Cette étude tente de répondre à la question de la possibilité ou plutôt du caractère intelligible de l'attribution à Dieu de la prescience de nos actes libres. Il s'agir d'un problème bien connu des historiens de la pensée, d'Aristote à Leibniz. La question "Dieu a-t-il la science des futurs actes futurs libres (plus généralement des futurs contingents)" doit être précédée par la question "la notion de Dieu comme d'un être qui a la science des actes futurs libres est-elle intelligible?" (...) L'auteur commence par étudier les raisons et enjeux d'attribuer ou de refuser à Dieu la prescience. Puis il s'attache à la conception de la liberté qui semble incompatible avec la prescience, avant de préciser l'idée d'incompatibilité de la prescience et de la liberté puis d'étudier les diverses tentatives proposées pour éviter une telle incompatibilité. (shrink)

As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be sick. (...) This essay traces the intertwining of psychoanalytic and sociological methods that allowed Fromm to create such new ideas. At the same time, it highlights how Fromm’s sociology was hampered by an economistic Marxist approach to the institutions and culture of democratic capitalist societies. Such theoretical restriction prevented Fromm from conceptualizing how institutions like democracy, science, and psychotherapy can provide resources for widespread emotional recuperation and civil repair. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

Death's inevitability is not in question, but its mystery is one that is equally unavoidable and the questions we are likely to have about what then unanswerable. Traditionally we have tended to be concerned with what – if anything – might happen to us personally after we pass away, but that is not our question here. Rather we wish to contemplate what a knowledge of what will happen to the others in our lives may do to us while we are (...) yet living. If we could know before we die the events that will befall our loved ones and/or our communities how might we react? Would that knowing be a comfort or a curse? Moreover, what might our contemplation on this query teach us about death more generally? Such is our concern in the discussion below.Export citation. (shrink)

Dans des travaux récents, l’aspect logique du thème de la prescience et de la causalité divines chez Boèce a été largement exploité, surtout dans les études vigoureuses de François Beets et John Marenbon. Cependant, si on considère l’ensemble des textes boéciens sans se borner à en privilégier quelques extraits, il apparaît que certains éléments de cette thématique peuvent encore être soulignés, principalement dans le sens du caractère négatif du discours sur la connaissance, la prescience et la causalité divines. (...) Cela semble permettre, par conséquent, de continuer le débat au sujet de ce qu’on pourrait nommer l’épistémologie philosophico-théologique de Boèce. (shrink)

Si Dieu prévoit toute chose, rien n’arrive sauf par nécessité car il y a incompatibilité entre la certitude de la connaissance et la contingence. Une des réponses classiques est celle que la philosophie analytique nomme « la solution boécienne » ou « de Thomas d’Aquin » et qui repose sur l’idée que Dieu est atemporellement éternel.Dans ce livre, John Marenbon démontre que les théories de ces deux auteurs ne correspondent pas à cette solution dans le sens où, selon eux, la (...) connaissance est relative aux sujets connaissants. Deux chapitres sont consacrés aux solutions du problème de la prescience avec, pour guides, Pierre Abélard, Guillaume de Conches, Pierre Lombard, Guillaume d’Auxerre, et d’autres. Dans le chapitre final, l’auteur pose la question de savoir jusqu’à quel point les techniques de l’analyse pratiquée par la philosophie anglo-saxonne servent à découvrir ce que les philosophes du Moyen Âge ont véritablement pensé. (shrink)

The deceptive strangeness of prescience in Dune is typical of Herbert's ideas. The ancient Babylonians were able to systematically predict astronomical events, but contemporary astrophysicists can forecast distant events beyond the Babylonians’ wildest dreams. Herbert describes the prescience of characters like Paul as a hyperawareness of possibilities and probabilities given certain choices, rather than being able to examine a fixed future. Common sense suggests that prescience should help us live together better. The Prisoner's Dilemma can be interpreted (...) in different ways, but the basic logic is always the same. The Prisoner's Dilemma is an imaginary interaction between “prisoners,” but it actually might make more sense with prescient characters from the Duniverse. Stuart Hampshire argued that self‐knowledge tends to have the opposite effect – that it makes us freer. Prescience is a vastly expanded understanding of possible and probable consequences given information and choices, not the observation of a fixed future. (shrink)

En vertu de quelle prescience la querelle la plus importante du XXe siècle a-t-elle annoncé la plus grande question du XXIe ? Lors de la rupture entre Camus et Sartre, le point sur lequel ils étaient le plus divisés était la question de la violence politique et spécifiquement celle du communisme. Et au fur et à mesure qu’ils continuaient à s’attaquer mutuellement, de façon codée,..

En vertu de quelle prescience la querelle la plus importante du XXe siècle a-t-elle annoncé la plus grande question du XXIe? Lors de la rupture entre Camus et Sartre, le point sur lequel ils étaient le plus divisés était la question de la violence politique et spécifiquement celle du communisme. Et au fur et à mesure qu’ils continuaient à s’attaquer mutuellement, de façon codée,...

This essay assesses the prescience of Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by examining its conclusions in light of the Global War on Terror. Following an initial section in which I provide a brief overview of Benjamin’s essay and revisit its conclusion, I proceed to analyze the various ways that Bush administration officials claimed that they could remake the world in America’s image. The key question at stake in this paper is whether Benjamin’s analyses still (...) prove useful for understanding the relationship between art and politics at this moment in history. This paper begins to extend Benjamin’s analysis of art as a mass medium to contemporary society by investigating various ways that the Global War on Terror was justified to the American people during the Bush administration. Specifically, I am interested in the idea that art remakes the world in opposition to reality, and the relationship between this idea and age-old aspirations to empire. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, the doctrine of informed consent has become a focal point in discussions of medical ethics. The literature of informed consent explores the evolution of the principle of autonomy, purportedly emerging from the mists of 19th Century medical practice, and finding its earliest articulation in legal cases where wronged citizens asserted their rights against medical authority. A commonplace, if not obligatory, feature of that literature is a reference to the case of Mary Schloendorff and the opinion (...) written by Judge Benjamin Cardozo by which the case is remembered. Commentators today applaud the prescience of Cardozo for an early articulation of what eventually would become bioethical orthodoxy concerning informed consent and its place as a bulwark of patient autonomy. They inevitably quote Cardozo's famous statement, “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”. (shrink)

Early twelfth-century logicians invoked past-tensed statements with future-oriented contents to undermine the assumption that every proposition ‘about the past’ is determinate. In the second half of the century, the notion of future-dependence was used to restrict the scope of necessity per accidens. At some point, this idea began to be applied in theology to solve puzzles surrounding predestination, prescience, prophecy, and faith. In the mid-1160s, Magister Udo quotes some thinkers who insisted that the principle of the necessity of the (...) past should exclude dicta that ‘relate to the future’, such as that he has been predestined. Peter of Poitiers adopted this ‘Ockhamist’ strategy around 1170. We find similar accounts in Simon of Tournai and Alan of Lille, who invoked it in other contexts as well. By the time of Praepositinus of Cremona, Hubert of Pirovano, and Stephen Langton, the restricted principle became something of a common view at Paris. (shrink)

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent (...) grasp of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)

In the months after Donald Trump's election, Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism crashed onto the Amazon bestseller lists. "Never has our future been more unpredictable," she had written in the preface to the first edition in 1951, "never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries." With an uncannily accurate (...) prescience, Arendt's dark history of her times seemed to be describing the insanity of our own. Arendt would've recognized the extremes of the twenty-first century from her own: the disenchantment with politics; the rise of conspiracy theories; self-censorship; powerlessness; tyranny and occupation, the climate catastrophe, the banality of evil. She had lived through it already. Born in the first decade of the last century, just before it lurched into war, she escaped Fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one its most influential-and controversial-public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Hannah Arendt wrote, and thought, in order to engage directly with the political chaos of her time. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. Her approach was to change the world by examining it unflinchingly, and not simply to criticise and protest. It is this defiance that attracts so many to her work today. (shrink)

The political writings of Kant and of Hegel present two contrasts, whose connection and explanation have never been adequately explored. The first contrast is in respect of the quality of their discussions of ‘home’ politics—in Kant's language, the ‘problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution’. Here Hegel shines. However much one may dislike the tone of voice, the vocabulary, the style and the arrangement of its arguments, his Philosophy of Right , especially when supplemented by his more topical political writings, (...) presents an array of dicta, judgments and arguments of notable penetration, balance and prescience. Consider for instance his account of the very different political functions of free associations and of representative bodies, and his perception of the symbolic—but crucially symbolic—role of head of state. On these, as on many other issues, Hegel's views deserve the credit that has of late begun to be restored to them. Whatever his philosophical failings, he had a remarkable sense of the key junctures of different strands in the life of politics; so that, although the kind of state he describes and admires retains little practical relevance today, his exposition of it remains a valuable training-ground in political appreciation. By contrast Kant's philosophy of the state, as we find it in Part II of his Philosophy of Right , in Part II of Theory and Practice and in Appendices I and II of Perpetual Peace , is at first sight little more than an academic exercise. It amounts to a restatement, in dehistoricized terms and in accordance with Kant's rationalist theory of morals, of Rousseau's central political teachings, viz. that an original, unanimous, unrescindable contract explains political allegiance, and that the idea of a General Will is a sufficient criterion of political justice within the state. From these two basic positions Kant develops a theory of civic obedience far more restrictive than that of Rousseau or indeed than that of Hobbes. Throughout, Kant accepts—in the spirit which one might accord to revelation—Rousseau's assumptions that government can be confined to issues that fall under a General Will, and that such a Will can be ‘found’ for the resolution of every political issue, so that honest men need never disagree about what the General Will is. But to say this is to say that Kant's concern with home politics is little more than academic. (shrink)

Ten years after his death, Vilém Flusser’s reputation as one of Europe’s most original modern philosophers continues to grow. Increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America, the Prague-born intellectual’s thought has until now remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. His innovative writings theorize—and ultimately embrace—the epochal shift that humanity is undergoing from what he termed "linear thinking" toward a new form of multidimensional, visual thinking embodied by digital culture. For Flusser, these new modes and technologies of communication make possible (...) a society in which dialogue between people becomes the supreme value.The first English-language anthology of Flusser’s work, this volume displays the extraordinary range and subtlety of his intellect. A number of the essays collected here introduce and elaborate his theory of communication, influenced by thinkers as diverse as Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl, and Thomas Kuhn. While taking dystopian, posthuman visions of communication technologies into account, Flusser celebrates their liberatory and humanizing aspects. For Flusser, existence was akin to being thrown into an abyss of absurd experience or "bottomlessness"; becoming human required creating meaning out of this painful event by consciously connecting with others, in part through such technologies. Other essays present Flusser’s thoughts on the future of writing, the revolutionary nature of photography, the relationship between exile and creativity, and his unconventional concept of posthistory. Taken together, these essays confirm Flusser’s importance and prescience within contemporary philosophy.Vilém Flusser was born in Prague and taught philosophy in Brazil. Andreas Ströhl is director of the film department at the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes in Munich. Erik Eisel works for a software technology company in Southern California. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

Imagery is one of the new, exciting frontiers in cognitive therapy. From the outset of cognitive therapy, its founder Dr. Aaron T. Beck recognised the importance of imagery in the understanding and treatment of patient's problems. However, despite Beck's prescience, clinical research on imagery, and the integration of imagery interventions into clinical practice, developed slowly. It is only in the past 10 years that most writing and research on imagery in cognitive therapy has been conducted. The Oxford Guide to (...) Imagery in Cognitive Therapy is a landmark book, which will play an important role in the next phase of cognitive therapy's development. Clinicians and researchers are starting to recognise the centrality of imagery in the development, maintenance and treatment of psychological disorders - for example, in social phobia, agoraphobia, depression, PTSD, eating disorders, childhood trauma, and personality disorder. In the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, researchers are identifying the key role that imagery plays in emotion, cognition and psychopathology.The Oxford Guide to Imagery in Cognitive Therapy has been written both for clinicians and researchers. For clinicians, it is a user-friendly, practical guide to imagery, which will enable therapists to understand imagery phenomenology, and to integrate imagery-based interventions into their cognitive therapy practice. For researchers, it provides a state-of-the-art summary of imagery research, and points the way to future studies. Written by three well-respected CBT researcher-clinicians, it is essential reading for all cognitive therapists, who have recognised the limitations of purely 'verbal' CBT techniques, and want to find new ways to work with clients with psychological disorders. Readership: CBT therapists. (shrink)

Abstract.Einstein learned from the magnet and conductor thought experiment how to use field transformation laws to extend the covariance of Maxwell’s electrodynamics. If he persisted in his use of this device, he would have found that the theory cleaves into two Galilean covariant parts, each with different field transformation laws. The tension between the two parts reflects a failure not mentioned by Einstein: that the relativity of motion manifested by observables in the magnet and conductor thought experiment does not extend (...) to all observables in electrodynamics. An examination of Ritz’s work shows that Einstein’s early view could not have coincided with Ritz’s on an emission theory of light, but only with that of a conveniently reconstructed Ritz. One Ritz-like emission theory, attributed by Pauli to Ritz, proves to be a natural extension of the Galilean covariant part of Maxwell’s theory that happens also to accommodate the magnet and conductor thought experiment. Einstein’s famous chasing a light beam thought experiment fails as an objection to an ether-based, electrodynamical theory of light. However it would allow Einstein to formulate his general objections to all emission theories of light in a very sharp form. Einstein found two well known experimental results of 18th and 19th century optics compelling (Fizeau’s experiment, stellar aberration), while the accomplished Michelson-Morley experiment played no memorable role. I suggest they owe their importance to their providing a direct experimental grounding for Lorentz‘ local time, the precursor of Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity, and doing it essentially independently of electrodynamical theory. I attribute Einstein’s success to his determination to implement a principle of relativity in electrodynamics, but I urge that we not invest this stubbornness with any mystical prescience. (shrink)

A proposta deste trabalho é analisar a concepção filosófica depresciência em Santo Tomás de Aquino e Ramon Llull, nas obrasSuma Teológicae O Livro da Contemplação. Para isso, discorremos previamente sobre o conceito deciência, base aristotélica tomista. Por fim, apresentamos a tradução de um extrato doLivro da Contemplação, como base documental para a segunda parte do trabalho. The purpose of this article is to analyze the philosophical conception of prescience in St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica and Ramon Llull (...) and the Book of Contemplation. To do so, we first discuss the Aristotelian-Thomist concept of science. We then present a translation of an extract from the Book of Contemplation as a documentary basis for the second part of the article. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, the doctrine of informed consent has become a focal point in discussions of medical ethics. The literature of informed consent explores the evolution of the principle of autonomy, purportedly emerging from the mists of 19th Century medical practice, and finding its earliest articulation in legal cases where wronged citizens asserted their rights against medical authority. A commonplace, if not obligatory, feature of that literature is a reference to the case of Mary Schloendorff and the opinion (...) written by Judge Benjamin Cardozo by which the case is remembered. Commentators today applaud the prescience of Cardozo for an early articulation of what eventually would become bioethical orthodoxy concerning informed consent and its place as a bulwark of patient autonomy. They inevitably quote Cardozo's famous statement, “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly (...) encouraged by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

Platonic religiosity is the first of two volumes devoted to the analysis of religiosity or religious feeling (pathos) in Plato. -/- (Back cover) Platonic Religiosity is a hermeneutical attempt to read Platonic works from the perspective of their religiosity. The aspects examined in the book are limited for the moment to the most basic, perhaps even the simplest, dimensions of religious feeling, those involving the representation of a relationship between man and divinity, Earth and Heaven, "low" and "high". Low and (...) high are spatial metaphors constitutive of our thinking. Although, in this case, they indicate the link between man and the super-sensible world, they also presuppose, at all times, the devout feeling (and the risk) of an insurmountable distance and remoteness that divides men from the numen. The need to affirm the relationship partly overcomes the presence of this feeling of distance, but never manages to neutralise it completely. -/- Religious feeling as such always oscillates between two terms: the need to establish a relationship with the divinity, and thus to guarantee its proximity to man, and the affirmation of its transcendence, namely the distance that divides us from the numen, up to the point, eventually, where the danger becomes the greatest: the denial of the god by man (atheism) or the human feeling of being abandoned by the god. The presence of these oscillations in the Platonic texts is analysed in several chapters of the book, devoted to different themes, such as the representations of reciprocity (do ut des), the images of the friendly god and the hostile god, the feeling of the threshold, prayers and invocations, verecundia and nostalgia, the feeling of dependence, the notion of prescience, assimilation to the god, the different types of ineffability, the role of atheism and incredulity, and lastly the notion of conversion, which substantiates Platonic religiosity by characterising it in the sense of a redemption-belief. (shrink)

A half-century ago the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck encouraged designers to think about “space and time” not as abstractions in themselves but rather as cultural events better approached through the medium of “place and occasion.” Van Eyck made this point on the basis of his own travels and through his extensive readings in cultural anthropology, and his prescience is only now acquiring the credibility that it deserves through the work of a multitude of interdisciplinary researchers. Phenomenologists argue that (...) we are embodied organisms-acting-within-environments, and these inhabiting abodes are constructed of both material and cultural dimensions. We are thus preeminently social in our range of self-consciousness, and intensely ceremonial in every facet of our being. Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists are currently locating the origin and development of our most basic social behaviors far in our pre-human past; neuroscientists are today modeling our social circuits in the deepest reaches of our brains. Architecture would gain much from an updated cultural theory grounded in these new models of human existence. (shrink)

Einstein learned from the magnet and conductor thought experiments how to use field transformation laws to extend the covariance to Maxwell’s electrodynamics. If he persisted in his use of this device, he would have found that the theory cleaves into two Galilean covariant parts, each with different field transformation laws. The tension between the two parts reflects a failure not mentioned by Einstein: that the relativity of motion manifested by observables in the magnet and conductor thought experiment does not extend (...) to all observables in electrodynamics. An examination of Ritz’s work shows that Einstein’s early view could not have coincided with Ritz’s on an emission theory of light, but only with that of a conveniently reconstructed Ritz. One Ritz-like emission theory, attributed by Pauli to Ritz, proves to be a natural extension of the Galilean covariant part of Maxwell’s theory that happens also to accommodate the magnet and conductor thought experiment. Einstein's famous chasing a light beam thought experiment fails as an objection to an ether-based, electrodynamical theory of light. However it would allow Einstein to formulate his general objections to all emission theories of light in a very sharp form. Einstein found two well known experimental results of 18th and19th century optics compelling (Fizeau’s experiment, stellar aberration), while the accomplished Michelson-Morley experiment played no memorable role. I suggest they owe their importance to their providing a direct experimental grounding for Lorentz’ local time, the precursor of Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity, and do it essentially independently of electrodynamical theory. I attribute Einstein’s success to his determination to implement a principle of relativity in electrodynamics, but I urge that we not invest this stubbornness with any mystical prescience. (shrink)

Michael Tooley’s latest argument against the possibility of divine foreknowledge trades on the idea that, whichever theory of time is true, the ontology of the future—or lack thereof—gives rise to special problems for God’s prescience. I argue that Tooley’s reasoning is predicated on two mischaracterizations and conclude that, on at least some theories of time, the possibility of divine foreknowledge appears secure.

t. 1. Monologion ; Proslogion -- t. 2. Le grammairien ; De la vérité ; La liberté du choix ; La chute du diable -- t. 3. Lettre sur l'incarnation du Verbe ; Pourquoi un Dieu-homme -- t. 4. La conception virginale et le péché originel ; La procession du Saint Esprit ; Lettres sur les sacrements de l'Église ; Du pouvoir et de l'impuissance -- t. 5. Sur l'accord de la prescience, de la prédestination et de la grâce (...) de Dieu avec le libre choix ; Prières et méditations -- t. 6. Lettres 1 à 147 -- t. 9. Histoire des temps nouveaux en Angleterre. Livres I-IV ; Vie de Saint Anselme. (shrink)

This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard’s career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard’s sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. The consistency of Baudrillard’s arguments belies the many superficial judgements made about them, which were anyway often knowingly (...) encouraged by Baudrillard’s rhetorical strategies. (shrink)

I present two of Jacob Klein’s chief discoveries from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me: the enchanting (to me) contemporaneous significance, the astounding prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. The first insight takes off from an understanding of the lowest segment of the so-called DividedLine in Plato’s Republic. In this lowest segment are located the deficient beings called reflections, shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associatedwith them called by Klein “image-recognition” (εἰκασία). The second discovery involves (...) a great complex of notions from which I will extract one main element:the analysis of what it means to be a number and what makes possible this kind of being, and, it turns out, all Being. (shrink)

I present two of Jacob Klein’s chief discoveries from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me: the enchanting (to me) contemporaneous significance, the astounding prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. The first insight takes off from an understanding of the lowest segment of the so-called DividedLine in Plato’s Republic. In this lowest segment are located the deficient beings called reflections, shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associatedwith them called by Klein “image-recognition” (εἰκασία). The second discovery involves (...) a great complex of notions from which I will extract one main element:the analysis of what it means to be a number and what makes possible this kind of being, and, it turns out, all Being. (shrink)