of mis-categorization, one where perceivers (...) mistake their sensory states to be properties of physical objects. I argue that the counterpart color and shape attributes of these states, which become ‘point of viewish’ when organized by the productive imagination, provides perceptual experience with its non-conceptual representational content. I then argue that this content is not a form of the mythical Given because one can only have a non-conceptual point of view on an object when an object is introduced into one's perceptual experience through the conceptual mis-taking of one's sensory states. So, while Sellars has a notion of non-conceptual representational content, it can only be salient in the context of a perceptual act that is conceptual overall. (shrink)

The main object of this project is how it can become possible to sense an invisible element such as the air. An installation will be created that will aim to provide a sensorial way of dealing with the air and the wind – that is air in motion – with the help of a computer-assisted environment. The objective is to engage the spectator in the navigation of semantic and sensual space that has its own quasi-mythical structure. The attention is (...) focused on the cognition dimension of the human body and senses and the enlargement of perception through the application of new technologies. The wind is a highly abstract phenomenon, with many physical and metaphysical aspects and is one of the basic elements of the physical universe. At the same time, the wind has an enormous impact on our lives, which we perceive, visually and acoustically only through its effects. That is why it has provided material for mythology and art throughout the centuries. In this project, the intention is to create a place where the visitor will be immersed into the landscapes of the winds of the world in order to increase his awareness and knowledge about them by merging technology, myth and body. The research is going to deal with both physical and metaphysical/mythological dimensions of the phenomenon. This starts with an investigation of references to winds and wind phenomena in mythologies world-wide, and extends over the scientific or causal explanations of the wind, as well as the investigation of its auditory and visual manifestations. Data from the Internet will be converted to audio and visual forms in a physical space, in real time. The online data that will be fed into the system are the intensity and direction of the winds at specific default locations on the planet. The visitor’s movements and his/her path in this given area will affect these audio-visual forms. The deliverables of the project (still in its definition phase) are:A study including the research methodology and the outcomes from the researchAn audio-visual interactive installation based on web data. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Myth, Song, and Music Education:The Case of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Swann's The Road Goes Ever OnEstelle R. Jorgensen (bio)In this article I explore how myth and song intersect in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King—and Donald Swann's song cycle setting of Tolkien texts, The Road Goes Ever On.1 (...) In so doing I am drawn back to Tolkien's The Hobbit, the novel from which The Lord of the Rings grew,2 and in the way of myth, I go back to the beginning to see what is there. After sketching some important themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and commenting as I go on Swann's musical setting of Tolkien's poems,3 I note several implications for music education.Why this particular tale? There are several reasons for my interest. Penned as a novel a half century ago, it was reborn at the turn of the twenty-first century in a widely circulated and highly acclaimed film trilogy. Its pagan and northern European roots are likewise intriguing, pointing back to a distant and imagined past. This extended historical tale can be seen as an epic journey in the genre of The Iliad and Beowulf.4 Such stories of other times were often sung as well as spoken, and Albert Lord describes the process whereby the telling and retelling of stories would be accommodated to the needs and interests of listeners, all of whom could be presumed to more or less know the story and identify with its characters.5 In a mass-mediated and technologically driven society in which attention is often focused on the present, evocations of the past fill a human need to know, individually and collectively, the story of how we came to be here. They prompt important philosophical questions such as those regarding the nature of good and [End Page 1] evil, ways to live a happy life, the role of supernatural events in human existence, and our responsibility to technology and the environment. And when studied in the context of a song cycle, we may better understand how myth and song intersect and be able to better reflect on what can be learned from this intersection for music education and its place in general education.Swann's song cycle evokes the cyclical journeys undertaken by Bilbo and Frodo, beginning with a party at home and ending triumphantly at home, although their pilgrimages generate yet others as ends become new beginnings. There is no end to this story; its beginning culminates yet others chronicled in The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, and its end commences another tale yet to be told. The rings in Tolkien's novel are figurative of these cycles: three rings for the elves, seven rings for the dwarves, and nine for mortal men. Bilbo's ring chronicled in The Hobbit is unveiled in The Lord of the Rings as the strategically most powerful one. Numerology, or the ancient study of numbers and their mythic significance, serves as a frame for the dense narrative that follows in Tolkien's texts. Swann sets a song cycle comprised of six songs, offering yet another number (whether intentional or not) in counterpoint to Tolkien's.The HobbitWithin this narrative are to be found various mythic qualities: a pilgrim on a quest, the band of travelers bound together in friendship by a common objective, the climactic but eventually successful journey, the struggle between good and evil, the crucial role of elemental natural forces and the interventions by powerful supernatural persons and forces in shaping events, the blurring of the natural and supernatural worlds, the inevitable tests that must be overcome in order to achieve the journey's objectives, the frailties of character demonstrated by the protagonist and his fellows, and the transformative quality of the journey on all those who undertake it.6 The action is set at a particular time and in a particular place with its own languages and kinds of writing (including runes or archaic angular writing that... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Around 390 BC, Isocrates wrote a text dedicated to the mythical Helen, Encomium of Helen. According to the rhetorician, his objective was to praise that character, who was recognized in two of Homer’s main works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although the isocratic text has already been thoroughly studied, we believe that Discourse Analysis will provide a more in-depth view of the text and its argumentative strategies. Thus, our objective is to analyze how the argumentative construction of the (...) Encomium of Helen took place. From the analysis, it was possible to notice that discourses have different layers, that Isocrates uses Helen’s story as a foundation for his argumentation and that the rhetorician reproduces imaginaries of femininity and masculinity, although this was not an explicit objective. (shrink)

On the broken myth in the philosophy of religion and theology Abstract. The article deals with the concept of broken myth, thus named by the German theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich (1886 - 1965). The thesis related to this concept is that all religions, including Christianity, use a mythical language. This language is expressing moral truths and metaphysical intuitions, but not the objective facts and states of affairs that may provide knowledge. The broken myth does not imply the rejection (...) of myth as a mere untruth, but rather its split into untruth, which is the garment of the story understood literally, and truth, which is (although not always and to varying degrees) a moral and spiritual inspiration. The broken myth is self-aware, but not discredited. The author formulates six reasons that can speak in favor of such view. He believes that its acceptance by the community of believers can be very difficult, so the traditional discourse of faith, in which one understands literally credo articles (including the notions of mystery and analogy), must be considered not as an anachronism, but as an autonomous partner of dialogue. -/- . (shrink)

This project was provoked by the almost nonexistent pushback from the Democratic liberal establishment to the (2020) exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, despite his acknowledged killing of two Black Lives Matters protesters against the police murder of George Floyd. It builds on three prior articles arguing for the revival of ancient Dionysian practice, Haitian Vodou, and Indigenous South American shamanism to empower leftist revolution. In essence, I propose an assemblage of spiritual practices that are accessible today for the neo-colonized 99% of (...) the global population, by synthesizing and reconstructing three democratic, lower-SES, Indigenous religions, all of which share a militant defiance of their respective tyrannical plutocracies. To avoid cultural appropriation, I center these reconstructed spiritual practices on the figure of the “mage,” a psychosocial healer loosely analogous to a shaman. And the mage’s signature activity, “magic,” I redefine naturalistically as free interpersonal performative action, practiced using two theoretical disciplines (philosophy and psychology) and two practical disciplines chosen by each mage. More precisely, Spirit/Dance channels the “spirits” of dead ancestors, historical figures, legendary heroes, mythical beings, and fictional characters, into the three ultimate objectives of “mindfulness” for psyches/souls, “liberation” for mindful bodies, and “social justice” for liberated communities, indirectly empowering long-term revolution. (shrink)

A good phenomenological theory must be able to account equally well for our experiences of veridical perception and hallucination, for our thoughts about universities, colors, numbers, mythical figures and more. For all of these are characteristic mental acts, and a theory of intentionality should be a theory of conscious acts in general, not just of consciousness of a specific kind of thing or of a specific kind of consciousness. In so far as phenomenology purports to be a general study (...) of intentional acts of consciousness, it must be able to account for acts with all kinds of objects and with all kinds of thetic character. Any limitation of these features puts the theory in danger of being an explanation of only some kinds of mental act, and of mis-characterizing the nature of intentionality in general. (shrink)

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly (...) why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep... I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. Every word has a weight here, in this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan "lamella". Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called "partial object": a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present: "'All right', said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin', thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'" The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a "something" that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal - more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the "living dead" which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void - its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die : when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. (shrink)

As Josef Pieper writes in his study “On Hope,” the virtue of hope is the virtue that completes the human being in its intermediary, temporal state (the “status viatoris,” or condition of being “on the way”). To be human is always to be “on the way” toward a fulfillment and completion not yet available to it (the “status comprehensoris”). Those who are hopeful direct themselves toward this end as to their fulfillment despite recognizing that it, in some sense, exceeds their (...) grasp, whereas those who are not hopeful either reject the possibility of such a fulfillment (despair) or prematurely suppose themselves to have attained it (presumption). While Pieper’s account of hope is largely based on the theologically-inflected account found in Thomas Aquinas, Pieper draws his conception of the nature of philosophy and philosophical reasoning ultimately from Plato. Philosophy, for Plato, on Pieper’s view, is essentially structured by the “not yet” condition that Pieper calls the status viatoris, as we see mythically depicted in Diotima’s account of Eros as being an intermediary daimon who, partaking of his parents’ opposed natures, is fundamentally characterized by poverty and lack (the “not”) on the one hand and by resourcefulness (the “yet”) on the other. The human soul, erotic at its very core, is structured by this twofold relation to the object of its greatest longing, Beauty Itself, which it doesn’t yet possess but for which it strives with all of its being. In this essay, I show that Plato has a “hopeful” sense of reason on account of the erotic condition (the status viatoris) that essentially characterizes the human soul’s spatio-temporal life during its incarnate, earthly state. If reason is, for Plato, to be true to itself, it must strive for the whole of wisdom even as it lacks that wisdom. Because reason is directed toward a fulfillment it can’t quite fathom, it must relate to that fulfillment essentially in the mode of hope. When, by contrast, reason becomes presumptuous, thinking that it already has a clear and secure cognition of the truth for which it seeks, it becomes dogmatic and runs the risk of falling into the misology diagnosed in the Phaedo when it inevitably comes up against some crack in its understanding. Likewise, when reason succumbs to despair—as we see, for example, in Meno’s eristic argument about the impossibility of learning—it becomes excessively skeptical and inert. Only when reason avoids the twin errors of presumption and despair can it continue in its pursuit of the whole of wisdom while remaining mindful of its limitations. (shrink)

In this ground-breaking article submitted for publication in mid-1986, Lucinda Vandervort creates a radically new and comprehensive theory of sexual consent as the unequivocal affirmative communication of voluntary agreement. She argues that consent is a social act of communication with normative effects. To consent is to waive a personal legal right to bodily integrity and relieve another person of a correlative legal duty. If the criminal law is to protect the individual’s right of sexual self-determination and physical autonomy, rather than (...) simply to regulate the type and degree of force that may be used to obtain compliance from a victim, the point of reference must be the individual complainant, as a person who makes choices, not social norms or objective tests based on the ordinary person. To determine whether consent is voluntary, attention must be directed to the presence or absence of factors that had a coercive impact on the individual complainant, a specific person with a collection of social, cultural, and psychological experiences, needs, fears, values, and priorities. Individuals have the right to exercise self-determination in accordance with their own values and perceptions, not those of a mythical victim. Accordingly, Vandervort argues that the prosecution may show either refusal, the absence of affirmative voluntary agreement (including passivity or the absence of consent due to unconsciousness), or circumstances that invalidate any apparent consent. Any of these prove the absence of consent for the purposes of establishing the actus reus of sexual assault. -/- The definition of consent as the affirmative communication of voluntary agreement is also shown to have a variety of implications for the interpretation and application of the law of sexual assault and the handling of evidentiary issues at trial in sexual assault cases. Key among these is the pivotal significance of the legal definition of consent as a tool to bar availability of the defence of “mistaken belief in consent.” Vandervort argues that in many cases the defence of “mistaken belief in consent” is based on ignorance of the law of consent, mistake about the legal definition of consent, or a failure to appreciate the legal significance of facts that are well-known, and not on a mistaken belief in an erroneous set of facts. The broad proposition asserted here is that a statutory criminal law is enforceable only if all defences based directly or indirectly on belief in the validity of extra-legal norms that authorize infringement of rights protected by the criminal law are barred. This proposition and the characterization of some mistakes about consent as legal, not factual, are also shown to be useful to exclude rape-myths and stereotypical assumptions---the stuff of which “social” definitions of consent have long been constructed---from the decision-making process at trial. -/- . (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has been (...) attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

In this article, I will draw on my own work and related publications to present some intuitions and hypotheses about the nature of the self and the mechanisms that lead to the development of consciousness or self awareness in human infants during the first 6 months of life. My main purpose is to show that the origins of a concept of self include the physical and the mental selves. I believe that it is essential when trying to understand what a (...) mental state is, that one identifies the social and physical aspects of the person to whom the mental state belongs. How can one identify a mental state or thought without making reference to a subject who experiences it (Hobson, 1990)? The other important feature of the self is that it is distinguished from other people and inanimate objects. ‘One's concept of self is a concept of a person; one's concept of persons cannot be a concept applicable only to a single individual (oneself), for the reason that in this case it would no longer constitute a concept'(Hobson, 1990, p. 165). I would like to argue that infants must be able to represent their physical and social selves in order to recognize that they are similar and different from other people, and to develop expectations and predictions about the behaviour of others (theory of mind). Unlike Strawson, I do not believe that the social and physical aspects of the self are, or become redundant to the nature of the self. I posit that the mature conscious self is a unique mythical and constantly changing entity, the formation of which is created not by the individual alone, but through continuous dialectical inquiry with other people. (shrink)

In this dissertation I defend a Kantian notion of the given. I show that something akin to Kant's theory of intuition is necessary to make sense of the normative role perception has in forming perceptual knowledge. ;Perceptual judgments require guidance from the objects they represent. I argue that this normative aspect of perception can be explained only by appeal to a non-conceptual content caused by the object perceived. But isn't this to appeal to the mythical given? I show (...) that it is not by comparing it to the result of Sellars' famous Myth of the Given argument. Contrary to the generally accepted view, what follows from Sellars' argument is not that the given is a myth, but rather that what is immediately present to mind cannot be known. This result leaves an explanatory option which the Sellars' critique does not consider. The given might be a part of knowledge while not itself being independently knowable. ;However, because the possibility of an immediate cognitive content is thought to have been foreclosed by the Sellars argument, much subsequent epistemology has overlooked this alternative. One widespread response has been to embrace coherence theories according to which justification is regarded as a relation between beliefs. These theories regard perception as a thoroughly causal phenomenon and consequently allow no role for perception in the justification of perceptual or other beliefs. ;I argue that in perceptual contexts only perception can decide the case between equally coherent conceptual determinations. But according to the coherentist this kind of justificatory function could not involve perception since perception is a thoroughly causal phenomenon. Against this view, I argue that some notion of the given, one which circumvents Sellars' criticism, is necessary to account for the normative role perception plays in perceptual belief. I show that Kant's notion of sensible intuition circumvents the Sellars critique. The idea of the given is redeemed in Kant's account, since it makes possible a theory of the normative role that perception plays in knowledge. (shrink)

A good phenomenological theory must be able to account equally well for our experiences of veridical perception and hallucination, for our thoughts about universities, colors, numbers, mythical figures and more. For all of these are characteristic mental acts, and a theory of intentionality should be a theory of conscious acts in general, not just of consciousness of a specific kind of thing or of a specific kind of consciousness. In so far as phenomenology purports to be a general study (...) of intentional acts of consciousness, it must be able to account for acts with all kinds of objects and with all kinds of thetic character. Any limitation of these features puts the theory in danger of being an explanation of only some kinds of mental act, and of mis-characterizing the nature of intentionality in general. (shrink)

Platonic myth meets American noir in this haunting series of philosophical images, from gigantic ferris wheels to offshore drilling rigs. It has been said that Plato, Nietzsche, and Giordano Bruno gave us the three great mythical presentations of serious philosophy in the West. They have spawned few imitators, as philosophers have generally drifted toward a dry, scholarly tone that has become the yardstick of professional respectability. In this book, Graham Harman tries to restore myth to its central place in (...) the discipline. In Chapter One, the narrator considers the motion of a Ferris wheel of many miles in diameter, which generates disasters and other events in its endless revolutions. In Chapter Two, he moves from the Chesapeake Bay to the depths of Hell, where he observes the show trial of pre-Socratic thinkers. In Chapter Three, the narrator encounters a battered steam calliope in India that may summon tsunamis, solar flares, and other catastrophic forces. In Chapter Four, he tries to explain reports of a ghostly boat in Japanese waters. In Chapter Five, he discusses causation on an offshore drilling platform. And in Chapter Six, amidst a deadly Paris hailstorm, he proposes a theory of objects without relations. (shrink)

This Paper claims that, contrary to the common assumption of Anglo-American jurists, collective rights are secondary to a analytically and experientially prior culture. Culture constitutes the identity and content of a collective right. The thrust of my Paper examines the disjunction between collective rights and the culture constituting a collective right. The clue to the disjuncture is that a collective right is assumed to be a rule or principle signified or represented in a written language. A rule or principle is (...) a concept. A culture, in contrast, is constituted from an experiential knowledge in an unwritten language. -/- I raise two contexts where a collective right cannot be identified without a consideration the analytically prior culture of the social group protected by a collective right: peremptory norms in international law and affirmative discrimination clauses in constitutional law. I then highlight a crucially important factor generating the unwritten language of a culture: namely, the collective memories of a group. Although a personal memory is experienced in a context-specific event, a member of a group absorbs its collective memory. The collective memory of the group exists before one is a member. Such a memory may defer to some event centuries earlier. The event may possess a mythic or even false character which cannot be verified except as a myth or historical falsity. One cannot be accepted as a member of a group without the group’s collective memory. Shared assumptions and expectations characterise a collective memory generating a culture. Such assumptions and expectations constitute meant objects. Meant objects are not posted by some source 2 external to the individual members. Meant objects are experienced. A jurist cannot analyze the signified collective rights without examining the social culture said to be represented by the boundary of the collective rights. One may be able to rationally justify a collective right in terms of its source, such as a basic constitutional text, the regularity of behaviour of lawyers and judges or some ultimate concept such as dignity. Such a rational justification, however, does not address why an individual is obligated to defer to the collective rights of an in-group in a state. One has to examine the social-cultural assumptions and expectations presupposed in the content of such collective rights in order to understand why the rights are obligatory. Such an examination dissolves the traditional boundary of legal knowledge which has excluded cultural phenomena generating the collective rights. (shrink)

This study constitutes the first systematic consideration of the connection between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. The central event in this relationship is a debate between the two held in Davos, Switzerland in 1929. The protocol of the debate has yet to be fully translated into English and no extended study of the confrontation between these two major thinkers presently exists. In short, though acknowledged as a unique and important event in the history of philosophy, the debate has received little (...) in the way of sustained historical and critical treatment. ;This study first presents the historical context of the debate and surveys the range of interaction between Cassirer and Heidegger. It next focuses on the text of the debate and its themes--Neo-Kantianism, "life philosophy," philosophy as ontology, and freedom and fate--the question of the human being's relationship to and in the world. ;Subsequent chapters trace the line of reasoning found in the Davos debate into and through other exchanges between Cassirer and Heidegger. Heidegger's criticisms of Cassirer's Mythical Thought are examined and an interpretation of Heidegger's concept of primordial understanding in terms of Cassirer's conception of mythical thought is ventured. This is followed by a comparison and contrast of key concepts from Heidegger's Being and Time and Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms--e.g., for Cassirer: "symbolic pregnance," "symbolic form," "expressive understanding," and for Heidegger: "discourse," "thrownness," "Dasein," "understanding," "the 'they'." ;The study closes by addressing Cassirer's final "ethical" objections to Heidegger's philosophy, examining Cassirer's unpublished critique of Being and Time as well as scattered shorter passages critical of Heidegger in published works. Cassirer's concern is seen to be with a conception of Dasein that focuses on the thrownness and anxiety of human being. Cassirer's objection to a philosophy with the idea of fate and destiny at its center is presented, as is his conception of philosophy and philosophy's task, and his idea of "humanitas" and human self-liberation. Heidegger's statement on "humanitas," "philosophy," and "thinking" in the "Letter on Humanism" is considered for its potential to serve as a "response" to Cassirer's express concerns. (shrink)

In the seminar XVI, D'un Autre à l'autre, in 1968/1969, Jacques Lacan claimed that there is an homology between the function of object a in the unconscious and the Marxian notion of surplus-value. Both concepts in fact revolve around similar axes: their reluctance to be localized in a certain place of the structure and their connection with the notion of surplus. In Chapter 7 of Das Kapital, Marx seems to imagine a purely mythical pre-capitalist society where production is only (...) devoted the pure satisfaction of basic survival needs and where labour is still controlled by the worker according to a certain purpose: with the irruption of the surplus in the capitalist mode of production the very qualitative dimension of the production and reproduction of commodities and human beings is commanded and organized by the pure drive of abstract accumulation. In order to rearticulate the incessant capitalist drive for abstract wealth, the symptom relies on the unsurpassable contradiction between labour-power and living-labour: essential in order. (shrink)

Dreams of gold have accompanied human history down through the ages. Gold is a beautiful and useful metal, easily shaped and immune to rust, and from the time of the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, it has been regarded as a precious metal from which jewels and decorative as well as everyday objects have been fashioned. Even before the concept of money turned it into one of the principal forms of exchange, gold was used as a medium of barter.Apart (...) from being of commercial and aesthetic value, gold is also a part of the stuff of fables and legends. Legendary and mythical lands where gold abounds have crowded the imaginative geography of almost all civilizations. The Bible itself, in the Book of Kings, speaks of the Mines of King Solomon, the Kingdom of Ophir, and the City of Sidon, while the prophet Zechariah observes that in the City of Tyre: “silver is heaped up like dust, and gold as the mire of the streets.” [Zachariah, 9.3]. (shrink)

A. F. Losev, one of the most important Russian philosophers and historians of ancient aesthetics and culture in the 20th century, develops in his ‘Dialectics of the Myth’ (Dialektika mifa), 1930, a personalistic ontology by using elements of neoplatonic philosophy and Orthodox Christian belief. According to Losev reality in all its different expressions and ontological strata must be understood as “mythical”, i.e. as “living mutual exchange of subject and object”. The subjective and personal aspect of reality is not grounded (...) in man’s epistemic relation to it alone; reality in itself has to be characterized as personal and subjective. The main philosophical opponent is Descartes, the founder of “modern rationalism and mechanism”. (shrink)

For the complex or boundary objects in which I am interested . . . dimensions implode . . . they collapse into each other . . . story telling . . . is a fraught practice . . . In no way is story telling opposed to materiality, [sic] But materiality itself is tropic; it makes us swerve, it trips us; it is a knot of the textual, technical, mythic/oneric [sic], organic, political and economic.

What general conclusions can be drawn about the reception of zymase, its relation to the larger shift from a protoplasm to an enzyme theory of life, and its status as a social phenomenon?The most striking and to me unexpected pattern is the close correlation between attitude toward zymase and professional background. The disbelief of the fermentation technologists, Will, Delbrück, Wehmer, and even Stavenhagen, was as sharp and unanimous as the enthusiasm of the immunologists and enzymologists, Duclaux, Roux, Fernback, and Bertrand, (...) and of Pfeffer, the experimental plant physiologist. Other skeptics—Voit, Kupffer, and Fischer—were conservatives in traditional fields. In all these cases it seems clear that professional commitments and outlook profoundly influenced the reception of zymase.In some cases there is a correlation with a specific earlier statement favoring the protoplasm theory or predicting a fermentation enzyme. Reynolds Green is a striking case of both. In 1893 he stated his belief that life processes in higher plants and fungi were identical, both being mediated by protoplasm.109 Thus he claimed that digestion was not carried out by enzymes, as in higher animals, but by the whole protoplasm, and so too fermentation in yeast: “All the metabolic processes must be carried out in the unicellular organism in the same mass of protoplasm.”110 But Green also insisted that there was no essential difference between “organized” and “unorganized ferments”; enzymes were simply more highly differentiated and specialized forms of primitive protoplasm. He spoke of “the alcoholic ferment” (that is, enzyme), and of intracellular enzymes—very advanced beliefs for 1893. Thus it is understandable why Green saw no reason to doubt his first negative results with yeast juice, and rushed into print. But it is also understandable that he persisted and soon became an outspoken advocate of Buchner's view; like Wroblewski and Pfeffer, he had already accepted the idea of an intracellular fermentation enzyme.The physiological chemists also fit the pattern in a special way. Physiological chemistry is generally regarded as the source of biochemistry; indeed, many early biochemists were trained in physiological chemistry, and imbibed there a progressive interest in enzymes and metabolism. It is not surprising, therefore, that on the whole Neumeister, Madfadyen, Wroblewski, and Loew accepted cell-free fermentation. But what is surprising, and significant, is the diversity of opinion in this group, from Abeles' living protoplasm to Wroblewski's organized array of active proteins. The feelings of the physiological chemists were mixed, and there was enough of the old protoplasm view in Macfadyen's and even Wroblewski's views to allow Buchner to see them as attacks on zymase. The ideas of physiological chemistry were also changing; the idea of protoplasm was already adjusting to the new interest in enzymes in the early 1890's. But in contrast to immunochemistry, the change in physiological chemistry was gradual, uneven, undramatic, and relatively invisible. For the new biochemistry, the tradition of physiological chemistry was the source of traditional conservatism as well as of new ideas of enzymes.In general, then, I claim that it was not experimental facts that determined attitudes toward zymase so much as previous commitments, experience, and expectations. Initially, at least, zymase was less a determinant of opinion than a touchstone of pre-existing opinion. Like a prism, it revealed the spectrum of existing attitudes toward vital phenomena.Also relevant here is the fact that the experimental evidence was entirely ambiguous; the interpretation of Buchner's experiments with antiseptics or dried yeast depended entirely on how far one was willing to stretch the scope of the terms “protoplasm” and “enzyme”. Likewise, how important one judged the instability of zymase to be, or the low level of in vitro activity, depended largely on one's point of view. There was no crucial experiment, no certain proof. Logically zymase could be regarded as protoplasm. A. Fischer did so in 1900;111 Macfadyen was still wavering in 1907;112 and Beijerinck was holding out as late as 1916.113 There were undoubtedly others. Besides the special case of Reynolds Green and the technologists, there are no recorded cases of conversion.But if there was no evidence to convert a dedicated protoplasmist, there was plenty to encourage a dedicated belief in the enzyme theory, and that, I believe, is precisely what happened. The arguments of Buchner et al in support of zymase had the greatest effect not on the protoplasmists but on those who were already predisposed toward the biochemical view. The zymase debate enabled the emerging group of biochemists to recognizethemselves as a group with a community of out-look and objectives; it brought the issue of protoplasm vs. enzyme into the open and gave it a specific and concrete issue on which to turn. The debate sharpened the biochemists' awareness that their point of view was becoming the new mainstream of biochemical thought.All this of course had an important secondary effect on those who opposed the new view, or who were not immediately concerned with it. After the zymase debate, it would have been almost impossible to ignore the new ideas; the dramatic and wide publicity the debate enjoyed would have made it difficult not to take sides. Buchner's successful defense of zymase itself became an important influence on opinion; the new movement had to be looked at with respect. But the primary effect of the debate, I assert, was on those who were already inclined to the new view. The outcome was not a mass conversion of individuals, nor the ejection of one idea by another. The sides probably did not change much; the real change was in the way each side regarded itself and its place in history. The zymase debate may perhaps best be regarded as a process of selection. Buchner's party became aware of itself as the new progressive point of view, while those holding the traditional view could no longer expound it publicly without appearing obstinate or old-fashioned. Thus the way was clear for the gradually wider establishment of the new ideas, especially among the new generation of biochemists. In this specific sense, the acceptance of zymase was a social phenomenon.This way of looking at the zymase debate also illuminates its coincidence with the emergence of biochemistry as a profession. The new professional trappings and organizations were the social manifestation of the new self-awareness gained from the zymase controversy. One of the most important effects on those disposed toward the new view was the awareness of an intellectual community and of the need to give that community social forms. The almost mythical importance of Buchner's “victory” over the old protoplasm theory that later became current is readily understandable. It was a useful ideology for a group anxious to assert the novelty of their approach, a novelty which they in fact felt quite keenly.But if the primary effect of the zymase controversy was on those predisposed to accept zymase, then obviously the success of zymase depended on the fact that change had already begun to occur. Indeed, one of the most striking, and again unexpected, results of this study is the extent to which the importance of enzymes was already recognized in the early 1890's. The new immunology clearly pointed the way. Macfadyen and Hans Buchner were looking for active proteins inside the cell in 1893. Reynolds Green, Wroblewski, and Pfeffer had all anticipated the discovery of a fermentation enzyme. Other discoveries in enzymology in the 1890's pointed the same way.114 Moreover, it is clear from this study that the old protoplams theory was adapting to the new discoveries concerning the importance of enzymes. The sidechains of the old protoplasm molecule were simply reinterpreted as enzymes, as in Wroblewski's theory, for example, or in Paul Ehrlich's extremely influential “sidechain theory” of antibody formation (1897). Despite the later views of Hopkins et al., the old protoplasm and the new enzyme theories were not irreconcilable; a continuity of development had already begun when zymase came so dramatically on the scene. Buchner himself observed that the difference between the two views had become largely verbal; in retrospect we might say, not verbal, but social and historical. The gap between the continuous change in ideas and the contemporary feeling of sharply discontnuous change is a measure of the elusive but real social and historical implications of the zymase debate, of the demise of an old establishment, and the emergence of a new.In retrospect, then, it is clear that a trend was already under way in various quarters when zymase appeared. But it was still a collection of isolated and dispersed events. The zymase controversy made the trend visible and gave it a dramatic unity. The debate influenced those who had already begun to change. It was so effective because things had begun to change and because it coincided with the direction of that trend. (shrink)