Views from one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin.

Empathy is an integral aspect of human existence. Without at least a basic ability to access others’ affective life, social interactions would be well-nigh impossible. Yet, recent studies seem to show that the means we have acquired to access others’ emotional life no longer function well in what has become our everyday business – technologically mediated interactions in digital spaces. If this is correct, there are two important questions: (1) What makes empathy for frequent internet users so difficult? and (2) (...) What can we do to alleviate the negative consequences? Correspondingly, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, we identify structural differences between offline and technologically mediated interactions that can explain why digital empathy is harder to achieve. Second, drawing on the literature on ‘situated affectivity,’ we consider the idea of modifying digital spaces in ways specifically designed to ‘scaffold’ empathy where our evolved mechanisms fail. Section 2 argues that empathy is requires interpreting the behavior of embodied subjects. Section 3 identifies three factors that are crucial for this interpretative endeavor: the empathizer’s affective repertoire, their perceptual input, and their background knowledge. Section 4 argues that technologically mediated interactions differ from face-to-face interactions with regard to these factors in ways which render our evolved empathy mechanisms less effective in the digital world. Section 5 introduces the idea that situational factors can serve as ‘empathic scaffolds,’ i.e., as ‘tools’ that can ‘shape’ people’s empathic reactions. Section 6 wraps up the main line of reasoning, responds to objections and invites further scholarship. (shrink)

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by (...) Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice-which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion-Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago. (shrink)

A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. He moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most (...) versatile writers of the twentieth century. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times. (shrink)

Arguing for controversial readings of many of the canonical figures, the book also focuses on lesser-known writers such as Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Nicolas ...

‘Borders’ will be in the twenty-first century what ‘frontiers’ where in the nineteenth. Frontiers were conceived as the line indicating the last point in the relentless march of civilization. On the one side of the frontiers was civilization; on the other, nothing; just barbarism or emptiness. The march of civilization and the idea of the frontiers created a geographic and bodygraphic divide. Certain areas of the planet were designated as the location of the barbarians, and since the eighteenth century, of (...) the primitives. In one stroke, bodies were classified and assigned a given place on the planet. But who had the authority to enact such a classification, and what was the logic of that classification? Furthermore, the classification of the world by region, and the link established between regions and people inhabiting them, was parallel to the march of civilization and companions of it: on the other side of the epistemic frontiers, people do not think or theorize; hence, one of the reasons they were considered barbarians. (shrink)

In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

On a currently popular reading of Locke, an idea represents its cause, or what God intended to be its cause. Against Martha Bolton and my former self (among others), I argue that Locke cannot hold such a view, since it sins against his epistemology and theory of abstraction. I argue that Locke is committed to a resemblance theory of representation, with the result that ideas of secondary qualities are not representations.

We analyse theories and research approaches in ecology and find that they fall into two internally homogeneous groups of linked ideas, each comprising a unique set of premises. The two sets of interpretive statements are thus mutually exclusive; they constitute alternative theoretical developments in ecology and should not be seen as complementary. They can, therefore, be considered two paradigms (Kuhn, 1962). Our interpretation is supported by the minimal overlap, if any, in the premises and research directions of the two approaches. (...) We label the dominant group of ideas the demographic paradigm and the less developed one the autecological paradigm. The internal logic of the demographic paradigm of ecology is strongly developed and consistent. Its premises and logic extend into current models of population genetics, biogeography, palaeontology, evolutionary theory and conservation biology. Nevertheless, many phenomena contradict the premises of the demographic paradigm; these contradictions cannot be accommodated within its theoretical framework without major disruptions in logic ensuing. Such phenomena can, in contrast, be understood in terms of the autecological paradigm. Because the status and strengths of the autecological paradigm are generally unrecognised and because autecology is frequently misrepresented in the literature, we redefine its premises and clarify its structure and aims as an aid to its future development. (shrink)

Este ensaio pretende explorar a hipótese de que haveria subjacente à indistinção criada na figura do monstro de Frankenstein, entre o humano e não-humano, um princípio mimético que embora não necessariamente implique o monstruoso, foi a ele associado. Entender que algo que imita a perfeição de um ser humano, em todas as suas características, sobretudo linguísticas, seria um ser humano, ou seja, ter a imitação como critério para se definir o humano, é colocado em questão no romance de Mary Shelley.

Mental causation, our mind's ability to causally affect the course of the world, is part and parcel of our ‘manifest image’ of the world. That there is mental causation is denied by virtually no one. How there can be such a thing as mental causation, however, is far from obvious. In recent years, discussions about the problem of mental causation have focused on Jaegwon Kim's so-called Causal Exclusion Argument, according to which mental events are ‘screened off’ or ‘preempted’ by physical (...) events unless mental causation is a genuine case of overdetermination or mental properties are straightforwardly reducible to physical properties. (shrink)

This collection of essays strikes new ground in our understanding of Kierkegaard's Either/Or and his authorship as a whole.

The goal of this paper is to explore the significance of Montague’s paradox—that is, any arithmetical theory $T\supseteq Q$ over a language containing a predicate $P$ satisfying $P\rightarrow \varphi $ and $T\vdash \varphi \,\therefore\,T\vdash P$ is inconsistent—as a limitative result pertaining to the notions of formal, informal, and constructive provability, in their respective historical contexts. To this end, the paradox is reconstructed in a quantified extension $\mathcal {QLP}$ of Artemov’s logic of proofs. $\mathcal {QLP}$ contains both explicit modalities $t:\varphi $ (...) and also proof quantifiers $x:\varphi $. In this system, the basis for the rule NEC is decomposed into a number of distinct principles governing how various modes of reasoning about proofs and provability can be internalized within the system itself. A conceptually motivated resolution to the paradox is proposed in the form of an argument for rejecting the unrestricted rule NEC on the basis of its subsumption of an intuitively invalid principle pertaining to the interaction of proof quantifiers and the proof-theorem relation expressed by explicit modalities. (shrink)

The background for this special issue is the multidisciplinary workshop "Minds, Models and Mechanisms: Current Trends in Philosophy of Psychiatry" which was held at Saarland University in April 2021. Though we had to switch to an online format due to the pandemic, the discussions at the event have been extremely inspiring. It brought together experts from diverse disciplines, like clinical psychiatry, neuroscience, computational modelling, philosophy of mind and cognition, and philosophy of science. Joining forces, researchers from these disciplines presented their (...) ideas on the subject. In the aftermath of the workshop, the organizers issued an open call for contributions. After a rigorous review process five papers made it into the final issue, each making an original contribution to the field. (shrink)

The Paradox of the Knower was originally presented by Kaplan and Montague [26] as a puzzle about the everyday notion of knowledge in the face of self-reference. The paradox shows that any theory extending Robinson arithmetic with a predicate K satisfying the factivity axiom K → A as well as a few other epistemically plausible principles is inconsistent. After surveying the background of the paradox, we will focus on a recent debate about the role of epistemic closure principles in the (...) Knower. We will suggest this debate sheds new light on the concept of knowledge which is at issue in the paradox – i.e. is it a “thin” notion divorced from concepts such as evidence or justification, or is it a “thick” notion more closely resembling mathematical provability? We will argue that a number of features of the paradox suggest that the latter option is more plausible. Along the way, we will provide a reconstruction of the paradox using a quantified extension of Artemovʼs [2] Logic of Proofs, as well as a series of results linking the original formulation of the paradox to reflection principles for formal arithmetic. On this basis, we will argue that while the Knower can be understood to motivate a distinction between levels of knowledge, it does not provide a rationale for recognizing a uniform hierarchy of knowledge predicates in the manner suggested by Anderson. (shrink)

In his theory of time Aristotle does not often mention the present time and nowhere gives a detailed account of it. Nonetheless, present time plays an important role in his conception. I primarily argue for the following claims: (1) According to Aristotle there is a perception of motion and there is a perception of time. These combined perceptions can neither occur in the past nor in the future nor in an indivisible now. Thus, there must be a present time. (2) (...) Aristotle acknowledges the passage of time. This passage of time can only be understood as a passing present. And since an indivisible now cannot pass, the passage of time delivers a further argument for the basic assumption of a present time. – For the most part I simply follow Aristotle’s argument in Physics IV 10 and 11. In doing so, I distinguish present time and now in the introductory puzzles, investigate the passing present in the co-perception of change and time, discuss the relation between change and the passage of time as well as the relation between the passing present and the different nows. (shrink)

This study aims at justifying one of Gilbert Durand’s postulates according to which all imaginaire (as a result of mental imagery) is anchored in our physiology but by directing it rather now towards our neurophysiology. New advances in neurobiology, connectome and neurogenomics lead to rethinking the framework of psychic activity and the induction of neural images.

In this radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Walter E. Wehrle demonstrates that developmental theories of Aristotle are based on a faulty assumption: that the fifth chapter of Categories is an early theory of metaphysics that Aristotle later abandoned.

Based on a comparison of various sources, such as different editions, correspondence, reviews, and lecture transcripts, it is shown that Ludwig Heinrich Jakob’s Outline of the General Logic and Critical Elements of Metaphysics in General uses one or more transcripts of Kant’s Logic Lectures as a source. In addition to the thus far known texts by Kiesewetter and Hippel, Jakob’s textbook should therefore also be added to the list of secondary transmissions of Kant’s Logic Lectures.

Albert Einstein's bold assertion of the form-invariance of the equation of a spherical light wave with respect to inertial frames of reference became, in the space of six years, the preferred foundation of his theory of relativity. Early on, however, Einstein's universal light-sphere invariance was challenged on epistemological grounds by Henri Poincaré, who promoted an alternative demonstration of the foundations of relativity theory based on the notion of a light-ellipsoid. Drawing in part on archival sources, this paper shows how an (...) informal, international group of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers, including Einstein, Paul Langevin, Poincaré, Hermann Minkowski, Ebenezer Cunningham, Harry Bateman, Otto Berg, Max Planck, Max Laue, A. A. Robb, and Ludwig Silberstein, employed figures of light during the formative years of relativity theory in their discovery of the salient features of the relativistic worldview. (shrink)

Depuis l'exil, le philosophe W. Benjamin recompose, dans une sA(c)rie de brA]ves vignettes, ses souvenirs d'enfance A Berlin. Loin de l'anecdote, il s'agit d'une vA(c)ritable plongA(c)e dans l'enfance et dans l'histoire, oA se retrouvent les thA]mes essentiels de la philosophie benjaminienne. Ce texte restA(c) inA(c)dit du vivant de l'auteur, est dA(c)sormais connu en plusieurs variantes, dont celle-ci est la derniA]re A laquelle il ait mis la main. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) est un philosophe, historien de l'art, critique littA(c)raire, critique d'art (...) et traducteur (notamment de Balzac, Baudelaire et Proust) allemand de la premiA]re moitiA(c) du XXe siA]cle, rattachA(c) A l'A(c)cole de Francfort. Traduction et prA(c)face de Pierre Rusch Postscriptum de Patricia Lavelle. (shrink)

Traducción de “Neue Dichtung in Rußland” escrito por Walter Benjamin originalmente en 1927 para la revista i10, publicada en Ámsterdam por Arthur Lehning entre 1927 y 1929. Tomamos el texto del tomo II/2 de la edición canónica de los escritos reunidos, Gesammelte Schriften, editados por Rolf Tiedemann y Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp, 1997 (pp. 755-762). Tomás Sufotinsky, [tradução, apresentação e notas].

Walter Kendrick traces the relatively recent concept of pornography—the word was not coined until the late 18th century—which became a public issue once the printing press gave ordinary people access to the erotica of the Greeks and Romans, the art and literature of the French enlightenment, and the poems of the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland's _Fanny Hill_. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of _Madame Bovary_ and _Lady Chatterly's Lover_, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and the (...) Internet, Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. (shrink)

The article gathers five new autographed testimonies from Kant’s life: a dedication copy to Hasse, a fragment on plagiarism, a letter of office from the second rectorate (1788), and two album-amicorum entries with a Persius quotation via Alexander Pope.