First, we should separate out the two distinct realms of discourse that are operative in this scandal: the formal legal one, from the informal public one. Each realm has different standards of judgment, and plays a different role. The formal, legal realm is organized to determine the legal guilt of innocence of the individuals accused, while it should be clear that the public realm—that diffuse and loose amalgam of both formal and informal communications—cannot determine individual legal guilt or innocence. First, (...) because it is not privy to all the facts (secrets can still be kept, even in these days of hyper-surveillance), and second, because the public realm of discourse is subject to the influence of various media which is in the business of selling stories. Almost everyone today understands that media reports of all sorts are edited, even when they are upholding the most scrupulous of journalistic standards. (shrink)

Gadamer insists that we can never abandon our own ‘horizon’ and transpose ourselves into or reconstruct an artist’s historical context, and re-experience a work’s original meaning. Our context-bound values and beliefs, or prejudgments, are a necessary condition for all understanding, but we can become aware of them in the attempt to understand works of art of the past, and achieve a fusion of horizons. But what of contemporary forgeries of artworks from the past, produced by someone sharing our own (...) horizon? Forgers tend to exaggerate the qualities or properties of a work that their generation particularly appreciates. Only when interpreters are able to recognize the forger’s prejudgments, which render his work different from that of the horizon he seeks to imitate, does the true meaning of the forger’s work become apparent, as – famously – in the case of Van Meegeren’s imitations of ‘Vermeers.’ Contemporary forgeries are a good test of whether we are able to recognize our prejudgments. (shrink)

The anthropological approach is the central focus of this study. Laboratories are looked upon with the innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands, and the societies found in these places are observed with the objective yet compassionate eye of the visitor from a quite other cultural milieu. There are many surprises that await us if we enter a laboratory in this frame of mind... This study is a realistic enterprise, an attempt to truly represent the social order of life (...) in laboratories and institutes of research, just as they are. By bringing the philosophical issues to the surface as matters not of prejudgement but as matters of concern, Karin Knorr-Cetina has developed the first really positive challenge to the philosophy of science since the days of paradigms and internal definitions of meanings. (shrink)

During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell (...) and Moore, were conceived as the bearers of the properties of truth and falsehood. Some thinkers however, such as Russell, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Husserl in the Logische Untersuchungen, argued that instead of, or in addition to, truth-bearers, one must assume the existence of certain entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. Various names were used for these entities, notably 'fact', 'Sachverhalt', and 'state of affairs'. (1) In order not to prejudge the suitability of these words we shall initially employ a more neutral terminology, calling any entities which are candidates for this role truth-makers. (shrink)

Autonomy has been hailed as the foremost principle of bioethics, and yet patients’ decisions and research subjects’ voluntary participation are being subjected to frequent restrictions. It has been argued that patient care is best served by a limited form of paternalism because the doctor is better qualified to take critical decisions than the patient, who is distracted by illness. The revival of paternalism is unwarranted on two grounds: firstly, because prejudging that the sick are not fully autonomous is a biased (...) and unsubstantial view; secondly, because the technical knowledge of healthcare professionals does not include the ethical qualifications and prerogative to decide for others.Clinical research settings are even more prone to erode subjects’ autonomy than clinical settings because of the tendency and temptation to resort to such practices as shading the truth when consent to participation is sought, or waiving consent altogether when research is done in emergency settings.Instead of supporting such dubious practices with unconvincing arguments, it would seem to be the task of bioethics to insist on reinforcing autonomy. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of Black African‐born nurses (BABN) with non‐native accents regarding their nursing career advancement in the United States. Data were collected using individual interviews. Fifteen nurses originally from three sub‐Saharan African countries were included in the study. The findings were reported under six themes: perceived low level of intelligence, not suitable to lead, making fun of/belittling, prejudging without evidence, downgrading, and accent modification. The finding indicated that participants believed that their race (...) and accent influenced their professional nursing opportunities. These results are relevant to BABNs, nurse educators, and healthcare organization leaders. BABNs are capable of participating in nursing leadership and education despite their non‐native accent. (shrink)

Hartry Field argues that conservative rather than true mathematical sentences facilitate deductions in nominalist (i.e., abstracta-free) science without prejudging its empirical outcomes. In this paper, I identify one branch of mathematics as nonconservative, for its indispensable role in enabling nominalist language about a fundamental scientific property, in a fictional scientific community. The fundamental property is electromagnetic reflectance, and the mathematics is Fourier analysis, which renders reflectance ascribable, and nominalist reflectance claims utterable, by this community. Using a recent characterization of conservativeness (...) by Kenneth Boyce, I argue that infinitudes can be rendered inherently mathematical and non-nominalizable in the fictional community, and that rendering infinitudes inherently mathematical for all real communities would yield a convincing counterexample to Fieldian conservativeness. (shrink)

The historical researches of Louis Couturat saved the logical work of Leibniz from the oblivion of neglect and forgetfulness. They revealed that Leibniz developed in succession several versions of a “logical calculus” (calculus ratiocinatororcalculus universalis). In consequence of Couturat's investigations it has become well known that Leibniz's development of these logical calculi adumbrated the notion of a logistic system; and for these foreshadowings of the logistic treatment of formal logic Leibniz is rightly regarded as the father of symbolic logic.It is (...) clear from what has been said that it is scarcely possible to overestimate the debt which the contemporary student of Leibniz's logic owes to Couturat. This gratitude must, however, be accompanied by the realization that Couturat's own theory of logic is gravely defective. Couturat was persuaded that the extensional point of view in logic is the only one which is correct, an opinion now quite antiquated, and shared by no one. This prejudice of Couturat's marred his exposition of Leibniz's logic. It led him to battle with windmills: he viewed the logic of Leibniz as rife with shortcomings stemming from an intensional approach.The task of this paper is a re-examination of Leibniz's logic. It will consider without prejudgment how Leibniz conceived of the major formal systems he developed aslogicalcalculi – that is, these systems will be studied with a view to the interpretation or interpretations which Leibniz himself intends for them. The aim is to undo some of the damage which Couturat's preconception has done to the just understanding of Leibniz's logic and to the proper evaluation of his contribution. (shrink)

Recent interpretations of Locke's primary/secondary quality distinction have tended to emphasize Locke's relationship to the corpuscularian science of his time, especially to that of Boyle. Although this trend may have corrected the unfortunate tendency to view Locke in isolation from his scientific contemporaries, it nevertheless has resulted in some over- simplifications and distortions of Locke's general enterprise. As everyone now agrees, Locke was attempting to provide a philosophical foundation for English corpuscularianism and one must therefore look not only at the (...) current scientific hypotheses but also at the nature of the philosophical foundation Locke was attempting to erect. In particular, Locke made an attempt, based on epistemological principles, to give a philosophical justification of atomistic corpuscularianism. Moreover, he was not content to give this justification post hoc—the epistemological foundation was prior to, and determined the framework for, the details of the correct scientific theory. Locke's epistemology made legitimate an atomistic theory, one making crucial use of the notion of solidity in the definition of the elementary particles, although it did not prejudge the details of this theory. (shrink)

This article arises indirectly out of the development of a particular approach, called ATT-Meta, to the understanding of some types of metaphorical utterance. However, the specifics of the approach are not the focus of the present article, which concentrates on some general issues that have informed, or arisen from, the development of the approach. The article connects those issues to the questions of metaphorical meaning and truth. -/- A large part of the exploration of metaphor in fields such as Cognitive (...) Linguistics and natural language Pragmatics takes metaphor to rest on complex mappings between a target subject matter and a source subject matter (see, e.g., Lakoff 1993, 2008). This is one main way in which some aspects of the source, generally including some structural aspects, can have parallels in the target. It is typical for much, and perhaps the whole, of the meaning of a metaphorical expression to be explained by means of these parallels. We will talk about “parallelism” rather than “isomorphism,” or even “analogy,” because “isomorphism” implies a strict one-to-one correspondence between items in the source scenario and items in the target scenario, and analogy theorists often hold that analogy rests on isomorphism. We wish not to prejudge the question of whether looser, messier forms of parallelism are sometimes needed. Also, we will talk about parallels rather than mappings, because our discussion will embrace the question of parallelism that may be discernible, albeit implicitly, in accounts of metaphor that are not presented as being based on mappings. Three main cases of such accounts are Relevance Theory (RT: e.g., Sperber & Wilson 2008, Wilson & Carston 2006), the categorization-based or "class-inclusion“ approach (Glucksberg 2008), and Ritchie’s (2006) CLST account (Context-Limited Simulation Theory). -/- One main issue we will address is that of substantial non-parallelism that can exist between source and target subject-matters in metaphor: more precisely, the issue that there may be source aspects that are exploited by the utterance and have a deep effect on metaphorical interpretation but that do not themselves have a natural parallel in the target subject-matter (although we will point out that artificial parallels can generally be created). This is part of a broader point that the content of metaphorical discourse should often be seen as being derived in a rather holistic way from several metaphorical bits of the discourse, which conspire to describe some source-domain scenario, rather than being derived by putting together metaphorical meanings of each metaphorical bit (even if each bit could in principle be assigned its own separate metaphorical meaning). As a result, we suggest that it is misguided to think of the propositions making up the content (or, if you like, "meaning“) about the target scenario that is being described is a matter of metaphorical meaning of specific grammatical units such as sentences, clauses or other constituents that a traditional semantic theory would assign propositional meaning to. Rather, grammatical units (that are to be taken metaphorically) have meanings in source-domain terms; content in target-domain terms is derived from the source-domain scenario depicted by those units and fleshed out through inference; and the target-domain content is only (in general) fuzzily relatable to particular grammatical units. This view is on a spectrum at whose extreme point we could place Davidson’s (1984) view that metaphors only have literal (i.e., source-domain) meanings, with other effects on the understander not being a matter of propositional content. However, on our view it is proper to take metaphorical discourse as having non-literal meaning, couched as a collection of propositions, among other things possibly; it is just that the propositions are not to be thought of (in general) as meaning of specific sentences, clauses or other grammatical units rather than of a possibly only fuzzily delineated piece of discourse. -/- A second main concern of the article is the question of how much, and what types of, inference are involved in the derivation of metaphorical meaning. While our own ATT-Meta approach accords with, amongst other accounts, Relevance Theory (RT) as to the centrality of inference in metaphor interpretation, we disagree with RT on its claim that metaphor interpretation is a matter of (a relatively high degree of) concept "broadening“ and (often) "narrowing“. We argue that almost all inference can in fact be theoretically re-described as concept broadening and/or narrowing, and what is left over should be included in the metaphor interpretation process anyway. Thus, the RT claim about broadening and narrowing really just says that inference, of unrestricted type, is involved in metaphor understanding, in accord with what ATT-Meta claims. (shrink)

This paper argues that if a person's beliefs are idealized as a set of sentences (theoretical, observational, and mixed) then the device of Ramsey sentences provides a treatment, of the mind-brain problem, that has at least four noteworthy characteristics. First, sentences asserting correlations between one's own brain state and one's own "private" experiences are, on such treatment, reconstrued as neither causal, coreferential, nor as meaning postulates, but as clauses in an overall hypothesis (Ramsey sentence) whose only nonlogical constants have "private" (...) meanings. Second, sentences asserting psycho-physical correlations in general, or in other individuals, remain theoretical and susceptible to scientific reduction, though not prejudged to be so. Third, communication between persons having mutually exclusive, "private," observational vocabularies can be made intelligible. Fourth, it becomes possible in principle (though not necessary) that the world could ultimately be given a total description in a scientific language, $L_{\varnothing}$ , without mental primitives. However, such a language would be susceptible to interpretation by a given individual using a metalanguage whose primitives (not among those of $L_{\varnothing}$ ) were privately observational to that individual. His procedure in accomplishing such an interpretation would be to construct a Tarskian truth definition in a metalanguage $ML_{\varnothing}$ and then to incorporate it, by Ramsifying its descriptive terms, in his own overall Ramsey sentence. The physical language, $L_{\varnothing}$ , while not containing a person's primitives, would, of course, be able to define their physical correlates, thus providing a certain sort of mutual mirroring, and a certain sort of relativity. (shrink)

The hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to the natural sciences has a special interest in the interpretive phases of these sciences and in the circumstances, cognitive and social, that lead to divergent as well as convergent interpretations. It tries to ascertain the role of the hermeneutic circle in research; and to this end it has developed, over the past three decades or so, a number of adaptations of hermeneutic and phenomenological concepts to processes of experimentation and theory-making. The purpose of the present essay (...) is to show how appropriate these concepts are to an important current research program (solar neutrinos) and thus to point out what difference they make to our understanding of science as a whole. This goal is pursued by means of comparison. The program of social constructivism in natural science has produced alternative but parallel concepts, embodied in an alternative and parallel vocabulary. The contrast between this vocabulary and that of hermeneutics and phenomenology reveals, so I argue, the advantages of the latter. But actually it does more: It reveals as well the pre-understanding or prejudgment of science embedded in each approach. (shrink)

Curren and Metzger develop a normative account of sustainability without prejudging the relationships between sustainability and global justice. This commentary propounds an alternative methodology...

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Resumo: Este texto discute a hipótese de que a crise das democracias contemporâneas é indissociável de dois fenômenos políticos distintos, porém correlatos, analisados a partir das teorizações de Michel Foucault sobre a biopolítica e o neoliberalismo: a) a crescente disseminação de atos e discursos de violência, de ódio e de preconceito contra populações vulneráveis, obedecendo à lógica biopolítica da proteção da vida de alguns ao custo da exposição à morte de vastas parcelas da população; b) a disseminação de políticas neoliberais (...) para a gestão da vida de populações vulneráveis. Considera-se que a articulação entre biopolítica e neoliberalismo produz o paradoxo de uma democracia sem demos, no sentido da desvalorização das lutas políticas coletivas por direitos iguais e por melhores condições de vida. Na conclusão, sugere-se que a reinvenção da democracia exige repensar o poder do demos, isto é, repolitizar o poder político de categorias sociais sujeitas a processos históricos de vulneração. Palavras-chave: Crise da democracia. Biopolítica. Neoliberalismo. Foucault. Butler. Democracy in crisis: biopolitics and neoliberal government of populations: This text discusses the hypothesis that the crisis of contemporary democracy relates to two distinct political phenomena, however correlated, analyzed thru Michel Foucault’s concepts about biopolitics and neoliberalism: a) the ascending dissemination of acts and discourses of hate, violence and prejudgment against vulnerable populations, according to the biopolitical logics of protecting the life of some at the expense of exposing the life of others to death; b) the dissemination of neoliberal policies to administrate the life of vulnerable populations. I argue that both phenomena seem to imply the paradox of a democracy without the demos, in the sense of the devaluation of collective political struggles for equal rights and for better life conditions. At the conclusion, it is suggested that the reinvention of democracy requires rethinking the power of the demos in the sense of re-politicizing the political power of social categories subjected to historical process that render them vulnerable. Keywords: Crisis of democracy. Biopolitics. Neoliberalism. Foucault. Butler. Démocratie en crise : biopolitique et gouvernement néolibéral de populations Résumé : On discute l’hypothèse que la crise de la démocratie contemporaine est associée à deux phénomènes politiques distinctes, mais corrélâtes, analysés par les concepts de Foucault sur la biopolitique et le néolibéralisme : a) la vague accrue d’actes et de mots de violence, haine et pré-jugements contre des populations vulnérables, selon la logique biopolitique de la protection de la vie de quelques-uns au prix du rejet à la morte de la vie des autres ; b) la dissémination des politiques néolibéraux vouées à la gestion de la vie des populations vulnérabilisées. L’articulation entre biopolitique et néolibéralisme semble impliquer le paradoxe d’une démocratie sans demos, au sens de la dévaluation des luttes politiques collectives pour des droits égaux et pour des meilleures conditions de vie. Finalement, on considère la réinvention de la démocratie par la ré-politisation du pouvoir du demos en tant que pouvoir des catégories sociales soumises à la vulnération. Mots-clés: Crise de la démocratie. Biopolitique. Néolibéralisme. Foucault. Butler. (shrink)

Understanding Aesthetics in it's etymological meaning as the "science of the perception" makes any study of the theory of the sensibility essential to understand a given aesthetics. Moreover, theories of sensibility and knowledge in Arabic and Islamic classical culture, have hardly been probed in it's aesthetic dimension. As a result of this, the spread of conceptualizations about Arabic and Islamic aesthetics has, in many cases, sunk in a sea of imprecisions and prejudgements. In the following pages, we present an approximation (...) of these topics through works of greats thinkers from Al-Andalus such as Ibn Hazm, Ibn Bayya, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rusd, Hazim al-Qartayanni, Ibn 'Arabi and Ibn Jaldun, in whose works we appreciate a clear, though diverse, intention of constituting a cognizant and percipient human subject, ethically and aesthetically defined, across psychologies and concepts that we will also discover in the construction of Aesthetics in the West. (shrink)

This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral and political criteria invoked in human rights documents possess cross-cultural force, many modern and postmodern developments erode confidence in moral appeals that go beyond a local consensus or apply outside a particular community. Often the point of departure for discussion is the Enlightenment paradigm of (...) a common morality, in which it is assumed that certain unchanging beliefs inhere in the structure of human reason. Whereas some thinkers continue to defend this paradigm, others modify it in diverse ways without abandoning entirely the attempt to address a universal audience, and still others jettison virtually all of its distinguishing features. Exhibiting a range of positions Western participants take in these debates, this volume seeks to advance the substance of the debates themselves without prejudging the outcome. Rival assessments of the Enlightenment paradigm are offered from various philosophical and theological points of view. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Robert Merrihew Adams, Annette C. Baier, Alan Donagan, Margaret A. Farley, Alan Gewirth, David Little, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

In this article, I suggest that an open mind wholly unburdened by preconceptions and prejudgments is a mistaken ideal. Not only is it unrealistic; it deprives us of context and background knowledge relevant to judging well. I begin with two cases that show how the ideal of the “prejudice-free” mind, though appealing, may end up thwarting good judgment: blind assessment and “blank-slate” jury selection. I then trace the prejudice-free ideal to the Enlightenment, exposing its roots in the subject-object worldview. (...) Drawing on Heidegger, I suggest that the subject-object worldview is misguided and that all judgment involves a prior understanding of the matter we judge. To have an open mind, paradoxically, is to have a stake in defending a prior understanding, to be possessed of an understanding of the good that one wishes to promote. I then draw out the implications of this view for how we might make sense of cultural differences,... (shrink)

The brief, practical texts in the Essentials of Qualitative Methods series introduce social science and psychology researchers to key approaches to capturing phenomena not easily measured quantitatively, offering exciting, nimble opportunities to gather in-depth qualitative data. In this book, Scott D. Churchill introduces readers to existential phenomenological research, an approach that seeks an in-depth, embodied understanding of subjective human existence that reflects a person's values, purposes, ideals, intentions, emotions, and relationships. This method helps researchers understand the lives and needs of (...) others by helping identify and set aside theoretical and ideological prejudgments. About the Essentials of Qualitative Methods book series: Even for experienced researchers, selecting and correctly applying the right method can be challenging. In this groundbreaking series, leading experts in qualitative methods provide clear, crisp, and comprehensive descriptions of their approach, including its methodological integrity, and its benefits and limitations. Each book includes numerous examples to enable readers to quickly and thoroughly grasp how to leverage these valuable methods. (shrink)

The question asked in this paper is: How can we investigate our phenomenal experience in ways that are accurate, in principle repeatable, and produce experiences that help clarify what we understand about the processes of sensing, perceiving, moving, and being in the world? This sounds like an impossible task, given that introspection has so often in scientific circles been considered to be unreliable, and that first-person accounts are often coloured by mistaken ideas about what and how we are experiencing. The (...) first-person experiments I suggest are different from experiments done in the psychology laboratory in that there is no narrowing down of the experiments to looking at a singular aspect of a question, and that they are to be carried out in most instances in a natural or specially structured environment without strict task controls or statistical experimental design. There is no intent to replace formal second- and third-person investigation, but to use a phenomenological approach to conjoin with hard research, and to suggest ways of awareness training that can enhance the skills of researchers. I take as a model an informal phenomenological approach for experimentation. I also suggest that it is possible through directing and broadening the attention process to turn consciousness towards what is non-conscious or unattended to in order to develop an improved sensory awareness and an ability to be open to experiencing without prejudging and without expectations. The idea is to go back to experience without first creating a theoretical stance from which to interpret what happens. I conclude with some other examples of this approach. (shrink)

Our starting point is a somewhat obscure incident which has lately attracted some attention. The year is 429 B.C., and the place is Athens in the third year of the Peloponnesian war. The plague, which had broken out only a year before, was still claiming its victims. Yet military operations were in full swing, and the general Phormio operating in the Corinthian gulf against a Peloponnesian fleet was able to score an impressive victory. The Lacedaemonians were deeply dissatisfied. This was (...) the first sea-fight they had been engaged in, and they found it hard to believe that their fleet was so much inferior to that of the Athenians. They dispatched three advisers to Knemos, the admiral in charge, instructing them to make better preparations for another sea-fight. Additional ships were solicited from the allies, and those already at hand were prepared for battle. It is at this point that the incident in question occurred. Not to prejudge the issue, I quote the text in full leaving the controversial phrases untranslated: 4. And Phormio on his part sent messengers to Athens to give information of the enemy's preparations and to tell about the battle which they had won, urging them also to send to him speedily as many ships as possible, since there was always a prospect that a battle might be fought any day. 5. So they sent him twenty ships, but gave τ δ κυμξοντι special orders to sail first to Crete. Nικας γρ Kρς Γορτνιος πρξενος ν persuaded them to sail against Cydonia, a hostile town, promising to bring it over to the Athenians; but he was really asking them to intervene to gratify the people of Polichne, who are neighbours of the Cydonians. 6. So μν λαβν τς νας. went to Crete, and helped the Polichnitans to ravage the lands of the Cydonians, and by reason of winds and stress of weather wasted not a little time. (shrink)

I introduce the reader to the character and complexity of lying, in terms of how the lie should be defined as a particular type of intentionally deceptive utterance, whether or not the deceiver succeeded in that aim, and examine how we might usefully avoid prejudging the justifiability of the lying utterance when compared to alternative forms of intentional deception and the overall outcome sought.

I present a reconstruction of the logical system of the Tractatus, which differs from classical logic in two ways. It includes an account of Wittgenstein’s “form-series” device, which suffices to express some effectively generated countably infinite disjunctions. And its attendant notion of structure is relativized to the fixed underlying universe of what is named. -/- There follow three results. First, the class of concepts definable in the system is closed under finitary induction. Second, if the universe of objects is countably (...) infinite, then the property of being a tautology is \Pi^1_1-complete. But third, it is only granted the assumption of countability that the class of tautologies is \Sigma_1-definable in set theory. -/- Wittgenstein famously urges that logical relationships must show themselves in the structure of signs. He also urges that the size of the universe cannot be prejudged. The results of this paper indicate that there is no single way in which logical relationships could be held to make themselves manifest in signs, which does not prejudge the number of objects. (shrink)

This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral and political criteria invoked in human rights documents possess cross-cultural force, many modern and postmodern developments erode confidence in moral appeals that go beyond a local consensus or apply outside a particular community. Often the point of departure for discussion is the Enlightenment paradigm of (...) a common morality, in which it is assumed that certain unchanging beliefs inhere in the structure of human reason. Whereas some thinkers continue to defend this paradigm, others modify it in diverse ways without abandoning entirely the attempt to address a universal audience, and still others jettison virtually all of its distinguishing features. Exhibiting a range of positions Western participants take in these debates, this volume seeks to advance the substance of the debates themselves without prejudging the outcome. Rival assessments of the Enlightenment paradigm are offered from various philosophical and theological points of view. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Robert Merrihew Adams, Annette C. Baier, Alan Donagan, Margaret A. Farley, Alan Gewirth, David Little, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

Debates about the metaphysical compatibility between miracles and natural laws often appear to prejudge the issue by either adopting or rejecting a strong physicalist thesis (the idea that the physical is all that exists). The operative component of physicalism is a causal closure principle: that every caused event is a physically caused event. If physicalism and this strong causal closure principle are accepted, then supernatural interventions are rules out ’tout court’, while rejecting physicalism gives miracles metaphysical carte blanche. This paper (...) argues for a more moderate version of physicalism that respects important physicalist intuitions about causal closure while allowing for miracles’ logical possibility. A recent proposal for a specific mechanism for the production of miracles (Larmer 1996d) is criticized and rejected. In its place, two separate mechanisms (suitable for deterministic and indeterministic worlds, respectively) are proposed that do conform to a more moderate. (shrink)

This paper addresses four different, albeit related, issues concerning Hilary Putnam's fact/value entanglement theory. It is organized around a series of questions. First, what set of problems does the theory attempt to resolve? The revision of the empiricists and the positivist traditions will be the main concern of this first section. Secondly, how does the notion of "fact/value entanglement" solves these problems? I argue that while Putnam has persuasively defended the possibility of an entanglement between descriptive functions and evaluative functions (...) at the level of language use, he nevertheless provides us with only indirect indications about the existence and properties of the bearers of this kind of entanglement; namely the assumed existence of thick ethical concepts and their necessity for some central human practices. These indirect signs are not sufficient to buttress Putnam's entanglement thesis between facts and values. Thirdly, what are the most appropriate candidates to play the role of bearers of the description/evaluation entanglement? I challenge the claim that the ontological notion of entanglement between facts and values, itself obscure, is indispensable. Instead, I argue that we can substitute the idea of fact/value entanglement for the simpler, and less problematic, notion of human action. Finally, does Putnam commit a petitio pincipii when he attempts to lay down the criteria by which to judge if a thick ethical concept is being appropriately used in a given situation? I argue that Putnam faces what I shall call "Nietzsche's problem" - the problem of not prejudging, in giving the relevant examples for the discussion, how the situation should be morally valued. (shrink)

Of all the objections to construing morality(n) in terms of rules, those which turn on the nature of moral reasoning, judgement and perception are perhaps the most directly pertinent to education, since they raise the question of whether people can be taught to think morally. The terms ‘reasoning, judgement and perception’ cover a wide field (deliberately); below I shall sometimes use the term ‘moral thought’ as a general term which does not prejudge questions such as how explicit the thinking has (...) to be, or whether there has to be some thinking which precedes action. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There is a popular way of appealing to consistency of judgment or principle whose result is to rule out relevant information. To avoid the danger of judging similar cases differently, relevantly different cases are treated alike. So the information distinguishing them is lost. I try to formulate, defend and apply a requirement upon determining whether situations are similar with respect to a principle. Adherence to the requirement is a way to prevent the loss of information through illicit appeals to (...) consistency. Part II examines a difficulty for the requirement proposed. The difficulty concerns determinateness: given the requirement's broad scope, it cannot yield judgments on specific cases without prejudging substantive issues. Without reaching any solution to the difficulty, I point out that parallel difficulties arise for similar requirements in diverse areas, and that the problem can be mitigated to varying degrees in actual applications of these requirements. (shrink)

Editorial Introduction to ‘Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives’. The four principal papers presented here, with interdisciplinary commentary discussion and their authors’ responses, represent contemporary approaches to an evolutionary understanding of morality -- of the origins from which, and the paths by which, aspects or components of human morality evolved and converged. Their authors come out of no single discipline or school, but represent rather a convergence of largely independent work in primate ethology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and dynamic systems modelling (...) on related problems, conjectures and tentative conclusions. In inviting contributions I deliberately made no attempt to define morality more sharply than common language and understanding have left it, including our ordinary responses to right and wrong, but not all of the very diverse thinking about this and other practical concerns -- and about what we should make of all these -- that ethics encompasses. This was not because of any lack of past definitions of morality, but because the history of controversy over these makes it advisable not to prejudge the question pending our inquiry's results. From these we may see some outlines of plausible answers begin to emerge, only a brief sketch of some of which I can attempt here, sampling the hypotheses, scientific support, critical discussion of this, and refinement of positions in authors’ responses. (shrink)

Eric Voegelin's new study of Greek civilization, part of his continuing study of Order and History, contains elements of both such approaches to antiquity. In briefest compass, it is Voegelin's contention that order in history depends upon the recognition of the transcendental source of order; disorder is engendered by the "immanentization" of this source. Nevertheless, the transcendental source of order, the Christian God, is experienced within history, and civilizations are evaluated in terms of their anticipation of, approach to, or withdrawal (...) from this God. In terms of Christ's revelation, Greek thought is prejudged as a defective preliminary vision of historical and metaphysical truth. Just as Christ completes the Greek vision in "existential" terms, so Thomas Aquinas remedies the faults of Greek theory. In the process of being rejected or completed, classical thought takes on a remarkably Christian appearance. Despite his conservative or transcendental intentions, Voegelin's version of Christianity places great emphasis upon history as "open" to the future, and so the christianization of the Greeks produces anachronisms of the most extreme liberalism. At the same time, however, the Greek failure to transcend either the polis as a form of temporal order or an immanent conception of Being is severely criticized. (shrink)

Various explanations for the success of science have become central to both sides of the philosophical debate over scientific realism. In this paper I argue that the recent attempt by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, in Leviathan and the Air-Pump, to provide a sociological explanation for the success of experimental science fails to make any significant contribution to this debate because of (1) the historical prejudgments that they employ and (2) their oversimplification of present-day philosophy of science.

After the publication of Wahrheit und Methode in 1960, Hans-Georg Gadamer, a celebrated student of Martin Heidegger, received rapidly a worldwide response for his intellectual genius by fusing different philosophical horizons into a coherent and rational perspective which he calls ‘philosophical hermeneutics.’ In his attempt to construct philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer criticizes historicism, romantic hermeneutics and modern subjectivism since they disregard ontological structure of historical understanding. By claiming that prejudgment (or fore-understanding) is the basis for a genuine understanding, he contends that (...) we can overcome false prejudgment only by having recourse to the subject matter of the texts and by understanding texts on the model of dialogue which happens between the partners questioning themselves on the basis of a subject (sache). For him, understanding oneself and others happens as an event of dialogue simply because understanding takes place within the world of language. Language gets concretized and temporalized by the give and take of words. In other words, language is not a mere system of signs, but rather is uncoveredness of beings and the way within which human Dasein realizes himself. Since historical tradition which supports every event of understanding discloses itself only within language and language is a matter of sharing and participating, understanding is historical and temporal. Here the words “historicity” and “temporality” do not refer merely to “being in the history and time.” This is to approach the event of understanding from chronological and universal notion of time. Historicity and temporality are basically the distinctiveness of disclosedness of beings. Philosophical thoughts, scientific theses, trends which effect the course of history constitute the historicity of understanding by creating a sort of discontinuity in the continuity of history. Hence historicity is the basis for the formation of fore understanding and prejudgment. Philosophical hermeneutics tries to show how the continuity of history and traditions occurs through discontinuity (historicity) of understanding. (shrink)

By using case studies from the history of science as evidence for its claims, the philosophy of science can develop a more productive relation to its subject matter, the history of science. As might be expected, many problems involving the relation between theory and evidence in science reappear here as methodological problems about the relation between the philosophy of science and the history of science. For example, the most important of these difficulties involves the "contamination" of historical evidence by philosophical (...) theories. The difficulty may be resolved as follows: the history of science is "theory-laden", but not necessarily with the solutions to the problems it poses for philosophers. As a result, case studies can be used to test our explanatory theories about science as long as those case studies have not yet been reconstructed by the theory they are meant to test. Furthermore, once an explanatory theory has been " well -supported", we can, using that theory, go on to reconstruct case studies. Such a theory would thereby take on the force of a normative claim about science, bypassing what has been viewed as a fundamental disjunction between the descriptive and normative function of theory. From this point of view, insistence on a single criterion of demarcation as a "ground" for philosophical claims is misguided, since it prejudges a still -open question--is science homogeneous?--that can only be answered by further investigation of science. (shrink)

This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates human rights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Human rights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. Words have been thought to (...) copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in human rights laws, I begin by outlining how universal human rights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of human rights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of human rights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether human rights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law. (shrink)

This paper analyzes some issues that emerge in attempts to distinguish and relate "moral" and "nonmora1' action-guides. It examines one material criterion (otherregardingness) and three formal criteria (universalizability, prescriptivity, and overridingness) and considers whether they constitute necessary and/or sufficient conditions of "morality." It treats these criteria in relation to ideals and prudential, political, and religious considerations. Furthermore, it contends that the classification of action-guides as moral or nonmoral should not prejudge their respective weights or replace substantive moral debate. The formal (...) and material criteria may determine what counts as morality, not how much morality counts. (shrink)

A notation for the language of physics is given, and a system of axioms constructed. It is argued that from the standpoint of a 'realistic' ontology our method is preferable to Carnap's 'coordinate languages.' The primitive ideas are the part-whole relation μ and the set H of coordinate systems. Only such statements are intended in the axioms as are non-controversial; i.e. no open cosmological questions are prejudged.

In order to revise interpretive prejudgments, it is important to first recognize them for what they are. Problematically, the habitual overreliance on deficient prejudgments can make such recognition difficult. An impasse appears: How can one intervene on deficient interpretive resources if those very same resources conceal their deficiencies? I analyze James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” in which the protagonist Gabriel is highly resistant to internalizing experiences that might otherwise prompt him to revise his interpretive projections. I argue (...) that Gabriel only becomes aware of his interpretive shortcomings after an experience of profound hesitation that allows him to affectively sense the limitations of his prejudice. Drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kristie Dotson, and Alia Al-Saji, I argue that Gabriel’s experience of hesitation temporarily denaturalizes his deeply entrenched sexism, circumventing the hermeneutical impasse described above. Read in this way, “The Dead” illustrates the power of affective experiences to unsettle highly resilient ways of seeing the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ProvocationsHerbert Fingarette (bio)Our Other LifeWe live, each of us, two interconnected lives. One we respect and take seriously. The other we dismiss as fantastical, accidental, and wholly unreal. I refer here, of course, to our waking life and our dream life.My concern with the dream life is not the one that has occasional popularity—the dream as the embodiment of rather arcane symbols which decipher into messages about our deep (...) unconscious life. Freud and others who have interpreted dreams in this way may have a point. But in any case it is not the point I want to make here.What is a dream, after all? It is an experience, an experience we live through. Often it has an intensity that surpasses the intensity with which we live our waking experience. Often the experience embodies flights of fantasy and imagination that are both amazing and wholly untypical of our experience in waking life.Whence come these startling, fantastic situations that we live when asleep? There is only one possible answer, the obvious one. They come from us. The dreamer is the creator. If there is amazing novelty, it is the dreamer whose imagination has created this.The dream-life is an often powerful, evocative, imaginative world which we create and in which we live a substantial part of our life. Why do we dismiss it?One obvious reason, perhaps the sole and only necessary reason, is that what happens in the dream is disconnected with the structure and content of our waking life. We view it as "unreal," and refer to waking life as "real" life.Yet a moment's reconsideration reveals that both of these lives are "real," they really happen, we really experience them. The difference lies not in their reality but in the seeming incompatibility of the two. What happens in the dream is not consistently continued when we wake. Moreover the way things happen in a dream is often strikingly different from the way they happen when we're awake. In my dream I am in one place, and then instantaneously in a very distant place. The person I dream is my mother but also my grown daughter, and yet at the next moment my daughter at a childhood age. [End Page 861]I live exciting, fearful, and strange situations in which I am being attacked. Such things have never happened in my waking life. I dream that I'm a professor who realizes he is grossly late for his class, and can't remember what the assignment was or what I am to lecture on. In my waking life I am also a professor, but I've rarely been late for class, and never have forgotten the assignment or the lecture material.Yes, there is at times an obvious connection—my role as professor, the identity of someone as my mother or daughter. But what happens, and the way it happens in one life are dramatically unlike and disconnected with the other life.Why should I dismiss my dream life? It constitutes a goodly portion of my total life. I live it. I feel it, I react emotionally. It reveals an extraordinarily free and intense imagination that I largely fail to use when awake. What if the question were put to one, but without context or prejudgments: Which life would you find more interesting, challenging, exciting—day life or dream life? Try to think about that question in its own terms, without bias.Am I proposing something contrary to human nature? Not at all. We know there are cultures ("primitive?") in which dream life is viewed as an important, meaningful dimension of one's existence. We in the contemporary Western world are the exceptions. We dismiss this other life of ours. As a result, we fail to fully appreciate it in its own right.Indeed, as I've said, there are often connections. One needs no arcane theory of unconscious symbols to recognize this in my professorial dream. My embarrassing dream life as an unprepared professor is obviously related to my quasi-obsessive concern when awake to be prompt and thoroughly prepared. Clearly, in this regard, my two lives form a... (shrink)

Biological scientists are increasingly encountering work-related ethical problems. For most, their training leaves them quite unprepared. Rather than merely providing additional bolt-on courses in ethics, a way of introducing critical thinking skills seamlessly into the curriculum is proposed. A method is described whereby students become engaged in self-generated discussion about the scientifically recognized, but philosophically complex, terms ‘disease’ and ‘health.’ Addressing these words, students are confrontedwith the need to develop critical thinking skills without realizing that they are entering into overt (...) philosophical argument—the like of which many often prejudge to be abstract and worthless. (shrink)

Just as some types of philosophical analysis are more useful than others to historians or political scientists, so, I find, are some sorts of historical research more useful to philosophers than are other sorts. Sommerville makes history useful to non-historians by clarifying the large-scale historical background against which his investigative questions are posed, and then separating out crucial figures, ideas, and events from arcana of interest primarily to specialist historians. His interpretations are relatively neutral, striking a welcome balance between mere (...) reporting of events or textual ideas on the one hand, and on the other, accounts so theoretically laden that they prejudge or foreclose promising interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

Self-righteousness and censoriousness are strong emotions. They exist in the claims of ‘orthodoxy’ as much as in the protests of ‘heterodoxy’. They lie behind claims of tolerance as often as behind displays of intolerance. These emotions should be disentangled in the motives of the men who make history, of those who write history, and of those who read history. The very designation ‘heterodox’ is both etymologically and conceptually structured in antithesis to ‘orthodox’. It is a word not only of doctrinal (...) description, but also of inherent condemnation. The structure and the intention of words such as Shī‘a , comprising the whole sweep from bid‘a to ghulūww , direct the attention back to an opposite concept which originates, defines and prejudges these words. One corollary of this is that the movements and doctrines defined as ‘heterodox’ are fundamentally related to the ‘orthodox’ and cannot be understood in isolation. Another is that this relationship, by its very definition in terms of vindication and repudiation, is one of tension. (shrink)

1. ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office, but to serve and obey them.’ 2.3.3) Unfortunately, Hume uses ‘reason’ to mean ‘discovery of truth or falsehood‘ as well as discovery of logical relations. So suppose we avoid, as Hume I think does not, prejudging the question of how many ingredients are requisite for action, by separating these two claims out: A. Reason is and ought only to be the (...) slave of the passions. B. Reason ) is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. (shrink)

Christology seems to fall fairly clearly into two divisions. The first is concerned with the truth of the two propositions: ‘Christ is God’ and ‘Christ is a man’. The second is concerned with the mutual compatibility of these propositions. The first part of Christology tends to confine itself to what is sometimes called ‘positive theology’: that is to say, it is largely given over to examining the Jons revelationis —let us not prejudge currently burning issues by asking what this is—to (...) see what evidence can be found for the truth of these propositions. Clearly, the methods used will be above all those of New Testament exegesis. The second part of Christology will necessarily consist entirely of that speculative theology which is contrasted with positive theology. Even if the earliest speculation on this topic is to be found in the New Testament itself and thus becomes fair game for the exegetes, any attempt to relate the primary truths, ‘Christ is God’ and ‘Christ is a man’, to eachother is a work of reflection, and in the terminology I am using speculative. (shrink)

Richard Wolin, in his article 'Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Untruth and Method' ( New Republic , 15 May 2000, pp. 36-45), wrongly accuses Gadamer of being 'in complicity' with the Nazis. The present article in reply was rejected by the New Republic , but is printed here to show that Wolin in his article is misinformed and unfair. First, Wolin makes elementary factual errors, such as stating that Gadamer was born in Breslau instead of Marburg. He relies (...) on a highly questionable source, Teresa Orozco, as 'definitive'. He argues often by misconstruing the evidence and guilt by association. For instance, he associates Gadamer with Werner Jaeger, with whom he disagreed and had little contact. Finally,he misinterprets basic terms in Gadamer's hermeneutics, Vorurteil and authority, attributing to them the popular sense of these terms instead of their place in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Vorurteil , popularly translated as 'prejudice', but better rendered as 'prejudgment', refers to the prior knowledge that one needs in order to understand a situation or a text. In some cases, this is part of the inherited tradition. Authority refers to the respect one pays to those one recognizes as having more knowledge than oneself: one's doctor, or parent, or teacher, a judge, or certain texts. It is not an abject surrender to all authority but the necessary respect for authority in human relationships and in society in general. By misconstruing these terms, Wolin attempts to discredit Gadamer's general philosophy,not just to demonstrate a connection to the Nazis. At the end, his argument turns into a misinformed general political attack on Gadamer as an enemy of Enlightenment values. (shrink)

This article is far less a position paper or a descriptive analysis than an attempt to illuminate the lines that connect commonly recognized realities of human life: unfamiliar others in the form of strangers, interpersonal feelings in the form of trust, and organized belief systems in the form of religion. Its epistemological and even ontological conclusion may be sketched as follows: where belief overtakes wonder, religion fails in its mission to enhance life. When fear overtakes wonder, individuals fail in the (...) promise of their aliveness. In particular, when belief overtakes wonder, religion fails in the sense of constraining or even shutting the individual off from investigation and exploration of the unknown or unfamiliar, or from what is not sanctioned as proper. When fear overtakes simple curiosity and the desire to know, the individual fails in the sense of simply reacting, prejudging a situation or a person as threatening or dangerous in advance of actual experience. When belief and fear together take over, human experience is shackled and crippled. It remains ideologically tethered and affectively maimed. The effect of this tethering and maiming has moral consequences having to do with a recognition or non-recognition of the foundational common humanness of humans. (shrink)

1. ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office, but to serve and obey them.’ 2.3.3) Unfortunately, Hume uses ‘reason’ to mean ‘discovery of truth or falsehood‘ as well as discovery of logical relations. So suppose we avoid, as Hume I think does not, prejudging the question of how many ingredients are requisite for action, by separating these two claims out:A. Reason is and ought only to be the slave (...) of the passions.B. Reason ) is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. (shrink)

Interpretation becomes important when direct understanding is either lacking or inadequate. Observational understanding is geared to the world conceived on the model of nature outside of us and is directed by the goals of the natural sciences. Reflective understanding by contrast conceives the world as a sphere in which we participate and is more in line with how the human sciences, which include all the humanities and some of the more critically oriented social sciences, approach their subject matter. This chapter (...) aligns observational understanding with the intellectual faculty of Verstand and reflective understanding with the power of Verstehen. To attain critical hermeneutics, we must be able to account for both kinds of understanding by considering them as part of a more full‐fledged theory of judgment. We can initiate this by developing what Kant has to say about a range of judgments and prejudgments whereby we orient ourselves to the world. (shrink)

Some of the most important disagreements among value theorists concern what things, if any, are intrinsically valuable, and what role intrinsically valuable things have in determining the value of other things. To understand these disagreements a clear account must be provided of the notion of intrinsic value which is their focus. The account should not prejudge these disagreements. For reasons to be considered I do not think that an adequate account has been provided of a notion of intrinsic value that (...) can be taken to be the focus of these disagreements. I attempt to provide such an account in this paper. In order to do this I outline what I think is a reasonable task for a value theory, the task of “reconstructing value.” In explaining this task I take as a model the task of reconstructing knowledge. (shrink)