Newman’s anthropology duly appreciates the individuality and subjectivity of the human person, identifying each person as having “an infinite abyss of existence” within. Each person has thoughts and experiences that can never be fully understood by another. Yet Newman balances this focus on the radical irreducibility and individuality of the person with the inextricably social dimension of personhood, which is important for belief and value formation and moral development. He recognizes that we are social beings, discovering ourselves and growing through (...) the influence of community and interpersonal relationships. This essay proposes, through a presentation of the personalist thought of Newman, that the radical individuality and subjectivity of the person does not need to be seen as an alienating or isolating reality but can rather be viewed as a basis for the development of interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of Philip A. Rolnick’s Person, Grace, and God with comments by Andrew Grosso, Paul Lewis and Paul Gavrilyuk and a response by Philip Rolnick.

Central to the functioning of colonialism and coloniality is a specific construction of time, in terms of which the spatial ordering of the world also translates into a temporal ordering. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues that there is a specific rhetorical device at work here, namely the ‘denial of coevalness’, which is a colonial distancing strategy through which other worlds are robbed of validity on account of not existing within the same time as the West. In this article, I aim to (...) add to analyses of scholars like Fabian, Chakrabarty and Mignolo by arguing that this colonial temporal ordering, which persists today, is also thoroughly gendered. As a point of departure I use Walter Mignolo’s idea that the denial of coevalness relies on two distinctions, namely nature versus culture, and tradition versus modernity. I argue that the discursive construction of nature (as opposed to culture) and tradition (as opposed to modernity) centres on gendered assumptions and an obsession with control over women’s bodies. In the course of making this argument, I also point out the overlaps, as well as key differences, between woman’s exclusion from Western linear time, on the one hand, and the temporal distancing of the colonised, on the other. In particular, I show how Western linear chronology positions Western women and previously colonised women in vastly different ways. I argue that if one considers the extent to which the denial of coevalness relies on colonial gender discourses, the erasure of indigenous sexuate knowledges that contradict the colonial gender discourses is not one erasure among many, but one of the key erasures that colonial temporality hinges on. A crucial implication of my analysis is that the process of undoing, deconstructing or dismantling the colonial denial of coevalness is also inherently a feminist project. (shrink)

(OPEN ACCESS) In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting – respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does not (...) justify such support – although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Finally, I argue that an account of supported voting based on the ethics of political care can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in incommunicability cases, and it can account for the inclusive approach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to supported decision-making. However, I show that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellow citizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care – but not necessarily surrogate voting. (shrink)

Demonstratives seem to have posed a severe difficulty for Frege’s philosophy of language, to which his doctrine of incommunicable senses was a reaction. In “The Thought,” Frege briefly discusses sentences containing such demonstratives as “today,” “here,” and “yesterday,” and then turns to certain questions that he says are raised by the occurrence of “I” in sentences (T, 24-26). He is led to say that, when one thinks about oneself, one grasps thoughts that others cannot grasp, that cannot be communicated. (...) However, nothing could be more out of the spirit of Frege’s account of sense and thought than an incommunicable, private thought. In the first part of the paper, I explain the problem demonstratives pose for Frege, and explore three ways he might have dealt with it. I argue that none of these ways provides Frege with a solution to his problem consistent with his philosophy of language. The first two are plausible as solutions, but contradict his identification of the sense expressed by a sentence with a thought. The third preserves the identification, but is implausible. In the second part, I suggest that Frege was led to his doctrine of incommunicable senses as a result of some appreciation of the difficulties his account of demonstratives faces, for these come quickly to the surface when we think about “I.” I argue that incommunicable senses won’t help. I end by trying to identify the central problem with Frege’s approach, and sketching an alternative. (shrink)

I elaborate and defend a set of metaphysical and epistemic claims that comprise what I call the acquaintance approach to introspective knowledge of the phenomenal qualities of experience. The hallmark of this approach is the thesis that, in some introspective judgments about experience, (phenomenal) reality intersects with the epistemic, that is, with the subject’s grasp of that reality. In Section 1 of the paper I outline the acquaintance approach by drawing on its Russellian lineage. A more detailed picture of the (...) approach emerges in succeeding sections, which respond to a range of objections. Some critics charge that approaches of this sort are overly idealized, in that they ignore the cognitive flaws and limitations of actual human beings. I begin to address these worries in Section 2, by arguing that the epistemic commitments of the acquaintance approach are in fact relatively modest. In Section 3, I sketch a picture of introspective reference that explains how phenomenal reality can intersect with the epistemic in a phenomenal judgment, as the acquaintance approach requires. Drawing on this picture of introspective reference, Section 4 sets out a practical strategy for achieving knowledge by acquaintance. Some contemporary acquaintance theorists (BonJour 2003, Fumerton 1996) employ demanding epistemic standards for knowledge by acquaintance, standards beyond those mandated by the acquaintance approach. In Section 5 I show that instances of introspective knowledge that meet less demanding standards can satisfy the acquaintance approach’s epistemic commitments. The final sections concern the most direct challenges to the acquaintance approach, which target the claim that phenomenal reality intersects with the epistemic. According to one such challenge, this claim is belied by the fact that possessing a phenomenal concept is a matter of having certain dispositions. Section 6 draws on a discussion by Sosa (2003) to articulate this challenge, and responds to it on behalf of the acquaintance approach. Section 7 addresses Stalnaker’s (2008) worry that, if phenomenal reality intersected with the epistemic, phenomenal information would be incommunicable. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege criticized Kant's use of the term "representation" in a footnote in the Foundations of Arithmetics. According to Frege, Kant used the term "representation" for mental images, which are private and incommunicable, and also for objects and concepts. Kant thereby gave "a strongly subjectivistic and idealistic coloring" to his thought. The paper argues that Kant avoided the kind of subjectivism and idealism which Frege hints in his remark. For Kant, having "Vorstellungen" requires the capacity of synthesis, by virtue (...) of which the mind goes beyond its subjective states, and its modifications become presentations of an independent world. (shrink)

I develop a Latin Social model of the Trinity that is an extension of my previous article on indexicals and the Trinity. I focus on the theological desideratum of the necessity of the divine persons’ unity of action. After giving my account of this, I compare it with Swinburne’s and Hasker’s social models and Leftow’s non-social model. I argue that their accounts of the divine persons’ unity of action are theologically unsatisfactory and that this unsatisfactoriness derives from a modern conception (...) of personhood according to which distinct and incommunicable intellectual acts and volitional acts are necessary conditions for one’s being a person. I argue that the Latin Social model is preferable to the modern-personhood models because it is simpler in explanatory economy with regard to securing the necessity of the divine persons’ unity of action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Communicative Implications of Kant’s Aesthetic TheoryThomas HoveIn recent discussions of aesthetic theory, critics who raise social, cultural, and political concerns have issued important challenges to the Kantian legacy. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) continues to be widely regarded as one of the founding documents of modern aesthetic theory. But the arguments he laid out in that notoriously enigmatic work remain controversial on a variety of fronts. (...) One of those arguments concerns his distinction between pleasures that are beautiful and those that are agreeable. According to Kant’s definition, what makes experiences of the beautiful special is that they have a potentially communicable universal validity. By contrast, pleasures that are merely agreeable are incommunicable and remain confined to private sensation. Philosophers have found this distinction problematic for a variety of reasons. Their detailed commentaries have examined the intricate logical and conceptual difficulties that Kant’s theory raises (see Allison 2001; Guyer 1982, 1997, 2002; Kalar 2000; Wenzel 2005). On another front, sociologists and cultural critics—whom I will broadly refer to as “social critics”—typically raise concerns about the theory’s hidden social implications (Bourdieu 1984; Eagleton 1990; Smith 1988; Shumway 2005). Specifically, they question Kant’s proposal that judgments about the beautiful ought to have universal validity. Taking an external standpoint, they tend to regard aesthetic judgments either as the peculiar habits of [End Page 103] specific social classes, or as badges of hierarchical distinction, or as weapons in symbolic struggles for cultural dominance.To suggest why Kant’s theory is worth revisiting in the wake of such critiques, the following analysis defends his theoretical effort to distinguish the experience of the beautiful from that of the agreeable. This feature of his aesthetic theory highlights an alternative to the cognitive and practical concerns that social critics emphasize. In particular, I indicate how Kant’s aesthetic theory offers directions for the effort to explain how aesthetic experience promotes communicative sociability. By emphasizing this theme, I hope to supplement the rival emphasis that social critics place on the Kantian legacy’s elitist undercurrents. Social critiques characteristically overlook the affective type of sociability to which aesthetic experience gives rise. This oversight occurs because those critiques tend to privilege the theoretical and practical dimensions of communication. In the process, they disregard the special types of validity claims that are unique to aesthetic discourse. Following the lead of his academic precursors Meier and Baumgarten, Kant tried to define a possible third mental “faculty” that differs from cognitive and practical reason (see Henrich 1992, 31–36). But the difficulty of defining this third faculty, much less determining its existence, continues to vex both philosophers and communication theorists.Kant’s Account of Aesthetic Experience and Its CriticsIn the opening sections of the Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts to establish the independence of aesthetic judgment from theoretical and practical cognition. Those faculties are concerned with cognitive and moral concepts. By contrast, the aesthetic properties that concern taste judgments have a unique ontological and epistemological status. Kant’s argument about that status is itself enormously complex, involving as it does an intricate network of idiosyncratically defined concepts (for example, the understanding, the imagination, intuition, representations, objects, etc.). But to avoid getting lost in those intricacies, we can bracket them by simply referring to aesthetic “experience.” Also, we can concentrate on the two properties that distinguish aesthetic experience from other kinds of experience. First, aesthetic properties relate to the feelings of pleasure that are aroused by certain encounters with objects. Second, aesthetic properties are “merely subjective” (Kant 2000, 75). They do not have an objective status because we cannot associate the feelings they arouse with determinate concepts and objects. [End Page 104] As Miles Rind puts it, “in making a cognitive judgment one requires everyone to conceptualize an object in a certain way, while in making a judgment of taste one requires others to share one’s liking for an object” (Rind 2000, 83). In sum, Kant differentiates aesthetic judgment from both theoretical and practical cognition because it is radically subjective and because its unique grounding lies in feelings of pleasure and displeasure.Social critics tend to downplay the idea that there... (shrink)

Ce livre ne parle pas de religion. Son but n'est pas de plaider la cause d'une quelconque confession, avec ses dogmes et ses préceptes, mais d'examiner la question de savoir s'il existe un être suprême, suffisamment distinct du monde pour qu'on puisse l'appeler "Dieu". Il s'agit donc d'une recherche purement philosophique, appuyée sur les seules ressources de l'expérience et de la logique. Pour avancer clans cette voie, l'auteur commence par réfuter les objections les plus couramment opposées à cette entreprise (freudisme, (...) matérialisme, kantisme), avant de développer cieux types d'arguments tendant à prouver qu'il existe un Dieu : les premiers partent du constat que l'univers physique ne se suffit pas à lui-même, qu'il ne saurait donc exister sans avoir une cause transcendante ; les seconds, qui se fondent sur l'analyse des idées et des aspirations humaines, arrivent à la conclusion anti-voltairienne que "si Dieu n'existait pas, nous ne pourrions pas l'inventer". Ces deux types d'arguments, qui furent d'abord élaborés par les philosophes de l'Antiquité et les théologiens du Moyen Age, font ici l'objet d'une reformulation rigoureuse, nourrie par les travaux des philosophes anglo-saxons contemporains. L'ambition de cet ouvrage, au-delà des preuves qu'il soumet à la discussion, est d'accréditer à nouveau l'idée que l'existence de Dieu n'est pas seulement l'objet d'une foi incommunicable, mais la conclusion au moins probable de raisonnements accessibles à tous. (shrink)

In an attempt to improve upon Alexander Pruss’s work (The principle of sufficient reason: A reassessment, pp. 240–248, 2006), I (Weaver, Synthese 184(3):299–317, 2012) have argued that if all purely contingent events could be caused and something like a Lewisian analysis of causation is true (per, Lewis’s, Causation as influence, reprinted in: Collins, Hall and paul. Causation and counterfactuals, 2004), then all purely contingent events have causes. I dubbed the derivation of the universality of causation the “Lewisian argument”. The Lewisian (...) argument assumed not a few controversial metaphysical theses, particularly essentialism, an incommunicable-property view of essences (per Plantinga’s, Actualism and possible worlds, reprinted in: Davidson (ed.) Essays in the metaphysics of modality, 2003), and the idea that counterfactual dependence is necessary for causation. There are, of course, substantial objections to such theses. While I think a fight against objections to the Lewisian argument can be won, I develop, in what follows, a much more intuitive argument for the universality of causation which takes as its inspiration a result from Frederic B. Fitch’s work (J Symb Logic 28(2):135–142, 1963) [with credit to who we now know was Alonzo church’s, Referee Reports on Fitch’s Definition of value, in: (Salerno (ed.), New essays on the knowability paradox, 2009)] that if all truths are such that they are knowable, then (counter-intuitively) all truths are known. The resulting Church–Fitch proof for the universality of causation is preferable to the Lewisian argument since it rests upon far weaker formal and metaphysical assumptions than those of the Lewisian argument. (shrink)

This article discusses the possibility for vulnerable writing within feminist methodological approaches to research. Drawing upon a project that involved difficulties and tensions in conducting transnational research, including the documenting and telling of a partial narrative of an individual who set herself on fire, the article discusses what it might mean to focus more explicitly on explicating and recognising vulnerability in writing. In providing examples from working with a situated, localised analysis that engages feminist, postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches to (...) attend to the particular and everyday, I address some of the hesitations and uncertainties in undertaking research and producing knowledge, and concerns with forms of reflexive practice. At the heart of the discussion is the question of a vulnerable ethics, of how it is possible for feminist methods to represent the lives of others, especially when stories fail in the telling, both in providing adequate explanations and in the ways that trauma and suffering can remain incommunicable. Included in this are concerns as to how we as researchers are affected within the production of research. As a form of receptivity and wounding, the article argues for vulnerable writing that challenges feminist methods to remain open and receptive to what will always resist sense-making, while continuing to respond to the demand that we do justice to the lives of others. (shrink)

This essay addresses a stream of thought manifested in some forms of social justice activism – namely, that members of marginalized groups have privileged insight into the nature of social reality which others cannot understand, much less critique. This position, which I call “epistemic isolationism,” seems to rest on the claim that the knowledge that is embedded in lived experience is incommunicable. The essay proceeds in three parts: first, there is a brief overview of standpoint epistemology, including a recent (...) version which seems to support epistemic isolationism. Second, there is an explication of the concept of “lived experience” as developed by Wilhelm Dilthey. Third, there is an argument against the claim that lived experience is incommunicable, drawing from the work of Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. The payoff of the argument is that sharing lived experience through expressions like literature and narrative inspires mutual recognition and respect which can, in turn, support a robust form of solidarity and serve as a foundation for more effective social justice advocacy. (shrink)

Persons are thought to have a special kind of value, often called "dignity," which, according to Kant, makes them both infinitely valuable and irreplaceably valuable. The author aims to identify what makes a person a person in a way that can explain both aspects of dignity. She considers five definitions of "person": (1) an individual substance of a rational nature (Boethius), (2) a self-conscious being (Locke), (3) a being with the capacity to act for ends (Kant), (4) a being with (...) the capacity to act for another (Kant), and (5) an incommunicably unique subject (Wojtyla). She argues that none is capable of grounding both aspects of dignity since they are incompatible kinds of value; it is impossible for the same thing to ground both. Human persons are infinitely valuable in virtue of shareable qualities of their nature, whereas they are irreplaceably valuable because of a nonqualitative feature of their personhood. (shrink)

The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative, phenomenal nature of conscious experiences also cannot be communicated to others in the form of a message composed of classical bits of information. Because in a classical world everything physical is observable and communicable, it is a daunting task to explain how an empirically unobservable, incommunicable consciousness could have any (...) physical substrates such as neurons composed of biochemical molecules, water, and electrolytes. The challenges encountered by classical physics are exemplified by a number of thought experiments including the inverted qualia argument, the private language argument, the beetle in the box argument and the knowledge argument. These thought experiments, however, do not imply that our consciousness is nonphysical and our introspective conscious testimonies are untrustworthy. The principles of classical physics have been superseded by modern quantum physics, which contains two fundamentally different kinds of physical objects: unobservable quantum state vectors, which define what physically exists, and quantum operators (observables), which define what can physically be observed. Identifying consciousness with the unobservable quantum information contained by quantum physical brain states allows for application of quantum information theorems to resolve possible paradoxes created by the inner privacy of conscious experiences, and explains how the observable brain is constructed by accessible bits of classical information that are bound by Holevo's theorem and extracted from the physically existing quantum brain upon measurement with physical devices. (shrink)

What is hermeneutics? -- The suffering stranger and the hermeneutics of trust -- Sandor Ferenczi : the analyst of last resort and the hermeneutics of trauma -- Frieda Fromm-Reichmann : incommunicable loneliness -- D.W. Winnicott : humanitarian without sentimentality -- Heinz Kohut : glimpsing the hidden suffering -- Bernard Brandchaft : liberating the incarcerated spirit.

Ineffability in Plato is a conundrum. There are at least four dimensions of ineffability in Platonic texts: epistemic (divine), strategic (religious), unspeakability and incommunicability. In this paper, I deal only with the first dimension, which is strictly epistemic in kind, and defend that Plato rejects divine ineffability, namely, the belief that the knowledge of the divine in general is inaccessible to the human mind. Several crucial passages attest to this rejection unequivocally. They show that Plato attached a great philosophical relevance (...) to what I call the equivalenceprinciple, namely, the interdependence or specularity between human and divine intelligence. The assertion of this principle represents the Platonic path to absolute knowledge, which I try to locate in the broader context of the history of philosophy, from early philosophers to Hegel. (shrink)

The paper presents the theological and philosophical category of Deus absconditus and shows it in the perspective of Nicholas of Cusa’s ideas contained in his dialogue De Deo Abscondito. The hidden God is the totally transcendent God that is beyond creation both ontologically and logically. Deus absconditus is God that cannot be the object of rational cognition and positive knowledge, hence the only way to acquire any knowledge of him is the method of negative theology. Therefore, the hidden God is (...) the subject of mystical epistemology. Cusanus’s Deus absconditus is also called Truth and as such he is not only incomprehensible, but also incommunicable. God’s transcendence, rational unintelligibility and inexpressibility are the aspects which the considerations presented in this paper build on. (shrink)

This paper is about different types of silence, and about differing processes of philosophical investigation and sagely illumination. It is argued that the sagely Dao of wu wei leads to silence in the sense of no spoken words, and the philosophical way of proof leads to silence in the sense of no spoken words. So both proof and wu wei both lead to silence in the sense of no spoken words. Accordingly there is a type of silence that results from (...) the explosive process of philosophical argumentation and reduction to no spoken words because of undecidability, and there is also a type of silence that results from the implosive process of sagely silence and reversion to silent illumination with no spoken words. However, the silence of explosion and the silence of implosion differ as regards processes of reduction and reversion respectively. Therefore, proof and wu wei both lead to silence in the sense of no spoken words, but the type of silence resulting from the explosive process of philosophical argumentation and reduction to no spoken words because of undecidability and the type of silence resulting from the implosive process of sagely silence and reversion to silent illumination because of the incommunicability of Dao differ. (shrink)

William Lane Craig’s God over All argues against the kind of “divine conceptualism” about abstract objects which I defend. In this conference presentation I note several points of agreement with and appreciation for Craig’s important work. I then turn to five points of critique and response pertaining to: the sovereignty-aseity intuition, the reality of false propositions, God’s having “inappropriate” thoughts, propositions being purely private and incommunicable, and a consistent view of God’s own ontological commitments. I conclude by summarizing our (...) two key differences, indicating that we may have much more in common than first appears. (shrink)

It is frequently said that pain is incommunicable and even that it destroys language . This paper offers a phenomenological account of pain and then explores and critiques this view. It suggests not only that pain is communicable to an adequate degree for clinical purposes, but also that it is itself a form of communication through which the person in pain appeals to the empathy and ethical goodness of the clinician. To explain this latter idea and its ethical implications, (...) reference is made to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

Le présent article indique les principales caractéristiques de la ritualité funéraire. Il montre, au-delà de ses formes d'organisation, ses enjeux. Retenue du mort, séparation du défunt et remaniement des places que les vivants occupent en rapport à la société des morts, constituent les dimensions principales d'une ritualité sans doute variable selon les cultures, mais aussi universelle. On peut décrire les pratiques des funérailles, les « expliquer » en montrant qu'elles ressortissent à des impératifs sociaux, ou les « comprendre » en (...) disant que l'être désolé trouve au travers de coutumes les moyens d'affirmer son attachement à l'être aimé et de nier symboliquement la perte qu'il subit. Mais il faut surtout comprendre que la ritualité funéraire, qui déborde des obsèques, oblige les sociétés au-delà de leurs capacités communicationnelles. Ce débordement est précisément l'affaire de toute culture et de son travail. En direction de l'incommunicable.This article describes the main characteristics of the funeral ritual. It shows beyond its forms of organization, its issues. Retention of death, separation and rearrangement of the deceased that the living spaces occupy in relation to the company of the dead, are the main dimensions of a ritual probably varies by crop, but also universal. We can describe the practices of funerals, "explain" by showing that they belong to social imperatives, or "understand" saying sorry be found through customs means to affirm its commitment to the loved and symbolically deny the loss sustained. But above all understand that the funeral ritual, which extends beyond the funeral, requires companies beyond their communication skills. This overflow is precisely the case of any culture and work. Towards the incommunicable. (shrink)

In a society that becomes more and more multicultural, is it still possible to guarantee harmonious coexistence, based on shared values? Or do we have to resign ourselves to the idea of an inevitable clash, or at least an inevitable incommunicability, between "us" and "them"? This question refers to this other: is there objectively an essential commonality among all human beings? And is human reason capable of grasping truly universal truths and values, therefore universally shared? In this text, the affirmative (...) response goes hand in hand with the thesis that the objective truth must be sought collaboratively, as the title says: with a dia -logue in which each subject does not renounce the logos, that is, his inexhaustible competence to know the truth. (shrink)

Troubadour of truth, by R. E. Brennan.--Reflections on necessity and contingency, by Jacques Maritain.--Intellectual cognition, by Rudolf Allers.--The problem of truth, J. K. Ryan.--The ontolgical roots of Thomism, by Hilary Carpeuter.--The role of habitus in the Thomistic metaphysics of potency and act, by V. J. Bourke.--The nature of the angels, by J. O. Riedl.--The dilemma of being and unity, by A. C. Pegis.--Prudence, the incommunicable wisdom, by C. J. O'Neil.--A question about law, by M. J. Adler.--The economic philosophy of (...) Aquinas, by J. A. Ryan.--Beyond the crisis of liberalism, by Y. R. Simon.--The fate of representative government, by Walter Farrell.--The Thomistic concept of education, by R. J. Slavin.--The perennial theme of beauty, by Immanuel Chapman.--Epilogue, by H. T. Schwartz.--Bibliography (p.[363]-419). (shrink)

The foundation of bioethics is the dignity of the human person. The concept of personhood developed from Christian Revelation. The marks of personhood include individuality, substantiality, rationality, incommunicability, and relatedness. Relevant issues for bioethics include the reality of personhood, the inseparability of human nature from human personhood, and the import of personhood for the inviolability of every human being. The recent bioethical instruction, Dignitas personae, reasserts that the embryo should be treated as a person and contains a latent philosophical argument (...) for defining the embryo as a person. The struggle to conceptualize personhood is the effort to value every human being as the image and likeness of God, who is ineffably Triune in his Personhood. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9.4 (Winter 2009): 725–736. (shrink)

This paper situates Husserl’s phenomenology and Carnap’s logical empiricism within a common project—the pursuit of structural objectivity. The rise of empirical psychology and physiology in the late nineteenth century contributed to a view of the self that both thinkers find threatening to the possibility of communication and thus knowledge. With subjectivity presenting the danger of incommunicability, objectivity becomes oriented around communicability. To overcome this threat and to secure an understanding of the possibility of knowledge, each thinker appeals to the formal (...) structures of constitution and logical grammar. In doing so, they help to establish a view of objectivity that responds to contemporary science and is consistent with it. This places Husserl much closer to the birth of modern scientific objectivity than he seems to have realized. Even so, whatever credibility he may have lost in the eyes of historiographers of science should be regained in his stature as philosopher of science. (shrink)

Pourquoi voudrait-on encore connaître la vérité, pourquoi chercher à l’exprimer, si celle-ci est inconnaissable, si elle est incommunicable ou si son expression ne nous confère aucun pouvoir sur autrui? Telle est la difficulté que soulèvent les sophistes, qui nous détournent de la connaissance de la réalité et de l’expression de la vérité au profit d’un usage rhétorique du discours garantissant à qui le maîtrise tout pouvoir sur les hommes. Dans cet article, je montrerai que cette difficulté est au cœur (...) des conceptions platonicienne et aristotélicienne de la vérité qui cherchent à établir ce que les sophistes nient, à savoir que la vérité puisse être désirable. Une affirmation qui ne va pas de soi, étant donné qu’il ne suffit pas de dire la vérité pour être entendu. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 8-21MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, StereotypesDaniel W. SmithIn his writings on Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski makes use of various concepts—such as intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes, resemblance and dissemblance, gregariousness and singularity—that have no place in Nietzsche's own oeuvre. These concepts are Klossowski's own creations, his own contributions to thought. Although Klossowski consistently refused to characterize himself as a philosopher ("Je (...) suis une 'maniaque,'" he once said, "Un point, c'est tout!"),1 his work in its entirety was marked by an extraordinary conceptual creation. From this point of view, his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle can be read as a work in philosophy—at least in the idiosyncratic sense given to this term by Gilles Deleuze, who defined philosophy as the creation or invention of concepts [Deleuze and Guattari 2]. No doubt, Klossowski remains an almost unclassifiable figure—philosopher, novelist, essayist, translator, artist—and attempting to analyze his work through the prism of philosophy may seem to be a reductive approach that belies the complexity of his exceptional oeuvre. Reading Klossowski as a conceptual innovator, however, at least has the advantage of allowing us to chart a consistent trajectory through his difficult and often labyrinthine text, without denying its other dimensions (affective, perceptive, literary, and so on). In what follows, then, I would like to examine three of Klossowski's most characteristic and important concepts—impulses and their intensities, phantasms, and simulacra and their stereotypes—as well as the precise interrelations he establishes among them. Taken together, these three concepts describe what Klossowski terms the tripartite economy of soul, which constitutes the implicit model through which he interprets Nietzsche's thought.1Impulses as Fluctuating IntensitiesKlossowski describes his books on both Nietzsche and Sade as "essays devoted not to ideologies but to the physiognomies of problematic thinkers who differ greatly from each other" ["Postface" 137, emphasis added]. This emphasis on the "physiognomy" of thinkers reflects Nietzsche's insistence on taking the body rather than the mind as a guide for philosophy since the body is a more accessible phenomenon, less surrounded by myth and superstition. "The body and physiology as the starting point," Nietzsche wrote. "Why?... The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible [End Page 8] phenomenon.... Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul" [WP §§492, 489, 491]. Klossowski himself, however, when writing of the intensive status of the impulses, frequently makes use of the term "soul" (âme), owing in part, no doubt, to his interest in the theological literature of the mystics, such as Meister Eckhardt and Teresa of Avila. For the mystics, the depth of the soul is something irreducible and uncreated: it eludes the exercise of the created intellect, and can only be grasped negatively.2 Nonetheless, if one can find a similar apophaticism (or "negative theology") in Klossowski, it is related exclusively to the immanent and chaotic movements of the soul's intensive affects, and not to the transcendence of God. What is incommunicable in the soul (or body) are its "impulses"—their fluctuations of intensity, their rises and falls, their manic elations and depressive descents, which are in constant variation.Nietzsche himself had recourse to a highly varied vocabulary to describe what Klossowski summarizes in the term "impulse": "drive" (Triebe), "desire" (Begierden), "instinct" (Instinke), "power" (Mächte), "force" (Kräfte), "impulse" (Reize, Impulse), "passion" (Leidenschaften), "feeling" (Gefülen), "affect" (Affekte), "pathos" (Pathos), and so on.3 Klossowski frequently employs the musical term tonalité to describe these states of the soul's fluctuating intensities—their diverse tones, timbres, and changing amplitudes—which can take on various forms ("aggressiveness, tolerance, intimidation, anguish, the need for solitude, the forgetting of oneself" [NVC 6]). At bottom, what these impulses express are what Klossowski calls the "obstinate singularity" of the human soul, which is by nature noncommunicable; they constitute "the unexchangeable depth" (le fond inéchangeable) or "the unintelligible depth" (le fond unintelligible) of the soul. What makes every individual... (shrink)

What does it mean to say that a person has dignity, and what explains her dignity? Linda Zagzebski argues that personal dignity entails both infinite and irreplaceable value. Initially she grounds the former claim in the power of rationality and the latter in the uniqueness of one’s subjective lived experience. Later she grounds both in the power of rationality, understood in terms of reflective consciousness. I argue that the latter account is an improvement upon the former but that needless problems (...) arise from both accounts because she conflates properties considered in the abstract with properties instantiated in concrete persons and she fails to recognize an ambiguity in the notion of incommunicability or uniqueness. I also argue that the more fundamental account of rationality should be given not in terms of reflective consciousness but in terms of the ability to understand particulars in light of universals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Many recent works on the methodology of intercultural philosophy point to a fundamental dilemma of the discipline: if there is a common ground for intercultural understanding, then the essence of this ground is universal instead of multi-cultural; if there are irreducible and incommunicable factors in different cultures, then complete understanding seems to be impossible. In this paper, I propose that this dilemma is founded on the assumption that intercultural philosophy is equivalent to intercultural understanding. I argue that, however, (...) intercultural philosophy should begin with questioning. Instead of understanding another culture using one’s own conceptual scheme, intercultural questioning puts one’s conceptual scheme and traditional worldview into question. The new questions obtained by phenomenologically reducing traditional thought will become a ground for intercultural dialogue without reducing one’s culture to another culture. Finally, I will use a case in Chinese philosophy to demonstrate the process of intercultural questioning. (shrink)

I would like to start with a historical question or, more precisely, a question pertaining to the history of science itself. It is a widely accepted idea that Aristotelism has been an obstacle to the emergence of modern physical science, and this was for at least two reasons. The first one is the cognitive role Aristotle is supposed to have attributed to perception. Instead of considering perception as an origin of error, Aristotle thinks that our senses provide us with a (...) reliable image of the external world. The perceptive knowledge is a kind of knowledge in its own right, and the theoretical knowledge is, in fact, the continuation of the perceptive knowledge in some way. The second reason is the presumed inability of the Aristotelian philosophers to apply mathematics to the physical world. This was a formidable obstacle because modern physics came to be but as a mathematical physics. Aristotelianism had therefore to be, so to speak, superseded by the Platonic movement that originated in Florence around Ficino in order to give modern physics the conditions of its appearance. Galileo had to say that “Nature is written with mathematical letters” and Descartes that “our senses do not teach us what things are, but to what extent they are useful or harmful to us”. Alexandre Koyré is right to consider Galilean physics to be basically Platonic. The theoretical justification Aristotle offers for the impossibility of a convergence between mathematics and physics seems to be based on some fundamental features of his philosophy, i.e. he rejects the Platonic conception of a unique science, encompassing all things, and replaces it with the doctrine of the incommunicability of genera, whose corollary is that there is but one science for each genus. (shrink)

The experience of each one of us is individual, private and particular, and in its immediacy is incommunicable. Images of all sorts, sense factors, figments of the imagination, mental comments and judgments, all these impressions, some persistent, some fleeting, follow one another in endless passage through the consciousness.

From what has been said, ‘tis easy to discover, what is so much enquired after, the principium Individuationis, and that ‘tis plain is Existence it self, which determines a Being of any sort to a particular time and place incommunicable to two Beings of the same kind.

Frege's doctrine that the demonstrative ‘I’ has a private, incommunicable sense creates tension within his theory of meaning. Fregean sense is supposed to be something objective, which exists independently of its being cognized by anyone. And the notion of a private sense corresponding to primitive aspects of an individual of which only he can be awaredoes violence both to Frege's theory of sense as well as to our notionof language as something essentially intersubjective. John Perry has arguedthat Frege was (...) led to the doctrine of private senses in spite of his beliefin the objectivity of sense through his attempt to solve a problem which indexicals posed for his theory. And while philosophers have argued about whether the notion of a private sense is in fact problematic for Frege, they have tended to share Perry's assumption about its origin. (shrink)

Some facets of making music are explored by combining arguments of Raffman's cognitivist explanation of ineffability with Merleau-Ponty's view of embodied perception. Behnke's approach to a phenomenology of playing a musical instrument serves as a further source. Focusing on the skilled performer-listener, several types of ineffable knowledge of performing music are identified: gesture feeling ineffability —the performer's sensorimotor knowledge of the gestures necessary to produce instrumental sounds is not exhaustively communicable via language; gesture nuance ineffability —the performer is aware of (...) nuances of instrumental gestures, e.g., micro-variations of intensity or duration of musical gestures, but cannot perceptually, and consequently conceptually, categorize those fine-grained variations; and ineffabilities of inter-subjectivity —the non-verbal interaction between performers that makes a performance a vibrant dialogue is similarly incommunicable. An attempt to identify some of the ineffable dimensions of this dialogue is proposed. Further ineffabilities relating the acoustical embedding of performing are identified. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Commandment against the Law Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”Tracy McNulty (bio)Pierre Legendre has shown that the Romano-canonical legal traditions that form the foundations of Western jurisprudence “are founded in a discourse which denies the essential quality of the relation of the body to writing” [“Masters of Law” 110]. It emerges historically as a repudiation of Jewish legalism and Talmud law, where the rite (...) of circumcision encodes the subject’s entry into law as an “allegiance to the absolute Writing,” or the “relationship between the human subject and the logical place of the Other” [110–11; see also “les juifs”]. In this shift, one understanding of writing is displaced by another: the material inscription of the letter, as an incommunicable limit or cut, is supplanted by the fantasy of what Legendre calls a “living writing,” a writing “in the heart” that promotes an ideal of perfect communication in which nothing is lost, in which meaning is lodged in an absolute Other who guarantees all knowledge. In his words, “we belong to a culture in which a mystically alienated human body stands in the place of the absolute book. The state has emerged from this structure.... Its basic characteristics can be set out by means of a fundamental Romano-pontifical maxim: the Emperor carries all the archives in his breast (omnia scrinia habet in pectore suo)” [“Masters of Law” 109].The ultimate theological source of this Roman maxim is Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law in the Epistle to the Romans. Paul’s polemic is structured by a distinction between two orders of law: the “law of God” and the “law of sin.” The first is associated with the intelligible “spirit” of the law, which is “written in the heart,” the second with the prescriptive “letter” of the Jewish law, which compromises or corrupts the first by binding it to a particular representation and consigning it to written form. Paul’s solution is to bypass the law, to bypass representation, and perhaps even language itself. The prescriptive “letter” of the Jewish law must be sublated by the law of the spirit, such that “we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit” [Romans 7: 6]. Christ, as the living embodiment of the law of God, upholds the spirit of the law by “fulfilling”––and so rendering obsolete–its written form.The doctrine of Christ as the “living law” sustains what Legendre describes as a “banalisation of writing” [“Masters of Law” 111], a disregard for its material inscription that holds the letter to be nothing more than a placeholder, a flawed or incomplete representation of a meaning or truth that is itself beyond words. At the same time, it makes possible the legal and political fantasy of a living writing, located in a single body understood as the site of interpretive authority. The extraction of a meaning or truth from the intractable letter becomes the ultimate aim of the legal order and the most lofty task of its sovereign interpreter, uniquely charged with animating the dead letter. This notion permeates what Peter Goodrich describes as “the most standard protocols of legal reading,” according to [End Page 34] which “it is not the letter but the spirit that determines the meaning of the law”:The text is composed of dead letters (litera mortua); the rule is no more than a “mute judge,” a sleeping form, requiring the interposition, anima legis, of jurist or judge.... [T]he meaning of the law is internal to its living body, viva vox iuris or lex loquens, its image, interpreter, or legislator. In classical terms it is spelled out by reference to something beyond words: “to know the law is not to know the words of the law, but its force and power.” In a renaissance formulation we are similarly told that “no words, forms, niceties, or propriety of language is of any regard in the Civil Law, in comparison to truth, faithfulness and integrity. For verba menti, non verbis servire debet; words, are made as instruments to serve and express the mind, and not to command it.”[229–30]1... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"An Encyclopedic Pico della Mirandola"?Rethinking Aquinas on Christ's Infused KnowledgeJoshua H. LimIntroductionIn what has come to be known as Thomas's account of the triple knowledge of Christ, the infused knowledge holds a tenuous place. It stands awkwardly between two kinds of knowledge, beatific and acquired, which are explicitly linked to the fulfillment of Christ's redemptive mission.1 Christ's earthly [End Page 147] beatific knowledge, controverted though it may be, nevertheless (...) has for Thomas a definite soteriological end.2 As the author of salvation, Christ, from the moment of conception, had to possess in actu the very knowledge to which he was to lead the rest of humanity, namely, the supernatural and beatific knowledge of the divine essence and of all things in it. Christ's acquired knowledge is also ordered to our salvation; it is necessary on account of exigencies arising from the integrity of human nature. In the assumption of a complete human nature, it was necessary for Christ to possess acquired knowledge, for without an agent intellect having its proper operation (i.e., abstracting intelligible species from phantasms arising from the senses), Christ's humanity would have been incomplete, imperfect.3 Thus, according to the patristic dictum that what is not assumed is not redeemed, Christ's redemption of human nature would have been imperfect. In contrast to these two types of knowledge, it is not clear whether and how the infused knowledge contributes to human salvation. Unlike the beatific knowledge, the infused knowledge does not belong intrinsically to the state of the comprehensor, for beatitude does not consist in a knowledge of created things in themselves, but in God;4 and unlike the acquired knowledge, the infused knowledge is not necessary for the assumption of an integral human nature.5 Add to this Thomas's passing description of Christ's infused knowledge as "proportioned to the angelic nature," encompassing all intelligible species of things knowable through nature and through the light of grace. In this vein, the infused knowledge threatens to transform Christ into a caricature of a man—turning Christ into what É. H. Wéber has disparagingly called an "encyclopedic Pico della Mirandola."6 [End Page 148]Herein lies the problem. Given the acquired and beatific knowledge, what use is there for the infused knowledge? The knowledge of all that can be known by nature is already attributed to Christ through his acquired knowledge; further, the knowledge of all the mysteries of grace is accessible to Christ through his beatific knowledge of God and all things in Verbo. While humans, as viatores, gain knowledge through the senses, and, as comprehensores, behold God through an elevation of the soul through glory, it is unclear whether a third kind of knowledge, the infused knowledge, is necessary and, if so, to what end. If, according to the Scholastic dictum, God and nature do nothing in vain, what sense can be made of Christ's infused knowledge?At least since the seventeenth century, Thomists have typically sought to resolve this tension by appealing to the unique role of infused knowledge in Christ's earthly transmission of knowledge. Thus, the infused knowledge fills a gap between the beatific and acquired modes of knowing, providing Christ's soul with a mode of knowledge which enables him to communicate supernatural truths, the mysteria gratiae,7 otherwise known in the blessed vision of the Word, through created and, therefore, humanly communicable intelligible species. Christ's acquired knowledge, restricted to what is naturally knowable, is insufficient to lead "many brothers to glory,'" while the beatific knowledge, though saving, nevertheless remains unconceptualizable and therefore incommunicable in mode.8 According to this view, therefore, the necessity of the infused knowledge arises as a bridge of continuity between the beatific and acquired knowledge, enabling Christ to communicate the truth of the kingdom of God in a way that is proportioned to the human nature in via.Such an account has two clear points in its favor. First, by highlighting the gulf between the beatific and acquired modes of knowledge, it makes room for a distinct, third mode of knowledge. Second, and related to the first point, by accounting for the... (shrink)

Pierre Klossowski's career in philosophy is a brief but significant intervention into the manner in which the connections between desire, identity, and meaning are thought. Although Klossowski's influence on much of what is called French “post-structuralism” or “post-modernism” is frequently noted, Klossowski's development of the motif of the simulacrum is rarely traced in its proper context. Through readings of the texts of the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as his own ruminations on the polytheism of (...) the ancient Roman cult of Diana, Klossowski constructs a critique not only of the identity of the self but also of the supposed unity of reason and rational signs. Klossowski's critique demonstrates how meaningful discourse is produced from the basis of incommunicable affects, which project images in consciousness that, only then, are able to take the form of iterable simulacra. Our “gregarious” discourse in language is, thus, formed only indirectly from the affects and acquires its supposed unity only as it fails to express those affects. (shrink)

One cannot deny that the person of Christ is present in the Eucharist, on a Catholic interpretation, but the term ‘person’ is rarely, if ever, used in formulas or theology describing the Eucharist. Moreover, the understanding conveyed by Scriptural imagery of the Eucharist, such as the Passover Lamb or our spiritual food, is rather sub-personal. In this chapter, I argue instead that the role of the person of Christ is most clearly perceived in the sacrificial action within which the Eucharist (...) is embedded in every Mass. I argue that the Mass is related to Calvary in a specifically second-personal sense, in which we are equipped to love with God what God loves, and sacrifice with God what God sacrifices. On this account, the focus of the Eucharist is not on communicating the incommunicable person of Christ but being formed as an adopted divine person. Also on this account, salvation is not about becoming slightly better human beings but being formed as children of God. (shrink)