The compound eyes of insects exhibit stunning variation in size, structure, and function, which has allowed these animals to use their vision to adapt to a huge range of different environments and lifestyles, and evolve complex behaviors. Much of our knowledge of eye development has been learned from Drosophila, while visual adaptations and behaviors are often more striking and better understood from studies of other insects. However, recent studies in Drosophila and other insects, including bees, beetles, and butterflies, have (...) begun to address this gap by revealing the genetic and developmental bases of differences in eye morphology and key new aspects of compound eye structure and function. Furthermore, technical advances have facilitated the generation of high‐resolution connectomic data from different insect species that enhances our understanding of visual information processing, and the impact of changes in these processes on the evolution of vision and behavior. Here, we review these recent breakthroughs and propose that future integrated research from the development to function of visual systems within and among insect species represents a great opportunity to understand the remarkable diversification of insect eyes and vision. (shrink)

Insect and crustacean lineages diverged over 500 Myr ago, and there are continuing uncertaintles about whether they evolved from a common arthropod ancestor or, alternatively, they evolved independently from annelid worms. Despite the diversity of their limbs and lifestyles, the nervous systems of insects and crustaeeans share many common features both in development and in function. Cellular and molecular embryology techniques reveal good evidence for homologies in the developing segmental ganglia. In the visual system, this seemingly common programme of insect (...) and crustacean CNS development culminates in common adult neural function. Comparisons of the cellular anatomy and physiology of animals as diverse as flies and crayfishes indicate that the neural circuits in the lamina of their optic lobe have been inherited largely unchanged from a common ancestor with good compound eyes. (shrink)

In his lecture course “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” (1929–1930) Martin Heidegger repeatedly alludes to experiments with insects as examples for the relation of animals to the world. One report deals with a photograph made through the compound eye of a glow worm. By questioning what the glow worm might see, Heidegger separated animal vision from human vision as ontologically incomparable. In my paper I first show the source of Heidegger’s report and then discuss how deeper knowledge of the (...) original investigation might shed new light on Heidegger’s presentation and his conclusions. (shrink)

With the introduction of Deleuze’s conception of the flow of desire, Foucault’s explication of Velasquez’s Las Meninas is enhanced through a new interpretation of Picasso’s lengthy cubist study of Las Meninas. By examining the arrow-headed structuration of the painting as filtered through panopticism, the single sided diamond that Foucault discovers in Velasquez’s painting is rendered as only half of the picture. Focusing the cone of sight on the panoptic figure and inverting the cone, with the bodies at the edges of (...) the painting serving as the hinges that hold the double perspective together, completes the diamond structuration of the painting with the inclusion of the synoptic dimension. As the viewer’s eyes are drawn across the figures in the forefront of the painting towards the circular mirror hanging on the black wall at the back of the painting, the opposite maneuver is happening simultaneously. The viewer usurps the position of an ambiguous and ever changing subject, and fills out this pan-synoptic scene. A new diagram that conjoins the operative structure of surveillance can decode the valuations of desired commodities, diagnose the economy of control, and program a mode of becoming that breaks our complicity in the social machine and produces unfamiliar, unforeseen, and transgressive behaviors that blaze lines of escape from the predominant system. The goal in this paper, by drawing together these Deleuzian and Foucauldian ideas and applying them to contemporary art, is to map or diagram the manipulation and reproduction of gender identities in the modern world. (shrink)

Over 10 years ago, Pax‐6 was shown to play an evolutionarily conserved role in controlling eye formation from Drosophila to humans.1 Since then, the identification of an entire cascade of conserved eye determination genes has brought a new understanding to the developmental relationship between the insect compound eye and the vertebrate camera eye.2 Additional studies are now beginning to suggest that even late aspects of eye development, including cell type specification, also share common molecular machinery. In this commentary, I (...) will discuss some of these findings, with a particular focus on the recent study by Dyer et al.3 describing a novel role for the Prox1 transcription factor in specifying horizontal cells in the mouse retina. As Prospero, the Drosophila homolog of Prox1, also participates in retinal cell specification, these data provide a forum for asking new questions concerning pathways that may regulate retinogenesis across evolution. BioEssays 25:921–925, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

For decades the study of social perception was largely compartmentalized by type of social cue: race, gender, emotion, eye gaze, body language, facial expression etc. This was partly due to good scientific practice, and partly due to assumptions that each type of social cue was functionally distinct from others. Herein, we present a functional forecast approach to understanding compound social cue processing that emphasizes the importance of shared social affordances across various cues. We review the traditional theories of emotion (...) and face processing that argued for dissociable and noninteracting pathways, as well as more recent evidence for combinatorial processing of social cues. We argue here that early, and presumably reflexive, visual integration of such cues is necessary for adaptive behavioral responding to others. In support of this claim, we review contemporary work that reveals a flexible visual system, one that readily incorporates meaningful contextual influences in even nonsocial visual processing, thereby establishing the functional and neuroanatomical bases necessary for compound social cue integration. Finally, we explicate three likely mechanisms driving such integration. Together, this work implicates a role for cognitive penetrability in visual perceptual abilities that have often been ascribed to direct encapsulated perceptual processes. (shrink)

We argue that although E-Z Reader does a good job in simulating many basic facts related to readers' eye movements, two phenomena appear to pose a challenge to the model. The first has to do with word length mediating the way compound words are identified; the second concerns the effects of initial fixation position in a word on eye behavior.

A patient arrives in the emergency room apparently in a comatose state. But is he really unconscious or just faking? The young doctors on duty are skeptical. Failing to get a reaction with a chest rub, they try a variety of methods that become increasingly sadistic—pressing on the patient's fingernail with a ballpoint pen, spraying his testicles with a skin‐freezing compound, announcing an imminent eye injection to scare the patient awake.I first encountered those chilling pen‐and‐ink images in a 2012 (...) comic book, Disrepute, authored by Thom Ferrier, the nom de plume for British general practitioner Ian Williams. Disrepute is part of a young but growing genre that Williams helped dub "graphic medicine" when he founded a website by that name in 2007. Using the graphic novel form, doctors, nurses, and patients are producing accounts that often reveal the dark underbelly of the world of medicine. From patients and their families, these include portraits of imperious and insensitive physicians or nurses; from doctors, explorations of the doubt that racks them when their treatment ends in a mistake or a patient's death. While the form is also referred to as “comics,” the work, as in Williams's strip, is bleak just as often as it is humorous. (shrink)

Common sense, affirmed Ferrier, can neither be set aside nor taken for granted by philosophy. Rather, it must be converted into philosophy, and this "by accepting completely and faithfully the facts and expressions of common sense as given in their primitive obscurity, and then by construing them without violence, without addition, and without diminution into clearer and more intelligible forms". In the period under discussion, the early nineteenth century, the attempt to elucidate the phenomena of mind and their linguistic moulds (...) came under the title of 'mental science' or 'analysis'. More specifically, the process envisaged for this science was inductive, what Dugald Stewart would call a dual operation of analysis and synthesis or Cabanis the method of decomposition and recomposition. Agreement on the use of such a procedure for the philosophy of mind or on the details of the technique employed was never unanimous: in the case of the latter, it had first to be established whether the 'scientist' was dealing at the outset with 'simple' or 'compound' phenomena and whether he was to proceed from the known to the unknown or vice versa. Beneath this controversy lay the roots of an earlier separation between the 'analysis of nature' and the 'analytic of imagination'. Michel Foucault, whose distinction this is, argues that these two directions of analysis begin to converge towards the end of the eighteenth century. But the moment of convergence, being fraught with difficulties for those at the intersection, is less than happy. This uneasiness of mind accounts, moreover, for the strain of conversion in 'Common Sense' philosophy. Nevertheless, where the struggles at the juncture are most intense, there is a commensurate heightening of philosophical awareness. Faintly visible in the first inquiries of Thomas Brown into causality and volition, it reaches a crescendo in his more mature reflections on memory and attention, the nature of consciousness and reflection itself. Emerging with this apprehension, and giving it depth, is Brown's sensitivity to the feelings of selfhood and his belief in the recovery, however imaginary, of the individual's past. That sense of an order to be captured and restored, combined with a recognition of the affections which, more often, reap the havoc of human nature, create in his writings the sort of excitement associated not with the resolution of dilemmas, but with a prolonged, agonizing and continual tension. The subsequent discussion moves towards as it is moved by that realization. (shrink)

The Drosophila compound eye is an excellent experimental system for analysing fate induction of identifiable single cells. Each ommatidium, a unit eye, contains eight photoreceptors (R1‐R8), and the differentiation of these photoreceptors occurs in the larval eye imaginal disc in discrete steps: first R8 is determined, then R2/R5, R3/R4, R1/R6 and finally R7. Induction of R7, in particular, has been extensively studied at the molecular level. The R8 photoreceptor presents on its surface a ligand, Bride of Sevenless, that binds (...) and activates Sevenless receptor tyrosine kinase in the R7 precursor. Autophosphorylated Sevenless initiates a Ras1‐mediated cascade, which eventually activates transcription factors in the nucleus via Raf1 and MAP kinases, resulting in R7 development. However, recent studies indicate that Sevenless (Sev) functions just to neuralize the cell and has no role in R7 fate determination per se. It appears that the R7 fate may represent the lowest rung of a ‘neuronal ground state’, which is attained without any specific inductive cue. It is plausible that the R7 precursor is actively prevented from taking on the neuronal fate and this inhibition is removed by activation of Sev. (shrink)

Co‐option of the eye developmental gene regulatory network may have led to the appearance of novel functional traits on the wings of flies and butterflies. The first trait is a recently described wing organ in a species of extinct midge resembling the outer layers of the midge's own compound eye. The second trait is red pigment patches on Heliconius butterfly wings connected to the expression of an eye selector gene, optix. These examples, as well as others, are discussed regarding (...) the type of empirical evidence and burden of proof that have been used to infer gene network co‐option underlying the origin of novel traits. A conceptual framework describing increasing confidence in inference of network co‐option is proposed. Novel research directions to facilitate inference of network co‐option are also highlighted, especially in cases where the pre‐existent and novel traits do not resemble each other. (shrink)

Co‐option of the eye developmental gene regulatory network may have led to the appearance of novel functional traits on the wings of flies and butterflies. The first trait is a recently described wing organ in a species of extinct midge resembling the outer layers of the midge's own compound eye. The second trait is red pigment patches on Heliconius butterfly wings connected to the expression of an eye selector gene, optix. These examples, as well as others, are discussed regarding (...) the type of empirical evidence and burden of proof that have been used to infer gene network co‐option underlying the origin of novel traits. A conceptual framework describing increasing confidence in inference of network co‐option is proposed. Novel research directions to facilitate inference of network co‐option are also highlighted, especially in cases where the pre‐existent and novel traits do not resemble each other. (shrink)

The members of the Six gene family were identified as homologues of Drosophila sine oculis which is essential for compound-eye formation. The Six proteins are characterized by the Six domain and the Six-type homeodomain, both of which are essential for specific DNA binding and for cooperative interactions with Eya proteins. Mammals possess six Six genes which can be subdivided into three subclasses, and mutations of Six genes have been identified in human genetic disorders. Characterization of Six genes from various (...) animal phyla revealed the antiquity of this gene family and roles of its members in several different developmental contexts. Some members retain conserved roles as components of the Pax-Six-Eya-Dach regulatory network, which may have been established in the common ancestor of all bilaterians as a toolbox controlling cell proliferation and cell movement during embryogenesis. Gene duplications and cis-regulatory changes may have provided a basis for diverse functions of Six genes in different animal lineages. (shrink)

This review is focused on recent advances in our understanding of the development of coordinated cell polarity, through experiments on the Drosophila compound eye. Each eye facet (or “ommatidium”) contains a set of eight photoreceptor cells, placed so that their rhabdomeres form an asymmetric trapezoid. The array of ommatidia is organized so that these trapezoids are aligned in two mirror-image fields, dorsal and ventral to the eye midline (or “equator”). The development of this pattern depends on two systems of (...) positional information that inform the cluster of cells that will form an ommatidium of anterior/posterior (a/p) and dorsal/ventral (d/v) direction. The former (a/p) is encoded by a progressive wave of development (the morphogenetic furrow). The latter (d/v) involves molecules known to act in tissue polarity in other organs and organisms. Our understanding of the function of these molecules rests not only on their mutant phenotypes, biochemistry, and expression patterns, but also on the spatial effects when mutant patches of cells are made (genetic mosaics). BioEssays 21:275–285, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The Drosophila Bolwig organs are small photoreceptor bundles that facilitate the phototactic behavior of the larva. Comparative literature suggests that these highly reduced visual organs share evolutionary ancestry with the adult compound eye. A recent molecular genetic study produced the first detailed account of the mechanisms controlling differential opsin expression and photoreceptor subtype determination in these enigmatic eyes of the Drosophila larva. Here, the evolutionary implications are examined, taking into account the dynamic diversification of opsin genes and the spatial (...) regulation of opsin homolog expression in other insects. It is concluded that, consistent with their common evolutionary roots, the Drosophila larval and adult eyes use the same mechanisms for the regulation of opsin expression and photoreceptor cell fate specification. Strikingly, the structurally highly derived Bolwig organs retained a more ancestral state of opsin expression and regulation. Inconspicuous in size, the Drosophila larval eyes deliver useful lessons in the reconstruction of homology between neuronal cell types with gene expression data, and on the conservative nature of gene regulatory network evolution during the emergence of novel organs from ancestral templates. BioEssays 30:980–993, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This essay examines the persistent engagement with cosmopolitan inclusivity through the endorsement of indigenous sacredness in works of ethnographic fiction. I focus on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, James Cameron’s Avatar, and Taiwanese writer Ming-yi Wu’s science fiction The Man with the Compound Eyes, three iconic environmental representations of indigenous knowledge. These texts illustrate how indigenous thinking has very often been transformed from place-bound, locally-embedded cultural traditions to an embodiment of Euro-American eco-spirituality that overturns both national boundaries (...) and the humannature divide at the turn of the twenty-first century. In settler environmental narratives, the insistence on the ethnographic mode strengthens the desire for authenticity and intimacy. (shrink)

In the remote deserts of Utah, at a location selected for clear air and remoteness from the lights of civilization is the Fly's Eye, a group of "compound eye" light detectors with photomultipliers for facets. It watches the night sky for the light made by the most energetic cosmic rays as they enter the upper atmosphere. Physicists using the Fly's Eye have found an exciting new result, the upper energy limit of cosmic rays. And they have also observed something (...) else, something entering the atmosphere from the direction of the Swan. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 59-82 [Access article in PDF] Bombing and the Symptom Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny Paul K. Saint-Amour Many used the Japanese word bukimi, meaning weird, ghastly, or unearthly, to describe Hiroshima's uneasy combination of continued good fortune and expectation of catastrophe. People remembered saying to one another, "Will it be tomorrow or the day after tomorrow?" One man described how, each night he was on (...) air-raid watch, "I trembled with fear.... I would think, "Tonight it will be Hiroshima." These "premonitions" were partly attempts at psychic preparation, partly a form of "imagining the worst" as a magical way of warding off disaster. —Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967) Robert J. Lifton's pathbreaking work on the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima focuses on the psychological aftermath of the bomb, but opens with a brief and surprising section called "Anticipation." Given the instantaneous and unprecedented devastation caused by the first atomic bomb, the anticipation of so singular an experience is just as difficult to imagine as its subsequent assimilation. In fact, the unassimilable nature of traumatic violence would seem to depend in some way upon the impossibility of its anticipation, as Lifton implies: "Neither past experience nor immediate perceptions—the two sources of prior imagination—could encompass what was about to occur." Yet Lifton also records an expectant, premonitory atmosphere in Hiroshima during the weeks before the bombing, a compound of past experience and immediate perceptions that, while inadequate to "encompass" the eventual experience of the bomb, cannot simply be dismissed as speculation that found an accidental correlate in the nuclear event. While no one in Hiroshima knew ahead of time what would occur on August 6, 1945, many had noted the city's eerie exemption from conventional bombardment and speculated as to the reasons for it. During the summer of 1945, a series of rumors circulated in Hiroshima, rumors attributing the sparing of the city, variously, to its modest military and industrial significance; to the presence of prominent foreigners there, possibly including President Truman's mother; to important American prisoners-of-war supposedly held in the city; to the number of its citizens who had emigrated to the US; to the presence of large numbers of American spies living among its citizens; to its physical appeal in the eyes of Americans who had saved the city as a site for their postwar occupation villas; and, most wishfully, to the wartime grace of a cartographic error: "We thought that perhaps the city of Hiroshima was not on the American maps" [Lifton 15-17]. 1 Other inhabitants [End Page 59] of the city feared that Hiroshima appeared all too prominently on US maps, but had been set aside for "something unusually big"—perhaps the inundation of the city by floodwaters that could be released by the bombing of a massive upstream dam. Still others spoke of a "special bomb" [PWRS 220-22; Lifton 17]. All these rumors responded to citizens' impression that their city had been in some way singled out, and the term bukimi—also meaning "ominous" or "uncanny"—spoke to the suspended question of whether Hiroshima and its inhabitants had been singled out for preservation or for annihilation.The survivors who recollected their anticipatory bukimi years after the bombing may have retrospectively amplified their memories of weird expectation, perhaps as a way of attempting to master an incommensurable and singular event by installing it within a narrative of causality, continuity, even prophecy. Nonetheless, the bukimi experienced by inhabitants of Hiroshima should not be understood as pure retrospection, nor as groundless hunch, since it arose from a series of empirical observations later revealed to have a single and coherent origin in US military strategy. By the summer of 1945, most Japanese cities whose size and military-industrial importance were similar to Hiroshima's had already been bombed with incendiaries: those who lived in Hiroshima had watched waves of American bombers fly past on their way to other targets, while the dozen or so bombs that had fallen accidentally on... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Sayyid Sadr al-din Mohammad Dashtaki Shirazi is the inventor of the division of composition into unified composition and composition by join. With this division, Dashtaki has expressed a new theory about the composition of the material object from first matter and form, as well as the composition of man from soul and body, and considers these compositions as an alliance and unification, not simply the parts joining to each other. In this paper, we will present Dashtaki’s arguments on the theory (...) of unified composition. We will also examine three objections to this theory and responses to them. Finally, we will examine the background of this theory in Bahmanyar's phrases. Dashtaki believes that when the components in the compound have a real plurality, i.e. each one exists separately from the other, a composition by join is created, such as the composition of a house from numerous clays. But if the components in the compound are united and none of them are separate from the others and exists actually, the resulting composition will be an alliance and union. He believes that in the unified composition, every component is identical to any other component and is identical to the whole. Accordingly, Reza is a unique being, both human and writer. In order to achieve a composition, a plurality is needed and in order to form a single composition, there must be plural components related to each other. An important question is that, principally how is a composition possible, if unified composition comes to existence only when the components are made united with each other and with the whole? In other words, unified composition is not possible, because the first condition of the acquisition of the composition, i.e., the plurality of the constituent components, is not satisfied. Dashtaki strives to express a difference between the components in the union compound. He believes that the conditions of the realization and the survival of the components are different, and that is enough for them to be different. In Dashtaki's point of view, in the unified composition the components are analytical, not being separate and plural, in reality. In other words, the components do not have actual and "in-the-world" plurality, which means that it is our intellect that separates them and looks at them as independent objects. Therefore, unity and identity are in-the-world and plurality and discernibility are analytical and in the mind. Dashtaki's first argument for his theory in general is as follows: the three major material objects (solid, plant and animal) are undoubtedly real compounds. But in these compositions, components exist potentially, and in a unified composition, components do not exist actually. Therefore, these objects are unified compounds. The second argument is that the accuracy of predication implies unity. In the unified composition, the components are identical with the whole, and therefore, the components can be predicated to the composition. In Dashtaki's view, if A is predicated to B, then it could be concluded that they are identical and unified. The first objection to this theory is that the unity is incompatible with causality. From the perspective of the Peripatetics, form is the cause of the matter, and this is incompatible with the union of the two. Dashtaki states that in case of causality, there is no need for cause and effect to be two different and discernible entities, but a single entity may be from one aspect the cause and, from another, the effect. In other words, the foresaid causality is analytical causality. When mind analyses something, and then finds analytical components, it can see between those analytical and intellectual components, causality, and find some of them as the cause of the others. The second objection is the incorrectness of the unity in compounds with components not being similar. only in the compounds having similar parts, one can accept the unity of matter and form. For example, in compounds such as horses, it is not possible to accept the union of matter and form, because in horses, there are components with different natures, such as bones, flesh and nerves. Unity of These parts with each other and with the whole is not plausible. Dashtaki’s respond is that the horse is also a natural unit and has no actual plurality. Components having similar or different natures does not make any difference. According to the theory of unified composition, the horse's components are united with the horse's form and have only analytical plurality. Horse’s components are just analytical components, not actual, independent ones. The third objection is the incompatibility of the actual existence of components with their unity. But Dashtaki maintains that a unique actual personal entity cannot have actual plural components. He states that compounds such as horses exist objectively, but objective and real existing is divided into two kinds: dependent existence, and independent existence as a single real thing. Therefore, the two characteristics of "being a component" and "being independent" are incompatible and do not come together in a real being. Dashtaki has also quoted phrases from Bahmanyar to confirm his point of view. Bahmanyar says that the properties of an animal belong to the whole and compound, not to each component. For example, it is a horse that feels, not its bone or brain, as the eye is also a compound, but seeing is the work of the eye, not the work of any of its components. Therefore, the animal, which is something compound, has characteristics that none of its components have. So the animal is something over and above its components. Bahmanyar thinks the components in the animal are potential. Then he states a general rule: any compound in which unity is real, its components do potentially exist. Therefore, Bahmanyar considers the body parts of the living organism as a potential being and generally believes that the components of any compound that have true unity are potential. The potentiality of the components in a real compound does not that mean that the components are destroyed and a new thing is produced. The components are also available, but they do not have the effects they had separately before the composition comes into existence. In other words, the components have found a unique identity together and therefore have a new effect.. It seems that Bahmanyar has expressed the same idea that Dashtaki is looking for in the theory of unified composition. Therefore, it can be said that before Dashtaki, Bahmanyar has come up with the thought of a unity. Of course, Bahmanyar has not explained much about this, and Dashtaki is the first who has organized and completed this idea as a philosophical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hildegard: Medieval Holism and ‘Presentism’—Or, Did Sigewiza Have Health Insurance?Jerome L. Kroll (bio)Keywordsholistic healing, presentism, Hildegard of Bingen, medieval medicineSuzanne Phillips and Monique Boivin have published an article examining Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098–179) treatment and cure of Sigewiza, a possessed woman. The purpose of their article is to demonstrate Hildegard’s holistic, or biopsychosocial, approach to healing as a model that we in the twenty-first century have lost but would (...) do well to recover. Several questions come to mind:What is Hildegard’s model?Have we lost it?Is it something we wish to emulate?The basics of the case history is that a noblewoman, Sigewiza, is ill or possessed of an evil spirit. Attempts by her local abbot and community to send her on pilgrimages or otherwise to cure or exorcise her, even with Hildegard’s recommendation, have only short-lived success, after which Sigewiza’s illness or demon returns. Finally, the abbot asks Hildegard to take the noblewoman into her Benedictine monastery, and after a suitable time and various interventions, Sigewiza is permanently (presumably) cured. The arduous process of effecting this cure has left Hildegard weak and ill herself, a pattern of poor physical health from which Hildegard suffered all her life.Phillips and Boivin claim that this is an early example of conceptualizing and utilizing a bio-psychosocial model to treat a complex illness. Hildegard, well known for her medical and pharmaceutical knowledge, applies the proper dietary changes to correct Sigewiza’s humoral (biological) imbalance. She treats the psyche and its partner, the soul, by long hours of discussion with Sigewiza and verbal duels with her demon, as well as by exorcising the demon, and she includes the social aspects of treatment by bringing Sigewiza into the Benedictine community of sisters as a participating member. Which of these three modalities may be sufficient for a cure depends upon the medieval literary genre in which the case appears. If in a medical text, then the proper dietary treatment and application of compounds to neutralize and correct the offending humoral imbalances would be the therapeutic agents. In medieval hagiography, [End Page 369] the biological modality is never sufficient and often ridiculed, because the entire thrust of the text is to demonstrate the futility of medical (secular) ministrations and the effectiveness of saintly intervention in producing a cure, whether or not exorcism is technically part of the process. In Sigewiza’s case, perhaps because of the stubbornness of the possessing demon or because of other factors attached to Sigewiza’s condition, the three (biopsychosocial) modalities are utilized. It seems that Sigewiza has a treatment-resistant illness.The narrative follows a familiar topos in saint’s lives (Kroll and Bachrach 2005). Attempts to cure a demoniac by prayers, pilgrimages, intercessions of other local saints or reputedly holy persons, and sometimes by physicians (when available) are to no avail. The sufferer is brought, amidst great fanfare and public attention (a media event), to the holy woman who is the central figure of the particular Vita, and the sufferer is promptly, or protractedly, cured. In such an account, the holiness of the holy woman is further demonstrated and her reputation, shrine, and influence are duly extended and enhanced. The holy person, with humility, attributes the intercession and cure to the power of God, or Jesus or Mary or a particular patron saint, but the crowd of onlookers and the audience of the Vita understand that God (or Jesus or Mary) has in fact granted the miracle cure as a way of demonstrating the holiness of this holy person in contrast to those who previously tried to cure the ill person. The abbot who ‘referred’ Sigewiza to Hildegard, and the previous saints’ shrine to whom Sigewiza was brought, although generally acknowledged as being of fine character or respectability, had to suffer the ignominy of their petitions being rejected to dramatize the special regard in which Hildegard is held.Although we can say that the “purposes” for which Hildegard’s hagiographer includes such anecdotes is to demonstrate her holiness and her importance in God’s eyes, this does not stop us, nine centuries later, from using such... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 57-62 [Access article in PDF] In Contrast to Sentimentality: Buddhist and Christian Sobriety Bardwell Smith Carleton College An invitation to reflect on the spiritual disciplines of another tradition is a welcome but difficult assignment. It is welcome because having studied, taught about, and engaged in various forms of Buddhist practice for forty years, I have learned more about what becoming a Christian means than I (...) had anticipated. So much so that I'm tempted to wonder, in Chuang Tzu style, am I a Buddhist-Christian, a Christian-Buddhist, or just another person for whom labels don't suffice? It is difficult because spiritual practice, by exhuming the most elusive levels of human experience, teaches one that the inner life resists all attempts to define, let alone control--which is a good thing, for the more claims made about one's practice, the more self-deception thrives.The one claim I would make about my experiences of Buddhist spiritual practice, through meditation and pilgrimage, is that they have aroused immense gratitude for the fragile gift of life, plus a healthy respect for Buddhism's "three poisons of anger, greed, and ignorance," for they prod us to realize our essential nature. The same is true about the inner life of a Christian, which is why I said "becoming a Christian," for it is a process of unfoldment, not something static or accomplished. In other words, understanding the obstacles to spiritual growth within oneself, yet keeping one's eye on the potential that already exists in one's makeup (the buddha nature, the interdependence of all reality, or the image of god), helps one to persist without seeming to "progress" toward fulfilling this goal.This essay is a personal reflection; it does not attempt to be academic. The learner-seeker in me seeks to become one with what he is teaching-seeking. While teaching himself, he is always being taught by others in the reciprocity of life. Having "forgotten" his essential nature, he seeks to "remember," to become what he already is, painfully aware that he is often living a contradiction. As one talks about spiritual practice, the reference is typically to some activity set apart from ordinary life. Actually, in such practice one seeks to impart greater candor and depth to one's everyday existence through some sort of spiritual discipline, in particular by the act of attending to life through conscious awareness. And though one's inner life resists all tendencies to impose order upon it, discipline can forge channels through which new life breathes. [End Page 57]Before discussing forms of Buddhist practice that have made an impact upon me, it makes sense to note some influences that came earlier and have remained indelible. Combat experience in the Marine Corps, compounded by exposure in North China in 1945-1946 to kinds of suffering I had never imagined, prompted me to see the world and myself from a very different angle. In succeeding years Augustinian, Kierkegaardian, and Niebuhrian reflections on man's capacity for evil and self-deception taught me to regard claims to virtue or innocence with suspicion, to say the least. These were made especially graphic by portrayals of human brutality embodied in the worlds of a Dostoevsky or a Faulkner.When first exposed to Buddhist worldviews at the age of thirty-five, I found a comparable absence of sentimentality. Here too was a compelling awareness of the roots of suffering within each person and as magnified in social institutions and values. It was an awareness and acceptance of violence, evil, and self-deception as an inextricable part of the human experience; of greed, ignorance, anger, and hatred as threads in the tapestry of the human condition, but that a doorway out of this chamber of suffering also exists.In the varieties of Christianity and Buddhism that fed my imagination, I found sober realism coexisting with profound belief in the human capacity for transformation.While Christians and Buddhists depict this tension in their own ways, I detect no basic disagreement. The disease of ignorance and of... (shrink)

Art in Western civilization has become a commodity that is fixed to walls and viewed through the eyes. In fact, most museums and galleries post “Do not touch” signs dissuading audiences from partaking in anything but the visual aspects of art. Yet art production is something that is inherently tactile; it involves engaging with art media such as paint and brush or clay that is molded by the human hand.1 Compounded by the “Do not touch” attitude is the taboo in (...) society that draws people away from sensuality, especially touch. Yet touch is a natural way of exploring the world and, according to many researchers, a natural and important way of exploring art as well.2 There are many historical examples of art that have .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:32. HUME ON MODES As thorough a critic as Norman Kemp Smith states in his investigation of the Treatise that "Hume's treatment of... the complex ideas of modes... need not detain us." Whatever is interesting in this brief treatment, Smith suggests, rests on remarkable features of Humean doctrine, elsewhere expounded at length. This is true, I would agree, as a descriptive comment to the following degree. The category of (...) modes is officially regarded by Hume as highly marginal, even dispensible. But it is not in fact the case that, intrasystematically, the work of modes can be duplicated in non-modal materials. In this discussion I will show that Hume mistakes the case, and attempts to diagnose the error's deep sources. To the naked eye, the mistake seems perhaps small and reparable. Placed under the microscope, we find an important philosophical conception is at stake. Our raw material comprises the explanations of modality provided by Locke and Hume. Modes, according to Locke, are complex ideas which, however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as dependences on, or affections of, substances; such are the ideas signified by the words, triangle, grati2 tude, murder, etc. (2.12.4). Hume's account is similar in appearance. The idea... of a mode... is nothing but a collection of simple ideas.... The simple ideas of which modes are formed, either represent qualities, which are not united by contiguity and causation, but are dispers ' d in different subjects ; or if 33. they be all united together, the uniting principle is not regarded as the foundation of the complex idea. The idea of a dance is an instance of the first kind of modes; that of beauty of the second (I. I. VI). The appearance of harmony is capped by the uniformity in examples: Locke also mentions 'beauty' (2.12.5) as a modal term, and between his 'murder' and Hume's 'dance' there is nothing to choose. One small difference remains. The idea of dependence, prominent in Locke's sketch, is absent from the Treatise passage quoted. This disparity is eliminated by the following remark, temporarily withheld above: the difference betwixt [substances and modes] consists in this, that the particular qualities, which form a substance, are commonly referr'd to an unknown something, in which they are supposed to inhere (I. I. VI). Superficially then, both Locke and Hume might be thought to subscribe to the following theses. The designata of modal terms, but not of substantial terms, lack independence (I will call this 'the Modal Dependence Thesis' or 'MDT'). Modal terms designate complex ideas in the same way as do those substantial terms which designate complex ideas (this will be referred to as 'the Modal Complexity Thesis' or 1MCT'). But while Locke supports MDT, Hume rejects it, and whereas Hume advocates MCT, Locke — when pressed — will be found to disagree with it. Let us start with MDT. To establish that the category of modes is regarded, intrasystematically, as superfluous by Hume is to confirm the disagreement here between the two theorists. Hume categorically dismisses what Locke describes by the phrase 'a something I know not what' as contributing 34. to any particular idea of a substance. Accordingly, the designata of modal as well as substantial terms resolve identically under analysis, i.e. into combinations of simple ideas. Hume mentions a differentiating factor: the principle of union of simple ideas in the case of a substance scores higher in naturalness than in the case of a mode. The components of a substantial idea are "closely and inseparably connected by the relations of contiguity and causation" (I. I. VI), which are 'natural'. But Hume's own examples expose this as an ineffective device of differentiation, one to which Hume himself attaches little importance. Where is the unnaturalness in the case of the (modal) designata of 'beauty' and 'dance'? How — more pointedly — is the complexity involved in the (substantial) designata of 'dog' and 'table' more natural? Any difference here is one that Hume does well to play down and neutralise of all but sentimental significance. In adducing the idea of naturalness to explain the difference felt by the common... (shrink)

Reasons have recently occupied the centre of the theory of value. Some writers, such as Tim Scanlonthink that they are not only central, but exhaust the topic, since everything important that we want to say about the good or the valuable, or the obligatory and the required, can be phrased in terms of reason. An action is good to perform if the reasons in favour of performing it are stronger than those in favour of doing anything else or doing nothing. (...) An action is the right thing to do, or ought to be performed, if the reasons for doing it are so strong that it would be unreasonable to do anything else. In this kind of way, reasons can occupy the whole territory of ethics. Furthermore, if people who choose badly are choosing against reason, then this might seem to be a special and grave defect. It would locate the kind of fault they are indulging. It would give us, the people of reason, a special lever with which to dislodge their vices. For reason seems to have a peculiar compulsion about it. It is sometimes tempting to be bad, but surely not tempting to be irrational or unreasonable. Being able to corral knaves and villains in a compound reserved for those who trespass against reason and rationality may therefore represent definite progress. Reasons have another feature that attracts many contemporary theorists. They are just there, anyway. They exist whether or not agents take any notice of them. They do not only exist in the light of mere desires or mere inclinations. They are ‘external’ not ‘internal’. They bear on us, even when through ignorance or wickedness we take no notice of them. They thus very conspicuously shine the lights of objectivity, and independence, and even necessity. By basking in this light, ethics is rescued from the slough of sentiment and preference, and regains the dignity denied to it by theorists such as Hobbes or Hume, Gibbard or myself. Whole books have therefore been written stressing the external nature of reasons. These lines of thought contain less than meets the eye, however, if talk of reason just turns out to be another idiom for talking about the good and the right.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Circumcision and Regrets from the Mother of Three SonsMaría Viola SánchezI am a psychologist and a radio talk show host for 25+ years. Both of my parents spoke English as their second language. I was raised by immigrants who demanded that "we speak English because we are Americans." I have four adult children, three sons, and a daughter.I gave birth to my children in the mid-80s. They are very (...) close in age and remain dear friends to this day. While I was a professional with a career when my children were born, I took a leave to work part-time and largely, to be a stay-at-home mother for nearly ten years. I was very involved with all their academic and extracurricular activities. I became a single mother when they were 2, 4, 6, and 7 years old, which served to redouble my parenting efforts to compensate for the absence of their father.My dirty secret is that I circumcised my three sons. I did so out of sheer ignorance. I am ashamed and deeply saddened by my decision at the time of their births. This is a burden that I will live with for the rest of my life. Something that I took away from them and that I can never repair.Here's the justification for my ill-informed decision. My father was circumcised, my two brothers were circumcised, and my then-husband was circumcised. I blindly assumed all males were to be circumcised. Further complicating the circumstances surrounding their births and the decision to circumcise them is the fact that their father is Jewish. He most likely would have given me pushback on not circumcising our sons, even though we had agreed to raise our family as Roman Catholics, my religion.After delivering my sons, I was asked, "Who would you like to circumcise your son?" My reply was, "Who has performed more of these procedures? And please bring my son to me to nurse after you have finished." Not one person, not one family member, not my son's father, any healthcare providers, not my pediatrician, or my OB/GYN asked me, "What are your thoughts about circumcising your son?" Had I been asked that question, I might have pondered the concept that there was a decision to be made, not a procedure that was necessary, as is the case with cutting the umbilical cord. When my infant sons were brought to me to nurse, they were sobbing so violently that they were unable to latch on to my breast. One can only surmise that no numbing agents were applied or anesthesia given, further compounding my burden of responsibility. Imagine their trauma!Over the course of my radio career, I hosted a program for an American non-profit national media organization, and one of my guests, Steven Svoboda, was scheduled to promote his newly founded organization, Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC). Steven has remained a colleague. I've interviewed him a dozen times over the decades to promote ARC's amazing work. Steven is the one that first opened my eyes to the ridiculousness of male circumcision. Subsequently, I now understand that circumcision is unnecessary, not medically mandated and that the procedure denies males their [End Page E1] right to genital integrity. What I have also learned is that the removal of the foreskin is the most important sensory component and it is comprised of thousands of Meissner's corpuscles as well as branches of the dorsal nerve and in between 10,000 and 20,000 specialized erotogenic nerve endings of several types.I have since apologized to my adult sons for the uninformed and ignorant decision I made after they were born. Two of my three sons have gracefully accepted my apology. The other son says that he's glad that he resembles both his father and most of his male peers.I have become such an "intactivist" that I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology, and my dissertation concerns itself with Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and its eradication. To know that 200 million females who are alive today have experienced FGM is another responsibility... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 278-294 [Access article in PDF] Homer's Human Animal: Ritual Combat in the Iliad Jonathan Gottschall I Freud called Darwin's revelation of man's animality a blow to human narcissism on par with Copernicus's finding that Earth is not the center of the solar system. While Darwin hinted at our bestiality in the Origin of Species, in later publications he conveyed the disturbing and fantastic news (...) that our ancestors were, as he playfully wrote in private notebooks, "monkey men." 1 Adam and Eve were not lovingly molded from the clay; they were the rude grandchildren of a "hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World." 2 Darwin's news was greeted by his contemporaries with a range of responses, from hooting derision to holy indignation, to resigned acceptance. Yet his hypothesis has been amply verified by the work of geneticists, primatologists, biologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and others. Nowadays we are not too chagrined to hear that we share a common ancestor with the other apes; it is orthodox evolutionary theory.But perhaps we give Darwin rather too much credit for this discovery. Surely he deserves esteem for deciphering the mechanism of evolution in natural selection, for helping demonstrate our kinship with other primates, and for providing subsequent scientists a head start for their research. He also deserves the less technical distinctions of giving human self-regard a terrific bloody nose and of helping to sire the modern existential crisis. But while Darwin may be responsible for giving scientific credibility to the notion that humans do not stand aloof from the rest of the animal kingdom, he was far from the first to come to this realization. [End Page 278]The artists of every age and the builders of mythology have come, with wondrous unity of conception, to similar conclusions. In fact, the world's earliest known pictorial art conveys this message. The hundreds of paintings and etchings adorning the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France, though over thirty thousand years old, include depictions of human-animal compounds, including a figure that is half-human and half-bison. 3 This ancient suggestion that the human and animal realms overlap is likewise indicated in the common mythological figure of the human-animal hybrid. As Dorothy Dinnerstein says: "Myth images of half-human beasts like the mermaid and the Minotaur express an old, fundamental, very slowly clarifying communal insight: that our species' nature is internally inconsistent; that our continuities with, and our differences from, the earth's other animals are mysterious and profound." 4 So Darwin did not invent the concept of the human animal. Rather, he marshaled the evidence and developed the theoretical model that established scientific credence for an ancient belief.The Ancient Greeks were particularly fascinated by hybrids blending human and animal morphology. Their mythology abounds with queer, conflicted, compound creatures. And so does their literature. Their first and greatest poet, Homer, was characteristically Greek in his attention to half-human creatures. The sirens, the centaurs, the minotaur, the chimera, Scylla, "Ox-eyed" Hera, and "Owl-eyed" Athena are all present or alluded to in his work. All of these figures symbolically insinuate that beasts dwell under every human skin.But Homer's suggestions of human animality do not cease with these compound creatures. In the Iliad, he presses this theme with depictions of warriors who are, physically, fully human. Homer suggests, however, that their dispositions and behavior patterns are, often, fully brutish. For Homer, the human animal is the most incongruous crossbreed of all: he is queer, conflicted, inconsistent, godlike, and brute. It is the "in-betweenness" of the human animal that makes him tragic. His soul would gravitate toward the empyrean, but his body roots him steadfastly in the blood and filth of animal life. The father Zeus, perhaps recognizing this, says: "In truth there is nothing more wretched on earth than man, of all things that breathe and move." 5The Iliad suggests human animality in a variety of ways. First, we are aligned with... (shrink)

The German word Festschrift is a compound of fest, which derives from the Latin festum, meaning “festival,” and schrift, an abstractum of schreiben, which means “writing.” It literally means “festival-writing,” though in keeping with an academic tradition extending back to the nineteenth century, a more appropriate translation is “celebratory volume.” And that is precisely what this is. The essays collected here celebrate Nancy Siraisi, distinguished professor emerita in history at Hunter College and the City University of New York. Most (...) Festschriften are tied to a momentous occasion, such as a seventieth birthday or a retirement, but this volume arose sui generis, from a collective desire to celebrate Siraisi’s scholarly achievements and to acknowledge the professional and personal impact she has had on each of us, on the discipline of history, and on the history of medicine and science in particular. Siraisi’s work is marked by lucid prose, profound originality, authoritative analysis of texts, and an accessibility that invites attention and response: she has been an invaluable guide through the periods spanning the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, always with an eye toward a better understanding of medicine’s connections to the broader intellectual, social, and cultural context in which it was taught, studied, and practiced. Her work embodies that rare combination of impeccable scholarship and deep insight guaranteeing its endurance, not only on its own terms but also through its influence on the rest of us. (shrink)

Discussions about brain data and privacy, particularly those advocating for human rights frameworks, at times, have embodied problematic undercurrents of, if not overt appeals to, neuro-exceptional...

Argues that Heidegger's early reading of Aristotle provides him with a critical resource for addressing the problematic domination of theoretical knowledge in Western civilization.

McTaggart’s thesis about the unreality of time has puzzled and still puzzles philosophers of the metaphysics of time, who defend the existence of either McTaggart’s A series or McTaggart’s B series. McTaggart himself, however, was led through his analysis to view as real what he called the “C series,” which, unlike the temporal A and B series, is atemporal. The author argues that the ancient conception of time, especially of the Neoplatonist Damascius, reveals an important gap in McTaggart’s thought, namely, (...) his overlooking the idea of an integral present (that is, a present that does not form a series), which allows to account for the B series as being generated from the C series without the involvement of the A series, which has been shown by McTaggart to have a contradictory nature. This comparative account enables us to see not only that Damascius was the first presentist in the history of the metaphysics of time, but also that McTaggart’s analysis rests upon the unreflected assumption that time, if it is real, progresses linearly. (shrink)

Discusses conceptual models and research findings into how affect influences non-conscious processing. Divided into two sections, the book discusses affect and perception, and affect and attention.

Can one see one thing as another without possessing a concept of it? The answer to this question is intuitively negative. This is because seeing x as F is usually taken to consist in the application of the concept F to x . Seeing the duck-rabbit figure as a duck figure, for instance, involves applying the concept DUCK to the figure; thus, one cannot see the figure as the figure of a duck unless one has the concept of a duck (...) and is able to deploy it when looking at the figure. Nearly by definition, then, one cannot see x as F without possessing a concept of F. Contrary to this line of reasoning, this article treats the question of whether we can see x as F without possessing a concept of F as an open and partially empirical question. Seeing x as F involves seeing x in a certain way, namely as F, and whether concepts are required in order to see something in a certain way is an open question. Accordingly, what follows offers a proposal for an alternative way of understanding seeing–as that does not appeal to concept application. (shrink)

Young children often treat robots as social agents after they have witnessed interactions that can be interpreted as social. We studied in three experiments whether four-year-olds from three cultures and adults from two cultures will attribute ownership of objects to a robot that engages in social gaze with a human. Participants watched videos of robot-human interactions, in which objects were possessed or new objects were created. Children and adults applied the same ownership rules to humans and robots – irrespective of (...) whether the robot engaged in social gaze or not. However, there was cultural variation in the types of ownership rules used. In Experiment 3, we removed further social cues, finding that just showing a pair of self-propelled robot-arms elicited ownership attributions. The role of social gaze in social attributions to robots and cross-cultural differences in ownership understanding are discussed. (shrink)