Hegel, in his work _Philosophy of Right_, defines ownership through three elements: acquisition by occupation, use, and transfer. To own something involves mere acquisition and encompasses its appropriate use and potential transfer to others. Subsequently, the final aspect mentioned was the concept of infinite judgement. The acts of owning and transferring to others are diametrically opposed, and Hegel’s unique logic forcibly connects these opposing concepts. This form of infinite judgement was advocated by the young Hegel during (...) the era of _Phenomenology of Spirit_. There, he stated, “Spirit is a bone”. However, when he later wrote _Science of Logic_ or _Encyclopedia_, the formulation of infinite judgement changed to “Spirit is not something that is bone”. This shift was influenced by Kant. In _Logic_, the discourse advances into syllogism, inferential theory, leading to “Spirit is a bone for such-and-such reasons”. In essence, Hegel binarily connected spirit and bone in his youth and introduced a mediating term in this connection later in his life, establishing inferential links. However, the notion of forcibly connecting opposing concepts remains. Therefore, the statement “Ownership is transfer” represents an infinite judgement while simultaneously signifying syllogism that “I truly own this object if I can transfer it to others”. This contributes to the reasoning that “I and objects can be connected through the intermediary of others”, progressing to the inference that “I and others can be connected through objects”, thereby laying the foundation for society. (shrink)

The infinite judgement has long been forgotten and yet, as I am about to demonstrate, it may be urgent to revive it for its critical and productive potential. An infinite judgement is neither analytic nor synthetic; it does not produce logical truths, nor true representations, but it establishes the genetic conditions of real objects and the concepts appropriate to them. It is through infinite judgements that we reach the principle of transcendental logic, in the depths (...) of which all reality can emerge in its material and sensible singularity, making possible all generalization and formal abstraction. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Ideal Kant discusses the principle of complete determination: for every object and every predicate A, the object is either determinately A or not-A. He claims this principle is synthetic, but it appears to follow from the principle of excluded middle, which is analytic. He also makes a puzzling claim in support of its syntheticity: that it represents individual objects as deriving their possibility from the whole of possibility. This raises a puzzle about why Kant regarded it as (...) synthetic, and what his explanatory claim means. I argue that the principle of complete determination does not follow from the principle of excluded middle because the externally negated or ?negative? judgement ?Not (S is P)? does not entail the internally negated or ?infinite? judgement ?S is not-P.? Kant's puzzling explanatory claim means that empirical objects are determined by the content of the totality of experience. This entails that empirical objects are completely determinate if and only if the totality of experience has a completely determinate content. I argue that it is not a priori whether experience has such a completely determinate content and thus not analytic that objects obey the principle of complete determination. (shrink)

In his table of judgements, Kant added infinity as a third quality. An infinite judgement ‘All S are non-P’ is said to differ from the affirmative ‘All S are P’ because it ascribes a negative predicate; and it differs from the negative ‘No S is P’ because it has a richer content. The present paper puts three interpretations of this surplus content to six tests. Among other things, it is examined whether these interpretations marry up with Kant’s solution (...) to the first antinomy, his conception of analyticity and the principle of complete determination. The unpleasant conclusion is that none of the interpretations can make its mark as the most adequate one. It thus remains unclear what Kant had in mind when positioning infinite judgements besides affirmative and negative ones. (shrink)

AbstractKant’s formal conditions for aesthetic judgment do not limit aesthetic reflection to certain aesthetic traditions and cultures. Moreover, these conditions open up the possibility of applying aesthetic reflection in the context of different approaches. From this perspective, Kant’s analytic of aesthetic judgment might furnish a useful basis for trans-cultural dialogues in the field of aesthetics and reflection on the arts. Yet the theory also has its limits, especially insofar as it neglects the somatic dimension of aesthetic experience. These two questions (...) are the primary concerns of the paper. (shrink)

Suppose you found that the universe around you was infinite—that it extended infinitely far in space or in time and, as a result, contained infinitely many persons. How should this change your moral decision-making? Radically, it seems, according to some philosophers. According to various recent arguments, any moral theory that is ’minimally aggregative’ will deliver absurd judgements in practice if the universe is (even remotely likely to be) infinite. This seems like sound justification for abandoning any such theory. (...) -/- My goal in this thesis is simple: to demonstrate that we need not abandon minimally aggregative theories, even if we happen to live in an infinite universe. I develop and motivate an extension of such theories, which delivers plausible judgements in a range of realistic cases. I show that this extended theory can overcome key objections—both old and new—and that it succeeds where other proposals do not. With this proposal in hand, we can indeed retain minimally aggregative theories and continue to make moral decisions based on what will promote the good. (shrink)

The problem of how to rationally aggregate probability measures occurs in particular when a group of agents, each holding probabilistic beliefs, needs to rationalise a collective decision on the basis of a single ‘aggregate belief system’ and when an individual whose belief system is compatible with several probability measures wishes to evaluate her options on the basis of a single aggregate prior via classical expected utility theory. We investigate this problem by first recalling some negative results from preference and judgment (...) aggregation theory which show that the aggregate of several probability measures should not be conceived as the probability measure induced by the aggregate of the corresponding expected utility preferences. We describe how McConway’s :410–414, 1981) theory of probabilistic opinion pooling can be generalised to cover the case of the aggregation of infinite profiles of finitely additive probability measures, too; we prove the existence of aggregation functionals satisfying responsiveness axioms à la McConway plus additional desiderata even for infinite electorates. On the basis of the theory of propositional-attitude aggregation, we argue that this is the most natural aggregation theory for probability measures. Our aggregation functionals for the case of infinite electorates are neither oligarchic nor integral-based and satisfy a weak anonymity condition. The delicate set-theoretic status of integral-based aggregation functionals for infinite electorates is discussed. (shrink)

Pascal's wager has fascinated philosophers far in excess of its reputation as effective apologetics. Very few of the wager's defenders, in fact, have retained more than an academic interest in its power to persuade. Partly this is a matter of good manners. Pascal is supposed to have pitched his wager at folks who understand only self-interested motivations, and today it is no longer fashionable for defenders of theism to disparage the character of their opponents. But partly the low-key concern with (...) apologetics expresses a philosophical judgement. Pascal's defenders have found the question of the wager's audience to be less philosophically engaging than the logic of its argument. I believe that this assessment is mistaken. The most puzzling feature of Pascal's wager is its invocation of infinite utility. What are finite human beings, theists or otherwise, supposed to make of the idea of an infinitely desirable happiness? There are, I will argue, two sorts of response to this question, and depending on which sort Pascal had in mind, the logic of his wager comes out very differently. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 2, November 1994, pp. 219-240 Infinite Divisibility in Hume's First Enquiry DALE JACQUETTE The Limitations of Reason The arguments against infinite divisibility in the notes to Sections 124 and 125 of David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are presented as "sceptical" results about the limitations of reason. The metaphysics of infinite divisibility is introduced merely as a particular, though especially representative (...) problem, among several that Hume discusses. Hume first writes: The chief objection against all abstract reasonings is derived from the ideas of space and time; ideas, which, in common life and to a careless view, are very clear and intelligible, but when they pass through the scrutiny of the profound sciences (and they are the chief object of these sciences) afford principles, which seem full of absurdity and contradiction.1 There follows an intuitive appeal to the apparent incoherence of the consequences of infinite divisibility in the geometry of space and measurement of time. Hume enlists natural belief against the infinite divisibility thesis in the mathematics of extension: But what renders the matter more extraordinary, is, that these seemingly absurd opinions are supported by a chain of reasoning, the Dale Jacquette is at the Department of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, 246 Sparks Building, University Park PA 16802 USA. e-mail: [email protected] 220 Dale Jacquette clearest and most natural; nor is it possible for us to allow the premises without admitting the consequences. Nothing can be more convincing and satisfactory than all the conclusions concerning the properties of circles and triangles; and yet, when these are once received, how can we deny, that the angle of contact between a circle and its tangent is infinitely less than any rectilinear angle, that as you may increase the diameter of the circle in infinitum, this angle of contact becomes still less, even in infinitum, and that the angle of contact between other curves and their tangents may be infinitely less than those between any circle and its tangent, and so on, in infinitum? The demonstration of these principles seems as unexceptionable as that which proves the three angles of a triangle to be equal to two right ones, though the latter opinion be natural and easy, and the former big with contradiction and absurdity. (EHU 156-157) The implied sense of contradiction is then extended by Hume to the problem of infinite divisibility in time. The absurdity of these bold determinations of the abstract sciences seems to become, if possible, still more palpable with regard to time than extension. An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession, and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction, that no man, one should think, whose judgment is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit of it. (EHU 157) The contradictions involved in traditional concepts of extension and time demarcate the limits of which reason is capable. But Hume's answer is more complex than merely surrendering to skepticism over the prospects of reason achieving understanding in the metaphysics of space and time. He tries to show that what he calls "Pyrrhonian" skepticism is ultimately self-defeating in its application of reason against reason. In place of a negative conclusion, he offers another solution to the paradoxes of infinite divisibility. What is remarkable about Hume's pronouncements against the infinite divisibility of extension and time, that may signal a change in his methodology if not his overall position on divisibility in the Enquiry from that of A Treatise of Human Nature, is his straightforward claim that natural belief rebels against the concept of infinite divisibility as its consequences apply to the metric of space and time.2 As in the Treatise, Hume pits natural disbelief in infinite divisibility against abstract metaphysical reason. But in the Enquiry, he does not invoke reason merely to correct the excesses of natural belief for the skeptical deflation of natural belief, say, in the necessity of causal connection, or the existence of mind-independent continuants. On the contrary, Hume Studies Infinite Divisibility in Hume's First Enquiry 221 Hume here appears instead to invoke natural disbelief in... (shrink)

Pascal's wager has fascinated philosophers far in excess of its reputation as effective apologetics. Very few of the wager's defenders, in fact, have retained more than an academic interest in its power to persuade. Partly this is a matter of good manners. Pascal is supposed to have pitched his wager at folks who understand only self-interested motivations, and today it is no longer fashionable for defenders of theism to disparage the character of their opponents. But partly the low-key concern with (...) apologetics expresses a philosophical judgement. Pascal's defenders have found the question of the wager's audience to be less philosophically engaging than the logic of its argument. I believe that this assessment is mistaken. The most puzzling feature of Pascal's wager is its invocation of infinite utility. What are finite human beings, theists or otherwise, supposed to make of the idea of an infinitely desirable happiness? There are, I will argue, two sorts of response to this question, and depending on which sort Pascal had in mind, the logic of his wager comes out very differently. (shrink)

A guest's gift -- In the voice -- Square necessities -- Varieties of indefiniteness -- An imported irregularity -- Ways of indeterminacy -- From empty words -- Toward the object in general -- The infinite judgment -- Zero logic -- Non-I and I -- Collapsing sentences -- The springboard principle -- After the judgment -- A persistent particle -- Callings.

Following Lauwers and Van Liedekerke (1995), this paper explores in a model-theoretic framework the relation between Arrovian aggregation rules and ultraproducts, in order to investigate a source of impossibility results for the case of an infinite number of individuals and an aggregation rule based on a free ultrafilter of decisive coalitions.

I develop a new reading of Frege’s argument for the indefinability of truth. I concentrate on what Frege literally says in the passage that contains the argument. This literal reading of the passage establishes that the indefinability argument is an arguably sound argument to the following conclusion: provided that the Fregean conception of judgment—which has recently been countered by Hanks—is correct and that truth is a property of truth-bearers, a vicious infinite regress is produced. Given this vicious regress, Frege (...) chooses to reject that truth is a property of truth-bearers. Frege’s choice leads to a unique version of the Fregean conception of judgment. His unique conception of judgment can cope with Hanks’s recent criticisms against the Fregean conception. (shrink)

This dissertation evaluates the efforts of modern philosophers of aesthetics and politics to distinguish judgment from both cognition and volition. To see the rule under which any given particular is to be subsumed as a law fabricated and imposed by either God or reason is to characterize free judgment in terms of sovereignty. This generates the skeptical dilemma of an infinite regress of the legitimacy of the rule's application that can only be avoided by seeing the act of judgment (...) as an act of will. Such a voluntarist account of politics and judgment must in the end deny plurality for identity, and efface the categorical Aristotelian distinction between the public and the private. The rejection of the teleology of publicity is thus tied to the collapse of phronesis back into a Platonic techne that strives to produce society and man in the image of the eidos. ;Three "solutions" to this aporia are considered. The first is Hannah Arendt's appropriation for politics of Kant's aesthetic judgment, which allows for categorical distinctions between the public and the private and between judgment and the observance of rules. This project fails on account of the extreme formalism of that aesthetics. The second reads the third Critique as an allegory of politics. This too fails, as Kant's aesthetic community relies upon the productive legislation of the genius, a figure whose lineage reaches back to the half divine, half bestial figure of Machiavelli's founding prince. The third is a direct return to Aristotle. While his ethical philosophy offers us our best account of phronesis and epieikeia, it does not sufficiently engage the motivations for its own rejection. Hobbes, Locke, and Kant were not so taken with the model of mechanistic science that they simply forgot that in their common lives they regularly made judgments without the implicit or explicit guidance of a rule. The modern is better seen as a Weltanschauung, less a description that might be right or wrong than a desire. The alternative to the aporia of judgment is not found in the aesthetic but in a Wittgensteinian form of philosophical therapy. (shrink)

This paper considers the trade-off between unanimity and anonymity in collective decision-making with an infinite population. This efficiency-equity trade-off is a fundamental difficulty in making a normative judgment in a conflict between generations. In particular, it is known that this trade-off is quite sensitive in the formulation of unanimity axioms. In this study, we consider the trade-off in a preference-aggregation framework instead of the standard utility-aggregation framework. We show that there exists a social welfare function that satisfies I-strong Pareto, (...) independence of irrelevant alternatives, and finite anonymity. This contrasts with an impossibility result in the standard utility-aggregation framework, and this means that the trade-off is also sensitive for background frameworks of aggregations. (shrink)

I examine the relation between logic and nature in terms of ‘reflection’, the word that Hegel uses at the end of theEncyclopaedia Logicto describe the self-sundering or externalization of the idea into nature. Although nominally the term ‘reflection’ seems to denote a uniquely mental process and is often used so by Hegel in his early critique ofReflexionsphilosophie, in his later writings it also has an irreducibly ontological significance. Hegel describes logic's opening-out to nature as a movement of ‘reflection’ [Widerschein] and (...) he follows Kant in describing the shift from the finite to the infinite in the relation between nature and thought as one of reflective judgement. Although Hegel generally considers reflection to be uniquely concerned with finite cognition and the constitution of finite things, I argue that in his embrace of reflective judgement he sees a key role for reflection in the relation of logic, nature and spirit. (shrink)

According to the transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of pure reason, there are two properties of time that cannot be intellectualized: passage and infinitude. This study tries to show that these essential properties of time come to light in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The contemplation of beauty will be understood as a non-successive time and the wonder that we experience in seeing the sublime will be understood through Kant’s concept of infinite moment. These two aesthetic concepts of time will (...) be integrated into Kant’s broader view of time as developed in the first Critique. (shrink)

I am the LawIt is hard to imagine two more disparate characters than Judge Joseph Dredd and Hercules J—the one an over-muscular, faceless and heavily armed street judge astride a Lawmaster motorcycle who overidentifies with his role ; the other devoid of any physical presence or image, and structurally decoupled from the execution of law by a fierce determination to maintain the separation of powers and accountability which Dredd so effortlessly ignores. Hercules J is the embodiment of an intellectualised, yet (...) creative, operationalisation of law. To the academic spirit, Hercules is infinitely preferable as a model of judicial activism: his world conjures a contemplative modality, ever alert to the requirements of rights and largely aligned with the temper of the post-Enlightenment. By contrast, Dredd is the personification of the worst aspects of law-and-order as the debased and politicised manifestation of the Rule of Law. His is an intensely visceral presence, the metonymic blindness of Themis replaced by the Dredd’s fractured eyeline: blindness as a signifier of impartiality yields to blindness as a symptom of institutional rage. This article interrogates the characters, actions and values of Hercules J and Dredd J, viewed primarily through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s Force of Law, focusing on the relationship between law and violence as it is exposed in Hercules’s and Dredd’s worlds, and then turning to judicial confrontation with the aporetic: the aporias, identified by Derrida and others, that law must confront. The interrogation continues, finally contemplating the current state of law in the common law world—the world of liberal democracies, suggesting that the high point of democracy may well have passed, and that we are on a Dredd-ward trajectory. (shrink)

A Hegelian reading of good and bad luck -- In Shakespearean drama (phen. of spirit, King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, a Midsummer night's dream) -- Tearing the fabric: Hegel's Antigone, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and kinship-state conflict (phen. of spirit c. 6, Judith Butler's Antigone, Coriolanus) -- Aufhebung and anti-aufhebung: geist and ghosts in Hamlet (phen. of spirit, Hamlet) -- The problem of genius in King Lear: Hegel on the feeling soul and the tragedy of wonder (anthropology and psychology in the encyclopaedia, Philosophy (...) of mind, King Lear) -- Richard II's mirror and the alienation of the Universal Will (of the I that is a We) (Richard II, phen. of spirit c. 5) -- Falstaff and the politics of wit: negative infinite judgment in a culture of alienation (Henry IV parts I & II, phen. of spirit c. 6, philosophy of right) -- Henry V's unchangeableness: his rejection of wit and his posture of virtue reinterpreted in the light of Hegel's theory of virtue (philosophy of right, Henry V) -- Hegel's theory of crime and evil: (re)tracing the rights of the sovereign self (aesthetics, phen. of spirit, phil. of right, Richard II through to Henry V) -- Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth and Henry V: conscience, hypocrisy, self-deceit and the tragedy of ethical life (phil. of right, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V) -- Negation of the negative infinite judgment versus sublation of it: punishment vs. pardon (phil. of right, phen. of spirit c. 6 and Henry VIII) -- Universal wit : the absolute theater of identity (phen. of spirit c. 6 and 8, Pericles, the Tempest) -- Absolute infections and their cure (phen. of spirit c. 6, the Winter's tale). (shrink)

The article analyzes the meaning of infinite judgment within absolute knowing and tries to explain the role that this judgment plays within the last moment of the phenomenological path. The infinite judgment in question states: “the being of the ego is a thing”. The analysis starts with the conception of infinite judgment in pre-Kantian and Kantian logic, that has certainly influenced the way in which Hegel conceived of this logical structure. In order to shed light on the (...) Hegelian conception of infinite judgment at the time the Phenomenology was written, it is necessary to examine the way in which this kind of judgment is presented in the Jena System (1804-05) which develops the logical structures at work in the phenomenological process. Finally, the negation implicit in the judgment “the being of the ego is a thing” is expounded upon: the being of the ego is a thing - the soul - that in actuality is not a thing. The paradoxical structure of this judgment, that consists of this absence-presence negation, becomes evident in this double value. This judgment expresses the moment of crisis in the structure of judgment itself. This crisis is the linguistic expression of the inconsistency immanent in the pretence of consciousness to capture its object, that is constitutively separated from it. At the same time this judgment is also the negative moment necessary for the solution of this crisis and for the passage of consciousness into absolute knowing, in which the radical separation between subject and object that characterizes consciousness is completely reconciled. (shrink)

The article analyzes section VI B («The Spirit in Self-Estrangement») within absolute knowing. The main focus is Hegel’s speculative analysis of the formal structure of absolute knowing, starting from infinite judgement («the thing is ego»), to its conclusion with the definition of utility as preisgegebnes Sein für anderes (a being at the mercy of an «other», in Baillie’s translation). The article does not examine the phenomenological process of culture development, but focuses on the formal structure of pure insight (...) (the most important result of culture), comparing the self which constitutes the insight with the one which manifests itself as self-knowing spirit in absolute knowing. Here the inexorable Aufhebung of insight, as purest incarnation of modern reason, comes to light: Hegel emphasizes rationality and therefore he criticizes its abstract form which downgrades pure insight from reason to raisonnements of Understanding. (shrink)

This paper discusses an apparent contrast between Kant’s accounts of the mathematical antinomies in the first Critique and in the Prolegomena. The Critique claims that the antitheses are infinite judgements. The Prolegomena seem to claim that they are negative judgements. For the Critique, theses and antitheses are false because they presuppose that the world has a determinate magnitude, and this is not the case. For the Prolegomena, theses and antitheses are false because they presuppose an inconsistent notion of world. (...) The paper argues that the contrast between the two works is only apparent, and provides an interpretation which removes it. (shrink)

In a famous passage in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant calls the “spirit” an animating or enlivening principle in the mind. Rather than a positive affirmation building on a protobiological background, this definition marks an aesthetic notion of life. As a first step, the “Gemüt” shows itself to be an ambivalent concept between transcendental philosophy and anthropology. This ambivalence then reoccurs in the notion of life in an aesthetical regard: Life in this sense is the one (...) hand bound to the empirical notion of the powers of life – and thereby to the pre-critical works – but is now turned into something surpassing. Life in aesthetical terms is negatively bound to life in an empirical sense. So is spirit, too: It rather works as a negatively defined principle opening up the given. Life, Gemüt, and spirit make up a relational constellation that provides the grounds for the work of aesthetic ideas. By means of aesthetic ideas, spirit opens up the cognitive and thereby enlivens the Gemüt. This principle, which is spirit, can then be understood as following Kant’s logic of the infinite judgment, because the aesthetic is the opening of the rational to its indeterminate other. (shrink)

Summary The question underlying this article is whether the Kantian transcendental philosophy is wide enough to constitute the objects of quantum physics as objects of possible experience and consequently to found the objectivity of quantum physical knowledge. It is shown that the Kantian determinations of the categories (quality, substance, causality) can be interpreted and elaborated in such a way that the quantum physical concept of an object characterized by nonobjectivity of properties is conceived. Therefore the categories are valid in quantum (...) mechanics and warrant the objectivity of quantum physical experience. By the interpretation of the Kantian infinite judgement as an indefinite proposition it is possible to define the non-objectivity of properties categorially as indefiniteness of qualities. In particular by the indefiniteness of the position-quality the non-permanent localizability of quantum mechanical objects can be understood a priori. However the object of possible experience, especially the quantum mechanical object is underdetermined by the categories of substance and causality: If the object is determined to be a substance it is not yet conceived to be an individual; its characterization by means of probability laws is categorially indeterminate. In so far the significance of transcendental philosophy for the foundation of quantum physics is limited. (shrink)

Hume’s discussion of space, time, and mathematics at T 1.2 appeared to many earlier commentators as one of the weakest parts of his philosophy. From the point of view of pure mathematics, for example, Hume’s assumptions about the infinite may appear as crude misunderstandings of the continuum and infinite divisibility. I shall argue, on the contrary, that Hume’s views on this topic are deeply connected with his radically empiricist reliance on phenomenologically given sensory images. He insightfully shows that, (...) working within this epistemological model, we cannot attain complete certainty about the continuum but only at most about discrete quantity. Geometry, in contrast to arithmetic, cannot be a fully exact science. A number of more recent commentators have offered sympathetic interpretations of Hume’s discussion aiming to correct the older tendency to dismiss this part of the Treatise as weak and confused. Most of these commentators interpret Hume as anticipating the contemporary idea of a finite or discrete geometry. They view Hume’s conception that space is composed of simple indivisible minima as a forerunner of the conception that space is a discretely (rather than continuously) ordered set. This approach, in my view, is helpful as far as it goes, but there are several important features of Hume’s discussion that are not sufficiently appreciated. I go beyond these recent commentators by emphasizing three of Hume’s most original contributions. First, Hume’s epistemological model invokes the “confounding” of indivisible minima to explain the appearance of spatial continuity. Second, Hume’s sharp contrast between the perfect exactitude of arithmetic and the irremediable inexactitude of geometry reverses the more familiar conception of the early modern tradition in pure mathematics, according to which geometry (the science of continuous quantity) has its own standard of equality that is independent from and more exact than any corresponding standard supplied by algebra and arithmetic (the sciences of discrete quantity). Third, Hume has a developed explanation of how geometry (traditional Euclidean geometry) is nonetheless possible as an axiomatic demonstrative science possessing considerably more exactitude and certainty that the “loose judgements” of the vulgar. (shrink)

Russell’s initial project in philosophy (1898) was to make mathematics rigorous reducing it to logic. Before August 1900, however, Russell’s logic was nothing but mereology. First, his acquaintance with Peano’s ideas in August 1900 led him to discard the part-whole logic and accept a kind of intensional predicate logic instead. Among other things, the predicate logic helped Russell embrace a technique of treating the paradox of infinite numbers with the help of a singular concept, which he called ‘denoting phrase’. (...) Unfortunately, a new paradox emerged soon: that of classes. The main contention of this paper is that Russell’s new conception only transferred the paradox of infinity from the realm of infinite numbers to that of class-inclusion. Russell’s long-elaborated solution to his paradox developed between 1905 and 1908 was nothing but to set aside of some of the ideas he adopted with his turn of August 1900: (i) With the Theory of Descriptions, he reintroduced the complexes we are acquainted with in logic. In this way, he partly restored the pre-August 1900 mereology of complexes and simples. (ii) The elimination of classes, with the help of the ‘substitutional theory’, and of propositions, by means of the Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment, completed this process. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of Rudolph Otto's understanding of the structures of human consciousness making possible the appropriation of revelation. Already in his dissertation on Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, Otto was preoccupied with how the " outer " of revelation could be united to these inner structures. Later, in his groundbreaking Idea of the Holy, Otto would explore the category of the numinous, an element of religious experience tied to the irrational element of the holy. This paper (...) first provides a brief account of Otto's account of the holy, especially its numinous, irrational elements. Second, the paper analyzes Otto's understanding of the structures of consciousness grounding the experience of the numinous and allowing the irrational element to be " schematized " by the rational element. Otto's exposition of these structures is heavily influenced by his reception of Kant's analysis of the two stems of human cognition, namely understanding and sensibility, and their possible relation to a common root, which Otto identified with what the mystics called the ground of the soul. Yet it is in Otto's reception of Kant's Critique of Judgment that all of these ideas find their completion, and it is here where we must look to understand the relation between the religious a priori and Otto's category of the numinous. Kant's aesthetic idea is a singular representation given in intuition; it is infinitely saturated and as such intimates the ideas of God, the soul, and the world as a whole. I show how Otto appropriates Kant's aesthetic idea and its relation to ideas of reason in order to make sense of how an empirically given revelation, for instance, an experience of the numinous, can connect with the inner structures of consciousness and thereby have the singular import that it does. (shrink)

Results from a crowdsourced audio questionnaire show that inflected infinitives in Galician are still acceptable in a broad range of contexts, different from those described for European Portuguese. Crucially, inflected infinitives with referential subjects are widely accepted only inside strong islands in Galician (complements of nouns, adjunct clauses). They are widely rejected in non-islands, notably in the complements of epistemic/factive verbs, in contrast with Portuguese and older varieties of Galician (Gondar 1978, Raposo 1987). Statistical analysis shows, however, that, in the (...) complements of epistemic/factive (and desiderative) verbs, inflected infinitives are significantly more acceptable in instances of control, whether partial or exhaustive. In fact, there is no significant difference between these two types of control in Galician, unlike in Portuguese, where inflection is generally better in instances of partial control and is not acceptable in instances of exhaustive local subject control (Modesto 2010, Sheehan 2018). We propose an analysis of this pattern in terms of phase theory. The inflectional domain of non-finite clauses remains visible to the thematic domain of the next clause up, according to the less strict version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2001), allowing control to take place. Pronouns/or pronominal inflections in the inflectional domain of visible non-finite clauses therefore get controlled. In islands, however, material in the inflectional domain remains free/referential. Despite this basic pattern, the data are characterized by substantial interspeaker variation. Statistical analysis shows that gender, urban/rural birthplace and mother tongue are all significant factors in this variation, while age and region of birth are not. Most notably, urban-born male bilinguals with Spanish as their mother tongue consistently rate the sentences higher on the Likert scale. Overall, the results show that crowdsourcing can lead to empirically robust syntactic descriptions of minority languages which are likely to be subject to substantial sociolinguistic variation and where judgements from a single social group may be misrepresentative of the general picture. The study also highlights, however, the challenges associated with using crowd-sourced audio-questionnaires of this kind in languages of this kind and the need for statistical analysis of results to control for substantial amounts of variation. (shrink)

My article critically evaluates five key claims in Kerr’s interpretation of Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia, ch. 4, proof for God. The claims are: the absolutely considered essence is a second intention, or cognitional being; à la John Wippel, the real distinction between essence and existence is known before the proof; contra David Twetten, Aristotelian form is not self-actuating and so requires actus essendi; the De Ente proof for God uses the Principle of Sufficient Reason; an infinite regress must (...) be eliminated before concluding to God. This author wonders if these questionable claims are traceable to the mindset of analytic philosophy which values precision and discreteness and so can fail to appreciate crucial paradoxes in Aquinas’s metaphysics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“No One Is Psychotic in My Presence”S. Nassir Ghaemi (bio)Keywordsexistentialism, Semrad, delusions, psychosis, empathy, HavensWe are all prone to make wrong judgments about others (and ourselves) based on inaccurate (or insufficient) information. I recently had this experience with a relative, who cited a number of behaviors as reasons for him to make a rather harsh judgment about my internal mental states. Before hearing his rationale—and despite my belief that (...) he was wrong—I had to reserve some doubt that I might, unconsciously, have those disagreeable habits that my kind relative ascribed to me. But after I heard his explanation, the only possibility that seemed to fit was psychosis (in him, not me); because I was rather certain that he did not have a psychotic illness, I had to conclude that he had beliefs that served his own purposes in some way, although they were simply wrong.We all do this, all the time (perhaps this is the source of the wisdom behind a peasant woman’s admonition to Maxim Gorky: “Remember, above all, do not judge: that is the Devil’s work” [Gorky 1949]).But we do not all have delusions, at least in the sense that delusions are supposed to mark out psychiatric illnesses. Rhodes and Gipps (2008) make this point in their critique of cognitive theories of delusion: “One (‘rationalist’) line of research has explored to what extent people with psychotic delusions may have a malfunction in their reasoning processes (Garety and Hemsley 1994). Another (‘empiricist’) approach has it that delusions are a product of normal reasoning processes running on data provided by abnormal perceptual experiences (Maher 1988, 1999).” Both approaches identify abnormal kinds of reasoning in persons with psychosis, most of which are shared with the normal population (like my relative). But: “the question needs to be asked as to why, in many cases, clear counter-evidence has no effect in correcting the delusional belief. Confirmation bias after all itself only explains why people may not look for disconfirming evidence (Wason 1968), and does not explain why people may fail to believe it when they happen upon or are presented with it” (Rhodes and Gipps 2008, 306).This gets to the distinction between non-bizarre and bizarre delusions (a distinction that the authors do not make in their paper): Non-bizarre delusions seem completely explainable on cognitive grounds—they are not incredibly irrational (my relative’s perspective is logically plausible), yet they are just wrong (it is empirically false, I think). (Another example: I could plausibly believe that the FBI has me—a Shiite Muslim Middle Eastern male who hails from the Axis of Evil—under surveillance; it would simply be false, or not). On the other hand, the authors’ examples of delusions are both bizarre and wrong at first glance, not because they are illogical (in their conceptual associations), but simply because they just seem wrong without [End Page 315] much need to explain why (unlike my relative’s theories): “What, then, needs accounting for is why deluded persons do not themselves recognize the following: the unlikeliness of their belief, the insufficiency of the grounds they provide, the unlikeliness of their premises when they provide them (as well as their conclusions), the greater likelihood that the evidence they adduce was (for example) hallucinated rather than perceived, and so on” (Rhodes and Gipps 2008, 297).The authors turn first to Ludwig Wittgenstein, then John Searle—the former for the notion that we have “Bedrock certainties” that are founded on having served us in acting in the world (these beliefs do not require rational or empirical justification), the latter for the notion of a Background “defined as those abilities and dispositions which themselves are neither representations nor rules, yet that we need to hypothesize as functioning before we can make sense of everyday perception, thinking and language” (Searle 1995, 129). Go mow the lawn, we say, presuming that scissors will not be used:The capacity to discern what counts as the relevant context is itself a Background capacity that cannot, on pains of an infinite regress of an infinity of disambiguations, be understood as consisting in further propositional knowledge. The cultural ‘common sense... (shrink)

The notion of the value of life is often invoked in discussions regarding medical care for the sick and the dying. This theme has figured in arguments about medical ethics for decades, but many of the phrases associated with this concept have received little serious scrutiny. It is true that some philosophers have declared a few commonly used phrases such as “the sanctity of life,” “the infinite value of life,” and “the value of life itself” to be unclear at (...) best or misguided at worst. Their hasty dismissal of these phrases, however, is not the end of the story. I generally agree with this philosophical judgment but for reasons very different from those typically given by others. Moreover, the reasons I wish to .. (shrink)

The transition from morality to the morals involves the dissolution of the antagonism of the moral, the overcoming of the antinomy of constant obligation. In his Wissenschaft der Logik, Hegel focuses on the logical defect of endless progress “mostly in its ap­plication to morality“ (RPh, § 268). Pure will and the moral law on the one hand, and nature and empiricality on the other “presuppose each other as fully independent and mutually indifferent“, and thus the opposition is postulated as an (...) axiom, which excludes its overcoming the antagonism. The antagonism “does not dissolve in infinite progress. It is, on the contrary, depicted as unsolved and unsolvable, and thus confirmed“. The result is “the very same antagonism that stood at the beginning“ (RPh, § 269 an.). The progress ad infinitum exhibits itself as antagonism that unjustly points to itself as a solution of what contradicts itself (WdL 5, p. 166). The real overcoming of this antinomy fails; the idea of the Judgment Day solution owes the answer and is only an expression of excessive gentleness towards the world. Antinomies and collisions in moral action in the end separate, which implies the persistence in insuperable antinomy. Another topic would be a detailed exposition of Hegel’s solution proposal. In any case, Hegel sees the naturalness of speculative thought in the necessity to think the ideality of both of the opposing sides, that is, to understand them beforehand as the moment of the concept of moral action, see them as opposing in their moving unity and think them as the transition from morality to the moral action, the morals, in which the antagonism of the moral is not abstractly lost, but elevated, guarded and overcome. (shrink)

We will flip a fair coin infinitely many times. Al calls the first flip, claiming it will land heads. Betty calls every odd numbered flip, claiming they will all land heads. Carl calls every flip bar none, claiming they will all land heads. Pre-theoretically, it seems that Al's claim is infinitely more likely than Betty's, and that Betty's claim is infinitely more likely than Carl's. But standard, real-valued probability theory says that, while Al's claim is infinitely more likely than Betty's, (...) Betty's claim is exactly as likely as Carl's. I use John Conway's surreal numbers to capture these pre-theoretic judgements about the relative probabilities of Al's, Betty's, and Carl's claims. Surreal-valued probabilities also allow us to calculate precise numerical values for those claims. For instance, we will see that Betty's claim has a probability equal to the reciprocal of the product of the square root of cardinality of the continuum and the fourth root of 2. The article provides a 'user's guide' to surreal-valued probabilities and raises questions for further research. (shrink)

Three of Zeno's objections to motion are answered by utilizing a version of nonstandard analysis, internal set theory, interpreted within an empirical context. Two of the objections are without force because they rely upon infinite sets, which always contain nonstandard real numbers. These numbers are devoid of numerical meaning, and thus one cannot render the judgment that an object is, in fact, located at a point in spacetime for which they would serve as coordinates. The third objection, an arrow (...) never appears to be moving, is answered by showing that it only applies to a finite number of instants of time. A theory of motion is also advanced; it consists of a finite series of contiguous infinitesimal steps. The theory is immune to Zeno's first two objections because the number of steps is finite and each lies outside the domain of observation. Present motion is hypothesized to be an unobservable process taking place within each step. The fact of motion is apparent through a summing (Riemann integration) of the steps. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Newton's Metaphysics: Essays by Eric SchliesserMarius StanEric Schliesser. Newton's Metaphysics: Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Hardback, $99.90.Newton owes his high regard to the quantitative science he left us, but his overall picture of the world had some robustly metaphysical threads woven in as well. Posthumous judgment about the value of these threads has varied wildly. Christian Wolff thought him a metaphysical rustic, as did Hans (...) Reichenbach some two centuries later ("Die Bewegungslehre bei Newton, Leibniz und Huygens," Kant-Studien 29 [1924]: 416–38). In the 1960s, the tide would turn, as Howard Stein and James Edward McGuire separately began to show that Newton's metaphysics was not just sophisticated, but often more compelling than its early modern alternatives (see respectively "Newtonian Spacetime," Texas Quarterly 10 [1967]: 174–200; and Tradition and Innovation: Newton's Metaphysics of Nature [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995]). Eric Schliesser's book unfolds in that same register of appreciative, high scholarship, and it attests to the enduring attraction of its subject.The book grew out of previous discrete papers, to which he added a few more for this occasion. Accordingly, it does not come with a master argument. Rather, it is an in-depth exploration of some key metaphysical themes in Newton. As such, it befits its subject figure, who reflected on themes and concepts while stopping short of working out systems.The first major theme is Newton and Spinozism. The latter does not denote Spinoza's metaphysics. In fact, Schliesser explains, Newton shared with Spinoza some weighty commitments, for example, to space being actually infinite, and to substance monism: "for Newton, there is strictly speaking only one genuine substance," namely, God (33). Rather, "Spinozism" is an interpreter's category for a bundle of three theses: identifying God and nature; denying final causation in the physical world; and the assumption of "blind" metaphysical necessity. Some counted Hobbes and John Toland as Spinozist in this sense, and even Epicurus, avant la lettre. Newton and his followers argued vehemently against this package, as Schliesser shows in chapters 4, 5, and 8. Their chief complaint was that Spinozism is unable to account for the "origin of motion," for a certain type of order, and for the stability of cosmological structure—and to do so in a way that "meets the standards of Newtonian mechanics" (122). This interpretive lens allows Schliesser to draw Kant in, by reading his youthful Theory of Heaven as a possible Spinozist reply to their objections (chapter 3). [End Page 157]A second theme is the metaphysics of mechanics, where Schliesser weaves together several strands. One is the ontology of gravity, for which he offers a novel construal: for Newton, gravity counts as real, but in a qualified sense. Namely, it is not essential and not intrinsic: "even after creation, a lonely partless particle of matter in the universe would not be said to gravitate." And gravity is relational: a "shared quality" of two or more bits of matter, which obtains in virtue of their sharing a nature (19). Another strand is Newton's ontology of time—really, a subtle, difficult topic long neglected. Famously, Newton in Principia defends absolute, true, and mathematical time. The question is what these three qualifiers denote, and whether Newton thought they were synonymous. Schliesser in chapter 7 argues for the provocative view that "absolute" and "true" time are not identical concepts; rather, they pick out different entities. These entities share a common structure, namely, metric and topological. That makes them species of "mathematical" time (179). But, Schliesser contends, Newton has unequal warrant for his two concepts of time.Yet another theme is formal causation. It comes to the fore in chapter 5, which grapples with Newton's opaque idea that space is an "emanative effect." Schliesser explains that here, "emanation picks out a species of formal causation" (147), but in a novel, early modern sense that comes from Bacon, not Aristotle. If space has a formal cause, then so has its twin brother, time, the topic of chapter 7. God is their common formal cause. Then in chapter 6 (coauthored with Zvi Biener) Schliesser adds that, for Newton, laws... (shrink)

There is not agreement among moral intuitionists on the nature of moral intuitions: some favor a doxastic interpretation, others a non-doxastic interpretation. This paper argues that although both interpretations have legitimacy, the doxastic interpretation is preferable. The paper discusses three salient roles for moral intuitions:Role 1: To serve as a test for moral theories.Role 2: To provide a particularist grounding for moral judgment.Role 3: To stop a vicious infinite regress of justified moral belief.The doxastic interpretation better serves Role 1, (...) given the greater justificatory weight rationally accorded intuitive moral beliefs over intuitive moral “seemings,” upon which we may place little if any justificatory weight: intuitive beliefs provide firmer ground for judging moral theories to be correct or incorrect, adequate or inadequate, etc., than mere seemings. The doxastic interpretation better serves Role 2, in that particularist intuitional belief warrants greater confidence in apparent moral truth than intuitive seemings; and given that moral particularists commonly allot great epistemic authority to intuitions about particular cases, this counts heavily in favor of intuitional belief. The doxastic interpretation better serves Role 3 because (i) the greater agential justificatory burdens attendant to believing that p as opposed to merely being appeared to (or its seeming) that p, warrants that a higher degree of epistemic weight be given doxastic intuitions; and (ii) they are less vulnerable to doxastic ascent-type arguments, which would undermine their basicality as justification providers. (shrink)

Neopragmatism has been accused of having ‘an experience problem’. This paper begins by outlining Hume's understanding of perception according to which ideas are copies of impressions thought to constitute a direct confrontation with reality. This understanding is contrasted with Peirce's theory of perception according to which percepts give rise to perceptual judgments which do not copy but index the percept (just as a weather-cock indicates the direction of the wind). Percept and perceptual judgment thereby mutually inform and correct one another, (...) as the perceiver develops mental habits of interpreting their surroundings, so that, in this theory of perception, as Peirce puts it: “[n]othing at all…is absolutely confrontitional”. Paul Redding has argued that Hegel’s “idealist understanding of logical form” ran deeper than Kant’s in recognising that Mind is essentially embodied and located, and therefore perspectival. Peirce’s understanding arguably dives deeper still in distributing across the space of reasons (and thus Being) not just Mind’s characteristic features of embodiedness and locatedness, but also its infinite corrigibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:19. AN 'INCONVENIENCE' OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM In Part II of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Cleanthes maintains that the similarities between the works of nature and those of human contrivance, namely, the presence of means to ends relations and a coherence of parts, are sufficient to enable us to reason analogically to the conclusion that the cause of the design of the world resembles human intelligence. Cleanthes insists in Part (...) IV that the ideas which -we have of mind are 'just and adequate and correspondent' to God's nature. Philo, who throughout the discussion has insisted on 'the adorable mysteriousness ' of the divine nature, responds to Cleanthes by saying that he will endeavour to show the inconveniences of that anthropomorphism, which you have embraced; and shall prove, that there is no ground to suppose a plan of the world to be formed in the divine mind, consisting of distinct ideas, differently arranged; in the same manner as an architect forms in his head the plan of a house which he intends to execute. (D160) It is the aim of this paper to explicate this 'inconvenience of Cleanthes' anthropomorphism. Philo begins by claiming that nothing is gained by Cleanthes' position whether it is assessed by 'reason' or by 'experience'. The judgment of reason is that a mental world or universe of ideas requires a cause as much as does a material world or universe of objects ; and if similar in its arrangement must require a similar cause. For what is there in this subject, which should occasion a different conclusion or inference? In an ahi: L ra.-t view, they are entirely alike; and no difficulty attenda the one supposition, which is not common to both of them. (D160) Similarly, experience cannot perceive any material difference in this particular, between these two kinds of worlds, but finds them to be governed by similar principles, and to depend upon an equal variety of causes in their operations. (D16ÌÌ 20. Philo concludes that the type of argument employed by Cleanthes leads to an infinite regress: How therefore shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that Being, whom you suppose the Author of nature, or, according to your system of anthropomorphism, the ideal world, into which you trace the material? Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle. (D161) He then suggests, as though it will prove to be more satisfactory, that we should not go beyond the material world itself: But if we stop, and go no farther; why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression?... If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better... never to look beyond the present material world. (D161-162) In suggesting that it is better never to look beyond the material world, what precisely is it that Philo is 2 advocating? George Nathan maintains that "Cleanthes is unaware that Philo is trying to eliminate only the externality of the cause. He is not trying to deny its intelligence ". (Chappell 410) Pike, on the other hand, interprets Philo' s position as eliminating the requirement for a causal account of the order present in the world: If we introduce an ordered mind in an effort to explain the existence of an ordered world, must we not provide a similar explanation of the ordered mind? But if we accept this demand, we shall have to introduce yet another intelligent being as the creator of the first. This explanatory chain can end only in an infinite regress. We would probably do better to assume that order in the material world is an ultimate fact that does not require explanation. Once we take the first step down the explanatory trail we are committed to go on forever. (Pike 157) 21. I will now examine critically the interpretations suggested by Nathan and Pike. Certain questions suggest themselves regarding Nathan's position. First, what does Nathan mean by the intelligence of... (shrink)

Continuing Keith Ward's series on comparative religion, this book deals with religious views of human nature and destiny. The beliefs of six major traditions are presented: the view of Advaita Vedanta that there is one Supreme Self, unfolding into the illusion of individual existence; the Vaishnava belief that there is an infinite number of souls, whose destiny is to be released from material embodiment; the Buddhist view that there is no eternal Self; the Abrahamic belief that persons are essentially (...) embodied souls; and the materialistic position that persons are complex material organisms. Indian ideas of rebirth, karma, and liberation from samsara are critically analysed and compared with semitic belief in the intermediate state of Sheol, Purgatory or Paradise, the Final Judgement and the resurrection of the body. The impact of scientific theories of cosmic and biological evolution on religious beliefs is assessed, and a form of 'soft emergent materialism' is defended, with regard to the soul. In this context, a Christian doctrine of original sin and atonement is presented, stressing the idea of soterial, as opposed to forensic, justice. Finally, a Christian view of personal immortality and the 'end of all things' is developed in conversation with Jewish and Muslim beliefs about judgement and resurrection. (shrink)

The way in which mathematics relates to experience has deeply engaged philosophers from the scientific revolution to the present. It has strongly influenced their views on epistemology, mathematics, science, and the nature of reality. Kant's views on the nature of mathematics and its relation to experience both influence and are influenced by his epistemology, and in particular the distinction Kant draws between concepts and intuitions. My dissertation contributes to clarifying the role of intuition in Kant's theory of mathematical cognition. It (...) focuses in particular on Kant's theory of magnitudes. This theory explains the applicability of mathematics to experience while bridging his philosophy of mathematics and his philosophy of science; it is therefore central. Kant's views on magnitudes, however, have been neglected. ;The dissertation divides into four parts. It begins by analyzing Kant's concept of magnitude and the closely related concepts of quanta, quantitas, quantity and number. These clarifications lay the groundwork for reconstructing and evaluating Kant's views. ;Understanding Kant's theory of mathematical cognition requires understanding how the quantitative forms of judgment and the categories of quantity are employed in mathematics. I argue for an interpretation that reflects the influence of 18$\sp{\rm th}$ Century metaphysics on Kant's thought, and reveals Kant's attempt to find a place for a mathematical conception of the world within that metaphysics. ;I also examine Kant's arguments for two fundamental properties of space--infinite divisibility and unlimited extent. I argue that intuition plays a perceptual role that can only be understood within the context of Kant's theory of imagination. ;Finally, I argue that according to Kant, a homogeneous manifold in intuition is required to represent composition and a mathematical version of the part/whole relation. The dissertation uses a modern understanding of the properties of relations to analyze the part/whole relations Kant refers to in his logic, and contrast them with the part/whole relations in his theory of magnitudes. Modern measurement theory aids in identifying Kant's insights into the conditions for the applicability of mathematics to experience. Kant's insights constitute an important part of his views on the role of intuition in mathematics. (shrink)

From 1929 onwards, C. I. Lewis defended the foundationalist claim that judgements of the form 'x is probable' only make sense if one assumes there to be a ground y that is certain (where x and y may be beliefs, propositions, or events). Without this assumption, Lewis argues, the probability of x could not be anything other than zero. Hans Reichenbach repeatedly contested Lewis's idea, calling it "a remnant of rationalism". The last move in this debate was a challenge by (...) Lewis, defying Reichenbach to produce a regress of probability values that yields a number other than zero. Reichenbach never took up the challenge, but we will meet it on his behalf, as it were. By presenting a series converging to a limit, we demonstrate that x can have a definite and computable probability, even if its justification consists of an infinite number of steps. Next we show the invalidity of a recent riposte of foundationalists that this limit of the series can be the ground of justification. Finally we discuss the question where justification can come from if not from a ground. (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)

Peacocke argues for a ‘generalized rationalism’, holding that ‘all entitlement has a fundamentally a priori component.’ (2) But his rationalism ‘differs from those of Frege and Gödel, just as theirs differ from that of Leibniz.’ He requires both substantive theories of intentional content and of understanding, and systematic formal theories of referential semantics and truth. We need an externalist theory of content: ‘Only mental states with externally individuated contents can make judgements about the external, mind-independent world rational.’ (123) Purely evidential (...) conceptions of meaning and content are inadequate. (34-49) They cannot account for the following: a thinker often has to work out what would be evidence for a content; contents cannot depend, for their identity, on all of the infinitely ramifying evidential connections among them; and thinkers conceive, however tacitly, of (at least some) observed properties as categorical. By contrast with an evidential theory, a truthconditional theory of content can account for all these problematic facts. Peacocke states, develops and defends three principles of rationalism which collectively ‘relate entitlement to truth, to the identity of states and their intentional contents, and to the a priori.’ (3-4) He does not thoroughly explain his central notion of entitlement, but this much is clear: any thinker is entitled to various transitions in, or into, thought. An example of a transition into thought would be that from one’s perceptual experience to an observational judgment. An example of a transition in thought would be a logical inference from certain premises to a conclusion. A transition is rational just in case the thinker is entitled to it. (Note that this aims to explain rationality in terms of entitlement, not the other way round.) It is clear from 28 that Peacocke needs an abstract ontology of entitlements (such as proofs, in the case of mathematics). Yet he does not endorse ‘Gödel’s obscure quasi-perceptual and quasi-causal epistemology of mathematics and the abstract sciences.’ (54.. (shrink)

The ethical turn that affects artistic and political practices today should not be interpreted as their subjection to moral criteria. Today, the reign of ethics leads to a growing indistinction between fact and law, between what is and what ought to be, where judgement bows down to the power of the law imposing itself. The radicality of this law is that it leaves no choice, and is nothing but the simple constraint stemming from the order of things. This brings (...) about an unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil, justice and redemption that can be traced not only in contemporary politics, but in philosophical reflection and film. (shrink)

Logic in Action/Doron Avital Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide (Napoleon Bonaparte) Introduction -/- This book was born on the battlefield and in nights of secretive special operations all around the Middle East, as well as in the corridors and lecture halls of Western Academia best schools. As a young boy, I was always mesmerized by stories of great men and women of action at fateful cross-roads of decision-making. Then, like as today, (...) I felt the full weight of the moment of truth as it confronts the individual, the man or woman of action, with the imminent necessity to decide. Alongside, as I was climbing up the ladder of education, I found myself just as well captivated by the great intellectual stories of our times, in particular 20th century analytic philosophy and, at its core, the machinery of modern logic. How do then the cool contemplative modes of the philosophical and analytic outlooks, that are better fitting of the philosopher's armchair at the fireplace, hang together with the heat of the battlefield or the angst of the ticking clock of time left to the completion of a daring special operation? Growing up I was pondering exactly that. Not accidently, and in fact as consequence, I have chosen a course in life that challenged me to visit the poles of both theory and practice. I set myself on a mission to unravel the tension between the contemplative inquiry, supposedly theoretical, aiming at the logical structure of things, and the uncompromising test of life and action. The puzzle of the gap between theory and practice has become ever since the guiding question of my life. -/- Not long ago, I met two friends, Avner Shor, a veteran combat soldier of the special forces unit I eventually commanded, and Aviram Halevi, a fellow officer with whom I served. Why will we not put into writing the ideas that guided us during our years of military action, we wondered. At that time, I used to deliver the keynote lectures to the senior officers' course of Israel central intelligence organization, the Mossad. For this I already had to put some of these ideas in writing. Avner was quick to introduce me with a notable publisher and even helped me write the first chapter. With Aviram I sat to many meetings, where he would challenge me with key questions, and we followed them with memories of operations and battles, aiming to draw the required lessons. This served me well when I finally sat down to write the first draft of the book. The result was more extensive than me and my friends had expected. I had to add a particularly long chapter dealing with the story of modern philosophy and logic. This was required, I felt, as no decision-making process lives in an intellectual vacuum. Knowingly or subconsciously, the intellectual climate of the time guides us for better or worse with the decisions we finally take. The initial draft was naturally cumbersome and inaccessible. But here I had the privilege of meeting a particularly talented editor, Rami Rothholtz. I found in Rami both an editor and a critical reader. As an infantry combat soldier at youth and now a senior journalist and editor, Rami insisted on simplifying and refining my ideas. Had it not been for his work, this book would have been literally unreadable. *** I opened my book with a brief description of a single night of a special operation deep at the Lebanon Bekaa valley, far away from Israel northern border. The mission was to kidnap a senior terror leader known to be holding in captivity an Israeli pilot. This was also the last special operation I commanded in my military career. A single special operation night, but what had to precede it? For sure, many months of intense and skillful preparations. What is Planning? This is the question with which I open up chapter (2) of the book. I confront in this chapter two approaches to planning. The first is the one I saw as a mission to myself to cultivate in my many years of military service. The second is the one I saw as representing a deep-rooted fallacy that holds a firm grip on today's conventional wisdom about planning. To further examine the logic of the competing models, I was required in chapter (3) to analyze the concept of "The Standard". I argue that the false model of planning has its roots in an attitude of an uncompromising adherence to the power of literal obedience to standards and rules. The standard, or what is outlined by a rule as prescribing a future course of action, is seen as an answer to the fundamental tension between theory (planning) and practice (execution). I argue in contrast that the standard does not produce an answer but rather what I call: "A Well-Defined Question". In essence, it is a meticulously-well-planned invitation to exercise a fresh judgment. A judgement that has as an anchor the default answer that the standard produces but is open to extension as it confronts the new frame of reference of the test of reality. In chapter (4), I present a new tool for planning and execution: "The Polygon of Risks" or "The Polygon of Execution". The Polygon is a geometric illustration of the underlying tension that exists between all dimensions of the operational project. The construction and conceptualization of the trade-offs that exist between the various dimensions - segments of the polygon - is the first topic on the planner's agenda. I position the concepts of "Daring" and "Taking Proactive and Well-Informed Risks" as necessary logical constituents of the polygon and show how in contrast the false model of planning is responsible for an operational culture that is risk-averse. It encourages, in fact, the piling up of false securities at the segments' level that eventually lead to the collapse of the polygon. The necessary trade-offs relationships that exist between the segments of the polygon express the fundamental tension between partnership and competition: partnership in a joint goal and competition over resources, both material and abstract. When this tension is not managed well, that is, when the players' local optimizations overshadow the global optimization required for the success of the project, the execution polygon collapses. In this scenario, we may find the setting of the bar of "High Standards" in a players' spheres of responsibility to conceal a hidden agenda of personal insurances taken against a possible failure. Once the overall risk is not mitigated by way of collaborative joint executional dialogue, the process that leads to a collapse of the polygon is literally unstoppable. *** In chapter (5), I discuss "(Fateful) Decisions". I examine the way in which we should translate the polygon into sequential critical decisions on the timeline. The execution polygon is not a rigid scaffolding but a dynamic conceptual illustration of the -/- project. It will need now to be converted into successive decision junctions. We will find the content of a decision and its timing on the timeline to be inseparable. The right decision is the one that is taken at the right time. The moment of decision is in fact the last moment of deliberation, the first moment available for action, i.e. the first possible "Can" is also the latest possible "Must". Deciding too soon is analog to the "Jumping of the Gun". The decision maker is forcing a pre-conceived answer to a state of affairs not ripe for an answer, e.g. the target in the shooting range is not yet erected. Late to decide and the decision maker may envision what he or she should have done but reality is no longer available for them to harness it right, e.g. consider a tennis player's frustration when reviewing a too-late-to-react move in the video replay. I review in this chapter many fateful decisions, both historical, from Napoleon's Waterloo, to a Bridge Too Far of WWII, to the failed rescue attempt of American hostages at the time of the Iranian Revolution, as well as fateful decisions I had to take in the course of my military life, both in combat and in special operations, and show the sense in which they all answer to our analysis. The theme of chapter (6) is "The Moment of Truth". This is the moment when everything is on the line and from which there is no turning back. I discuss the formative repetitive structure of the schooling and simulation phase and contrast it with the "One Shot, One Opportunity" nature of the moment of truth. This is extremely helpful when we analyze the logical structure of failures as unwarranted repetitions of past lessons. The schooling curriculum indeed consists of important abstractions drawn from lessons of the past. However, it is when we project them in a fashion that is literal or mechanical that we cross path with the possibility of a failure. The paradox of education is that what we must repeat in school and simulation must be extended and not repeated in real life. What is required of us so we do not fall into the fallacy of repetition in face of the moment of truth is the core subject of the discussion of this chapter. In chapter (7), I took a lengthy philosophical detour surveying the intellectual drama of modern logic, and in general, the story of 20th century analytic philosophy. Readers who choose to bypass the somehow demanding narrative of this drama can do so and still keep the argumentative thread of the book. However, even by way of skipping the more technical parts, I would still urge the readers to delve into the discussion in this chapter as I believe this would grant them a deeper understanding of the overall conceptual framework. I explore here the work of two key figures: the logician Kurt Gödel and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, both were crowned in 2000 by TIME Magazine, as the leading Logician and Philosopher, respectively, of the 20th Century. I review the fascinating logical result of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and examine its relevance as setting a theoretical limit to the power of formalization. This amazing logical result - a result that shakes the logical foundations of 20th century thought in as much as the discovery of irrational numbers shook the foundations of the Pythagorean program of the ancient Greeks - bears significantly on the question of action and the blind trust we place in the power of formalization in the form of protocols and rules. It is here that Wittgenstein's philosophy enters in full force. We follow Wittgenstein as he dismantles our conception of rules as if there were "Railroads to Infinite", i.e. as prescribing for us in-advance their proper employments in all possible -/- future eventualities. Instead we propose that the dilemma of action demands of us an extension of rules rather than a mechanical or blind repetition of their literal imperative. In turn, this extension can serve as a new lesson added to the curriculum of school and simulation. The theme of chapter (8), the concluding chapter, is Strategy, Logic, and Ethics. The chapter comes to place the ethical dilemma in the conceptual map we presented in the book. I discuss here the tension between strategy as a process of setting goals and deriving backward as it were the steps that are necessary for achieving these goals, to the inescapable dictation of the ethical imperative. This unavoidable tension is particularly important against the backdrop of contemporary culture that is guided by a vision of personal success and achievement that may threaten our ability to do what is right. Most of all, I am troubled in this chapter, with the role logic may play, first as a liberating force enabling a change that is tuned to the ethical imperative, and second, as a force designed to justify on logical grounds, as it were, the existing power structure. It is in this junction that brave individuals will be called to challenge the governing logic of the zeitgeist - logic that operates now as an oppressive force that serves the vested interest of beneficials of the existing order. When success is favored over doing what is right, as we must admit is the prevailing cultural mood of our times, that the words of Emanuel Kant carry their full weight: "Do the Right thing and leave the Consequences to God". For this we need heroes and heroines that challenge the time by bearing the full weight of responsibility that comes with the doing of what is Right. *** This book was written more than anything from the perspective of the heroes and heroines of action. Sometimes they may be missing the exact words or the full insight into the solid logical complexity that stands between them and the doing of what is right. They feel what is right to do on the battlefield of life, whether in real battle, in political or economic life or whether in the life of creativity and the quest of the intellect. They do need, in analogy, proper logical and intellectual artillery. I hope they will find the logical cannons they require as they travel through the pages of this book. The rest is in their hands at the Moment of Truth. -/- Doron Avital, Tel Aviv 2011 -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel and the Problem of Beginning: Scepticism and Presuppositionlessness by Robb DUNPHYJ. M. FritzmanDUNPHY, Robb. Hegel and the Problem of Beginning: Scepticism and Presuppositionlessness. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. x + 213 pp. Cloth, $105.00This rich, learned, and important book investigates and critically evaluates how, according to Hegel, philosophy should begin. Briefly stated, the problem of beginning philosophy is that any beginning seems susceptible to a skeptical (...) challenge that takes the form of a dilemma. On the one side, if philosophy begins immediately with a presuppositionless assertion, skeptics will contend that it is dogmatic. On the other side, if philosophy begins mediately with a claim that presupposes an argument, skeptics will confront each premise of that argument with a trilemma: The premise is either only a dogmatic assertion; it is the conclusion of an argument whose premises must in turn be justified (which threatens an infinite regress); or it depends on an argument that is viciously circular. Hegel solves this problem with a beginning that is simultaneously immediate and mediate.The introduction explains that this book has three goals. First, it critically analyzes the problem of beginning, showing how Hegel responds to the skeptical challenge. Second, it explains how Hegel’s approach to the problem and his solution are informed by his deep engagement with the tradition of Pyrrhonian skepticism. Finally, it provides a guide to reading Hegel’s essay “With What Must the Beginning of the Science be Made?” in the Science of Logic.Chapter 1, “Hegel and Pyrrhonian Scepticism,” presents the essentials of Pyrrhonism and Hegel’s interpretation of it. Pyrrhonism is a way of life. It aims to find an equally good counterargument for every argument it encounters, thus leading to a suspension of judgment that allows the skeptic to live in a state of undisturbedness. Pyrrhonism presents encountered arguments with a trilemma: Either they depend on dogmatic assertions; they generate an infinite regress of arguments; or they are viciously circular. Hegel’s interpretation emphasizes skepticism’s equipollence, whereby it opposes every argument with a counterargument that is equally persuasive. Viewed historically, Pyrrhonism seems to have confronted arguments only as it happened to encounter them and to have restricted itself to epistemology. However, Hegel is open to the interpretation that skepticism’s inquiry could be completed. This would allow it to demonstrate that for every argument there will always be an [End Page 143] equally persuasive counterargument. He also interprets skepticism as accepting a metaphysical principle regarding the inherent instability of objects.“A Short History of the Problem of Beginning,” chapter 2, provides a detailed précis of Hegel’s essay. It also gives the brief history of the problem of beginning, discussing Descartes, Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. It notes that some philosophers posit an objective beginning, others a subjective beginning. It explains why Hegel regards previous attempts to solve the problem of beginning as inadequate. It recognizes that Fichte’s solution can be interpreted as much closer to that of Hegel than Hegel acknowledges.Chapter 3, “The Problem of Beginning,” supplies Hegel’s own account of the problem. His solution has two versions, one in the Science of Logic and the other in the Encyclopedia Logic. Each version posits a beginning without determinate content. In the Science of Logic, Hegel states that absolute knowing, the culminating shape of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, corresponds to the empty thinking with which philosophy begins. Philosophy’s beginning in the Science of Logic is mediate as it emerges from the progression of shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit and immediate as it does not have an object of thought. In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel proposes that a completed skepticism corresponds to the abstract concept of being with which philosophy begins. Philosophy’s beginning in the Encyclopedia Logic is mediate as it emerges from the skepticism’s equipollence and immediate as being without content. Hegel ultimately denies that a completed skepticism could play this role, however, which suggests that he believes that philosophy can begin immediately.“Meditation I—Phenomenology,” chapter 4, argues that Hegel’s first version is unsuccessful. To succeed, William Maker’s interpretation would have to be accepted, which... (shrink)

Walter Benjamin called Felix Noeggerath (1885-1960) the “universal genius” or simply “genius.” In his 1916 treatise “Synthesis and the Concept of System in Philosophy,” Noeggerath offered a reading of Kant’s concept of synthesis in an original and radical manner. He dares to confront thought with the incommensurability of atheoretical Being. The linkage between logic and incommensurability is what he calls rationalism. In contradiction to this claim, any attempt to exclude atheoretical Being from the realm of logic is anti-rationalism. Noeggerath elaborates (...) on this in a penetrating discussion and modification of epistemological positions, especially those of the Marburg School and Hermann Cohen. Noeggerath constructs a notion of the philosophical system with the help of Kant’s three tables of transcendental judgements, categories, and principles in the Critique of Pure Reason. Each of these tables is known to contain 12 individual elements in four groups of three each. For the systematic division, the third group under the title “Relation” is decisive. Noeggerath assigns one systemic part to each kind of relation: “For it is to be connected: the categorical relation with ethics, the hypothetical with logic, and the disjunctive with aesthetics.” As a result the classical sequence, beginning with logic, is changed. “The order of the limbs is: a) ethics, b) logic, c) aesthetics.” In Noeggerath’s logical outline, specific mathematical concepts of meta-geometry play a decisive role. According to him, philosophy can resemble their preciseness in building a viable concept of the infinite. The prerequisite is that philosophy does not itself behave mathematically but proceeds along its own path in critical distance to the “specialized, act-kindred thinking” of the mathematician. (shrink)

The “staccato run,” in which a runner stops infinitely often while running from one point to another, is a prototypical “superfeat,” that is, a feat involving the completion in a finite time of an infinite sequence of distinct acts. There is no widely accepted demonstration that superfeats are impossible logically, but I argue here, contra Grunbaüm, that they are impossible dynamically. Specifically, I show that the staccato run is excluded by Newton’s three laws of motion, when those laws are (...) supplemented with a defensible philosophical judgment. (shrink)