Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) are invaluable neuroscientific tools for unveiling human neural dynamics in three dimensions (space, time, and frequency), which are associated with a wide variety of perceptions, cognition, and actions. MEG/EEG also provides different categories of neuronal indices including activity magnitude, connectivity, and network properties along the three dimensions. In the last 20 years, interest has increased in inter-regional connectivity and complex network properties assessed by various sophisticated scientific analyses. We herein review the definition, computation, short (...) history, and pros and cons of connectivity and complex network (graph-theory) analyses applied to MEG/EEG signals. We briefly describe recent developments in source reconstruction algorithms essential for source-space connectivity and network analyses. Furthermore, we discuss a relatively novel approach used in MEG/EEG studies to examine the complex dynamics represented by human brain activity. The correct and effective use of these neuronal metrics provides a new insight into the multi-dimensional dynamics of the neural representations of various functions in the complex human brain. (shrink)

In this article I will address the critical question of the constitution of global systems and the part played in such processes by what is often summarized as culture. I examine the important distinction between culture and globalization and culture as constitutive of global social relations. The need to cleave to a systemic treatment of globality is put, while noting the dangers that lie in one-dimensional accounts of global system constitution. To offset any such tendency I explore the constitution of (...) global systemness from a structurationist perspective. I outline the nature and significance of culture in the study of global systems, drawing attention to different literatures. Finally I underscore the importance of the cultural turn in the study of global systems and what has to be done to take full advantage of it.In what follows I will address the critical question of the constitution of global systems and the part played in such processes by what is conveniently – if sometimes unhelpfully – summarized as “culture”. By global systems I mean networks of interaction and meaning that transcend both societal and national frames of reference. I want to shift the emphasis away from an under-theorized focus on cultural globalization to a consideration of global systems as enacted in part through cultural processes. In other words, I do not want to conflate the conjunctional features of contemporary (cultural) globalization with culture as the realm of lived experience integral to the enactment of all social-systemic relations. In some respects this approach may be seen as part of a shift – perhaps a paradigm shift – in how we understand the space of the social, and in how, or whether, we construe the global as the constitutive of all social relations (Beck 2003; Shaw 2003). I will begin with a mild polemic against a well-known systemic account of world-making forces that highlights some of these issues. (shrink)

Attribute spaces are a type of conceptual spaces which Carnap introduced in his late basic system of inductive logic. This article shows how to extend Carnap's use of them into a full model of inductive reasoning with geometrically represented concepts, extending my earlier work. The proposed model draws on Bayesian non-parametric techniques in order to define a probability distribution over the attribute space and a way of updating it with data. The model is another example of conceptual and formal (...) continuity of Carnapian inductive logic with subsequent developments in statistics. (shrink)

The concept of emotion can be organized within a hypothetical space comprising a limited number of dimensions representing essential properties of emotion. The present study examined cultural influences on such conceptual structure by comparing the performance of emotion word classification between Japanese and Korean individuals. Two types of emotional words were used; central concepts, highly typical examples of emotion, and less typical peripheral concepts. Participants classified 30 words into groups based on conceptual similarity. MDS analyses revealed a three-dimensional structure (...) with valence, social engagement, and arousal dimensions for both cultures, with the valence dimension being the most salient one. The Japanese prioritized the social engagement over the arousal while the Koreans showed sensitivities to the arousal dimension. Although the conceptual structure was similar for the two countries, the weight of importance among the three dimensions seems to be different, reflecting each culture’s values and communication styles. (shrink)

The pigeon-inspired optimization algorithm is a category of a newly proposed swarm intelligence-based algorithm that belongs to the population-based solution technique. The MKP is a class of complex optimization problems that have many practical applications in the fields of engineering and sciences. Due to the practical applications of MKP, numerous algorithmic-based methods like local search and population-based search algorithms have been proposed to solve the MKP in the past few decades. This paper proposes a modified binary pigeon-inspired optimization algorithm named (...) (Modified-BPIO) for the 0 - 1 multidimensional knapsack problem (MKP). The utilization of the binary pigeon-inspired optimization (BPIO) for solving the multidimensional knapsack problem came with huge success. However, it can be observed that the BPIO converges prematurely due to lost diversity during the search activities. Given the above, the crossover operator is integrated with the landmark component of the BPIO to improve the diversity of the solution space. The MKP benchmarks from the Operations Research (OR) library are utilized to test the performance of the proposed binary method. Experimentally, it is concluded that the proposed Modified-BPIO has a better performance when compared with the BPIO and existing state-of-the-arts that worked on the same MKP benchmarks. (shrink)

In the recent literature, it has been shown that the wave function in the de Broglie–Bohm theory can be regarded as a new kind of field, i.e., a "multi-field", in three-dimensional space. In this paper, I argue that the natural framework for the multi-field is the original second-order Bohm’s theory. In this context, it is possible: i) to construe the multi-field as a real-valued scalar field; ii) to explain the physical interaction between the multi-field and the Bohmian particles; and (...) iii) to clarify the status of the energy-momentum conservation and the dynamics of the theory. (shrink)

Focusing on the multi-dimensionality of interactional settings, this study analyzes how the material world is a significant factor in the sequential co-production of the video-taped doctor—patient interactions. The analysis shows how a material artifact, the patient's file, is relevant in two ways: a) as a device which is employed in the sequential organization of the interaction. The patient's file is being used in the contexts of topic development and topic change. b) The file with its specific physical and symbolic features (...) is being co-produced and contested by both actors as a knowledge reservoir. Further inspection of the interactions in concert with theoretical reflections of the role of space and materiality suggests that interactions should be interpreted as happening in spatially arranged constellations of material objects and actors. In these both rigid and flexible constellations boundaries are established, access is distributed, and meaning is solidified. (shrink)

The dynamics and fusion of multiple media into one space has been thoroughly studied by Frederick J. Kiesler. His investigations into a multi-dimensional, space are in fact the beginnings of what would become a radically new concept of form and content appropriately called ‘Endless Space’. In the 1930s entitled the ‘Correalist Theory’ believes that the essence of reality is not in the ‘thing’ itself, but in the way it correlates and orders itself to its environment, to its (...) spatial dynamics and to its atmosphere. Kiesler also deemed that it was essential to disregard the boundaries that separate the different arts and media. These boundaries needed to be dissolved and proclaimed that painters, sculptors and designers, driven away by functionalism, would return from exile to be welcomed by architecture. Since his death in 1965, his notion of Endless Space and his studies ‘On correalism and biotechnique’ in particular, have resurfaced in recent art discourse. New technologies have emerged that are now provoking different questions regarding the techno-ethics of integrated biotech and post-digital tectonic potentials that withhold the concept of an ubiquitous and synaesthetic space. (shrink)

It is generally argued that if the wave-function in the de Broglie–Bohm theory is a physical field, it must be a field in configuration space. Nevertheless, it is possible to interpret the wave-function as a multi-field in three-dimensional space. This approach hasn’t received the attention yet it really deserves. The aim of this paper is threefold: first, we show that the wave-function is naturally and straightforwardly construed as a multi-field; second, we show why this interpretation is superior to (...) other interpretations discussed in the literature; third, we clarify common misconceptions. (shrink)

Curved multi-dimensional space-times (5D and higher) are constructed by embedding them in one higher-dimensional flat space. The condition that the embedding coordinates have a separable form, plus the demand of an orthogonal resulting space-time, implies that the curved multi-dimensional space-time has 4D de-Sitter subspaces (for constant extra-dimensions) in which the 3D subspace has an accelerated expansion. A complete determination of the curved multi-dimensional spacetime geometry is obtained provided we impose a new type of “equivalence principle”, meaning (...) that there is a geodesic which from the embedding space has a rectliniar motion. According to this new equivalence principle, we can find the extra-dimensions metric components, each curved multi-dimensional spacetime surface’s equation, the energy-momentum tensors and the extra-dimensions as functions of a scalar field. The generic geodesic in each 5D spacetime are studied: they include solutions where particle’s motion along the extra-dimension is periodic and the 3D expansion factor is inflationary (accelerated expansion). Thus, the 3D subspace has an accelerated expansion. (shrink)

Over the history of research on sign languages, much scholarship has highlighted the pervasive presence of signs whose forms relate to their meaning in a non-arbitrary way. The presence of these forms suggests that sign language vocabularies are shaped, at least in part, by a pressure toward maintaining a link between form and meaning in wordforms. We use a vector space approach to test the ways this pressure might shape sign language vocabularies, examining how non-arbitrary forms are distributed within (...) the lexicons of two unrelated sign languages. Vector space models situate the representations of words in a multi-dimensional space where the distance between words indexes their relatedness in meaning. Using phonological information from the vocabularies of American Sign Language and British Sign Language, we tested whether increased similarity between the semantic representations of signs corresponds to increased phonological similarity. The results of the computational analysis showed a significant positive relationship between phonological form and semantic meaning for both sign languages, which was strongest when the sign language lexicons were organized into clusters of semantically related signs. The analysis also revealed variation in the strength of patterns across the form-meaning relationships seen between phonological parameters within each sign language, as well as between the two languages. This shows that while the connection between form and meaning is not entirely language specific, there are cross-linguistic differences in how these mappings are realized for signs in each language, suggesting that arbitrariness as well as cognitive or cultural influences may play a role in how these patterns are realized. The results of this analysis not only contribute to our understanding of the distribution of non-arbitrariness in sign language lexicons, but also demonstrate a new way that computational modeling can be harnessed in lexicon-wide investigations of sign languages. (shrink)

Modal logics, originally conceived in philosophy, have recently found many applications in computer science, artificial intelligence, the foundations of mathematics, linguistics and other disciplines. Celebrated for their good computational behaviour, modal logics are used as effective formalisms for talking about time, space, knowledge, beliefs, actions, obligations, provability, etc. However, the nice computational properties can drastically change if we combine some of these formalisms into a many-dimensional system, say, to reason about knowledge bases developing in time or moving objects. To (...) study the computational behaviour of many-dimensional modal logics is the main aim of this book. On the one hand, it is concerned with providing a solid mathematical foundation for this discipline, while on the other hand, it shows that many seemingly different applied many-dimensional systems (e.g., multi-agent systems, description logics with epistemic, temporal and dynamic operators, spatio-temporal logics, etc.) fit in perfectly with this theoretical framework, and so their computational behaviour can be analyzed using the developed machinery. We start with concrete examples of applied one- and many-dimensional modal logics such as temporal, epistemic, dynamic, description, spatial logics, and various combinations of these. Then we develop a mathematical theory for handling a spectrum of 'abstract' combinations of modal logics - fusions and products of modal logics, fragments of first-order modal and temporal logics - focusing on three major problems: decidability, axiomatizability, and computational complexity. Besides the standard methods of modal logic, the technical toolkit includes the method of quasimodels, mosaics, tilings, reductions to monadic second-order logic, algebraic logic techniques. Finally, we apply the developed machinery and obtained results to three case studies from the field of knowledge representation and reasoning: temporal epistemic logics for reasoning about multi-agent systems, modalized description logics for dynamic ontologies, and spatio-temporal logics. The genre of the book can be defined as a research monograph. It brings the reader to the front line of current research in the field by showing both recent achievements and directions of future investigations (in particular, multiple open problems). On the other hand, well-known results from modal and first-order logic are formulated without proofs and supplied with references to accessible sources. The intended audience of this book is logicians as well as those researchers who use logic in computer science and artificial intelligence. More specific application areas are, e.g., knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular, terminological, temporal and spatial reasoning, or reasoning about agents. And we also believe that researchers from certain other disciplines, say, temporal and spatial databases or geographical information systems, will benefit from this book as well. Key Features: Integrated approach to modern modal and temporal logics and their applications in artificial intelligence and computer science Written by internationally leading researchers in the field of pure and applied logic Combines mathematical theory of modal logic and applications in artificial intelligence and computer science Numerous open problems for further research Well illustrated with pictures and tables. (shrink)

A sociological conceptualisation of space moves beyond the material to the relational, to consider space as a social process. This paper draws on research that explored the reproduction of legitimated knowledge and power structures in intensive care units during encounters, between patients, who were experiencing mental illness, and their nurses. Semi‐structured telephone interviews with 17 intensive care nurses from eight Australian intensive care units were conducted in 2017. Data were analysed through iterative cycling between participants' responses, the literature (...) and the theoretical framework. The material and relational aspects of space in this context constitute a dynamic process that is concerned with the reproduction of everyday life, the preservation of the biomedical authority of intensive care, and the social othering of people experiencing mental illness. The work of theorists such as Löw, Harvey and Foucault underpins the exploration of space as a multi‐dimensional, malleable social process that both produces and is the product of social interaction and the social world. In this paper, we argue that the performative work of knowledge and power production and reproduction, considered here in relation to intensive care spaces, enables ongoing othering and disenfranchisement of people experiencing mental illness. (shrink)

_Time, Space, and Phantasy_ examines the connections between time, space, phantasy and sexuality in clinical practice. It explores the subtleties of the encounter between patient and analyst, addressing how aspects of the patient’s unconscious past are actualised in the present, producing new meanings that can be re-translated to the past. Perelberg’s analysis of Freud’s Multi-dimensional model of temporality suggests that he always viewed the constitution of the individual as non-linear. In Freud’s formulations, the individual is decentred and ruled (...) by different temporalities, most of which escape their consciousness. Perelberg identifies the similarities between this and Einstein’s theory of relativity which states that rather than being absolute, time depends on the relative position and speed of the observing individual suggesting that rather than being a reality, time is an abstraction, connecting objects and events. Throughout this text, Perelberg draws together connections between time, mental space, and phantasy showing how time is constantly reshaped in the light of new events and experiences. This book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers. (shrink)

Points of view are a central phenomenon in human cognition. Although the concept of point of view is ambiguous, there exist common elements in different notions. A point of view is a certain way to look at things around us. In conceptual points of view, things are looked at or interpreted through conceptual lenses. Conceptual points of view are important for epistemology, cognitive science, and philosophy of science. In this article, a new method to formalize conceptual points of view is (...) introduced. It is based on the conceptual space approach, where concepts are regions of multi-dimensional quality spaces. Points of view, as defined in this article, consist of a selection of relevant dimensions, referred to here as determinables, and of a certain supposition, referred to here as a theory, about the subject content. After considering some early efforts to formalize points of view, the notion of conceptual space is defined and explored. One concept of point of view is defined and developed in the framework of conceptual space, and a new logic for points of view is also outlined. The problem of mind–body correlation is discussed as an example of the application of the notion of points of view. To conclude, the meaning and applications of the new concepts and tools developed in the article are discussed. (shrink)

An exploration of the post-politics of global capitalism in theory and practice Our age is celebrated as the triumph of liberal democracy. Old ideological battles have been decisively resolved in favour of freedom and the market. We are told that we have moved 'beyond left and right'; that we are 'all in this together'. Any remaining differences are to be addressed through expert knowledge, consensual deliberation and participatory governance. Yet the 'end of history' has also been marked by widespread disillusion (...) with mainstream politics and a rise in nationalist and religious fundamentalisms. And now an explosion of popular protests is challenging technocratic regulation and the power of markets in the name of democracy itself. This collection makes sense of this situation by critically engaging with the influential theory of 'the post-political' developed by Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek and others. Through a multi-dimensional and fiercely contested assessment of contemporary depoliticisation, The Post-Political and Its Discontents urges us to confront the closure of our political horizons and re-imagine the possibility of emancipatory change. ". (shrink)

Arguments, claims, and discussions about the “level of description” of a theory are ubiquitous in cognitive science. Such talk is typically expressed more precisely in terms of the granularity of the theory, or in terms of Marr’s three levels. I argue that these ways of understanding levels of description are insufficient to capture the range of different types of theoretical commitments that one can have in cognitive science. When we understand these commitments as points in a multi-dimensional space, we (...) find that we must also reconsider our understanding of intertheoretic relations. In particular, we should understand cognitive theories as constraining one another, rather than reducing to one another. (shrink)

Learning to recognize visual objects from examples requires the ability to find meaningful patterns in spaces of very high dimensionality. We present a method for dimensionality reduction which effectively biases the learning system by combining multiple constraints via the use of class labels. The use of extensive class labels steers the resulting lowdimensional representation to become invariant to those directions of variation in the input space that are irrelevant to classification; this is done merely by making class labels independent (...) of these directions. We also show that prior knowledge of the proper dimensionality of the target representation can be imposed by training a multi-layer bottleneck network. Computational experiments involving non-trivial categorization of parameterized fractal images and of human faces indicate that the low-dimensional representation extracted by our method leads to improved generalization in the learned tasks and is likely to preserve the topology of the original space. (shrink)

The semantic similarity between words is one of the basic knowledge in Natural Language Processing. There have been several previous studies on measuring the similarity based on word vectors in a multi-dimensional space. In those studies, high dimensional feature vectors of words are made from words' cooccurrence in a corpus or from reference relation in a dictionary, and then the word vectors are calculated from the feature vectors through the method like principal component analysis. This paper proposes a new (...) placement method of nouns into a multi-dimensional space based on words' cooccurrence in a corpus. The proposed method doesn't use the high dimensional feature vectors of words, but is based on the idea that ``vectors corresponding to nouns which cooccur with a word w in a relation f constitute a group in the multi-dimensional space''. Although the whole meaning of nouns isn't reflected in the word vectors obtained by the pro posed method, the semantic similarity between nouns defined with the word vectors is proper for an example-based disambiguation method. (shrink)

A method of generating synonyms for a stimulus word using a computer is proposed. Vector Space Model, where words in text data are arranged in a multi-dimensional space and degree of similarity between two words of them is calculated from how close the words are in the space, may be available to the method. However, it is not easy to optimize parameters in the method because there is no appropriate standard synonym database where proper synonyms for a (...) stimulus word are thoroughly collected. Therefore, we first built such a standard database employing two steps of human subjects expriments, and optimized the parameters of the method of generating synonyms. As the result, it was found that the Vector Space Model-based method using an electronic dictionary as source is better to generate synonyms than the one using a text corpus and an ordinal method using a thesaurus. (shrink)

We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them orig...

This is a composite review of three intriguing and provocative books that address the interconnections between East Asian and Western philosophy. Firstly, in _Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding: Toward a New Cultural Flesh_, Kwok-Ying Lau thinks that phenomenology can help construct a “cultural flesh” between civilizations that encourages East-West philosophical dialogues, and that China needs to adopt Western terminology to facilitate an intercultural engagement. Merleau-Ponty’s “inter-world” can help this bridge. Secondly, in _Fundamentals of Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy_, Lin Ma and Jaap (...) van Brakel argue that Chinese thinkers of the modern world invent “Chinese philosophy” in order to engage with Western thought. In a distinct fashion, they incorporate a Wittgenstein-inspired scenario whereby the necessary precondition for comparative intercultural philosophy is the “attitude-toward-a-soul principle” alongside the “family resemblance principle” which includes the “no need to speak the same language principle” or no need for one tradition to adopt another’s terminology. Thirdly, in _Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought_, Eric S. Nelson proposes that intertextual analysis opens multi-dimensional spaces of interpretation to situate changing views of East-West encounters in Germany ranging from Hegel and Kant to Buber and Heidegger. Daoism, Confucianism, Chan and Zen Buddhism are sites for examination by Western thinkers that open portals to East Asian culture and philosophy. (shrink)

Three big philosophical problems about consciousness are: Why does it exist? How do we explain and understand it? How can we explain brain-consciousness correlations? If functionalism were true, all three problems would be solved. But it is false, and that means all three problems remain unsolved (in that there is no other obvious candidate for a solution). Here, it is argued that the first problem cannot have a solution; this is inherent in the nature of explanation. The second problem is (...) solved by recognizing that (a) there is an explanation as to why science cannot explain consciousness, and (b) consciousness can be explained by a different kind of explanation, empathic or “personalistic” explanation, compatible with, but not reducible to, scientific explanation. The third problem is solved by exploiting David Chalmers“principle of structural coherence”, and involves postulating that sensations experienced by us–visual, auditory, tactile, and so on–amount to minute scattered regions in a vast, multi dimensional “space” of all possible sensations, which vary smoothly, and in a linear way, throughout the space. There is also the space of all possible sentient brain processes. There is just one, unique one-one mapping between these two spaces that preserves continuity and linearity. It is this which provides the explanation as to why brain processes and sensations are correlated as they are. I consider objections to this unique-matching theory, and consider how the theory might be empirically confirmed. (shrink)

'Overpopulation' is often implicated as a major causative factor of poverty and environmental degradation in the developing world. This review of the population-resource debate focusses on Red, Green and neo-Malthusian ideologies to demonstrate how they have ramified into current economic and development theory. A central hypothesis is that key elements of Marxist analysis, tempered by the best of Green thought, still have much to offer the subject. The contributions of capitalism to 'underdevelopment', and its associated environmental crises, are clarified and (...) reasserted in a contemporary context. The concept of valuation vector is also introduced, and a novel closure of Blaikie's 'Chain of Explanation' is proposed. The Circuit of Capital model thus created is applied to specific case-studies of resource-population conflict so as to overturn the simplistic conventional connection held between population growth and ecological devastation. The model highlights sequential causes of poverty arising from important capital-based factors which might otherwise be overlooked. It can accommodate a variety of Red-Green perspectives and its structural form is suited to the unravelling of complex population-resource pressures in the multi-dimensional space of the modern global political economy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reports of the Death of the AuthorDonald KeeferReports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated. Throughout Western history, the death of a hero, the disappearance of something sacred, the fall of a leader, or the defeat of a powerful people has signaled cultural crises and the coming of anxiety-filled transformations towards an unknowable future. When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the belated obituary on the death of God, (...) he was well aware of its enormity. He complains that millennia will pass before humanity will overcome its living in the “immense frightful shadow” of God. 1 Roland Barthes’s 1968 notice on “The Death of the Author,” however, announces an analogous loss of the “Author-God” with nothing but smug confidence: “We know to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” 2 Since his actual death in 1980, and despite his writings contra the author, Barthes has become the sort of Author declared moribund in his article, as he is attentively read and dutifully quoted with adulation by artists, art and literary critical theorists alike. 3For Abigail Solomon-Godeu, writing on photography, the death of the author, and by extension, the artist and composer, as theorized by Barthes, was a cornerstone in a new age of cultural production and consumption. Readers would be liberated from the tyranny of authorial authority. She links the transgressive edge of “appropriative art,” found in such works as photographer Sherry Levine’s photographs of famous photographs, to playing out the cultural consequences of Barthes’s manifesto. “The dismantling of the notion of unique subjectivity Barthes understood as a salutary blow struck against ossified and essential retrograde bourgeois humanism.” 4 The paramount irony is [End Page 78] that the Four Henchman of the Authorial Apocalypse, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Paul De Man, are given the godlike status of founding fathers of postmodernism by practically every writer on the current art scene. The program to “challenge the symbolic itself,” is accepted as a sacred charge by the new cultural clerisy. 5Nearing three decades of postmortem of the author, what has changed? The “death of the author” has given birth not to the reader, but to a booming industry of “discursive practices,” or the production of texts on texts. And clearly, not one of the producers of these texts would happily give credit to discourse itself for their byline. Despite postmodern misgivings about authority and propriety, we can still be sued for appropriating without their permission words and ideas theoretically the product of language itself! 6 Isn’t it high time that we began to demand some sort of truth in advertising or reporting on matters such as these?Margit Sutrop has lamented in the pages of this journal the resilient attitudes of those cultural critics who take as axiomatic Barthes’s claims: “Even the sharpest philosophical analysis has had no influence on those speaking about the death of the author.” 7 In fact, many of the critiques are so good, one must wonder if our continuing concern with Barthes isn’t bordering on overkill. Sutrop sees that Barthesian proponents have too much invested in the thesis to be moved. She then acknowledges that arguments might prove fruitless against the force of a metaphor. This is a very troubling concession however. There is nothing surprising about a community’s lack of self-criticism except when that community advertises itself as the party that dares to challenge all. The convenience of certain “truths,” or beliefs not subject to correction ought always to make us suspicious.The truth is Barthes’s attack has much less to do with authors than with a style of reading: “We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (DOA, p. 146). The tenacity of Barthes’s supporters is a function of the sort of reading that Barthes licenses here and in his other works. Clearly... (shrink)

The species concept is one of the central concepts in biological science. Although modern systematics speculates about the existence of a complex hierarchy of nested taxa, biological species are considered particularly important for the active role they play in evolution. However, neither theoretical biologists nor philosophers of biology have come to an agreement about what a species is. In this chapter, we address two questions pertaining to biological species: (1) are they individuals or universals? and (2) are they bona fide (...) or fiat entities? In section The Species-as-Individuals View, we illustrate the reasons that have led many scholars to support the view that species are individuals. In the next two sections, we show that the relational concepts of species – on which the species-as-individuals view is based – provide neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for species membership. This seriously undermines the species-as-individuals view. In the section A Conceptualist Model for the Metaphysics of Species, we advance the proposal that species are fiat concepts (and thus, universal entities partially dependent on the human mind) carved in a multi-dimensional space representing the properties that the biological organisms possess. The final section concludes. (shrink)

Context: Using radical constructivism, society can be considered from the perspective of asking the question, “Who conceives of society?” In Luhmann ’s social systems theory, this question itself is considered as a construct of the communication among reflexive agents. Problem: Structuration of expectations by codes operating in interhuman communications positions both communicators and communications in a multi-dimensional space in which their relations can be provided with meaning at the supra-individual level. The codes can be functionally different and symbolically generalized. (...) Method: More than Luhmann, I focus on the hypothetical status of the communication of meaning and the uncertainty involved. Meaning can be communicated because of reflexivity in interhuman communications; meaning cannot be observed. Results: The communication of denotations between semantic domains can generate “horizons of meaning” as reflexive orders that remain structurally coupled to individual minds. This elusive order contains a trade-off between “organization” at interfaces integrating expectations at each moment of time, and the potential of further differentiation among symbolically generalized codes of communication in a “self-organization” over time. Implications: One can model the coding in the communication of meaning as latent variables that evolve as an implication of the interacting intentions and expectations. The structure of expectations can be visualized and animated using semantic maps. The self-organizing horizons of meaning operate in a multidimensional space different from the network topology, and at another pace, since meaning is provided to events from the perspective of hindsight. Constructivist content: This perspective of the radical constructedness of social reality transforms the status of agency and organization in sociological theorizing from a source of change to a resource of communicative competencies and reflexive performativity. (shrink)

If institutional heterogeneity tends overall to reduce survival chances, it may also persist and be harnessed to good use. This article investigates this ambivalence by looking at how institutional heterogeneity emerges, develops, and survives. An inductive study of the “Metropolitan Opera” archives suggests that what enables heterogeneity to survive and to withstand the pressure for homogenization is its inherent potential for “multivocality.” The analysis shows how institutional discrepancies were bridged over through an opportunistic, “multivocal” action pattern, whereby the organization maneuvered (...) between conflicting institutional demands, seeking to minimize dependence on any single constituency or evaluation principle. Maintaining discretionary options is essential in multi-dimensional space, where ambiguity makes optimization impractical. The trade-off in this action pattern includes remarkable adaptability and operational inefficiencies. (shrink)

. In what follows, I review the modern theory of the origin of the universe as astronomers and physicists are coming to understand it during the last decades of the twentieth century. An unexpected discovery of this study is that the story of “cosmogenesis” cannot be completely told unless we understand the fundamental nature of matter, space, and time. In the context of modern cosmology space has become not only the bedrock of our physical existence, it may yield (...) a fuller understanding of the universe itself. (shrink)

There have been several previous studies on measuring the semantic similarity between words whose concepts are represented as points in a multi-dimensional vector space acquired from text data such as electronic dictionaries or text corpora. A central problem in these studies is how to select orthonormal basis vectors for the space which represents attributes of the words. We propose a method of building the space by combining two representative methods, one using singular value decomposition and the other (...) using the contents of a thesaurus. The proposed method was evaluated both for the purposes of similar word retrieval and for document retrieval. The evaluations showed that the proposed combination is more effective than either of the original methods alone for both of these tasks. (shrink)

The notion of belief appears frequently in cognitive science. Yet it has resisted definition of the sort that could clarify inquiry. How then might a cognitive science of belief proceed? Here we propose a form of pluralism about believing. According to this view, there are importantly different ways to "believe" an idea. These distinct psychological kinds occur within a multi-dimensional property space, with different property clusters within that space constituting distinct varieties of believing. We propose that discovering such (...) property clusters is empirically tractable, and that this approach can help sidestep merely verbal disputes about what constitutes “belief.”. (shrink)

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

Responsible research practices are critical to maintaining integrity in research and the provision of institutional trainings is an important means of promoting research integrity. However, studies show contrasting results on the efficacy of institutional training and that these approaches may not be fully effective in promoting research integrity among individuals and improving the overall climate in research integrity. Therefore, a more comprehensive multi-dimensional learning strategy seems to be needed. This includes continuous and tailored training at different institutional levels, the incorporation (...) of training sessions focusing on the development of the moral character of researchers, and the use of different mentoring practices. With this comprehensive approach, research institutions can foster a culture of integrity in research, improve the overall research integrity climate and promote responsible research practices by individuals. (shrink)

Is democracy necessarily bound to territorial spaces and boundaries, or can democratic processes and institutions dispense with territorial ties? To answer this question, which arises, for example, in debates about democracy beyond the state, this article reconstructs conceptions of territory influential in democratic theory, as well as in recent debates on transnational citizenship and territorial rights. It establishes the container-space, social-space, and place conceptions of territory, and negotiates a nuanced and multi-dimensional understanding of territorial spaces and boundaries and (...) their relations to democracy. Based on this conception, democracy does not necessarily depend on (a) territory. Neither, however, should this connection be dismissed lightly. Instead, proponents of both the preservation and the loosening of ties between democracy and territory need to answer two distinct, yet complementary questions concerning (1) the justification of territorial spaces and boundaries as social spaces, and (2) the functions they fulfil as container spaces. Exclusive place conceptions of territory, however, are not consistent with the proposed understanding of territory. In the final part, this article negotiates institutional perspectives for plural democratic spaces and boundaries by briefly reviewing theoretical sketches on democracy beyond the state, as well as developing constellations of nested political spaces within the European context. (shrink)

Research from psychology, neurobiology and behavioral economics indicates that a binary view of motivation, based on approach and avoidance, may be too reductive. Instead, a literature review suggests that at least seven distinct motives are likely to affect human decisions: “consumption/resource seeking,” “care,” “affiliation,” “achievement,” “status-power,” “threat approach” (or anger), and “threat avoidance” (or fear). To explore the conceptual distinctness and relatedness of these motives, we conducted a semantic categorization task. Here, participants were to assign provided words to one of (...) the motives. By applying principal component analysis to the categorization assignments we represent the semantic inter-relations of these motives on a two-dimensional space, a “semantic atlas.” This atlas suggests that, while care and affiliation are conceptually close, affiliation is closer to threat avoidance (or fear); opposite to these motives we find achievement, consumption and power, with the latter lying closer to threat approach (or anger). In a second study, we asked participants to rate how well the motive-specific words obtained in the first study described their currently experienced feelings. We find that semantically close motives are also more likely to be experienced together, that is, we replicate most of the semantic relations in the “subjective atlas.” We discuss our findings in comparison to other multi-dimensional models of motivation, which show clear similarities. In addition to these motivational atlases, we provide a database of motive-specific words, together with the valence and arousal scores. These can be used for future research on the influence of motives on decision making. (shrink)

In this article, I address the question of whether science can and should be seen as a common good. For this purpose, the first section focuses on the notion of knowledge and examines its main characteristics. I discuss and assess the core view of analytic epistemology, that knowledge is, basically, justified true belief. On the basis of this analysis, I then develop an alternative, multi-dimensional theory of the nature of knowledge. Section 2 reviews and evaluates several answers to the question (...) of what to understand by the notion of a common good. It discusses both economic and socio-political interpretations of this notion. In Section 3, I develop an alternative account of the common good of scientific knowledge. This knowledge constitutes a common good if it is both non-exhaustible and in the public interest. The two notions are equally important, but in this article, the focus is on the former. For reasons of space, a detailed discussion of the latter is impossible; it will be provided in a forthcoming book. My answer to the question posed in the title of this article builds on the critical discussion of extant views in Sections 1 and 2: some aspects of these views are included in this alternative account, while others are shown to be unhelpful or untenable. The final section discusses some practical implications of this account for the politics of science. The main conclusion is that scientific research should not be privatized through patenting its products. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, in all of these neighbouring fields, modal systems have been developed that we call multi-dimensional. (Our definition of multi ...

Current approaches to cyber-security are not working. Rather than producing more security, we seem to be facing less and less. The reason for this is a multi-dimensional and multi-faceted security dilemma that extends beyond the state and its interaction with other states. It will be shown how the focus on the state and “its” security crowds out consideration for the security of the individual citizen, with detrimental effects on the security of the whole system. The threat arising from cyberspace to (...) (national) security is presented as possible disruption to a specific way of life, one building on information technologies and critical functions of infrastructures, with relatively little consideration for humans directly. This non-focus on people makes it easier for state actors to militarize cyber-security and (re-)assert their power in cyberspace, thereby overriding the different security needs of human beings in that space. Paradoxically, the use of cyberspace as a tool for national security, both in the dimension of war fighting and the dimension of mass-surveillance, has detrimental effects on the level of cyber-security globally. A solution out of this dilemma is a cyber-security policy that is decidedly anti-vulnerability and at the same time based on strong considerations for privacy and data protection. Such a security would have to be informed by an ethics of the infosphere that is based on the dignity of information related to human beings. (shrink)

The time of vegetal life itself—denoted as plant-time in this article, following the work of Michael Marder—is essential to human-plant relations. Conceptualized as a multi-dimensional plexity, vegetal temporality embodies the endemic land-based seasons, rhythms, cycles, and timescales of flora in conjunction with human patterns. The contemporary poet Judith Wright invoked a time-space continuum throughout her writing as a means to convey the primordial character of Australian plants while resisting the imposition of a colonialist schema of time. Wright’s bold textualization (...) of vegetal temporality embodies her commitment to fostering botanical ethics and locally-grounded activism on behalf of Aboriginal people and the Australian environment. (shrink)

This article is aimed at introducing a French discourse analysis model, e.g. the ‘star model’, initiated by the LAA team led by Robert Vion in Aix-en-Provence, to English-speaking researchers. It will be argued that language activity is multi-dimensional and can be traced at various heterogeneous levels of speech productions belonging to macro as well as micro orders. Speakers achieve different varieties of positioning which result in negotiating an interactional space within a pre-given situation. The model is precisely designed to (...) offer a unified and comprehensive view of such heterogeneous phenomena in constant interconnection. In this study, we also intend to illustrate our approach through the analysis of two different corpora. Speakers’ strategies under extreme conditions will be analysed; the various sequences used were taken from a special corpus which we were asked to study as part of a national research programme. In order to illustrate interactional space shifts, we will also use the transcript of a meeting which took place between a patient and a medical investigator in a hospital in Marseilles. (shrink)

There is a prominent phenomenon in the religious life of Vietnam, which is the emergence of “new religions”. These phenomena have not only made the religious space of the nation more complex and multi-dimensional but also challenged stability and sustainable development within the religious communities in this key economic region. Having studied the new religious phenomenon in recent years, we have noted its progress and widespread characteristics within the ethnic communities. While it may appear that "new religion" is a (...) simple and gentle concept and practice, it is in fact, intrinsically related to and has significant implications on the social life of the community members. However, there is a growing concern, considerable suspicion and anxiety with regards to its impacts on individuals, families, social and cultural traditions, beliefs and religions; many have opined that it is radically changing the peaceful cohabitation of diverse religious traditions, revealing a potential for conflicts across groups. Based on the religious reality of the Southern region of Vietnam, the Center for Religion Studies has implemented a project regarding new religions in Ho Chi Minh City and the problems faced by the religious policy in Vietnam. This article is an overview of the results of this project. (shrink)

The mismatch between the demand for, and supply of, health products has led to the increasing involvement of courts worldwide in health promotion and marketing. This study critically examines the implementation of one country’s Milk Code within the framework of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes, and the efficacy of the judicial process in balancing corporate marketing and state regulatory objectives. Drawing upon the Philippine experience with its own Milk Code, it evaluates the capacities of courts to determine (...) policy costs and risks against the benefits of delineating and containing corporate marketing strategies for milk substitutes and supplements. The study finds that the methodological and information-based challenges faced by courts in resolving multi-dimensional health issues may not be overcome without serious questions concerning the legitimacy of the judicial process itself. Despite the deficiencies of litigation and adjudication, the study notes the catalytic potential of a judicial decision in opening up vital policy space for future renegotiations among rival parties and interests. Third-party intervention is explored relative to this catalytic function. (shrink)

This study starts from the premise that mandala is a design of the Cosmos and consciousness. mandala is a contracted and systematically designed cosmic space and represents high-level spirituality at the same time. The work of designing mandala is an experience with a sacred world as itself and constitutes a process of self-discipline. In other words, mandala is to ritualize the world of Buddhism beyond a design context and visualize religious experience through a specific object. Therefore, it serves as (...) a medium that gets both producers and audiences to experience the sacred world. In this way, mandala is present as an experiencing design and a behaving medium. This study aims to identify the archetype of empirical and synthetic design by analyzing mandala as an integrated icon for which the Cosmos and human beings or consciousness and matter meet each other. Spatial structuralization is considered most important in the icon of mandala. The space in mandala is the place where consciousness joins reality, which represents the state of enlightenment. Many multi-dimensional Buddhas coexist in the space, and they are arranged in harmony and in order. This visual structure allows mandala to play the role of interactive medium. In the iconic shapes of mandala symbolizing a sacred world, major elements include a circle, square, semicircle, triangle and the numbers of 8 and 4. The respective shapes are matched to white, yellow, red and black, and the five different senses are connected to one another. The five senses are symbolic of earth, water, fire, wind and void which constitute the universe, and again they remain connected to five different parts of the body of a disciplinant drawing mandala: liver, kidney, spleen, lungs and heart. Those organs are associated with five Buddhas and in turn connected through the boundless space of the universe. By analyzing such a composite structure of mandala, this study tries to appreciate its in-depth meaning as an integrated design. (shrink)

Narratives of seed ‘loss’ and ‘persistence’ remain at loggerheads. Crop genetic diversity is rapidly eroding worldwide, we are told, and numerous studies support this claim. Other data, however, suggests an alternative storyline: far from disappearing, seed diversity persists around the world, resisting the homogenizing forces of modern capitalism. Which of these accounts is closer to the truth? As it turns out, crop biodiversity is more easily invoked than measured, more easily wielded than understood. In this essay, I contend that the (...) impasse reveals an error in the asking. We must, instead, look to the ontological, epistemic, and narrative dimensions of agrobiodiversity—and to the science, politics, and cultures of each. How is diversity empirically defined and measured? Who creates and categorizes diversity? Who does not? How is such knowledge mobilized in the accounts and narratives of different interest groups? Where, when, and why does a narrative hold true? This multi-dimensional view of agrobiodiversity makes space for a greater understanding of how diversity is created, maintained, and renewed. It suggests policy and institutional support for systems that engender such renewal of diversity, both in and ex situ. (shrink)

This article develops an unconventional perspective on the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill in at least four areas. First, it is shown that both authors conceived of utility as irreducibly multi-dimensional, and that Bentham in particular was very much aware of the ambiguity that multi-dimensionality imposes upon optimal choice under the greatest happiness principle. Secondly, I argue that any attribution of intrinsic worth to any form of human behaviour violates the first principles of Bentham's and Mill's utilitarianism, and that this (...) renders both authors immune to the claim by G. E. Moore that they committed a ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Thirdly, in light of these contentions, I find no flaw in Mill's ‘proof of utility’. Fourthly, I use the notion of intrapersonal utility weights to provide an interpretation of Mill's qualitative hedonism that is entirely consistent with his value monism. (shrink)

In the early 20th century, science was supposed to be “value free”. In 1953 Richard Rudner claimed that “the scientist qua scientist makes value judgments”, and later philosophers discussed the relations between science and values. From the 60’s onward Michael Scriven and other authors came to the conclusion that non-moral values (intrinsic or epistemic values) are required to evaluate scientific works. This paper supports this general view. However, it stresses that there are several independent scientific values, corresponding to a multi-dimensional (...) value space, and for this reason it is commonly impossible to compare the scientific worth of two different scientific contributions. Scientific values can be used to guide and to evaluate scientific research. However, the result is not a linear succession of better and better theories, but a proliferation of different theories and hypotheses, each of them fulfilling only a few desiderata. RESUMEN: A principios del siglo XX se suponía que la ciencia era “libre de valores”. En 1953 Richard Rudner concedió que “el científico cómo científico hace juicios de valor”, y filósofos posteriores discutieron las relaciones entre la ciencia y los valores. De los años 60 hacia delante, Michael Scriven y otros autores llegaron a la conclusión que valores no-morales (valores científicos intrínsecos o epistémicos) son requeridos para evaluar trabajos científicos. El presente trabajo utiliza esta perspectiva general. Sin embargo, enfatiza que hay muchos valores científicos independientes, correspondiendo a un espacio multidimensional de valores, y por esta razón es comúnmente imposible comparar los valores científicos de dos contribuciones científicas diversas. Los valores científicos se pueden utilizar para dirigir y para evaluar la investigación científica. Sin embargo, el resultado no es una sucesión linear de teorías mejores y mejores, sino una proliferación de teorías y hipótesis diversas, y cada una de ellas satisfaz solamente algunos desiderata. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)