The three research questions of this study have been: what exactly is active ambiguity?; how should we assess active ambiguities in an argumentative discussion?; what does an adequate dialectical account of active ambiguity look like? These three questions have been answered by giving a definition of active ambiguity, and by elaborating on the properties of active ambiguity. Based on the survey of possible consequences of active ambiguities, and based on the basic division of labour in a persuasion dialogue, we (...) arrived at a set of requirements that a normative, procedural account of active ambiguity should satisfy. The model for ambiguity dialectic both provides a detailed account of evaluating active ambiguities, as well as a dialectical account of dealing with alleged active ambiguity. The distinction between constitutive and regulative rules for discussion has made it possible to provide a discussion model in which discussants can raise the issue of active ambiguity, and in which they can argue about the correctness of such points of order. This immanent dialectical approach has lead to a fourfold classification of fallacies: by using an actively ambiguous expression a party either violates a regulative, or a constitutive rule for persuasion dialogue, and if this party violates a rule, he or she either commits a fallacy of ambiguity, and possibly also the more complex fallacy of equivocation. This model for ambiguity dialectic has been shown to be useful for the analysis and evaluation of complex debates and discussions. The present study can be extended in various ways:  A model for critical discussion can be enriched so that it accommodates other regulative rules, such as the rule that requires arguments to be valid. By doing so, other points of order and other fallacy criticisms can be studied from the perspective of a critical metadiscussion.  The results concerning active ambiguity can be applied to other modes of reasoning, such as visual argumentation.  The results can be applied to ambiguity at the level of larger stretches of argumentative discourse. That could lead to a fruitful contribution to the theory of argument structures.  There still is a need for dialectical models that concern the use of usage declaratives different from providing a disambiguation, such as the use of definitions, clarifications of unfamiliar expressions, amplifications, etc., and the question would have to be answered how the rules with respect to active ambiguity would relate to those models.  The model can be enriched by inserting a specific ‘linguistic utterance meaning testing machine’. That would be a major step towards implementing the model in a computer program.  The use of descriptive profiles of dialogue could be improved further. In order to analyse the way parties respond to dialectically complex contributions, we are in need of a dialectical theory that provides the parties with specific rights and obligations for putting forward complex contributions and for responding to complex contributions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 295-298 [Access article in PDF] A Dialectical Conception of Autism Giovanni Stanghellini Some Reasons for the Philosophical Turn in the Psychopathology of Schizophrenia There are many ways to become a schizphrenic. Each individual has her own schizophrenia, coherent with her life history, her problems and alternatives deriving from them (Binswanger 1960). What clinical psychiatry calls "schizophrenia" is not a unitary illness but (...) a common final state—a "syndrome" in the etymological sense, that is, a condition to which different psychopathological pathways may lead. Schizophrenic symptoms, like Schneiderian first-rank symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, experiences of passivity), are nothing but a rather uniform type of reaction. First-rank Schneiderian symptoms may be interpreted as attempts to explain disturbing basic experiences of change in self, body, and world perception (Klosterkoetter 1988) or as the epiphenomena of complex interactions between sensory disorders (aberrations in the perception of self, body, and world), conceptualisation disorders (impairments in the constitution of meanings and intentions), and attitudinal disorders (eccentric structure of values and beliefs) (Stanghellini 2000a). Since the schizophrenic syndrome, as defined by current diagnostic manuals, lacks any authentic core phenomena, and so-called schizophrenic symptoms are not specific (Berner and Kufferle 1982), the clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia finally becomes a diagnosis by exclusion (Maj 1998). This conceptual weakness is obviously unacceptable (not only for old dissenters from operational diagnostic criteria) and is kindling a velvet revolution in nosological studies and a renaissance of philosophically oriented psychopathological research (Parnas and Zahavi 2000). Autism: The Loss of Vital Contact with Reality Eugène Minkowski was a forerunner in the field of philosophical psychopathology: "The psychiatrist and the metaphysician become one in their common research concerning what is human and human experience" (Minkowski 1947). Indeed, his doctoral thesis on autism (Minkowski 1926) was dedicated to his teachers, the psychiatrist E. Bleuler and the philosopher H. Bergson, and his conceptualisation of autism is an ideal example of the link between philosophical perspectives and psychopathological research. The term "autism" was introduced by Bleuler (1911) to describe detachment from outer reality and immersion in inner life. Bleuler's concept of autism relied on Freud's (1905) notion of autoerotism and on associationistic psychology. According to Bleuler, autism was a consequence of the [End Page 295] splitting of psychic functions: a defense mechanism serving to avoid conflicts between desires and reality testing, promoting the shift to inner fantasy life and entailing social withdrawal, emotional indifference, inappropriate behaviors, and idiosyncratic values and beliefs.Minkowski, who was influenced by Bergson and phenomenology, departed from Bleuler's conceptualisation and defined autism as "loss of vital contact with reality" (Minkowski 1926, 1927). For Minkowski, autism is not a symptom, but a global phenomenon investing the whole person. Autism is a way of being whose essential feature is a pragmatic deficit: Autistic activity consists in the reduced capacity to interact with the external world. Autistic thought is characterized by its lack of communicative action. The pragmatic deviance of autistic language is a good example: The autistic person is not interested in communicating her inner world to the others; language is not a means of communication which serves mutual understanding, a cooperative process whose aim is interlacing one's own world with that of others. The autistic person's use of language is much like a soliloquy, the monologue of the solitary thinker more focused on ex-pression—the outward portrayal of immanent contents of consciousness—than on dialogue—the exchange of meanings between speaker and listener. Moreover, each meaning is presented in its manifold profiles or adumbrations and the task of selecting the context-relevant meaning is left to the listener.The pragmatic weakening of the autistic person, according to Minkowski, is not simply a social or occupational dysfunction (APA 1994), that is, a renunciation or refusal to act according to social expectations and standards. It involves the loss of vital contact with reality. The meaning Minkowski attributes to the term "vital" is essential for understanding his philosophical approach to defining the schizophrenic condition. Minkowski assumes that contact with reality is vital when it is established through action (and language... (shrink)

Using tools like argument diagrams and profiles of dialogue, this paper studies a number of examples of everyday conversational argumentation where determination of relevance and irrelevance can be assisted by means of adopting a new dialectical approach. According to the new dialectical theory, dialogue types are normative frameworks with specific goals and rules that can be applied to conversational argumentation. In this paper is shown how such dialectical models of reasonable argumentation can be applied to a determination (...) of whether an argument in a specific case is relevant are not in these examples. The approach is based on a linguistic account of dialogue and text from congruity theory, and on the notion of a dialectical shift. Such a shift occurs where an argument starts out as fitting into one type of dialogue, but then it only continues to makes sense as a coherent argument if it is taken to be a part of a different type of dialogue. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem posed by the current split between the two opposed hypotheses in the growing literature on the fallacy of begging the question the epistemic hypothesis, based on knowledge and belief, and the dialectical one, based on formal dialogue systems. In the first section, the nature of split is explained, and it is shown how each hypothesis has developed. To get the beginning reader up to speed in the literature, a number of key problematic examples are (...) analyzed illustrating how both approaches can be applied. Useful tools are brought to bear on them, including the automated argument diagramming system Araucaria, and profiles of dialogue used to represent circular argumentation in a dialogue tableau format. These tools are used to both to model circular reasoning and to provide the contextual evidence needed to properly determine whether the circular reasoning in a given case is better judged fallacious or not. A number of technical problems that have impeded the development of both hypotheses are studied. One central problem is the distinction between argument and explanation. It is concluded that the best way to move forward and solve these problems is to reformulate the two hypotheses in such a way that they might be able to co-exist. On this basis, a unified methodology is proposed that allows each hypothesis to move forward as a legitimate avenue for research using the same tools. (shrink)

While up to the 19th century there were philosophers within Judaism, these sages neither perceived themselves as Jewish philosophers nor did the Jewish community categorized them under this term. This situation changed with the rise of historicism. The first academically trained scholars in Judaism faced a new challenge: almost all leading contemporay German philosophers operated with a concept of a Christian philosophy which left no room for an acknowledgement of Jewish contributions to the history of philosophy. Zunz was the first (...) Jewish scholar who took issue with this Christian challenge when he coined the term Jewish philosophy. Zunz followed Boeckh when he drew a distinction between Philosophy within Judaism and Jewish philosophy. Zunz used the first term for the historical contributions of Jews in the history of philosophy. If the modern scholar does examine the Jewish sources properly with the historical-critical method, the conclusions will lead him to a Jewish philosophy. Since Jewish philosophy for Zunz did not represent the Jewish Volksgeist, he did not elaborate further upon it. After Zunz, Geiger preferred a different approach. Since Geiger understood himself as a theologian who was closer to Schleiermacher, he described an alternative dialectical relationship by confronting the histoical-critical examination of Jewish philosophical sources now with Jewish theology. Munk's Esquisse set the standard for all subsequent histories of Jewish philosophy. He was not interested in a contemporary Jewish philosophy but focussed exclusively on what Zunz had rendered philosophy within Judaism. His aim was to give back Jewish philosophy its rightful place as an integral part of the history of Western philosophy. Munk's groundbreaking studies were triggered by Ritter. Even though Munk's conception still has a certain heuristic value, the deficiency of this approach is obvious as well. (shrink)

Title: The Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Observations from the 1968 EraPublisher: Rowman & LittlefieldISBN: 0847676811Author: Karel Kosík, James H. Satterwhite Title: Profils de Jan PatockaPublisher: Facultes universitaires Saint-LouisISBN: 2802800825Author: Henri Declève Title: Filosofie a Politika kú ePublisher: Institut pro stredoevropskou kulturu a politikuISBN: 8085241048Author: Petr Rezek.

Criticism may degenerate into quibbling or nitpicking. How can discussants keep quibblers under control? In the paper we investigate cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue as well as cases in which a battle about minor objections replaces a discussion of the major issues. We survey some lines of discussion dealing with these situations in profiles of dialogue.

This paper aims at creating an adequate theoretical basis for a systematic integration of institutional insights into the pragma-dialectical analysis of argumentative exchanges that occur in institutionalised contexts. The argumentative practice of Prime Minister’s Question Time in the British House of Commons is examined, as a case in point, in order to illustrate how the knowledge of the characteristics of an institution, its rules and conventions can be integrated into the pragma-dialectical analysis. The paper highlights the role that (...) theoretical concepts and tools such as strategic manoeuvring, argumentative activity types and dialectical profiles play in this integration. (shrink)

As an introduction to the special issue on Perspectives on Strategic Maneuvering, this article provides a synthetic recapitulation of the various steps that were taken in developing the pragma-dialectical theory of strategic maneuvering. First, the concept of strategic maneuvering is described as a means to reconcile the simultaneous pursuit of dialectical and rhetorical aims. Second, strategic maneuvering is related to the various kinds of argumentative activity types in which it takes place. Third, the concept of dialectical profiles (...) is discussed and the parameters that are pertinent to distinguishing between different types of strategic maneuvering. Fourth, the fallacies are viewed as derailment of strategic maneuvering. Fifth, as a case in point, strategic maneuvering with inconsistency is examined. (shrink)

In Emotions, Values & Agency, Christine Tappolet develops a sophisticated, perceptual theory of emotions and their role in wide range of issues in value theory and epistemology. In this paper, we raise three worries about Tappolet's proposal.

According to pragma-dialectical methodology, a party in an argumentative discussion can be assumed to manoeuvre strategically between dialectical and rhetorical objectives. One confrontational form of strategic manoeuvring occurs when a critic charges an arguer with advancing a standpoint that has socially harmful consequences. In special situations this form of manoeuvring can be dialectically sound, for example when the standpoint is advanced in a way that damages the dialectical process. The boundary between fallacious and dialectically sound applications of (...) this form of manoeuvring is examined by looking for the manoeuvring’s soundness conditions. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 37, Issue 1, pp 5 - 22 Erasmus’ famous elusiveness can be linked to a marked preference for media and genres that allowed for a _persona_, a mask, behind which the ‘real’ Erasmus could disappear at will. This article seeks to identify the literary, rhetorical and above all dialectical patterns Erasmus made use of in order to separate man and argument and to distance speaker and enunciation. This does not only refer to Erasmus’ familiarity with satirical (...) and rhetorical devices, but also to his ingenious emulation of debating techniques that were common practice among the schoolmen he attacked so fervently. Erasmus’ famous ambiguity and eel-like quality is, at least in some high-profile cases, owed to his ambition of establishing declamation as an equivalent to scholastic controversial formats. Some of his most famous texts are testimony to the attempt of constructing a debating arena in print. (shrink)

Stephen Houlgate is one of the leading Hegel scholars of the English-speaking world. In this interview he explains how he became a “Hegelian” while studying in Cambridge, and he offers a fundamental profile of his account of Hegel. The interview addresses the following questions: Why does Houlgate consider Hegel’s philosophy to be the “consummate critical philosophy”? What are the main barriers to a proper access to Hegel’s thought? Why is logic as dialectical logic still indispensable for philosophical thought? (...) And finally, what can both analytical and “continental” philosophers learn from Hegel? (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

By the beginning of the 19th century Hegel's dialectic turned contradiction (conceived as unity of a concept with its determined negation) into distinguished inference. In the course of 20th century a family of systems known as "paraconsistent" formalized dialectical logic according to the contemporary paradigm of inference, oriented to truth-preserving, and not powered anymore solely by contradiction. In this way, nevertheless, Hegel's idea of logic as unfolding of concepts ordered by degree of "determination" reached at every step of the (...) process, was put aside. We attempt to recover the importance of that idea for the hegelian concept of "logical necessity", pointing out in addition that it may well play the role of an order relation for dialectical inference. (shrink)

Language & Logic -- Glossary -- Aristotle's syllogisms -- Russell's paradox & Frege's logicism -- profile: Aristotle -- Russell's theory of description -- Frege's puzzle -- Gödel's theorem -- Epimenides' liar paradox -- Eubulides' heap -- Science & Epistemology -- Glossary -- I think therefore I am -- Gettier's counter example -- profile: Karl Popper -- The brain in a vat -- Hume's problem of induction -- Goodman's gruesome riddle -- Popper's conjectures & refutations -- Kuhn's scientific revolutions (...) -- Mind & Metaphysics -- Glossary -- Descartes mind-body problem -- Brentano's intentionality -- Fodor's language of thought -- Parfit's persons -- profile: René Descartes -- Chalmer's zombies -- Zeno's paradoxes -- Kant's left hand -- Theseus' ship -- Laplace's demon, determinism, & free will -- Ryle's ghost in the machine -- Ethics & Political Philosophy -- Glossary -- Aristotle's ethics -- States of nature and the social contract -- Kant's categorical imperative -- profile: Immanuel Kant -- Mill's utilitarianism -- Marx's historical materialism -- The trolley problem -- Religion -- Glossary -- Aquinas' five ways -- Anselm's ontological argument -- profile: Thomas Aquinas -- Epicurus' riddle -- Paley's watchmaker -- Pascal's wager -- Hume against miracles -- Grand Moments -- Glossary -- Socrates' method -- Plato's cave -- Aristotle's four causes -- Lucretius' atomism -- profile: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Berkeley's idealism -- Kant's synthetic a priori -- Hegel's dialectic -- James' pragmatism -- Moore's common sense -- Wittgenstein's picture theory of language -- Continental Philosophy -- Glossary -- Nietzsche's Superman -- profile: Friedrich Nietzsche -- Derrida's deconstruction -- Heidegger's nothing -- Sartre's bad faith. (shrink)

Si les relations des Regulae avec leurs sources antiques ou médiévales ont été bien traitées, leur mise en place dans l'environnement immédiat laisse à désirer. Pourquoi n'a-t-on jamais mis ce premier ouvrage de Descartes en relation avec les "Dialectiques" qui font du xvie siècle un "siècle logique"? Une documentation surabondante prouve que ces logiques renaissantes sont tombées dans les oubliettes de l'histoire. De multiples courants rendent très vivant le développement de ces ouvrages consacrés à l'invention, au jugement et à la (...) méthode. Leurs profils deviennent forts apparents à qui les étudie. Or les Regulae, dont le profil typique exige la considération d'autres concepts que celui de méthode, épousent les schèmes conceptuels du ramisme, sans références à d'autres courants. D'où cette étude qui consiste à prendre pour point de référence la Dialectique française de La Ramée et à tendre l'axe critique et spéculatif qui ne cesse d'être tracé entre La Ramée et Descartes. Mais ce n'est pas là seulement une rétrospection créatrice : c'est aussi une nouvelle entrée dans la philosophie cartésienne de "la lumière naturelle". Les œuvres mûres seront à reconsidérer sous cet éclairage. (shrink)

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of (...) interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual and multimodal. Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional profiles of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario. (shrink)

As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with (...) different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences. (shrink)

Much modern science and ethics debate is on high-profile problems such as animal organ transplantation, genetic engineering and fetal tissue research, in discourse that assumes technical tones. Other work, such as narrative ethics, expresses the failed promise of technology in the vivid detail of human experience. However, the essential nature of contemporary technology remains largely opaque to our present ethical lens on health care and on society. The limited controversies of modern science and ethics perpetuate ‘technics’, a technical, problem-solving (...) mindset that fails to grapple successfully with the complexity of technology. A critical dialectic between practice and scholarship widens the ethical conversation in nursing to consider technology as an ongoing set of daily and fundamental moral choices on how we live. Critical text on technology recovers ethics from the limits of technics, and assists nurses to develop an inherent knowedge of technology that is needed to provide ethical care in a technological world. (shrink)

Much modern science and ethics debate is on high-profile problems such as animal organ transplantation, genetic engineering and fetal tissue research, in discourse that assumes technical tones. Other work, such as narrative ethics, expresses the failed promise of technology in the vivid detail of human experience. However, the essential nature of contemporary technology remains largely opaque to our present ethical lens on health care and on society. The limited controversies of modern science and ethics perpetuate ‘technics’, a technical, problem-solving (...) mindset that fails to grapple successfully with the complexity of technology. A critical dialectic between practice and scholarship widens the ethical conversation in nursing to consider technology as an ongoing set of daily and fundamental moral choices on how we live. Critical text on technology recovers ethics from the limits of technics, and assists nurses to develop an inherent knowedge of technology that is needed to provide ethical care in a technological world. (shrink)

The concept of biodiversity has entered the law. Article intends to make the conceptual suppositions and the ethical profile of the biodiversity concept explicit. Article takes “biodiversity” as a hybrid concept located at the intersection of biological science, environmental ethics, and international conservation policies. It proceeds with sections on genealogy and definitions of the concept. Further, a matrix-scheme is construed serving the purpose to make debates on biodiversity more specific and precise. Moreover, different approaches in environmental ethics are assessed (...) trying to substantiate the conservation of biodiversity in its entirety (“all”), but mostly fail in the attempt. A “strong” sustainability approach, however, can justify the protection of many and most components. Finally, the dialectics of biodiversity is outlined. On the one hand, a method is outlined how to proceed in order to reach resonable judgements about conservation and utilization of specific components of biodiversity while, on the other hand, the philosophical dimension is taken into account. This philosophical dimension is two-fold: a) epistemology of living beings and b) biophilic existentialism. Finally, some open questions with respect to implementation of “biodiversity” into law are asked. (shrink)

Either beauty is the beholding of a fixed and final aesthetic essence discontinuous with the rest of nature, or it is an intuitive grasp and encompassing feel of a consummated movement of natural energies and elements through their inner relations into a single, qualitative unity, whose pervasive tonality is a situational emergent from the biologically active, temporally continuous, and reciprocally constituting-constituted transactional dialectic between a human creature and the world. If aesthetic-mystical experience is indeed something “eternalized” out of all connection (...) with ordinary experience and the flood of moving fact, then what is immediately entailed is a phenomenological profile conceived as.. (shrink)

In this paper it is shown how tools developed in argumentation theory and artificial intelligence can be applied to the development of a new dialectical analysis of the speech act of making a proposal in a deliberation dialogue. These tools are developed, modified and used to formulate dialogue pre-conditions, defining conditions and post-conditions for the speech act of making a proposal in a deliberation dialogue. The defining conditions set out what is required for a move in a dialogue to (...) count as the making of a proposal by one of the parties. What is required are the conditions that (1) the move fit the requirements of the argumentation scheme for practical reasoning, and (2) the premises are propositions describing common goals of both parties or propositions that they reasonably consider means to achieve these goals. The analysis goes beyond the standard speech act approach by specifying not only the normative requirements for making a well-formed proposal, but also the requirements for responding to it by questioning or criticizing it, and the requirements for defending it. (shrink)

I will consider the question what the meaning of the unity of thought and thing is. This unity is introduced by Hegel as the main precondition of the science of logic, when it is understood as the definiens of the logical. I will try to clarify this issue primarily by interpreting chosen fragments in the chapter “Force and the Understanding, Phenomenon and the supra-sensible World” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, Hegel exposes the result of the dialectics of the passage (...) “Perception or Thing and Illusion” as the “unity of the being-for-itself and the beingfor- other”, and along with this result, he notes: “At first it seems they only pertain to the form of moments; but this being-for-itself and being for-other is also content itself,…” . I understand this unity as that between thought and thing. It appears when categories, as Hegel expressed it in logic and Encyclopedia, are seen in themselves. I determine the relationship between the speculative observance and unity of thought and thing as follows:categories are seen in themselves when they neither relate to instances of an extralogical area of use, nor are they considered as the content of meta-level predicates. When, for example, I observe the eidos “difference” in itself, than I think about this as a thing of “difference“, that is, as a differentiation. The unity of thought and thing is a derivation of itself and not the result of an interpretation or outside manipulation. I will try to profile my interpretation by criticizing other approaches. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading the Bloody "Face of Nature":The Persecution of Religion in Hawthorne's The Marble FaunMartin Kevorkian (bio)Perhaps The Marble Faun is a novel which needs to be seen in a certain light to be fully revealed. Although Hawthorne has always had his admirers and defenders among literary critics, this novel has sometimes been selected for unfavorable comparison"; this 1941 assessment by Dorothy Waples (224) still aptly describes the critical terrain (...) and the challenge of reading Hawthorne's last complete novel. In recent scholarship, Nancy Bentley's The Ethnography of Manners (1995) has been influential in marking The Marble Faun for continued unfavorable comparison. Geoffrey Sanborn (1998), in building a case for the postcolonial intelligence of Herman Melville, uses Bentley's argument about the novel's disregard for the "lower orders of creation" to set up Hawthorne as a representative of the typically blinkered "white male writers" against whose limitations Melville shines (18, 214n33). Hawthorne, especially in The Marble Faun, has become a kind of whipping boy for American literary history.Be that as it may, my concern is not to establish Hawthorne's status as a victim of criticism, but rather to seek a recovery of what may be sacrificed in hasty dismissals of The Marble Faun. The present article proposes that this novel arrives at its greatest insights by a consideration of the dynamics of exclusionary violence as such. Henry James lamented the absence of "real psychology" in the novel, and Ludwig Lewisohn complained about its lack of "acceptable intellectual or moral content" (cited in Waples 1941, 224). Yet the novel's achievement may be seen to meet both these criteria, in part because it delivers an analysis of intellectual history as a history of mimetic sacrifice. In response to Waples's terms of challenge—the need for a certain light that reveals—I suggest that mimetic theory's reading of the Enlightenment allows the novel to disclose more critical historical intelligence than has generally been attributed to it. [End Page 133]This reading will focus on the interaction of three characters: the mysterious Miriam, the mysterious Donatello, and the even more mysterious figure known as the Model. In setting up the action of the narrative, the novel divulges little about the backgrounds of any of these characters but places them in a situation with a readily discernible structure: the relationships between the figures may be defined by the element of pursuit. Donatello follows Miriam wherever she goes. But he is not the only one who does so. The hazy figure of the Model likewise shadows Miriam. The Model's pursuit of Miriam may precede Donatello's, or the two pursuits may be somehow coeval; the novel refuses to specify either pursuit as original, focusing instead on the late-stage escalation of resentment between Donatello and the Model.This mimetic pursuit culminates in the central violent event of the novel: Donatello, claiming authorization from Miriam's glance, hurls the Model from a precipice. I have argued elsewhere that when the protagonists thus decisively act to exclude the shadowy character known as the Model, they enact the foundational move of Enlightenment discourse and the ideal of Platonic dialogue upon which that discourse is based.1 Michel Serres summarizes the Platonic-Enlightenment strategy of communicational purity and clarity:To hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to seek to exclude him; a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man. The most profound dialectical problem is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety—or a variation—of the Same, it is the problem of the third man. We might call this third man the demon, the prosopopeia of noise.(1982, 67)Miriam and Donatello, the united protagonists, indeed demonize the Model in these terms. What I would now add to that equation is the value of the Model's vocational identity: he is a Capuchin monk. Within the communicational framework of my earlier analysis, the most telling details were detected in Hawthorne's emphasis on the Model's "noisy" and "hazy" profile. In hurling the Model from the edge of the precipice and thus silencing his interruptions, Donatello secures for... (shrink)

To the question,“what is sports”, or what is a good sports activity or event, I am sure Plato would know what to say, using references to his philosophical division of man into three parts, namely: the appetite soul; the emotional soul and the reasonable soul. Plato would have said that sports comes from the human person and being, and so, for any particular sports to be accorded the accolade of goodness it must have the correspondence of the three constituent parts (...) of man’s true nature. The concept of the soul in Plato is what exploring just as that of Professor Maduabuchi Dukor’s expositions concerning the African philosophical concepts of soul, mind, spirit and body as they affect philosophy of sports and the discipline of physical education. The article will therefore analyze the link between Plato concept of the good sports, Professor Dukor’s ontological ideas about the African core values as they affect the balance, harmony and health both the mind and body of the human being. The central point here is the analytical framework of enquiry which Plato sustained in his Dialogues when he queries people:“what is this?”. By this he wants people to appreciate the fact that when they are in search of truth, they usually have the impression that they have all when, actually, they have only half-baked understanding of issues. It is important therefore to understand the issues involved in the disciplines of physical education, philosophy of sports, ethics and the ontological frame of African philosophy as profiled under Professor Dukor theistic humanism of African philosophy. Centrally, the dialectical link between Plato and Dukor will expose the ethical dimension to sports development since every thing is not wining and money or drugs should not be the ultimate motivation for sports and physical exercises. The exercise of sports should lead to the dual development and balance of both mind and body; the highest being the competition of the soul with itself and not with others in which laurels, gold or money is won or lost. The man who wins is the one, like in the communal spirit of the African ontology, who has conquered over his selfishness and sacrifices for the good of the community. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

This research article aims to deliver an analytical representation of the intellectual environment of the culture journal Die Kreatur (1926–1930), a religious-dialogical quarterly edited by Martin Buber, Joseph Wittig, and Viktor von Weizsäcker and enlivened by some of the most prominent figures of German-Jewish interwar culture (among others W. Benjamin, H. S. Bergman, E. Rosenstock-Huessy, F. Rosenzweig, E. Simon, and L. Strauss). Building on a recognition of the problematic relationship between the dialogical model claimed in the programmatic foreword of the (...) journal and the group narratives enacted by its key contributors, the study attempts to outline the formation process of the intellectual plexus of the journal and to provide a differentiated analysis of its singular constituents via a sociologically informed framework. The representation of the intellectual network of Die Kreatur in accordance with the model of a “circle of circles” provides insight into the elusive dialectic of interaction and divergence that determines the relations between the main actors of the journal and thus contributes to unfold the interplay of biographical intersections and conceptual synergies, as well as incongruities, frictions, and contradictory instances that determines its editorial and philosophical profile. (shrink)

To readers of the Science of Logic, “mode” signifies the externality of the absolute, and its proper place within the text is at the level of the determinations of reflection, within the Doctrine of Essence. Let us take a look at the third section of the Doctrine of Essence: “Actuality”. In its broadest meaning, this signifies “reflected absoluteness,” that is to say, the unity of essence and existence; therefore, it is not a purely immediate existence, but “the immediate unity of (...) form between inner and outer.” Through this definition, a new kind of logical process is made possible - that of the actual totality’s self-manifestation. In the opening chapter of this section, headed “The Absolute,” the determination of the absolute is carried through from its initial unity to truly absolute identity by means of the complex play of reflection. Hegel’s treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of this paper; but if, at the initial stage of its dialectical cycle, reflection is external to the absolute - instead of being the proper determination of it - then it can at least be observed that in the third subdivision of the chapter what is under consideration is the negative return of the absolute into itself, and that this return is accomplished in such a way that “mode” is both the externality of the absolute and its reflection into itself: its being into itself and for itself. As one of the recent commentators on the Science of Logic has pointed out: “Le mode est ‘1’apparance comme apparance’: avec lui se profile un type d’extériorité qui ne sera plus en dette à l’egard d’une interiorité … la manifestation de l’absolu n’est pas une sortie de soi, mais plutôt sa constitution dans l’exteriorité des modes, puis des modalités de l’effectivité.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something can be (...) felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

This article demonstrates that typical restrictions which are imposed in dialogical logic in order to recover first-order logical consequence from a fragment of natural language argumentation are also forthcoming from preference profiles of boundedly rational players, provided that these players instantiate a specific player type and compute partial strategies. We present two structural rules, which are formulated similarly to closure rules for tableaux proofs that restrict players' strategies to a mapping between games in extensive forms and proof trees. Both rules (...) are motivated from players' preferences and limitations; they can therefore be viewed as being player-self-imposable. First-order logical consequence is thus shown to result from playing a specific type of argumentation game. The alignment of such games with the normative model of the Pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation is positively evaluated. But explicit rules to guarantee that the argumentation game instantiates first-order logical consequence have now become gratuitous, since their normative content arises directly from players' preferences and limitations. A similar naturalization for non-classical logics is discussed. (shrink)

Drawing on an ethnography among Quebecois and French female new Muslims, I consider how converts epitomize and embody the “encounter” between Muslim and western societies. By choosing Islam, converts position themselves on the margins, giving them a unique perspective on the “West.” My participants’ reflexive narratives hinge on continuity/disruption dialectics that dissolve the commonly held dichotomy between Sameness and Otherness. In analyzing these narratives, I view subjectivity as a rhetorical construction and elaborate upon converts’ daily intimate encounters and dialogues with (...) Otherness in social spaces. In light of Simmel’s figure of the Stranger based on distance and proximity, I show that converts’ experiences echo the “pacific coexistence” that Muslim and European populations have experienced historically. I argue that narratives are crucial to understanding how Islam—as a political and symbolic language of Otherness—can help frame and profile emergent western subjects and identities. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something can be (...) felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

In terms of classical tafsir literature, it is possible that the speeches made to a person or group in the Qurʾān carry messages for other individuals or groups. According to some approaches that emerged in the modern period, when the speech was made and to whom it was directed not only determine the meaning, but also limits it. This dilemma has to be based on the theoretical dimension. The most obvious example of the transition of the speech from direct counterpart (...) to the other is the transition of the speeches made to the unbelievers to the believers. Therefore, in this study, the possibility of the transcendence of the speech in the Qurʾān will be handled in the context of the messages for believers in the speeches directed to the unbelievers. One aspect of the issue of the transcendence of the speech in the Qurʾān can be explained by the style that the Qurʾān follows. However, the subject should also be based on linguistic aspects. As a matter of fact, the expansion of the speech can sometimes be related to the meanings of words and sometimes with the possibilities and literary aspects of language, and sometimes with an analytical effort. In this study, the related examples will be analyzed and it will be revealed that the transition between the speeches in the Qurʾān is possible in terms of the style of the Qurʾān. In the study, the methodological findings related to the linguistic aspects of the issue will also be studied.Summary: The discourse that the Qurʾān is an address by God makes different associations in terms of classical literature and some modern methods of understanding. In the works of classical method and rhetoric, a theoretical framework is drawn around the nature, arbitrariness, conditions and types of the book. In this context, the varieties, indications and scopes of the addresses in the Qurʾān are discussed. While it is emphasized that the Qurʾān is an address in modernist contextualist approaches, it is stated that understanding the address requires having contextual information, therefore reading the address as a book evaporates meaning. Because, according to these approaches, the meaning is sought in the text with the transformation of address to book (verbal culture to written culture), thus the Qurʾān is converted from a literal meaning into a system. Knowing what the Qurʾān tells and why it tells that, depends on the comprehension of all the contextual elements of the Qurʾān, which was sent as an address. In fact, knowledge of when, where and when the Qurʾān was sent about what events and to whom it is addressed, is the data that is primarily considered in the comprehension of the verses, as emphasized by the classical interpretation literature. However, the perception of the classical interpretation evaluates these data in different categories in terms of the integrity of religion, judgment and experience. For example, the narrations on the reason of sending and the Makki-Madani information are only examples of the meanings of the verses. They sometimes serve as elements that contribute to the comprehension of the verses, while sometimes with the help of other chapters they can narrow the meanings of the verses. The realist-methodological basis of the method science provides the emergence of this holistic-categorical perspective.It is difficult to justify the claim that there is an absolute relationship between the address and the addressee in terms of the classical literature. In the classical literature, the expressions, which come in the form of an address and have a mandatory relationship with addressees, are dealt with the concept of direct address. Direct addresses are binding for the first addressees. Because when an address is mentioned, it is mandatory to have an addressee. It can be assumed that this discourse has the same position with the context theories considering its premises. However, it is not possible to compare these theories with each other in terms of the scope of the address. Classical theories of reasoning consider that direct addresses cover indirect addressees by methods, such as shar’i (legal) necessity or analogy (qiyas), while contextualists and historians can convert the text beyond the virtual level by identifying what a command means within the context of the address-addressee relationship. When the Qurʾān is completely considered as an address, or when direct addresses are taken into consideration, it is very difficult for the modern period's comprehension methods that the verses, which mention or address the disbelievers-polytheists, can also address Muslims. In fact, the dialectic of the address-addressee requires this. Moreover, the addressees (polytheists-Muslims) who are spoken within the context of the verses have two different beliefs that cannot be dealt with at the same time and mentioned in the same verse. Therefore, it is not possible to direct the messages given to the polytheists to the believers and to attribute the qualities in these verses to Muslims.However, the classical literature did not even consider as a problem to address Muslims with the verses that directly addressing unbelievers-polytheists. It is because both linguistics and facts requires this. The method practitioners and interpreters discussed this issue in a very wide range. They examined the transitivity of the book between parties, such as people of the book-Muslims, Muslims-unbelievers, Prophet-ummah. In the context of the interpretation literature and the perception of modern-day interpretation, the possibility of the transitivity of the book can be clarified in the context of the inclusiveness of a verse that speaks of polytheists-disbelievers to include Muslims, or the conversion of an address to polytheists-unbelievers to Muslims. Classical literature explains this point sometimes with the literal indication (circularization) and the circumstance of literary use of language (rhetoric) and sometimes with the possibility of the address (stylistic features).In verses and hadiths, belief bases categorical classes, such as believers, unbelievers, polytheists, hypocrites, people of the book are mentioned, as well as descriptions of the characteristic-practical dimensions of these classes. In this context, commands sometimes refer to the practices that need to be performed in order to be a believer, sometimes works that must not be performed by the believer, and sometimes matters that might put the believer's faith-practice integrity at risk when it is done. In the Qurʾān, in some of the addresses to the believers, it is apparent that they are prohibited from being like unbelievers or having unbeliever-like qualities. Moreover, sometimes negative results that may arise for Muslims when they act like unbelievers are cited in the verses. Sometimes at the end of the verses that address and mention Muslims, information is included on situations involving unbelievers and the torment they will encounter. In addition, in cases where adjectives belonging to opposing belief profiles are mentioned, the address to non-Muslims expresses warning, evaluation, gratitude and perseverance in faith for Muslims, while the address to Muslims contains elements of incentive and opportunity for non-Muslim groups. It is possible to justify this matter with the style of the Qurʾān. However, it can be said that the transitivity of the address in the Qurʾān takes place in two theoretical aspects. The first of these is related to linguistic-rhetoric premises and it is used in antithesis, allusion, metaphor etc. The second one is the similitude-comparison. Here, the comparison is a phenomenon that occurs in the mind without the need for propositions. Because when the mind hears these statements, it can instantly reach a stronger meaning than the literal wording. In this study, it is discussed whether it is possible to transition from direct addresses to indirect addressees, with reference to the problems of the modern period. In this context, the study primarily focuses on the fact that the Qurʾān sometimes transmits its messages and teachings to addressees through opposing belief systems. Thus, the manner adopted by the Qurʾān while directing certain commands and negations, not directly but through the opposing side, has been presented. In this study, the possibility of the verses that only mentions polytheists-unbelievers to also addressing Muslims was analyzed and these verses were compared with addresses to Muslims on the same matters. In the last part of the study, a theoretical framework was drawn on the subject and the method of interdisciplinary transitivity was determined. (shrink)

In 2018, three journalists accused one of the Members of the Russian Parliament of harassment at workplace. Many influential persons of the Russian elite engaged themselves in the public discussion of the conflict. We studied that high-profiled discussion using a hybrid method merging human- and logic-oriented approaches in argumentation studies. The method develops ideas of the new dialectics, the argumentation logic and the logical-cognitive approach to argumentation, on which is based the algorithm for determining of dispute resolution by aggregating formal (...) and informal tools of analysis. We have reconstructed the discussion as two disputes about questions A and B. A: Did the MP violate the code of conduct by making statements or actions against the journalists? B: Are actions like the behavior of the MP harassment? The opinions of the discussion participants were grouped into the four points of view: A1 – the MP did not violate the code of conduct, A2 – the MP violated the code of conduct, B3 – the actions are not harassment, B4 – the actions are harassment. We mapped arguments in support or against each of them using OVA software, evaluated the arguments with the help of the critical questions, a tool proposed in the new dialectics, and determined the ultimate A + B resolution by applying of the algorithm that combines elements of gradual and labelling semantics from the argumentation logic and the classification of disputes from the dialectical approaches. The resolution was a subset of four arguments that ensured the victory of A1+B4. However, the substantial incompatibility of those arguments highlighted a deep disagreement, an unresolvable difference of opinion, between the parties about the permissibility of courtship. The deep disagreement, a bonus result yielded by the application of the hybrid method, excluded the interpretation of the determined resolution as convincing for the parties, but pointed out a way to smooth the difference of opinions by elaborating of legal, social and moral aspects of the problem of harassment at workplace. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something can be (...) felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

In The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, editors Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson guide us through three decades in the intellectual itinerary of America’s foremost Hegelian Marxist, the revolutionary and philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya. The founder of Marxist-Humanism, News & Letters Committees, and the newspaper News & Letters, Dunayevskaya was the author of three books, to which “she sometimes referred… as her ‘trilogy of revolution’” : Marxism and Freedom, Philosophy and Revolution, and Rosa (...) Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution ; two collections, Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution and The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism ; and finally several thousand pages of articles, pamphlets, letters, lectures, speeches, and drafts reposited in Wayne State University’s Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs. In The Power of Negativity, Hudis and Anderson have culled through the extensive corpus undergirding her principal works, as well as writings related to the book she was working on when she died, “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy,” in order to profile the thinker at work. (shrink)

Introduction: Critical realism, hegelian dialectic and the problems of philosophy preliminary considerations -- Objectives of the book -- Dialectic : an initial orientation -- Negation -- Four degrees of critical realism -- Prima facie objections to critical realism -- On the sources and general character of the hegelian dialectic -- On the immanent critique and limitations of the hegelian dialectic -- The fine structure of the hegelian dialectic -- Dialectic : the logic of absence, arguments, themes, perspectives, configurations -- Absence (...) -- Emergence -- Contradiction I : Hegel and Marx -- Contradiction II : misunderstandings -- On the materialist diffraction of dialectic -- Dialectical arguments and the unholy trinity -- Dialectical motifs : tina formation, mediation, concrete universality, etc -- On the generalized theory of the dialectical remark, the failure of detachment, and the presence of the past -- Dialectical critical naturalism -- Towards a real definition of dialectic -- Dialectical critical realism and the dialectic of freedom -- Ontology -- The dialectic of truth -- On the emergence and derivability of dialecticized transcendental realism -- 1m realism : non-identity -- 2e realism : negativity -- Space, time and tense -- Social science, explanatory critique, emancipatory axiology -- 3l realism : totality -- 4d realism : agency -- The dialectic of desire to freedom -- Dialectical critical realism and the dialectics of critical realism -- Metacritical dialectics : irrealism and its consequences -- Irrealism -- The problems of philosophy and their resolution -- Contradictions of the critical philosophy -- Dilemmas of the beautiful soul and the unhappy consciousness -- Master and slave : from dialectics of reconciliation to dialectics of liberation -- The metacritique of the hegelian dialectic -- Marxian dialectic i: the rational kernel in the mystical shell -- Marxian dialectic ii: the mystical shell in the rational kernel -- Metacritical dialectics : philosophical ideologies, their sublation and explanation -- The consequences of irrealism -- Diffracted and retotalized dialectics -- Dialectic as the pulse of freedom. (shrink)

Introduction: Natural necessity, being, and becoming -- Accentuate the negative -- Diffracting dialectic -- Opening totality -- Constellating ethics -- Metacritique I : philosophy's primordial failing -- Metacritique II : dialectic and difference -- Conclusion: Natural necessity and the grounds of justice : natural necessity as material meshwork.