We often say things like “Even though X, Y” or “In spite of Y, X”. What do we mean when we say things like this? What does it imply about the reasons involved? I will argue that there are at least some cases, namely when they are used in the conclusions of conductive arguments, where it should be seen as modifying our expression of X and indicating a certain kind of affect towards X, and this is characteristic of (the most (...) interesting class of) conductive arguments. Showing that there are such uses thus shows that there are conductive arguments, or at least arguments with this characteristic feature, and, conversely, it will be shown that it is by taking the reasoning to be conductive that we can best make sense of these uses. I do not intend a comprehensive survey of all possible uses of “even though” or of all accounts of conductive arguments that have been given. (shrink)

One’s generosity to others declines as a function of social distance, which is known as social discounting. We examined cultural similarities and differences in social discounting and the mediating roles of the two aspects of interdependence (self-expression and distinctiveness of the self) as well as the two aspects of independence (harmony-seeking and rejection avoidance). Using the same procedure that previous researchers used to test North Americans, Study 1 showed that compared to North Americans, Japanese discount more steeply a (...) partner’s outcomes compared to their own future outcomes, whereas the decrease in the subjective value of the partner’s outcomes accelerates less as a function of social distance. To examine the cultural similarities and differences in social discounting in more detail, Study 2 tested Japanese and Germans and found that the hyperbolic with exponent model fitted the participants’ discounting behaviors better than the other models, except for the loss condition in Germans where the utility of the q-exponential model was indicated. Moreover, although the social discounting rate was higher in Japanese than in Germans, the cultural difference was limited to the gain frame. However, the decline in a person’s generosity accelerated less as a function of social distance in Japanese than in Germans. Furthermore, the cultural difference in the social discounting in gains was mediated by the level of harmony-seeking, which was higher in Germans than in Japanese. Implications for individuals’ generosity against the backdrop of cultural characteristics are discussed. (shrink)

Discounting the importance of historical influences upon Simmel's philosophy, the author gives a straightforward exposition of Simmel's Lebensphilosophie his theory of history--ic representation of Reality;" and lastly his theory of philosophy--"Philosophy is the expression of certain types of philosophical attitudes." With the aid of numerous translated quotations, Weingartner counts up the pluses and minuses of Simmel's work and critically evaluates him as a near-great philosopher.--A. B.

Since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have experienced high and sustained rates of economic growth. Recent explanations of this sudden and massive change in economic history have held that modern growth results from an acceleration of innovation. But it is unclear why the rate of innovation drastically accelerated in England in the eighteenth century. An important factor might be the alteration of individual preferences with regard to innovation resulting from the unprecedented living standards of the English during that period, for (...) two reasons. First, recent developments in economic history challenge the standard Malthusian view according to which living standards were stagnant until the Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial England enjoyed a level of affluence that was unprecedented in history. Second, behavioral sciences have demonstrated that the human brain is designed to respond adaptively to variations in resources in the local environment. In particular, Life History Theory, a branch of evolutionary biology, suggests that a more favorable environment should trigger the expression of future-oriented preferences. In this paper, I argue that some of these psychological traits – a lower level of time discounting, a higher level of optimism, decreased materialistic orientation, and a higher level of trust in others – are likely to increase the rate of innovation. I review the evidence regarding the impact of affluence on preferences in contemporary as well as past populations, and conclude that the impact of affluence on neurocognitive systems may partly explain the modern acceleration of technological innovations and the associated economic growth. (shrink)

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt claims that liberals have a narrower moral outlook than conservatives—they are concerned with fairness and relief of suffering, which Haidt sees as individualistic values, while conservatives care about authority and loyalty too, values concerned with holding society together. I question Haidt’s methodology, which does not permit liberals to express concerns with social bonds that do not fit within an ‘authority’ or ‘loyalty’ framework and discounts people who support liberal positions but do not self-ascribe as (...) liberals. I also argue that of the six ‘moral foundations’, fairness and relief of suffering are more fundamental values than authority and loyalty, which are virtues only if their objects are worthy. Moral education programs must also encourage students to recognize some values as more urgent than others, and permit inquiry into the actual reasons for political behavior other than professed value commitments. (shrink)

Care-supporting policies incentivise women’s withdrawal from the labour market, thereby reinforcing statistical discrimination and further undermining equality of opportunities between women and men for positions of advantage. This, I argue, is not sufficient reason against such policies. Supporting care also improves the overall condition of disadvantaged women who are care-givers; justice gives priority to the latter. Moreover, some of the most advantageous existing jobs entail excessive benefits; we should discount the value of allocating such jobs meritocratically. Further, women who have (...) a real chance to occupy positions of advantage have most likely already enjoyed more than their fair share of opportunities; they lack a claim to more. Women can have a complaint grounded in the expressive disvalue of sexist discrimination. This gives them special claims against men occupying the vast majority of top positions and against their higher share of opportunities for positions of advantage. But their claim does not speak against care-supporting policies. (shrink)

In this essay I describe how contractarianism might approach interspecies welfare conflicts. I start by discussing a contractarian account of the moral status of nonhuman animals. I argue that contractors can agree to norms that would acknowledge the “moral standing” of some animals. I then discuss how the norms emerging from contractarian agreement might constrain any comparison of welfare between humans and animals. Contractarian agreement is likely to express some partiality to humans in a way that discounts the welfare of (...) some or all animals. While the norms emerging from the contract might be silent or inconsistent in some tragic or catastrophic cases, in most ordinary conflicts of welfare, contractors will agree to norms that produce some determinate resolution. What the agreement says can evolve depending upon how the contractors or the circumstances change. I close with some remarks on contractarian indeterminacy. (shrink)

Education in democratic South Africa has been saddled with the extraordinary task of sanitising a once dehumanising and splintered education system into a singular narrative of social justice and creative, problem-solving individuals. This extraordinary effort has witnessed a pendulum swing from the openness of outcomes-based education, to a less flexible National Curriculum Statement, and recently, to what has been criticised as a too restrictive Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement. In its narrow focus on ‘assessment for learning’, CAPS appears to be trapped (...) in a particular understanding of teaching and learning that can be understood only in terms of measurement, thereby discounting education as happening outside that which can be measured. In this article, I contend, firstly, that while education is not averse to measurement, it cannot be allowed to dominate the educative process. Instead, it is possible to reconcile measurement, as expressed through a ‘language of needs’ with a language of ‘coming into presence’, which recognises that learners enter the education arena with their own ideas of what is known and yet to be known. Secondly, I argue, that if a post-apartheid education system hopes to re-humanise its citizens and society, then this will only be possible through cultivating a curriculum, which is understood as a process of socially just encounters—one which is always in becoming, and therefore not necessarily measurable. (shrink)

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human–material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers’ conceptions of (...) interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability. (shrink)

Nonhuman animals are unable to exert any direct control over the functioning of democratic institutions –the decisions of which, nevertheless, have a pervasive impact on their lives. Their interests are therefore likelier to be set back or unfairly discounted, and their choices are more vulnerable to arbitrary interference. Because of this, some authors have suggested that we ought to redesign our political institutions so that they are more responsive to the interests of animals. We argue that this strategy fails to (...) address the root of the problem, which is animals’ lack of robust political agency. We defend that, should it become technologically feasible, we have a pro tanto obligation, derived from the values that underpin democracy, to uplift, or radically enhance, the political agency of nonhuman animals, so that they can better participate in mass democratic politics, express their interests as they see them, self-organise to defend them, and hold their representatives accountable. Finally, we explain how our argument manages to resist the most important objections against animal enhancement and, in some cases, it does so better than alternative proposals based on the value of animal well-being. (shrink)

In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism 2.110–113, Sextus Empiricus presents four different accounts of the conditional, presumably all from the Hellenistic period, in increasing logical strength. While the interpretation and provenance of the first three accounts is relatively secure, the fourth account has perplexed and frustrated interpreters for decades or longer. Most interpreters have ultimately taken a dismissive attitude towards the fourth account and discounted it as being of both little historical and logical interest. We argue that this attitude is unwarranted (...) and demonstrate that the conditional expressed in the fourth account can profitably be understood as a precursor of analytic entailment, familiar from containment logics such as those developed by Parry and Angell. Exploiting recent work by Fine, we present a formal truthmaker semantics for this conditional and show how it sheds light on a number of longstanding issues in the interpretation of this passage. (shrink)

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

The idea that quotidian, middle-level concepts typically have internal structure-definitional, statistical, or whatever—plays a central role in practically every current approach to cognition. Correspondingly, the idea that words that express quotidian, middle-level concepts have complex representations "at the semantic level" is recurrent in linguistics; it is the defining thesis of what is often called "lexical semantics," and it unites the generative and interpretive traditions of grammatical analysis. Hale and Keyser (HK) (1993) have endorsed a version of lexical decomposition according to (...) which "denominal" verbs are typically derived from phrases containing the corresponding nouns: ‘singvtr’ is supposed to come from something like DO A SONG; ‘saddlevtr’ is supposed to come from something like PUT A SADDLE ON; ‘shelvevtr’ is supposed to come from something like PUT ON A SHELF; and so forth.1 Their case for these claims revives a form of argument, the "impossible-word" argument, which has for some time been in eclipse. In this article we will claim that, whatever the right account of lexical decomposition eventually turns out to be, impossible-word arguments are infirm and should be discounted. We will use HK's paper as a text for this critique. (shrink)

The catch 22 situation in psychiatry is that for precise diagnostic categories/criteria, we need precise investigative tests, and for precise investigative tests, we need precise diagnostic criteria/categories; and precision in both diagnostics and investigative tests is nonexistent at present. The effort to establish clarity often results in a fresh maze of evidence. In finding the way forward, it is tempting to abandon the scientific method, but that is not possible, since we deal with real human psychopathology, not just concepts to (...) speculate over. Search for clear-cut definitions/diagnostic criteria in psychiatry must be relentless. There is a greater need to be ruthless and blunt in this, rather than being accommodative of diverse opinions. Investigative tests - psychological, serum, CSF, or neuroimaging - are only corroborative at present; they need to become definitive. Medicalisation appears most prominent in psychiatry; so, diagnostic proliferation and fuzziness appear inevitable. And yet, the established diagnostic entities need to forward greater and conclusive precision. Also, the need for clarity and precision must outweigh pandering to and mollifying diverse interests, moreso in the upcoming revision of diagnostic manuals. This is specially because the DSM-5, being an Association manual, may need to accommodate powerful member lobbies; and ICD-11 may similarly need to cater to diverse country lobbies. Finding precise biological correlates of psychiatric phenomena, whether through neuroimaging, molecular neurobiology and/or neurogenomics, is the right way forward. It is in the 1.5-kg structure in the cranium that all secrets of psychiatric conditions lie. Social forces, behavioural modification, psychosocial restructuring, study of intrapsychic processes, and philosophical insights are not to be discounted, but they are supplementary to the primary goal - studying and deciphering those brain processes that result in psychiatric malfunction. Experimental breakthroughs, both in psychiatric aetiology and therapeutics, will come mainly from biology and its adjunct, psychopharmacology; while supplementary and complementary breakthroughs will come from the psychosocial, cognitive and behavioural approaches; the support base will come from phenomenology, epidemiology, nosology and diagnostics; while insights and leads can hopefully come from many fields, especially the psychosocial, the behavioural, the cognitive and the philosophical. Major energies must now be marshalled towards finding biomarkers and deciphering the precise phenotype-genotype-endophenotype axis of psychiatric disorders. Energies also need to be focussed on unravelling those critical processes in the brain that tip the scale towards psychiatric disorders. At how those critical processes are set into motion by forces de novo, in utero, in the genes and their expression, by the environment's psychopathological social forces - stress, peer pressure, poverty, deprivation, alienation, malnutrition, discrimination of various types (caste, gender, race, etc.), mass conflicts (war, terror attacks, etc.), disasters (natural and man-made), religious/ideological fascism - or social institutions like marriage, family, work place, political governance, etc. Ultimately, we must decipher how the brain goes into malfunction when such varied forces impinge on it, which precise cortical areas and neuronal cellular and molecular processes are involved in such malfunction and its manifestation, as also which of these are involved when malfunction ceases and health is restored, and the psychosocial processes and institutions which aid such health restoration, as also those which promote well-being and help in primary prevention. Emphasis on the brain and its intimate neurological and molecular mechanisms will not impinge on, or nullify, importance of the 'mind,' wherein subtle and gross brain functions in the form of behaviour, thought and emotions in all their ramifications will continue to be the focus of psychological, cognitive, sociological, psychopharmacological, behavioural and philosophical research. Progress in brain research must move in tandem with progress in 'mind' research. (shrink)

Who/what can be had at an ontological discount? By grasping the “anitrelationality” and “dismediation” of social relations by capital’s system of accounts, we discern not only the epistemicide and the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital, we shed new light on racial abstraction and gender abstraction. We grasp in “the coloniality of race and gender” the logistics of abstraction that at once code the social factory and give rise to what I have called the derivative condition—a condition in which the (...) multiple forms of being, when dissolved in and as executable information, are functionalized as contingent claims on the value-form by means of “the world computer.” When we say that semiotic processes are metapragmatically put under economic and informatic pressure, we are also saying that the datafication expresses more than a simple analogy to the commodity form by assigning numbers to qualities. Rather, datafication appears as the preeminent mechanism for the commodification of sociality, and thus also encodes access to social currency. Femicide and the ritual violence of parastate cartels of “gore capitalism” can be seen as alternative means of issuing derivative (soft) currencies by imposing extrajudicial if equally violent systems of account. (shrink)

In response to Ainslie & Gault: The value of a temporally extended behavioral pattern depends on relationships inherent in the pattern itself. It is not possible to express that value as the simple sum of the discounted present values of the pattern's component acts.

This paper has three aims. First, I defend, in its most radical form, Hume's scepticism about practical reason, as it applies to purely self-regarding matters. It's not always irrational to discount the future, to be inconstant in one's preferences, to have incompatible desires, to not pursue the means to one's ends, or to fail to maximize one's own good. Second, I explain how our response to the “irrational” agent should be understood as an expression of frustrated sympathy, in Adam Smith's (...) sense of sympathy, rather than a genuine judgement about Reason. We judge these people because we cannot imaginatively identify with their desires and attitudes, and this is frustrating. Third, compared to the standard cognitive view, my account better explains the nature of our criticism of the “irrational,” and, by portraying “irrationality” as a cause of upset to other people, provides a better normative basis for being “rational.”. (shrink)

Nursing scholars have called for nursing approaches with children that ensure the promotion of their childhood, contesting dominant adult-based approaches that are adapted for practice with children. Although the nursing literature includes many important advances in the promotion of child-centered approaches, there are still significant gaps in fully recognizing the complexities of childhood within nursing. Within this paper, I (a) outline some key advances in nursing approaches with children, sometimes referred to as “Children's Nursing” (shifting away from “Pediatric Nursing” conceptions (...) that may be focused more on diseases than childhood); (b) highlight key gaps in current conceptions of Children's Nursing, namely the inadequate integration of work from the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies which challenges dominant age-based developmental models which discount children's voices and experiences as “immature”; and (c) propose a Childhood Ethics-based framework that bridges advances in Children's Nursing with those within Childhood Studies, which I refer to as the VOICE Children's Nursing Framework. The latter is rooted in the recognition of (a) children as active agents with capacities and interests in participating in discussions and decisions that affect them, and (b) best interests as the foundational basis for determining the nursing care required by a child which should be defined in an individualized manner, informed by a child's expressed aspirations and concerns. This Framework integrates biological, relational, and ethical dimensions of children's wellbeing and draws on hermeneutic approaches for eliciting and interpreting children's agential expressions, which involves continuous part/whole shifting to meticulously discern what is meaningful within a situation. The Framework is operationalized for clinical practice through the use of orienting questions, which is demonstrated through discussion of a clinical exemplar. The paper closes with proposed future directions for Children's Nursing development in practice, education, and research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle, and Red ViennaMalachi H. Hacohen*A stranger in his homeland even before emigrating in 1937, the philosopher Karl Popper is rarely considered an Austrian. Although he was born in Vienna in 1902 and buried there in 1994, he is known as an Atlantic intellectual and an anti-Communist prophet of postwar liberalism. He first became famous for The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). 1 He (...) wrote the book during World War II in his New Zealand exile, intending it as a defense of democracy against fascism. The defeat of Austrian socialism and the collapse of Central European democracies were the major experiences informing his analysis. But The Open Society quickly became, with Popper’s full support, a charter of Atlantic Cold War liberalism. His philosophy of science, exemplified best in Logik der Forschung, went through a similar transformation. 2 To be sure, it is commonly debated in the context of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle; but the circle’s emigration and the postwar triumph of analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American academy transformed positivism, too, into an Atlantic philosophy. The “fugue of exile’s disruptions” severed the thread connecting Popper to Austria. 3Yet Popper was the foremost philosopher to carry the progressive Viennese legacy into the postwar era. In his critiques of the Vienna Circle and Red Vienna he confronted the philosophical and political problems of Viennese late enlightenment [End Page 711] and the interwar crises of scientific reason and Central European democracy. Refashioning the fin-de-siècle progressive legacy, he drew novel visions of liberal science and politics, imagining utopian scientific and political communities that were engaged in the pursuit of truth and reform. He made critical debate the acid test of political and scientific rationality, the center of a new liberalism. Establishing a free public sphere as the sine qua non of the Open Society, he innovated on a familiar liberal motif, shared by thinkers as different as Kant, De Staël, Guizot, Mill, and Habermas.In The Open Society Popper also wrote the political platform of the postwar Social-Democratic Consensus that legislated for the welfare state and mobilized against Communism. During World War II he opted for a liberal-socialist alliance that would contain postwar Central European fascism. Instead, his “Popular Front” platform proved adaptable to postwar anti-Communism. He made a few naïve pronouncements on deterrence and the free world during the Cold War. 4 They reflect badly on his political philosophy. Yet disentangled from its Cold War associations, his liberalism contains an abiding cosmopolitan vision for an age that is looking beyond the nation-state. His cosmopolitanism originated as a solution to dilemmas of ethnic identity faced by the assimilated-Jewish Viennese intelligentsia. His Open Society expressed their dream of integration into a community that discounted religion, ethnicity, and nationality. 5 He refused to give up on cosmopolitanism in the bipolar world when Machtpolitik seemed the order of the day. Almost alone among postwar liberals, he retained a belief in an international legal order and challenged national self-determination. His vision has regained relevance today. Cosmopolitanism and critical debate provide a starting-point for renegotiating liberal dilemmas.“My theory of knowledge, my philosophy of science and my political philosophy are original only in their interdependence,” stated Popper in a 1976 interview. 6 His epistemology has major political and scientific significance. Well before cultural studies began deconstructing science, Popper countered philosophers’ and scientists’ claims of expertise. There is no philosophical method. Every person is a problem-solver, and so every person is a philosopher. “Science is nothing but enlightened and responsible common sense—common sense broadened by imaginative critical thinking.” 7 Demystifying science, he never gave up on the growth of knowledge. He conceived of science as an unending quest for uncertain but growing knowledge. A non-foundationist, [End Page 712] he insisted that objectivity meant intersubjectivity. Rationality was a product of critical debate. In today’s intellectual world, devoid of certainty, where systems of knowledge and identities have been thrown into flux, Popper’s unique synthesis of contingency, convention, and change with logical certainty, objectivity, and tradition suggests a promising direction in the... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Arne Naess once called himself ?a kind of metaphysician?: did or did he not therewith turn his back on his philosophical mentors in the Vienna Circle? To try to determine the meaning of this self-ascription, this paper first considers in detail two works in which his disagreements with the philosophers of the Vienna Circle found their clearest and most detailed expression. Concentrating on Carnap it will be argued that while some of Naess's criticisms cannot be taken as authoritative, he (...) did indicate a clear dividing line between himself and Carnap. Turning then to Naess's valediction to philosophy of science from 1972, Naess's appreciation of the role of metaphysics for science will be discussed and compared with his appreciation for the role of metaphysics for personal and political life as expressed in his still later ecophilosophy. Once allowance is made for the different needs addressed by his writings for the deep ecology movement and a certain 1960s' rhetoric is discounted as no longer appropriate, it can be seen that Naess's theoretical philosophy exhibited a remarkable continuity throughout. (shrink)

We argue that the use of the term “supernatural” is problematic in philosophy of religion in general, and in the contribution by Thornhill-Miller and Millican in particular. We address the disturbing parallel between Hume’s case against the rationality of belief in miracles and his dismissal of reports of racial equality. We do not argue that because Hume was a racist therefore his view against miracles is faulty, but we draw attention to how Hume sets up a framework that, for similar (...) reasons, discounts evidence of black intelligence and divine intelligence. We go on to argue against TMM’s revision of Hume on miracles. We then argue that empirical testing on the veracity of petitionary belief is impossible for there is no control case and that empirical testing can no more evaluate the evidential merits of most religious experiences than it can assess the merits of any robust philosophical position in epistemology, metaphysics, value theory, logic and mathematics. We express doubts about the integrity and scope of how one might enjoy the good of religion without belief. In a final section we offer a defense of the rationality of believing in specific religious traditions based on religious experience along with what we refer to as sufficient philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

The paper investigates, first of all, the epistemological status of one of the most elusive, yet vital, genres of literature, that aimed at childhood and adolescence. The “for” or “of” with which reference is made to the literature also known as ” youth” risks, in fact, to preserve the status quo of a discipline that has struggled (and still struggles) to find its own validity and legitimacy, discounted over time with an “invisibility” or a derubrication to derivative literature, secondary, weak (...) in its artistic and aesthetic canons. On the contrary, the aim here is to confirm, as witnessed by the most recent scientific studies, the total autonomy of literature for childhood and adolescence which, relying on at least two codes, iconic and verbal, boasts considerable expressive freedom, lending itself also as a faithful interpreter of post-modernity. One theorises, therefore, the possibility of speaking of a literature ‘from’ childhood and ‘from’ adolescence, underlining the need to consider the specification in the same way as a geographical and cultural location. Since we are dealing with works written and illustrated by individuals who are not boys or girls by birth (since the latter are not yet masters of iconographic writing), the most relevant will be those that faithfully draw on the physical and metaphysical region of childhood, restoring its complexity and expression, as a direct emanation of that other culture, which still and always exists and resists in us. (shrink)

This essay explicates and defends a version of moral cosmopolitanism. It builds on the work of Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who in turn build on Cicero and Kant. It is an update in a contemporary idiom of a classical cosmopolitanism. In a time when Enlightenment ideas are widely discounted, it gives expression to an Enlightenment view arguing that there should be a fundamental allegiance to the ideal of a worldwide community of human beings where each human being, just (...) be cause he/she is a human being, is equally a subject of concern and is taken to be of equal worth. Any patriotic concern for nation, or particularly groupings, should be subordinate to that ideal. It defends such a conception against the charge of elitism, unrealistic utopianism, anthropological naiveté and irrelevance, and of the charge that it involves a failure to attend to the importance of particular attachments. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(4) 2005: 273-288. (shrink)

There is increasing concern about “surveillance capitalism,” whereby for-profit companies generate value from data, while individuals are unable to resist (Zuboff 2019). Non-profits using data-enabled surveillance receive less attention. Higher education institutions (HEIs) have embraced data analytics, but the wide latitude that private, profit-oriented enterprises have to collect data is inappropriate. HEIs have a fiduciary relationship to students, not a narrowly transactional one (see Jones et al, forthcoming). They are responsible for facets of student life beyond education. In addition to (...) classrooms, learning management systems, and libraries, HEIs manage dormitories, gyms, dining halls, health facilities, career advising, police departments, and student employment. HEIs collect and use student data in all of these domains, ostensibly to understand learner behaviors and contexts, improve learning outcomes, and increase institutional efficiency through “learning analytics” (LA). ID card swipes and Wi-Fi log-ins can track student location, class attendance, use of campus facilities, eating habits, and friend groups. Course management systems capture how students interact with readings, video lectures, and discussion boards. Application materials provide demographic information. These data are used to identify students needing support, predict enrollment demands, and target recruiting efforts. These are laudable aims. However, current LA practices may be inconsistent with HEIs’ fiduciary responsibilities. HEIs often justify LA as advancing student interests, but some projects advance primarily organizational welfare and institutional interests. Moreover, LA advances a narrow conception of student interests while discounting privacy and autonomy. Students are generally unaware of the information collected, do not provide meaningful consent, and express discomfort and resigned acceptance about HEI data practices, especially for non-academic data (see Jones et al. forthcoming). The breadth and depth of student information available, combined with their fiduciary responsibility, create a duty that HEIs exercise substantial restraint and rigorous evaluation in data collection and use. (shrink)

In his Mathesis rationis Leibniz discounted out of hand four categorical propositions that would have considerably broadened the resultant syllogistic logic. He did this despite the facts both that he had devised a suitable manner for expressing the latent quantification over terms, and that he had reasoned adequately to determine which of the syllogisms in the resulting broadened logic were valid. Leibniz's reasons for discounting these non-standard propositions are shown to be inadequate, and the resultant syllogistic logic is outlined.

This study investigated personal perceptions and comprehensions of self-ascribed paranormal abilities. Twelve participants with supposed supernatural powers took part in semi-structured interviews exploring the origin, phenomenology, and nature of their powers. Interview transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, a qualitative method that identifies patterns within data. Four major themes expressed meanings and representations held by participants: Formative Influences, Subjective Paranormal Experience, Embodied Processes, and Perception of Reality. Consideration of themes identified an inextricable link between perception, interpretation, and belief in (...) ability. Within narratives, interviewees outlined, contextualised, and established the validity of their powers. They drew upon supporting autobiographical evidence from their life histories and obfuscated and/or discounted conventional explanations. Generally, accounts reflected individual attempts to comprehend and justify the nature and experience of professed abilities. The authors discuss these processes and suggest ways to extend and develop ensuing research. (shrink)

In this article, I want to reflect on the patient’s voice and why it is sometimes faint or goes altogether unheard. The patient may be too ill to speak or too incapacitated for her voice to express her autonomous wishes. She may speak a foreign language. She may be deaf and lacking an interpreter qualified to sign medical terminology. Her own views may be outshouted by a patient association that presumes to speak for her. Or she may be the target (...) of prejudice that makes it easy for socially privileged people to discount or ignore or not hear what she says.In this article, I examine a rather different, more subtle kind of voicelessness—one that is pervasive, causes moral... (shrink)

The coherence of omniscience is sometimes challenged using self-referential sentences like, “No omniscient entity knows that which this very sentence expresses,” which suggest that there are truths which no omniscient entity knows. In this paper, I consider two strategies for addressing these challenges: The Common Strategy, which dismisses such self-referential sentences as meaningless, and The Conciliatory Strategy, which discounts them as quirky outliers with no impact on one’s status as being omniscient. I argue that neither strategy succeeds. The Common Strategy (...) fails because it is both unmotivated and impotent. The Conciliatory Strategy fails because it leads to embarrassing situations in which omniscient entities are epistemically inferior to non-omniscient entities: we can, for example, devise trivia-based drinking games that force omniscient entities into an intoxicated state; and, given plausible closure principles for belief, such entities are unable to have the sorts of beliefs that give them reason to refuse to play. (shrink)

Recent writing on the idea of a form of life has tended to be critical of the use made of this notion by writers such as Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips and Norman Malcolm. Rightly or wrongly these writers have been regarded as meaning by ‘a form of life’, something like ‘a way or style of life’, and recent explicatory work on the notion has largely tended to discount this as a plausible interpretation of what Wittgenstein meant in his use (...) of the expression. The intention of this paper is not that of direct intervention in this particular dispute, though the conclusions drawn, if correct, would have some bearing on it. The intention is rather to develop, in order to make use of it, the idea of a form of life within the context of a number of philosophical difficulties. I should certainly claim to be drawing upon the remarks made by Wittgenstein in his own use of the expression: but I should not claim to be expounding Wittgenstein. Hence I do not wish to enter into the disputes referred to above about what precisely Wittgenstein meant by the expression, though again, what I say, if not wholly misguided, should have some bearing on these disputes. (shrink)

In typical critical thinking texts, hyperbole is presented as being largely “argumentationally innocent” - it’s primary role being to express emotion of to bring desired emphases to a particular point. This discounts its prevalent use in argumentation, as it is also used as a device to persuade, and in particular, to persuade an interlocutor that they should take or support a course of action. When it is so used, the exaggerated claims would, if true, provide greater support for the conclusion. (...) But since the claims are not fully accurate, this “greater support” is only illusory. Its use is thus deceptive and counts as fallacious reasoning. (shrink)

“Hallo, hier ist Jeff ” / “Hello, this is Jeff ” — the typical words, distinctively articulated, the hint of a question mark, when Jeff called you, usually with a splendid idea for a “nice little symposium”, some conference, an invitation to give a lecture, to participate in a colloquium, to contribute an article. During the decades I have known him, never once has there been less than complete commitment to semiotics, an ongoing fascination that never slackened, paired with an (...) outlook, principally in regard to politics, going far beyond the confines of a scholarly field. It was an inclusive vision of the world that was typical of him, albeit a Weltanschauung guided by unequivocal conceptions and based on ample reflection. Even so, Jeff had no misgivings about assumptions divergent from his own although these were deeply held: rather, that plurality seemed to energize him even more, and the resulting expression of his views would, as a rule, get highly animated and intense. His engagement had to be strong: semiotics has hardly ever been a popular discipline (discounting a brief voguish celebrity in France,chiefly caused by a deficient and reductive reception of Barthes). Indeed semiotics was (and still is) widely considered to be a pretentious undesirability, maybe particularly in Jeff’s native Austria (where he organized all the same a very substantial number of subsidized colloquies). It was, I think, not least the tenacity resulting from an inauspicious situation which made Jeff such a fighter. No doubt, he had to be ─ his outstanding services to semiotics in general, that’s to say in large measure on the international scene, by no means a setting mastered easily, give ample proof. And prodigal too was the incredible amount of publications to his credit, pouring forth in rapid succession, throughout the years. The loss we had to suffer this year will be felt for a long time; at least there are the memories of unparalleled engagement and the testimony of a stupendous oeuvre. And for some among us there are even quite private remembrances to cherish: in my case, for instance, an extended visit of Jeff’s ─ not so long ago at our place in south-western France ─ together with his companion and collaborator Gloria Withalm. (shrink)

“Hallo, hier ist Jeff ” / “Hello, this is Jeff ” — the typical words, distinctively articulated, the hint of a question mark, when Jeff called you, usually with a splendid idea for a “nice little symposium”, some conference, an invitation to give a lecture, to participate in a colloquium, to contribute an article. During the decades I have known him, never once has there been less than complete commitment to semiotics, an ongoing fascination that never slackened, paired with an (...) outlook, principally in regard to politics, going far beyond the confines of a scholarly field. It was an inclusive vision of the world that was typical of him, albeit a Weltanschauung guided by unequivocal conceptions and based on ample reflection. Even so, Jeff had no misgivings about assumptions divergent from his own although these were deeply held: rather, that plurality seemed to energize him even more, and the resulting expression of his views would, as a rule, get highly animated and intense. His engagement had to be strong: semiotics has hardly ever been a popular discipline (discounting a brief voguish celebrity in France,chiefly caused by a deficient and reductive reception of Barthes). Indeed semiotics was (and still is) widely considered to be a pretentious undesirability, maybe particularly in Jeff’s native Austria (where he organized all the same a very substantial number of subsidized colloquies). It was, I think, not least the tenacity resulting from an inauspicious situation which made Jeff such a fighter. No doubt, he had to be ─ his outstanding services to semiotics in general, that’s to say in large measure on the international scene, by no means a setting mastered easily, give ample proof. And prodigal too was the incredible amount of publications to his credit, pouring forth in rapid succession, throughout the years. The loss we had to suffer this year will be felt for a long time; at least there are the memories of unparalleled engagement and the testimony of a stupendous oeuvre. And for some among us there are even quite private remembrances to cherish: in my case, for instance, an extended visit of Jeff’s ─ not so long ago at our place in south-western France ─ together with his companion and collaborator Gloria Withalm. (shrink)

In this essay, Amy Voss Farris and Pratim Sengupta argue that a democratic approach to children's computing education in a science class must focus on the aesthetics of children's experience. In Democracy and Education, Dewey links “democracy” with a distinctive understanding of “experience.” For Dewey, the value of educational experiences lies in “the unity or integrity of experience.” In Art as Experience, Dewey presents aesthetic experience as the fundamental form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experiences and (...) that can bring together multiple forms of experiences, locating this form of experience in the work of artists. Particularly relevant to the focus of this essay, computational literacy, Dewey calls the process through which a person transforms a material into an expressive medium an aesthetic experience. Farris and Sengupta argue that the kind of experience that is appropriate for a democratic education in the context of children's computational science is essentially aesthetic in nature. Given that aesthetics has received relatively little attention in STEM education research, the authors' purpose here is to highlight the power of Deweyan aesthetic experience in making computational thinking available and attractive to all children, including those who are disinterested in computing, and especially those who are likely to be discounted by virtue of location, gender, or race. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13.1 (2003) 53-64 [Access article in PDF] Incentives for Providing Organs Patricia Milmoe McCarrick and Martina Darragh After a contentious debate at its 2002 annual meeting, the American Medical Association's House of Delegates voted to endorse the opinion of its Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs that the impact of financial incentives on organ donation should be studied (Josefson 2002). The shortage of organs (...) for transplantation has been an ongoing problem for more than 20 years. In June1981, Representative Philip Crane (R-IL) introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives proposing a $25,000 income tax deduction and a $25,000 estate tax exclusion for donating an organ (Tax Incentives 1981). Still the National Organ Transplant Act enacted in October 1984 prohibited the offering of any "valuable consideration" in return for organs (United States 1984).The developments of a legal market for tissues in the United States and a black market for organs around the world have raised the question of whether donation without compensation is the only ethically viable option. Some critics of the current system claim reliance on donation actually promotes a black market in organs (Kaserman and Barnett 2002, p. 38; Palmer 1999, p. 36). In addition, a new set of compensation issues has arisen as living kidney donor transplantations begin to rival those performed with cadaveric organs (United States 2001).As a result, current suggestions for incentives go far beyond the traditional death benefit payment to include such ideas as medals of honor for donors, reimbursement for funeral expenses, exchange programs for organ donation, and special medical insurance for living organ donors. Numerous bills introduced into the 107th Congress have proposed such incentives (Delmonico et al. 2002.) In October 2002, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded $5.2 million in grants to study both clinical and behavioral interventions for increasing organ donations that do not involve incentives. The inspiration for some of the funded proposals comes from the successes of Spain's social services and the United Kingdom's clinical administration of organ procurement programs (Robeznieks 2002). [End Page 53]With a nod to evidence-based medicine, the underlying concern expressed in much of the current literature is that no idea for increasing the supply of organs should be discounted before it is studied. This bibliography provides a short introduction to the range of opinions expressed on the issue of incentives for providing organs.al-Mousawi, M.; Samhan, M.; al-Mezairee I.; Razzak, M.A.; and Khawari, F. Cadaver Organ Procurement in Kuwait. Transplantation Proceedings 31 (8): 3375-76, 1999.The authors describe a protocol that significantly increased cadaveric organ donation and credit it with fostering the expansion of an organ sharing program among the Arab Gulf states. Developed by Kuwaiti neurologists and anesthetists after a continuing education course on transplantation, the protocol places a special emphasis on the role of local transplant coordinators who facilitate the investigation of brain death cases by neurologists.Arnold, Robert; Bartlett, Steven; Bernat, James; et al. [Ethics Committee of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons] Financial Incentives for Cadaver Organ Donation: an Ethical Reappraisal. Transplantation 73 (8): 1361-67, 27 April 2002.To prepare for proposed studies of financial incentives for organ donation, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons convened a panel to develop a methodology for evaluating the ethics of such research. Comprised of organ procurement organization executives, physicians, surgeons, and ethicists, the panel generated a list of nine criteria for use in judging any incentives proposal. While opposed to direct payment or tax incentives for organ donation, a majority of the members support funeral expense reimbursement or charitable contributions as incentives that would not violate or undermine the ideal of altruism.Cameron, J. Stewart, and Hoffenberg, Raymond. The Ethics of Organ Transplantation Reconsidered: Paid Organ Donation and the Use of Executed Prisoners as Donors. Kidney International 55 (2): 724-32, February 1999.After reviewing arguments for and against payment for organ procurement, the authors apply these arguments to the specific case of obtaining organs from executed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Platonic Ethics: Old and NewEve Browning ColeJulia Annas. Platonic Ethics: Old and New. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 196. Cloth, $35.00Readers of Plato's dialogues in our time are almost unanimously affected by what Annas here calls "the developmental thesis." We bring to Plato's texts as a dogma the [End Page 114] view that his doctrines evolved over time, that later dialogues return to problems (...) unsuccessfully addressed in earlier dialogues, and in short that the Platonic corpus as a whole should be arranged as a kind of intellectual "Bildungsroman." The early and inconclusive explorations of Socrates give way to mature and expansive metaphysical doctrines, which in turn are tested and revised in subsequent works.This developmentalist dogma has dominated interpretations of Plato, with few exceptions (notably Paul Shorey), for a century and more. Yet this makes it a rather young dogma after all. Annas argues that it is a product of Victorian scholars, and especially targets the highly influential work of Benjamin Jowett (95 n.56). Jowett placed the Republic at the center of Plato's works and interpreted others backward and forward from it. The influence of this developmental thesis has been sweeping and, Annas argues, unfortunate. Armed with it, we are reluctant to consider the doctrines of the dialogues on their own terms; we make problems for one dialogue with concerns expressed in quite another; we tend to force our readings to fit the progressive picture and distort the works in the process.To achieve some distance from developmentalism and other modern preconceptions and dogma, Annas proposes listening with an open mind to ancient readings of Plato, especially those of the so-called Middle Platonists. Most modern students of ancient philosophy have been accustomed to discount these ancients as either too marginal to deserve a hearing or too biased to be fair readers. (In addition, access to their works in reliable texts and translations has been impossible until quite recently.)But such ancient readers as Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus, Philo, and Numenius have (Annas argues) much to offer.First, they are active participants in an ongoing intellectual conversation about "eudaimonism," or the sufficiency of virtue for happiness. They comfortably engage Plato in this conversation as a proponent of eudaimonism. This is as true for the Plato of Republic and Laws as for the earlier dialogues. These older readers of Platonic ethics demonstrate that it is indeed possible to discern a unified view of the relation between goodness and happiness, without violence to the texts. While Plato may speak with "many voices," as Arius Didymus averred, this does not entail that he held "many doctrines" (9).Another modern shibboleth which the older readers can help us dislodge concerns the proper understanding of the Republic. We have tended to classify it as political theory (and in this are supported by the Library of Congress, as Annas points out). While recognizing the hefty core of more individual ethical thinking which goes into the definition of justice in the soul, we have insisted that the "Fairest City" is a serious utopian project description and should shape and contain the Republic's ethical teachings. Here too the ancients were much less inhibited than we; most of them cheerfully ignore the city-building and attend mainly to the implications for moral life. Annas finds this not only salubrious and unity-supporting but more faithful to the text, whose political content she finds "brief and underdeveloped" (82).Many readers will find the treatment of Republic's political significance (or lack thereof) objectionable. Many readers will also find the idea of relinquishing developmentalism to be unappealing or even frightening. But Annas makes a strong case for [End Page 115] seriously consulting the ancient readers if only for their medicinal value; they can "... wake us from our developmental slumbers" (165). Moreover, she provides a friendly and accessible entree to their world, one which will be of value to many modern readers who have been mystified by them heretofore.All texts quoted are in translation, and the occasional bits of original texts are transliterated. An extremely helpful "cast of characters" (which everyone will be tempted to xerox and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.4 (2003) 379-383 [Access article in PDF] Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including Texts by Edmund Husserl. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Pp. 192. $19.95 pbk. The most striking characteristic of this volume is the manner that it presents layers of interpretation to the reader, particularly in that the writing is not intended (...) as a postmodern fête, and has limited value as a hermeneutic enterprise. Ultimately the book's true contribution is the seventy-nine pages devoted to the translation and printing of lecture notes used by [End Page 379] Merleau-Ponty in a class he gave at College de France, shortly before his death. However, the explanation of why this is so will have to be withheld until the end of this review.The course that Merleau-Ponty gave was organized around three essays published by Edmund Husserl. These essays are included in the volume reviewed here and must be briefly dealt with, as they are the core of whatever thinking occurs within and around this book. Interesting essays all, they deal with three longstanding issues of philosophical debate. The first essay challenges the classical notion of a transcendent ideal. Husserl attempts to show, through an examination of geometry, that an ideal is first called into existence when it is called into the realm of human experience, and he does this without ever resorting to the quality of detached being that Plato attributes to ideals. Then, in his second essay, Husserl attempts to defeat modernist cosmology, arguing, against Galileo, that the earth is a fixed point in the universe. Finally, his third essay hearkens back to Heraclitus and Parmenides, examining how human experience is able to extract a sense of atemporal quiddity in a world that is constantly falling into a past. A reader might be baffled that an intellectual could make such claims, but they are made from within the framework of phenomenology, and, within this paradigm as Husserl explains it, the claims he makes do not seem ridiculous at all. "The Origins of Geometry," "The Originary Ark, The Earth, Does Not Move," and "The World of the Living Present,"— these are the three essays that Merleau-Ponty forms his lecture course around. At sixty pages within this volume, they constitute one third of the text itself. For intellectual worth, I would say that these essays are the finest contribution in the text, but that claim is discounted because much of the essay material was already available in English translation. Nevertheless, it only makes sense to have it included in this volume in order to conveniently work back and forth between Merleau-Ponty's notes and Husserl's actual essays.However, that brings us to a significant problem within the text itself. If readers are like me, they will realize that it is often difficult to draw conclusions from the notes of others. Like secretarial shorthand, notes rely on a reader's ability to read both what has been written and what has been withheld in an expressive passage. There is no code that will allow us to recover what Merleau-Ponty recovered as he looked down on his podium at these notes and then raised his head to speak to his class. All that we have are the fragments, and they do not make a coherent argument, lacking both the clarity and the painstaking thoroughness that we find in books [End Page 380] such as The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. Certainly one cannot fault Merleau-Ponty for this—he did not write these notes for us, but for himself. His course might have been magnificent, even transcendent, but we will not know that from these fragments.I suppose it could be argued that the ambiguity inherent in such fragments liberates the text and opens it for some sort of radical hermeneutic exegesis; however, I sigh at the very thought of such an argument. Unless we intend to transform... (shrink)

Languishing in exile after Louis Napoleon's coup d'état of December 1851 shut down socialist agitation, the followers of the utopian theorist Charles Fourier turned their attention to the New World as an "asylum" where Fourierism's communal ideals might be realized. In so doing they joined a long line of utopian dreamers who saw the young United States as a promised land of free expression and social experimentation. The head of the French Fourierists, Victor Considerant, made contacts with the remnant of (...) the American Fourierist movement, toured the United States in 1853, and was thrilled by the vast open spaces of Texas. Considerant discounted the fate of another French socialist group, the disciples... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Aspects of Christian Mystical Rhetoric, Philosophy, and PoetryRyan J. StarkThis is an article about poets and poetic philosophers who make spirited arguments. My purpose in particular is to clarify the nature of mystical rhetoric, which needs to be distinguished from secular rhetoric (i.e., “secular” as nonspiritual). As ways of existing in language, they are ontologically incommensurable, and we should treat them as such. Mystical rhetoric is that into (...) which Spirit enters, conveying to both writer and reader some aspect of providential kairos that cannot otherwise be attained. That is, God completes mystical inferences. God participates, illuminating the hearts of those who open themselves to grace through faith. Or, in other words, writers and readers who want to enter into numinous arguments must shelve the hermeneutics of suspicion. An overly critical stance actually diminishes the possibility of insight, even if it is well intended, much like nervous backseat driving, which—though aimed at producing safety—inevitably works against it. I am not suggesting, however, that skeptics are at a complete loss when approaching mystical rhetorical situations. Rather, they simply do not grasp the metaphysical, enchanted, or occult dimensions of the discourses at work, because they have closed themselves off to Spirit or—more commonly—have attempted to transmogrify Spirit into secular concepts, which distorts spirited language and leads to mischaracterizations of religious experience.1 In contrast, I provide a Christian approach to [End Page 260] mystical rhetoric, one that neither discounts nor sidesteps the real presence of the supernatural.Inspired Rhetoric and HermeneuticsFuror poeticus is a key element of mystical persuasion. The phrase literally means “poetical fury,” and the idea behind it in a Christian framework is that the Holy Spirit aids writers in creating imaginative texts (e.g., sonnets, sermons, essays, novels, blogs, etc.) or, in pernicious instances, demons aid writers.2 In either case, a mysterious force helps the author to compose. Moreover, furor touches readers or listeners, a point seldom emphasized but nonetheless central to this sublime practice of composition. Inspired writing requires inspired reading: furor poeticus needs furor lectoris.3 The Spirit aids readers in understanding mystical rhetoric, as long as those readers participate earnestly in the discourse. John Milton (1674, 7.31), for example, famously envisions such a “fit audience” in the third invocation to the Muse in Paradise Lost (i.e., the “great Argument”), where he calls on the reader for hermeneutical verve, a spirited reading to complement his enthusiastic writing. Søren Kierkegaard also writes to an audience capable of spiritually minded hermeneutics, allowing him to perform various edifying dissimulations through pseudonyms: the despairing aesthete, the unscrupulous seducer, the rigid moralist, and so forth. These inspired writers expect believing readers to contribute to their works, to complete their disputations, in fact, through spirited exegesis. Their methods of composition demand it, which is to say that writers touched by furor leave little room in their arguments for the sustainable disposition of the uninspired reader.Cicero explains spirited rhetoric and hermeneutics in De divinatione, where Quintus talks about how inspired readers experience the same type of furor as inspired writers, seers, and prophets: “Men capable of correctly interpreting all these signs of the future seem to approach very near the divine spirit of the gods whose will they interpret, just as scholars do when they interpret the poets” (1938, 226). Scholarship, in other words, is capable of tapping into mystical energy, making the scholars as prophetic as the vates on which they write. In the second book of On Christian Doctrine (1958, 75–78), Augustine also explains the importance of mystical exegesis as a form of prophecy, where sincere readers undergo the same type of inspiration as mystical writers. For Augustine, spirited reading begins with prayer and ends with revelation. In both accounts of furor, Cicero’s and Augustine’s, [End Page 261] the inspired audience and the inspired writer together experience rapture, a divine vision or illumination, which is precisely the type of communion that occurs during mystical discourses.4Still, the idea of seeking communion with God is potentially unsettling. The notion produces anxieties of psychosis, possession, and self-erasure. Plato famously expresses such concerns in Ion, for example... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The essay elucidates the intellectual and historiographical phenomenon of migration to the forefront by engaging with the perceptions of the Teutonic/germanic migrations of the fifth century among a few major Victorian ethnologists and historians. It focuses particularly on the unique view of the ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham. While many Victorian historians of the mid-nineteenth century became obsessed with the Teutonic narrative, arguing that these ancient tribes had conquered vast territories of Europe, Latham, in contrast, downplayed the impact (...) of Teutonism, discounted the vastness of the Teutonic expansion in Europe and expressed his doubts regarding the alleged Teutonic purity of the English nation. Instead, Latham advocated for an ethnological investigation, drawing conclusions which were critical of the very influential Teutonic narrative that he considered misleading, since it was founded solely on superfluous ancient historical sources. Latham’s challenge of the prevailing thesis, hence, reflected a heightened mid-nineteenth century debate between ethnology and history. Rather than delving into the historical migrations themselves, the study of the perception of Teutonic migrations contributes to the understanding of how these historians and ethnologists differentiated between ‘ideal’ and ‘destructive’ historical migrations while inserting different meanings to the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘language’. (shrink)

The first question to ask of this diplomatic edition is why bother? Why attempt to provide an exact print reproduction of a handwritten antecedent of the Introduction to Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge? And why divide the book into Editor’s Introduction, Editor’s Commentary, Text, and Critical Apparatus? The answer makes one appreciate Belfrage’s labors. T. E. Jessop, the editor of the standard edition of MI, as I shall call the material from a notebook in the library (...) of Trinity College, Dublin, made several major editing errors. Belfrage’s painstaking approach avoids them by separating editing from interpreting. Some examples. First, Jessop entitled MI “First Draft of the Introduction to the Principles,” whereas Belfrage provides physical evidence that it began as a draft prepared for a printer and therefore was probably not the first draft of the Introduction. Second, Jessop numbered the sections of MI on the basis of his interpretation of how they related to the sections of the printed text of the first edition. By making at least one glaring mistake, he demonstrated why one should employ a neutral numbering system as Belfrage does. Third, he printed only the earliest statum of a stratefied document. This approach makes it easier for the reader, but suggests linearity where none exists, makes the printed text problematic for scholars interested in dating stages of Berkeley’s thought, and prevents one from seeing how the author worked his way to the text that was finally published. To make matters worse, Jessop incorporated into the sections dates from the margin that probably were added after the original version of the draft was written, thereby suggesting an incorrect composition period for the text he presents. In his Editor’s Introduction, Belfrage presents a carefully organized argument concerning the compositional history of MI; even better, he presents the text so that the reader, too, can assess the evidence. One final error, not an editing error, but what perhaps led to them, is worth noting. Jessop wrongly encouraged reader’s to discount MI’s importance; he remarked in his Editor’s Introduction that “Compared with the printed Introduction, the draft neither adds nor omits anything of substance.” The vague expression “anything of substance” makes refuting his claim difficult, but at the very least it is extremely misleading. One need not accept Belfrage’s overall interpretation of how MI relates to the printed text to realize he has provided powerful arguments against Jessop’s view. Belfrage’s interpretation, too complex to be adequately summarized here and, indeed, too complex to be fully presented in the Editor’s Commentary, is, roughly, that Berkeley’s views on language, knowledge, and representation changed dramatically from when he first wrote MI to when he quit correcting it. In defending this historical thesis Belfrage develops a number of distinctions regarding Berkeleian doctrines which are philosophically important whether or not his defence fully succeeds. Consequently, anyone who wishes to understand the doctrines developed in the printed Introduction will have to take into account Belfrage’s interpretation of how it relates to MI. What this means is that we are doubly in his debt. Not only has he provided us with a carefully edited version of MI, one which every research library should include, he has also deepened our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Platonic Ethics: Old and NewEve Browning ColeJulia Annas. Platonic Ethics: Old and New. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 196. Cloth, $35.00Readers of Plato's dialogues in our time are almost unanimously affected by what Annas here calls "the developmental thesis." We bring to Plato's texts as a dogma the [End Page 114] view that his doctrines evolved over time, that later dialogues return to problems (...) unsuccessfully addressed in earlier dialogues, and in short that the Platonic corpus as a whole should be arranged as a kind of intellectual "Bildungsroman." The early and inconclusive explorations of Socrates give way to mature and expansive metaphysical doctrines, which in turn are tested and revised in subsequent works.This developmentalist dogma has dominated interpretations of Plato, with few exceptions (notably Paul Shorey), for a century and more. Yet this makes it a rather young dogma after all. Annas argues that it is a product of Victorian scholars, and especially targets the highly influential work of Benjamin Jowett (95 n.56). Jowett placed the Republic at the center of Plato's works and interpreted others backward and forward from it. The influence of this developmental thesis has been sweeping and, Annas argues, unfortunate. Armed with it, we are reluctant to consider the doctrines of the dialogues on their own terms; we make problems for one dialogue with concerns expressed in quite another; we tend to force our readings to fit the progressive picture and distort the works in the process.To achieve some distance from developmentalism and other modern preconceptions and dogma, Annas proposes listening with an open mind to ancient readings of Plato, especially those of the so-called Middle Platonists. Most modern students of ancient philosophy have been accustomed to discount these ancients as either too marginal to deserve a hearing or too biased to be fair readers. (In addition, access to their works in reliable texts and translations has been impossible until quite recently.)But such ancient readers as Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus, Philo, and Numenius have (Annas argues) much to offer.First, they are active participants in an ongoing intellectual conversation about "eudaimonism," or the sufficiency of virtue for happiness. They comfortably engage Plato in this conversation as a proponent of eudaimonism. This is as true for the Plato of Republic and Laws as for the earlier dialogues. These older readers of Platonic ethics demonstrate that it is indeed possible to discern a unified view of the relation between goodness and happiness, without violence to the texts. While Plato may speak with "many voices," as Arius Didymus averred, this does not entail that he held "many doctrines" (9).Another modern shibboleth which the older readers can help us dislodge concerns the proper understanding of the Republic. We have tended to classify it as political theory (and in this are supported by the Library of Congress, as Annas points out). While recognizing the hefty core of more individual ethical thinking which goes into the definition of justice in the soul, we have insisted that the "Fairest City" is a serious utopian project description and should shape and contain the Republic's ethical teachings. Here too the ancients were much less inhibited than we; most of them cheerfully ignore the city-building and attend mainly to the implications for moral life. Annas finds this not only salubrious and unity-supporting but more faithful to the text, whose political content she finds "brief and underdeveloped" (82).Many readers will find the treatment of Republic's political significance (or lack thereof) objectionable. Many readers will also find the idea of relinquishing developmentalism to be unappealing or even frightening. But Annas makes a strong case for [End Page 115] seriously consulting the ancient readers if only for their medicinal value; they can "... wake us from our developmental slumbers" (165). Moreover, she provides a friendly and accessible entree to their world, one which will be of value to many modern readers who have been mystified by them heretofore.All texts quoted are in translation, and the occasional bits of original texts are transliterated. An extremely helpful "cast of characters" (which everyone will be tempted to xerox and... (shrink)

It is difficult to write clearly about any aspect of Plotinus’ thought. There are many reasons for this. One reason is that he is a very systematic thinker. So, for example, to treat his aesthetics one must also discuss his metaphysics, psychology, and his ethics. Anther reason is his well-known subtlety and obscurity of expression. Kuisma’s book on Plotinus’ aesthetics, however, shows that it is possible to write clearly, accurately, and succinctly about Plotinus. This book is a pleasure to read. (...) Kuisma argues against a modern, widely held interpretation of Plotinus’s aesthetics which claims that “Plotinus, in contrast to Plato, accepted the possibility of the artistic imitation of intelligible Forms,” thus giving “a new direction to Platonic art theory”. His thesis is, instead, that “the objects of artistic imitation are limited to the sphere of perceptions,” although this limitation can be overcome to some extent by “the use of symbols and symbolic conventions”, inasmuch as symbolic representations do not convey on the basis of sameness of form. He calls the common view “strong mimesis,” and his own view, “weak mimesis”. Clearly, Kuisma’s view shows Plotinus to be a traditional Platonist. Indeed, it would be odd if Plotinus, of all people, should discount Plato’s doubts about the ability of sensibles to represent eternal form. (shrink)

The main thesis of this book is that Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is an exemplification of Newtonian physics, whereas the later philosophy exemplifies contemporary, relativistic physics. The reader may recall Wittgenstein’s insistence, during both major periods of his thought, upon the separation of philosophy from science. However, Bolton’s unstated premise is that Wittgenstein’s thought was unconsciously determined by two different conceptions of physics. Whatever one may think of this, it leaves a question unanswered. Since both periods of Wittgenstein’s thought follow the (...) development of relativistic physics, why was he initially influenced by Newtonian physics or its expression in modern philosophy? Was this a contingent error of the youthful Wittgenstein, or an expression of historical inevitability? We find no discussion of this difficult problem in Bolton’s book. Instead, he claims, and to some extent shows, that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, crystallizes the axioms of modern philosophy, which is essentially Newtonian. At the historical level, this thesis is either wrong or uninformative. It is wrong because not all of modern philosophy can be explained on the basis of the peculiarities of modern or Newtonian physics. It is uninformative because to the extent that all modern philosophers took Newtonian physics for granted, the latter cannot account for the sharp differences between, say, John Locke and Hegel. Nevertheless, Bolton provides interesting and plausible reasons for regarding the Tractatus as an expression of that aspect of modern philosophy which may profitably be called "Newtonian." He fails to convince at least one reader that the repudiation of the Tractatus is a repudiation of modern philosophy for anyone other than Wittgenstein and his followers. On the other hand, once we discount, or even disregard, Bolton’s historical thesis, the more traditional virtues of his book come sharply into focus. Having recently reviewed the 686 page commentary by Baker and Hacker on the first third of the Investigations, as well as Wright’s 481 page essay on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, the author of this note is in a good position to appreciate the economy and lucidity of Bolton’s summary analysis of the main points in the Tractatus. As an example of my disagreement with Bolton’s interpretation, I begin with a brief citation from p. 86. (shrink)

Discounting future costs and benefits is often defended on the ground that our descendants will be richer. Simply to treat the future as better off, however, is to commit an ecological fallacy. Even if our descendants are better off when we average across climate change scenarios, this cannot justify discounting costs and benefits in possible states of the world in which they are not. Giving due weight to catastrophe scenarios requires energetic action against climate change.