In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 35-52 [Access article in PDF] Means Without End:Production, Reception, and Teaching in Kant's Aesthetics Gary Peters The Work of Art If aesthetics is to have a role within an art school context, it must be able to engage with the work of art as an ongoing and ontologically open productive enterprise. The reception of the artwork as a completed thing or (...) act and the aesthetic judgment necessary to take pleasure in the contemplation of it is largely irrelevant to the day-to-day work of the artist in the studio or onsite. Rarely do the tutor or student stand before a work that could be claimed to have reached completion or achieved what might be called "finality." On the contrary, in most cases an essential aspect of teaching practice is precisely to resist the impending closure of the work through a critical engagement which challenges the student to consider and reconsider the aesthetic possibilities of given forms within a situation of infinite reflection. Given this, it is important at the outset to consider Kant's notion of finality without end. So we may at least observe a finality of form, and trace it in objects — though by reflection only — without resting it on an end....Whenever an end is regarded as a source of delight, it always imports an interest as determining ground of the judgment on the object of pleasure. Hence the judgment of taste cannot rest on any subjective end as its ground. But neither can any representation of an objective end, i.e., of the possibility of the object itself on the principles of final connection, determine the judgment of taste. 1Echoing his famous description of art as "purposiveness without purpose," here the Kantian relation between finality and endlessness turns attention away from the art object, and the objective judgment determined by it, to the reflective process whereby the act of aesthetic judgment has primacy as that which acts upon the pleasure attending finality in the manner [End Page 35] of a tracing to be traced and retraced by the receiver. By thus denying finality an objective end, it is true that Kant removes the specter of desire from his aesthetics. But does this not also remove the originary work of the work of art, its eruptive production prior to reproduction in what might be called the "instant" of its creation outside of the "always already there" of what Jean-François Lyotard calls "aesthetic time?" 2 Indeed, to go further still, Maurice Blanchot famously conceives of the art work as harboring a radical "worklessness," a "neutral" absence that, nevertheless, is essential to its being a work, or its being as a work. 3 Does Kant's nonobjective account of aesthetic experience direct us, ultimately, toward this peculiar ontological neutrality, or does the communicative imperative at the heart of his aesthetics overlook what Blanchot would call the "fascination" of the work as the inscrutable presence of an absence? It is this problematic that weighs heavily upon the reading and teaching of Kant's aesthetics as presented here.In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard offers one solution to the problem. For him, reflective judgment is itself productive — "production that exceeds simple reproduction is an a priori condition for aesthetic judgment" (LAS, 67). That is to say, the power of the imagination and the pleasure associated with this power concern respectively the exercise and the registration of a productivity that is crucial for aesthetic reception to be possible. But does this playful enjoyment of our receptive/productive faculties and their beautiful attunement not obscure or distract us from the pure and immediate desire of the aesthetic where the concatenation of work and worklessness, that is to say, of production and reception, within the creative moment demands from the artist an interest in the ownership of, and responsibility for the work, as well as an absolute (one might say obsessive) commitment to the work of art — the labor of the aesthetic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 35-52 [Access article in PDF] Means Without End:Production, Reception, and Teaching in Kant's Aesthetics Gary Peters The Work of Art If aesthetics is to have a role within an art school context, it must be able to engage with the work of art as an ongoing and ontologically open productive enterprise. The reception of the artwork as a completed thing or (...) act and the aesthetic judgment necessary to take pleasure in the contemplation of it is largely irrelevant to the day-to-day work of the artist in the studio or onsite. Rarely do the tutor or student stand before a work that could be claimed to have reached completion or achieved what might be called "finality." On the contrary, in most cases an essential aspect of teaching practice is precisely to resist the impending closure of the work through a critical engagement which challenges the student to consider and reconsider the aesthetic possibilities of given forms within a situation of infinite reflection. Given this, it is important at the outset to consider Kant's notion of finality without end. So we may at least observe a finality of form, and trace it in objects — though by reflection only — without resting it on an end....Whenever an end is regarded as a source of delight, it always imports an interest as determining ground of the judgment on the object of pleasure. Hence the judgment of taste cannot rest on any subjective end as its ground. But neither can any representation of an objective end, i.e., of the possibility of the object itself on the principles of final connection, determine the judgment of taste. 1Echoing his famous description of art as "purposiveness without purpose," here the Kantian relation between finality and endlessness turns attention away from the art object, and the objective judgment determined by it, to the reflective process whereby the act of aesthetic judgment has primacy as that which acts upon the pleasure attending finality in the manner [End Page 35] of a tracing to be traced and retraced by the receiver. By thus denying finality an objective end, it is true that Kant removes the specter of desire from his aesthetics. But does this not also remove the originary work of the work of art, its eruptive production prior to reproduction in what might be called the "instant" of its creation outside of the "always already there" of what Jean-François Lyotard calls "aesthetic time?" 2 Indeed, to go further still, Maurice Blanchot famously conceives of the art work as harboring a radical "worklessness," a "neutral" absence that, nevertheless, is essential to its being a work, or its being as a work. 3 Does Kant's nonobjective account of aesthetic experience direct us, ultimately, toward this peculiar ontological neutrality, or does the communicative imperative at the heart of his aesthetics overlook what Blanchot would call the "fascination" of the work as the inscrutable presence of an absence? It is this problematic that weighs heavily upon the reading and teaching of Kant's aesthetics as presented here.In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard offers one solution to the problem. For him, reflective judgment is itself productive — "production that exceeds simple reproduction is an a priori condition for aesthetic judgment" (LAS, 67). That is to say, the power of the imagination and the pleasure associated with this power concern respectively the exercise and the registration of a productivity that is crucial for aesthetic reception to be possible. But does this playful enjoyment of our receptive/productive faculties and their beautiful attunement not obscure or distract us from the pure and immediate desire of the aesthetic where the concatenation of work and worklessness, that is to say, of production and reception, within the creative moment demands from the artist an interest in the ownership of, and responsibility for the work, as well as an absolute (one might say obsessive) commitment to the work of art — the labor of the aesthetic... (shrink)

What should sociologists make of nature? Pragmatism provides one possible answer to this question by centering the practical relations between humans and nonhuman nature. Stefan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements offers perhaps the most ambitious effort to develop a pragmatist sociology of nature. The book’s polemical aim is to depose a family of theories that, Bargheer argues, dominate our way of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture. This essay constructs an alternative, more accommodating critical encounter between competing (...) theories. It begins by simultaneously granting Bargheer’s positive theoretical contributions while entertaining several virtues of opposing theories of nature and culture that the book largely overlooks. The results include three challenges for a pragmatist sociology of nature: the problem of depth; the problem of breadth, and the problem of differentiation. I argue that this accommodating critical encounter may result in a smaller distance between pragmatism and other sociological theories of nature and culture, and opens to more opportunities for synthetic conversations, rather than pointing to unbridgeable chasms. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis rejoinder represents a final installment in a debate between myself and Paul Gunn over the feasibility and desirability of deliberative democracy. Here I argue that our debate has helped clarify an ambivalence in the literature surrounding the ends and means of deliberative democracy. I specify two ways to understand both ends and means, establish their importance in deliberative theory, and show how they can be combined. I conclude by showing how this systemic view incorporates (...) and overcomes several challenges facing modern democracy, such as the necessity of expert authority, the role of partisanship, and the problem of social complexity. (shrink)

In the Qurʾān, it is mentioned that those who disbelieve insist on not believing by putting forward various excuses. One of them is that deniers attribute polytheism to Allah’s wish. When those who disbelieve are asked why they do not believe, they argue that they cannot deny unless Allah wills. On the other hand, expressions in line with the words spoken by the polytheists in the Qurʾān are also attributed to Allah. Such a paradoxical appearance between the verses requires (...) a detailed examination of the subject. In this study, the reasons for using these expressions by the deniers and the historical contexts of the verses will be examined. In addition, we will talk about the discussion of whether the expressions that bind polytheism to the wish of God are absolutely correct, since the subject is related to the wish. Because the interpretation of the verses varies according to both views. In addition to this, whether the deniers are sincere in these words is an element that affects the interpretation. Ahl al-Sunna scholars argue that this proposition is absolutely correct and that the deniers say this sentence with a mocking attitude. On the other hand, Muʿtazilī scholars are of the opinion that the proposition is absolutely wrong and that the deniers say this word with conviction. In addition, while Muʿtazilī scholars think that the nature of the Allah’s wish in both verses is different; Ahl Sunna scholars think that both are the same. Although it seems at first glance that the disbelievers attribute their denial to the legacy of Allah is an attitude that mocks them and believes that Allah is pleased with them, in reality, this is because they deny fate and turn to coercion and do not believe in prophethood and the Hereafter. Because, saying “If Allah willed, we would not associate” is based on the conviction that Allah gave consent to this belief they inherited from their ancestors and left them in accordance with their current beliefs. Devotion to ancestors is not necessarily a bad thing. However, if loyalty to ancestors is through prophethood, it leads to a true faith and ensures that faith is transferred to the next generations in a healthy way. On the other hand, if traditional practices in the name of religion turn into a practice that is against the spirit of the religion after a while, devotion to ancestors becomes an element that leads to denial. The fact that their ancestors lived a very prosperous life in the world even though they also had this belief reveals that they did not believe in the hereafter. Because, according to their opinion, if their ancestors had not been on the right path, God should have punished them in this world. Another reason why they attribute their denial to the legacy of Allah is their lack of belief in prophethood. Because, according to them, prophethood does not have an effect, nor it is necessary, for their faith, which depends only on the legacy of Allah. The most important factor that determines whether the propositions in the verses we examined are correct is the context of the sentence and the intention of the people using the proposition. In other words, the meaning and value of attributing denial to Allah’s wish differs according to the addressee. Because one can mean the falsehood with a true word. The same expression used in different contexts used for this may also be false, due to the difference in context and purpose. As pointed out in verse 148 of Surat al-An’am, a person who has the ability and power to believe, abandon polytheism and rebellion, ignoring this opportunity and power given by Allah and implying that he is pleased with a deed that Allah is not pleased with like idolatry. “If Allah willed, we would not associate idolatry” is a false sentence and false claim that is expressed in the verse. On the other hand, as pointed out in verse 107 of the Surat al-An’am and verse 99 of Surat Yunus, our Prophet who is desperate in the current situation and who has an extreme sense of responsibility because they do not believe, consoled our Prophet that his only duty was to convey the truth to the deniers with the statement “If Allah so willed, they would not have converted to Islam” and “If Allah willed, all those on earth would have believed,” indicating that he allowed them to practice idolatry as a requirement of the test and that he did not force people to believe, in order to state that he is not a guardian and that he should not force them to believe. Therefore, each different situation points to a different dimension of the truth about God’s legitimacy. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means (...) of subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

Means–ends decoupling has recently been suggested as one consequence of the problems organizations face in trying to comply with institutional rules in contexts of institutional complexity. Such decoupling is characterized by the adoption, implementation, and scrutiny of particular codes of practice, which tend not to deliver the outcomes they were developed to produce. Recent scholarship focusing on this issue has suggested that such decoupling is a consequence of the trade-off organizations need to make between compliance and (...) goal achievement, most especially when the latter is difficult to evaluate. Although recent scholarship has suggested that this tension might be mitigated by the activities of developers of compliance rules, in this article, we explore how actors internal to organizations, in this case, two charitable organizations, mitigate this tension via nonconformance with particular codes. We focus on how the process of accounting for nonconformance results in the discursive coupling of means and ends as actors creatively develop vocabularies of motive, which respond to anticipated social criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas—Between Philosophy and Rhetoric:The “Teaching” of Levinas’s Scriptural ReferencesClaire Elise KatzIn an interview titled "On Jewish Philosophy," Emmanuel Levinas illuminates the connection that he sees between philosophical discourse and the role of midrash in interpreting the Hebrew scriptures. His interviewer immediately expresses surprise at Levinas's comments that suggested he saw the traditions of philosophy and biblical theology as in some sense harmonious (quoted in Robbins 2001, (...) 239). Levinas responds by elaborating on this connection he sees. For him, the lived experience of Judaism is above all a sense of belonging to humanity and, in turn, to a supreme order of responsibility (240). Although his intellectual life focused on the sacred texts of Judaism, this life included non-Jewish books, which he believed expressed a similar concern or a similar responsibility—a concern for the meaning of life. This list of such books includes Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Miser, and The Misanthrope, in addition to the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.In Levinas's view, these novels are not exercises of philosophyper se; as mentioned above, they express the same concerns that occupy philosophy, but they express these concerns in a different idiom. They do not offer a philosophical argument; instead, they use figurative language and literary narrative to convey their messages. By drawing this distinction between philosophy and literature, Levinas appears to have divided the written word into two categories: philosophy, on the one hand, and literary texts, on the other. Yet readers of his philosophical work cannot help but notice his frequent references to literary sources, including the numerous citations taken from the Jewish holy texts. His use of these citations encourages us to ask how we are to classify these books in general and how to classify, in particular, the Scriptures and the holy texts in Judaism. With regard to the holy texts in Judaism, should we classify them as simply a [End Page 159] literary device? Or, do they constitute a third category that falls somewhere in between philosophy and rhetoric? If the latter, then what is their status relative to these larger categories?Although Levinas insists on separating his two bodies of work—his philosophical writings and his Jewish writings—the distinction between them becomes increasingly blurred with his frequent introduction of citations from the Hebrew texts into his philosophy and by inflecting his Jewish writings with philosophical interpretations.1 In what follows, I examine the unique and significant role of Scriptural references within Levinas's philosophical work. My claim is that the Scriptural references are in fact rhetorical, but not "simply" rhetorical; they do pedagogical work for Levinas that other literary devices cannot accomplish. They engage his readers such that they are invited to grapple with the Scriptures in a manner potentially unfamiliar to them, and this invitation, in turn, has the pedagogical effect of attuning his readers to his texts and to his ethical project—even, one might say, to the other—and inviting them into an experience of transcendence.In the interview mentioned above, Levinas tells his interlocutor that for the Jews the Scriptures do not exist apart from the interpretations that accompany them. These interpretations are found in the collections of midrashim and the Talmud. One need know only a little bit about Hebrew and the construction of the Hebrew texts in order to see why these interpretations are significant. There are three grammatical concerns with the Hebrew language: first, biblical Hebrew does not contain vowels, though it does employ vowel aspirations; second, it is a language based on root letter combinations, and the meaning of these combinations alters, depending on the vowel aspirations that are inserted. For example, "Kiddish," the Hebrew blessing over wine, is based on a combination of Hebrew letters that are transliterated into English as KDSH. The blessing changes if we insert different vowel aspirations: "Kaddish" is the blessing said for those who have died. Third, biblical Hebrew lacks punctuation. Owing to the absence of vowels and punctuation, interpretation difficulties immediately emerge. The rabbinic model of midrash addresses these problems by offering multiple explanations and interpretations.Levinas, however, is not concerned with this aspect of the written language. Rather, he emphasizes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas—Between Philosophy and Rhetoric:The “Teaching” of Levinas’s Scriptural ReferencesClaire Elise KatzIn an interview titled "On Jewish Philosophy," Emmanuel Levinas illuminates the connection that he sees between philosophical discourse and the role of midrash in interpreting the Hebrew scriptures. His interviewer immediately expresses surprise at Levinas's comments that suggested he saw the traditions of philosophy and biblical theology as in some sense harmonious (quoted in Robbins 2001, (...) 239). Levinas responds by elaborating on this connection he sees. For him, the lived experience of Judaism is above all a sense of belonging to humanity and, in turn, to a supreme order of responsibility (240). Although his intellectual life focused on the sacred texts of Judaism, this life included non-Jewish books, which he believed expressed a similar concern or a similar responsibility—a concern for the meaning of life. This list of such books includes Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Miser, and The Misanthrope, in addition to the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.In Levinas's view, these novels are not exercises of philosophyper se; as mentioned above, they express the same concerns that occupy philosophy, but they express these concerns in a different idiom. They do not offer a philosophical argument; instead, they use figurative language and literary narrative to convey their messages. By drawing this distinction between philosophy and literature, Levinas appears to have divided the written word into two categories: philosophy, on the one hand, and literary texts, on the other. Yet readers of his philosophical work cannot help but notice his frequent references to literary sources, including the numerous citations taken from the Jewish holy texts. His use of these citations encourages us to ask how we are to classify these books in general and how to classify, in particular, the Scriptures and the holy texts in Judaism. With regard to the holy texts in Judaism, should we classify them as simply a [End Page 159] literary device? Or, do they constitute a third category that falls somewhere in between philosophy and rhetoric? If the latter, then what is their status relative to these larger categories?Although Levinas insists on separating his two bodies of work—his philosophical writings and his Jewish writings—the distinction between them becomes increasingly blurred with his frequent introduction of citations from the Hebrew texts into his philosophy and by inflecting his Jewish writings with philosophical interpretations.1 In what follows, I examine the unique and significant role of Scriptural references within Levinas's philosophical work. My claim is that the Scriptural references are in fact rhetorical, but not "simply" rhetorical; they do pedagogical work for Levinas that other literary devices cannot accomplish. They engage his readers such that they are invited to grapple with the Scriptures in a manner potentially unfamiliar to them, and this invitation, in turn, has the pedagogical effect of attuning his readers to his texts and to his ethical project—even, one might say, to the other—and inviting them into an experience of transcendence.In the interview mentioned above, Levinas tells his interlocutor that for the Jews the Scriptures do not exist apart from the interpretations that accompany them. These interpretations are found in the collections of midrashim and the Talmud. One need know only a little bit about Hebrew and the construction of the Hebrew texts in order to see why these interpretations are significant. There are three grammatical concerns with the Hebrew language: first, biblical Hebrew does not contain vowels, though it does employ vowel aspirations; second, it is a language based on root letter combinations, and the meaning of these combinations alters, depending on the vowel aspirations that are inserted. For example, "Kiddish," the Hebrew blessing over wine, is based on a combination of Hebrew letters that are transliterated into English as KDSH. The blessing changes if we insert different vowel aspirations: "Kaddish" is the blessing said for those who have died. Third, biblical Hebrew lacks punctuation. Owing to the absence of vowels and punctuation, interpretation difficulties immediately emerge. The rabbinic model of midrash addresses these problems by offering multiple explanations and interpretations.Levinas, however, is not concerned with this aspect of the written language. Rather, he emphasizes... (shrink)

While sport is often pursued more for reasons of meaning than morality, philosophers have had far less to say about the former. How are the ends of sport related to meaning and morality? I address the question through the case study of boxing. One reason for this approach is that the moral status of boxing is contested, which makes it an interesting candidate for immoral, meaningful activity. Drawing on Wolf’s hybrid account of meaning in life, I argue that boxing (...) can be a meaningful pursuit insofar as it fosters positive self-transformation and interpersonal connection. I then consider a structural obstacle facing the pursuit of meaning in competitive sport and look at the instructive case study of Tyson Fury. I make use of Setiya’s distinction between telic and atelic ends in order to diagnose the problem. Finally, I address the likely objection that the goals of boxing are either absurd or immoral and, therefore, unsuited to the pursuit of a meaningful life. (shrink)

Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive cognitive scientists to (...) design artificial agents that possess sensorimotor autonomy—stable, self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor interaction that can ground values, norms and goals necessary for encountering a meaningful environment. More specifically, we consider whether the Free Energy Principle (FEP) can provide formal tools for modeling sensorimotor autonomy. There is currently no consensus on how to understand the relationship between enactive cognitive science and the FEP. However, a number of recent papers have argued that the two frameworks are fundamentally incompatible. Some argue that biological systems exhibit historical path-dependent learning that is absent from systems that minimize free energy. Others have argued that a free energy minimizing system would fail to satisfy a key condition for sensorimotor agency referred to as “interactional asymmetry”. These critics question the claim we defend in this paper that the FEP can be used to formally model autonomy and adaptivity. We will argue it is too soon to conclude that the two frameworks are incompatible. There are undeniable conceptual differences between the two frameworks but in our view each has something important and necessary to offer. The FEP needs enactive cognitive science for the solution it provides to the problem of meaning. Enactive cognitive science needs the FEP to formally model the properties it argues to be constitutive of agency. Our conclusion will be that active inference models based on the FEP provides a way by which scientists can think about how to address the problems of engineering autonomy and adaptivity in artificial agents in formal terms. In the end engaging more closely with this formalism and its further developments will benefit those working within the enactive framework. -/- . (shrink)

The aim of the thesis is to show that there are some synthetic necessary truths, or that synthetic apriori knowledge is possible. This is really a pretext for an investigation into the general connection between meaning and truth, or between understanding and knowing, which, as pointed out in the preface, is really the first stage in a more general enquiry concerning meaning. After the preliminaries, in which the problem is stated and some methodological remarks made, the investigation (...) proceeds in two stages. First there is a detailed inquiry into the manner in which the meanings or functions of words occurring in a statement help to determine the conditions in which that statement would be true. This prepares the way for the second stage, which is an inquiry concerning the connection between meaning and necessary truth. The first stage occupies Part Two of the thesis, the second stage Part Three. In all this, only a restricted class of statements is discussed, namely those which contain nothing but logical words and descriptive words, such as "Not all round tables are scarlet" and "Every three-sided figure is three-angled". (shrink)

Definition of the Problem: One of the main ethical arguments against the therapeutic transplantation of fetal tissue in severe cases of Parkinson’s disease is the allegation that the relationship between the abortion and the transplantation is a (bad)-means-to-a-(good)-end-relation.Arguments: This paper differentiates between the actual experimental single-case treatment and a potential mass treatment. In the former case, ethical guidelines seem to guarantee that abortion and transplantation are two distinct actions and therefore abortion is not a means to (...) the end transplantation on principle. However, in the latter case – the potential mass treatment of patients with more severe cases of Parkinson’s disease – there seem to be several technical, logistical and psychological reasons for the impossibility to distinguish between abortion and transplantation.Conclusion: Although abortion is not a means to the end transplantation as a matter of principle the ethical problems of a mass treatment would be immense. (shrink)

We might begin by trying to unsettle the apparently natural inferences that are supposed to lead us so ineluctably to recognize something called “intrinsic value”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Heidegger and OntologyEmmanuel Levinas (bio)The prestige of Martin Heidegger 1 and the influence of his thought on German philosophy marks both a new phase and one of the high points of the phenomenological movement. Caught unawares, the traditional establishment is obliged to clarify its position on this new teaching which casts a spell over youth and which, overstepping the bounds of permissibility, is already in vogue. For once, (...) Fame has picked one who deserves it and, for that matter, one who is still living. Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument—with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride. In this study, it is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him.To get to the heart of Heidegger’s system, it seems fitting to begin with a problem that is generally familiar. We choose the problem of knowledge, a deeper understanding of which takes us to the very threshold of Heidegger’s thought. For this problem, central to modern philosophy, is one of the main obstacles of modern philosophy that Heidegger wishes to surmount. Neo-Kantianism, which takes knowledge as the philosophical problem of the first rank, is the movement against which Heidegger rebels with all his strength. We have, thus, every chance of gaining access to his thought by the main door, so to speak. Once inside the system we will try to trace its outlines, 2 reserving, for a second part of our work, the determination of Heidegger’s place in the history of ideas, especially in the phenomenological movement, as well as of his relations with the philosopher to whom he owes so much—Edmund Husserl. 31In its most general form, the problem of the theory of knowledge has a critical significance. It consists in delineating a domain where knowledge can be certain and in determining the criteria for the legitimate scope of knowledge. But this problem, as normal and as simple as it may appear, has deeper roots. That knowledge should need a criterion at all presupposes that truth is not identical to all that is known and that the course [End Page 11] of things can fail to correspond with the course of thought. “How does knowledge correspond to being?” is a more profound formulation of the problem of knowledge.But we are not going to touch anymore on the primordial phenomenon that generates the problem. The problem of correspondence between thing and thought presupposes a free activity of thought and its isolation in relation to the object. It is precisely this presupposition which renders their harmony and even their contact problematic. “How does the subject take leave of itself to attain the object?” is what the problem of knowledge, in the last analysis, boils down to. Its true source is thus the concept of “subject” as elaborated by modern philosophy. The cogito presided over the subject’s birth. The cogito was the affirmation of the privileged nature of the subject’s immanent sphere, of its unique place in existence; hence, the cogito was the specificity of the subject’s connection to the rest of reality, the sui generis nature which opens up the passage from immanence to transcendence, the passage from ideas contained in the thinking substance to 4 their “formal existence.”The concept of the subject, understood as a substance having a specific position in the entire domain of being, presents us with difficulties of two kinds. First, how do we understand this leave-taking from the self which the thinking substance brings about and which displays an entirely original aspect? Indeed, we could say that thought, in reaching out toward objects, does not actually take leave of itself, since its objects—considered as ideas and contents of thought—are, in a certain sense, already within it. In order to make sense of this paradox, Descartes... (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of the article is the analysis of the reasons and grounds of the crisis in the sphere of meaning-making, as well as searching answers to the questions about the meaning of human life in the contemporary world, which are maximally relevant in connection with the escalation of global problems, revealing the points of convergence between various theoretical positions, evaluation of their heuristic potential. Theoretical basis of the research is the historical-philosophical, comparative and system approaches, (...) as well as the analysis of philosophical insights in the field of global studies. Originality. Originality lies in the fact that this article is the first attempt to conduct comprehensive analysis in the problem of the sense of the Existence as it is presented in the first quarter of the 21st century and to relate it with the modern social situation that is characterized by a complex range of interconnected and interdependent anthropological problems of our time. Authors emphasize that the main reason in the crisis of meaning is that a man has lost touch with his roots, which is wildlife. He has created an artificial structure, civilization to satisfy his needs and finds no way to the transcendental, which is the true House of his being. Conclusions. A human must refuse from false self-conceit concerning his potential omniscience and omnipotence, cease dictating his own rules to the Existence, determine the boundaries of his freedom and try to clearly realize his place in the objective structure of being. The global situation can change for the better only if a dramatic change in the area of meaning-making happens. The decisive force, which may encourage nudging to the positive changes, can be either the free will of people who have realized the criticality of the situation or external natural and social circumstances that will make people reorganize radically. The proper prioritizing, a deep awareness of universal goals and solidarity between people could be the value basis that will become the foundation to find the meaning and create a more favorable future. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Before Descartes, middle age philosophers like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Duns Scotus (1266-1308), and Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) used to discuss the distinction between essence and existence in three ways (of course, Ibn-Sina was the first who made this distinction to rehabilitate Aristotelian philosophy in the Islamic heritage). Descartes was aware of that, but discussed it according to the relation between mind and body. Yet, he told us many times that he was used to separate essence from existence (...) in metaphysical issues. The objective of this paper is first to rephrase his untold opinion about the relation between essence and existence on the basis of his conception of the problem of distinction according to mind and body, and second, to disclose that Descartes's conception of existence is twofold. At the end, it is claimed that his twofold notion of existence and his inability to overcome it, is the principal factor in his failure to explicate everything according to first principles, and so in his failure to defeat skepticism. (shrink)

Kant does not provide clear-cut definitions of apperception, consciousness, and self-consciousness and everywhere uses these terms as synonyms, which creates the problem of the relationship between these faculties. The importance of this problem stems from the colossal significance of each of the above-mentioned faculties which are intimately connected with Kant’s formulation of the key tasks of transcendental philosophy. The prime task is to discover the categories of understanding and to prove the legitimacy of their use, a task that is (...) further complicated by the difference between the editions of the Critique of Pure Reason in terms of the argumentation in the section on the deduction of categories and Kant’s concept of apperception. Accordingly, the author seeks to clarify the purpose of each of the above-mentioned faculties and to establish their inter-relationship. To this end the author analyses the functional roles of consciousness, self-consciousness and apperception in solving the main tasks of the first Critique. It turns out that consciousness is a reflexive cognitive capacity which provides access to representations in our soul and allows us to distinguish them and to connect them. Self-consciousness is the mode of the functioning of consciousness which makes it possible to study three objects of consciousness: internal and external representations of the subject, the synthetic activity of understanding and our soul. Apperception is the Latin synonym of the concept of Selbstbewußtsein and is aimed at studying the unity of our representations. Because Kant distinguishes multiple kinds of unity, there are different names for apperception. Kant uses the concept of Apperzeption as a synonym of self-consciousness because his concept of consciousness follows the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions (...) in connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions (...) in connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions (...) in connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

This book aids in the rehabilitation of the wrongfully deprecated work of William Parry, and is the only full-length investigation into Parry-type propositional logics. A central tenet of the monograph is that the sheer diversity of the contexts in which the mereological analogy emerges – its effervescence with respect to fields ranging from metaphysics to computer programming – provides compelling evidence that the study of logics of analytic implication can be instrumental in identifying connections between topics that would otherwise (...) remain hidden. More concretely, the book identifies and discusses a host of cases in which analytic implication can play an important role in revealing distinct problems to be facets of a larger, cross-disciplinary problem. It introduces an element of constancy and cohesion that has previously been absent in a regrettably fractured field, shoring up those who are sympathetic to the worth of mereological analogy. Moreover, it generates new interest in the field by illustrating a wide range of interesting features present in such logics – and highlighting these features to appeal to researchers in many fields. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not (...) as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. ks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions (...) in connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not (...) as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. -/- The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. -/- Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. (shrink)

Mathematically, gauge theories are extraordinarily rich --- so rich, in fact, that it can become all too easy to lose track of the connections between results, and become lost in a mass of beautiful theorems and properties: indeterminism, constraints, Noether identities, local and global symmetries, and so on. -/- One purpose of this short article is to provide some sort of a guide through the mathematics, to the conceptual core of what is actually going on. Its focus is on (...) the Lagrangian, variational-problem description of classical mechanics, from which the link between gauge symmetry and the apparent violation of determinism is easy to understand; only towards the end will the Hamiltonian description be considered. -/- The other purpose is to warn against adopting too unified a perspective on gauge theories. It will be argued that the meaning of the gauge freedom in a theory like general relativity is (at least from the Lagrangian viewpoint) significantly different from its meaning in theories like electromagnetism. The Hamiltonian framework blurs this distinction, and orthodox methods of quantization obliterate it; this may, in fact, be genuine progress, but it is dangerous to be guided by mathematics into conflating two conceptually distinct notions without appreciating the physical consequences. (shrink)

Now available in English for the first time, The Visibility of the Image explores the development of an influential aesthetic tradition through the work of six figures. Analysing their contribution to the progress of formal aesthetics, from its origins in Germany in the 1880s to semiotic interpretations in America a century later, the six chapters cover: Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898), the first to separate aesthetics and metaphysics and approach aesthetics along the lines of formal logic, providing a purely syntactic way of (...) using signs, regardless of objective content; Alois Riegl (1858-1905), who went on to further develop aesthetics on the model of formal logic, creating a theory of style in response to Zimmermann's call for an aesthetics oriented toward formal logic; Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who represents a step toward an understanding of consciousness by using pictures as cognitive tools; Konrad Fiedler (1841-1895), the Saxon philosopher who considered the possibility that some kinds of images are made and viewed not for what they show, but for their visibility's sake alone; Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), responsible for taking up the connections between the problems of reducing the range of potential meanings and contexts of a given image down to just the picture surface; Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who set out to establish whether a picture with no objective reference, such as an abstract painting, still counts as a sign, and if so, in what sense. Bringing these thinkers together and interlinking their ideas, Lambert Wiesing presents an engaging history of formal aesthetics, while reconstructing the philosophical foundations for the appearance of new image forms in the 20th century, including the video-clip, abstract collage, digital simulation and virtual reality. Using this original approach, The Visibility of the Image introduces the rise of modern image theory and provides a valuable account of our engagement with pictures in the 21st century. (shrink)

This chapter sharpens the book’s criticism of exclusivist responsible to religious multiplicity, firstly through close critical attention to arguments which religious exclusivists provide, and secondly through the introduction of several new, formal arguments / dilemmas. Self-described ‘post-liberals’ like Paul Griffiths bid philosophers to accept exclusivist attitudes and beliefs as just one among other aspects of religious identity. They bid us to normalize the discourse Griffiths refers to as “polemical apologetics,” and to view its acceptance as the only viable form of (...) pluralism. This reasoning may seem initially plausible, but on closer examination his and other’s defence of the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity fall apart. Informed by our study of luck-leaning theological explanations of religious difference and the counter-inductive thinking they exemplify, I argue that exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are best explained by personal and group bias, and that a discourse between exclusivist authors or sects is beyond the pale of reasonable disagreement. Our study of descriptive (psychological) and prescriptive (religious) fideism in the first sections of Chapter Five suggests that we turn back to formal features of doxastic methods (i.e., of how people process), features that may be straightforwardly tested for in studies utilizing scales of religious orientation. These formal features allow us to better recognize not only the multiplicity of models of faith that religious adherents adhere to, but also that the relationship between forms of fideism is scalar: there is a spectrum of views running from rationalism to fideism, and at the fideistic end from moderate to strong forms of religious fideism. I further explain why developing tests and markers for a high degree of fideistic orientation is important to all those who study religion. The second half of the chapter turns to criticism or censure of exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, in contrast to apologetic defenses of exclusivism. While we have examined the close connections between fideism and fundamentalism, and again between fundamentalism and exclusivism in earlier chapters, a sharper focus reveals an important but little-recognized distinction reflected in the literature: the distinction between religion-specific (or particularist) and mutualist exclusivism. The mutualist doesn’t talk just about the right of adherents of one specific religion to assert exclusivism, but the adherents of any and all “home” religions. I argue that some previously unrecognized problems for the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are brought to light when we make the distinction between the two basic ways to understand the claim that exclusivists are making. I put particularist (Barth, Lindbeck, Plantinga) and mutualist (Griffiths, Gellman, Margalit, D’Costa) defenses of exclusivism on the horns of a dilemma, and argue that despite the popularity it presently enjoys among post-liberal theologians, a close examination reveals that the very conceptual coherence of mutualist exclusivism is in serious doubt. (shrink)

Perhaps nothing so radically changes one’s value perspective as psychosis. In a moving article, writer Mark Lukach describes his wife Giulia’s struggle with an illness presumed to be bipolar disorder. A woman with a “concrete life plan … to become a director of marketing at a fashion company and have three kids by the time she turned 35”, Gulia’s acute psychosis resulted in her ranting “unintelligible babble about heaven, hell, angels, and the devil”. For her husband, Gulia had become a (...) different person; “the person you love is no longer there, replaced by a stranger who’s shocking and exotic”.Yet, change to value systems is ubiquitous and usually far less dramatic than that occurring in... (shrink)

Once the preserve of philosophy and theology, what Weber called `the problem of theodicy' - the problem of reconciling normative ideals with the reality in which we live - recurs in the social sciences in the secular form of `sociodicy'. Within a functionalist framework, sociodicies have offered legitimizing rationalizations of social adversities, inequalities and injustice, but seldom address the existential meaning and ethical implications of human affliction and suffering in social life. We suggest that an apparent indifference to these questions (...) in social theory reflects a deeper tension between modernity's millennial expectations of moral progress and the escalating history of violence, exploitation and suffering in the modern world. The task of sociodicy, we argue, should be reconstructed as a critique of the decivilizing implications of this tension, not just to document the consequences of suffering on people's lives, but in order to reassess the experience of modernity at the end of one of the most disturbed and violent centuries the world has known. (shrink)

Decision theory, understood as providing a normative account of rationality in action, is often thought to be an adequate formalization of instrumental reasoning. As a model, there is much to be said for it. However, if decision theory is to adequately account for correct instrumental reasoning, then the axiomatic conditions by which it links preference to action must be normative for choice. That is, a choice must be rationally defective unless it proceeds from a preference set that satisfies the axiomatic (...) conditions. -/- The crucial feature of standard decision theory for present purposes is that it conceives rational action as maximizing, as doing the best that one can in terms of satisfying one’s preferences. For maximizing to be possible, the preference set in question must completely order a person’s options. But I have argued elsewhere that that condition is often unmet by actual preference sets, so maximizing is not always available. Given that it is not, satisficing deserves attention, both as the most important alternative to maximizing and for the lessons it can yield with respect to goal-directed action. With those lessons in hand, standard maximizing decision theory is reconsidered, with the aim of showing that it does not adequately represent the normative distinction between means and ends. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 335-358 [Access article in PDF] Between East and West: Hegel and the Origins of the Russian Dilemma Ana Siljak Nikolai Berdiaev, the eminent twentieth-century Russian philosopher, wrote that the "problem of East and West" was an "eternal" one for Russia. 1 Attempting to make sense of the violent upheavals that shook Russia in 1917, Berdiaev believed that the source of (...) Russian troubles lay in the "inconsistency of the Russian spirit" due to the "conflict of the Eastern and Western elements in her." 2 Russia, he argued, always contained within its wide territory an invisible and shifting border between two continents, and thus Russian society was forever torn between two cultures. Berdiaev insisted that Russia could not discover its true calling or its place in the world until it resolved its internal conflict between East and West. 3Berdiaev was contemplating the course of the nineteenth century, when Russia's geographical destiny had deeply troubled Russian intellectuals. In the late 1830s Russian thinkers began their minute analyses of cultural and historical sources, hoping to determine the essential character of their nation and believing that their research would enable them to predict Russia's future. Often, diverse questions of progress and stagnation, tradition and innovation, and the individual and society were all framed within this overarching problem of East versus West.It is tempting to see this Russian dilemma as longstanding and natural, given Russia's position between two continents. Indeed, many recent scholars have argued that Russian encounters with Asia, taking place within the framework of Russia's territorial expansion eastward, forced Russians to examine their relationships [End Page 335] with the Eastern, Asian world. 4 It is true that European geographers and historians have debated the location of the border between Asia and Europe since the Middle Ages. But before the nineteenth century this ambiguity hardly troubled Russian minds. The Muscovite state of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, was well acquainted with cultures and lands to its East, engaging in trade and diplomatic relations with Muslim Tatars and others. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Muscovy was concerned about its position between Eastern and Western countries. 5 Even Peter the Great, whom historians have credited for bringing European customs into Russia, was little concerned with the European/Asian divide in Russian culture. For him the most important geographical question was Russia's place among the northern states, and he was particularly obsessed with Sweden as Russia's primary military rival. 6After Peter's reign, educated Russians, as they became increasingly acquainted with Western European culture, experienced their first pangs of envy and self-doubt in the face of perceived European superiority. Nonetheless, throughout the eighteenth century few cultured Russians had trouble embracing a diverse historical legacy and national character--German, Slavic, Asian. After all, Europeans themselves were proud of their barbarian past. Peter the Great's chief historian, V. N. Tatishchev, wrote with full confidence and little concern that the Russian empire was located "in both Europe and Asia," noting that though more Russian people lived in Europe, Russia had more territory in Asia. In passing he mentioned that "where the border between these two large and most important cultures is located, no one has as yet determined for certain." 7 According to him, the Slavic people as a whole could be divided into Asian and European branches, thus both cultures were of importance in Russian history. 8The first of the great nineteenth-century Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, was proud of Russia's diverse heritage. Russia, he wrote, [End Page 336] raising its head between the Asiatic and European kingdoms, represented within its civic life the characteristics of these two parts of the world: a mixture of old Eastern customs, brought by the Slavs into Europe and renewed, so to speak, by our long connection with the Mongols; Byzantine customs borrowed by the Russians along with the Christian religion, and some German customs imparted by the Varangians.... 9This cultural "mixture... (shrink)

I develop a critique of Hume’s infamous problem of induction based upon the idea that the principle of induction (PI) is a normative rather than descriptive claim. I argue that Hume’s problem is a false dilemma, since the PI might be neither a “relation of ideas” nor a “matter of fact” but rather what I call a contingent normative statement. In this case, the PI could be justified by a means-ends argument in which the link between (...) class='Hi'>means and end is established solely by deductive reasoning. The means-ends argument is an elementary result from formal learning theory that you must be willing to make inductive generalizations if you want to be logically reliable in the types of examples Hume described. This justification of the PI avoids both horns of Hume’s dilemma. Since no contradiction ensues from rejecting logical reliability as an aim, the PI is contingent. Yet since the proof concerning the PI and logical reliability is not based on inductive reasoning, there is no threat of circularity. (shrink)

Theories of meaning developed within the analytic tradition, starting with Gottlob Frege, and within continental philosophy, starting with Husserl, can be distinguished by their disagreement about the phenomenon of collapse or failure of meaning. Our text focuses on Frege’s legacy, taken up by Rudolph Carnap, which culminated in a view of the collapse of meaning defined first by a purely syntactic conception of categorial error and second, when Tarski entered the scene, by the paradoxes created by the conflict between (...) the use of the predicate truth and the concept of proof. As positivism’s conventionalism and late model-theoretic semantics became the paradigms derived from this position, the result, in our view, was a conception of meaning success and meaning failure dominated by dependence on a technological conception. We will argue that this dependence leads to the inability to evaluate the breaks in rational parameters and crises of meaning addressed by the phenomenological and transcendental perspectives. Husserl’s critique of logic as technology is the basis for the reflexive standpoint on the phenomena of meaning failure that leads to a theoretical and eidetic ideal approach to that phenomenon. It is then suggested that this phenomenological reflective standpoint on the problem of meaning failure is the origin of the doors that lead to the divergent paths between the analytic and continental traditions. Thus, this is an article with three argumentative phases connected into a larger unity. The first phase presents Husserl’s critique of a purely extensional, syntactic, and recursive conception of logical consequence and the concept of truth; the second presents Hussel’s larger conception of meaning-failure; the third—presented in an appendix— presents a lesson on the division between continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to clarify the meaning and the use of the concept of relativism in the context of National Socialism (NS). This chapter analyzes three aspects of the connection between relativism and NS: The first part examines the critical reproach that NS is a form of relativism. I analyze and criticize the common core of this widespread argument, which is developed in varying contexts, was held in different times, and is still shared by several (...) authors. The second part investigates the ideological debate among Nazi philosophers themselves concerning whether NS is indeed a form of relativism. I focus on the epistemological consequences of Nazi anthropology and analyze both its relativistic tendencies and the strategies used to reject relativism. In contrast to the received view, I argue that Nazi philosophers attempted to overcome both absolutism and relativism. The third part investigates the academic debate on relativism during NS, using the example of the prize question on relativism that was announced by the Prussian Academy of Science in 1936. By examining the academic approaches to the problem of relativism, I also address the question of how broader philosophical debates were related to the core of Nazi ideology. Academic philosophers took the self-understanding of Nazi philosophers seriously. They saw the shared aim of overcoming relativism as an opportunity to collaborate with NS. The brief conclusion summarizes the findings of the chapter. I conclude that, in the context of NS, critics, ideologists, and academics understand and use the concept of relativism in the same way. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 23-26 [Access article in PDF] The Complexity of Evil Behavior David E. Ward I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN this reply by thanking the commentators. The reports of their clinical experience contained some interesting evidence regarding evil behavior that, I think, supports my thesis and their full frontal criticism has given me a chance to reemphasize how complex the problem of evil behavior is.On (...) the question raised by Steven Sverdlik, as to whether Kant was in possession of the idea of the unconscious: it never occurred to me that Kant's notion of the subreption of the will—the idea that we could somehow be deceived with regard to our true motives (1956, 121)—could be regarded as a reason for assuming that Kant had a concept of the unconscious. Certainly talk of being unsure of one's motives has been common currency in every age that has had the idea of acting out of duty as opposed to desire. This uncertainty allows us to think about unconscious motives and thus of a set of hidden mechanisms that might motivate our actions without our being aware of them. However, I think we would both agree that Kant nowhere articulates this hypothesis. Freud did articulate it. So I agree that I should have said that Kant was not in possession of a concept of unconscious mechanisms that may generate behavior in such a way as to be opaque to the agent involved.Sverdlik has two worries with regard to my thesis. The first concerns my characterization of evil behavior as wrongdoing for wrongdoing's sake. He believes that rather than insisting that all principled behavior must fit this formula, "Ward is really interested in wrongdoing that is non-impulsive and actuated by some principle, but not necessarily the satanic one." This is, indeed, exactly what I was interested in. It is the unconscious adherence to some principle that causes all the trouble for evil people. Sverdlik thinks that my proposal was "to attribute acceptance [of such principles] to the unconscious" and to maintain that though the agent does "not consciously accept it, [it] does do so unconsciously" (my emphasis). What I actually said was: In my account, there is a near-perfect dovetailing of the two different psychological perspectives—that of Kant's moral psychology (which lacks the resources to accommodate the possibility of evil) and that of Peck's psychiatric diagnosis of evil—that explains (on my construal) how an unconscious adherence to unacknowledged principles could be the driving power behind evil behaviour. What is the difference between unconscious acceptance of a principle and unconscious adherence to it? This difference can be illustrated in connection with Sverdlik's continuation of his argument: Ward suggests that the agent does not consciously accept it, but does so unconsciously. But why does the unconscious not see that it is not universalizable? And if it does see this, why does it proceed to act on it? Ward's picture of the unconscious must allow it to be rational enough to understand the narcissistic principle, for example, [protect your self-image at all costs] and to act on it. But if it is that rational, then it is puzzling that it does not draw the same conclusion [End Page 23] that the agent's conscious deliberation can and will draw. Therefore, if consciously acting on a non-universalizable principle is inexplicable, then so is unconsciously acting on it. According to my picture of the unconscious, what the unconscious is rational about are hypothetical principles: it sees the connection between means and ends with perfect rationality. When, in my article, I distinguished between categorical and hypothetical imperatives I pointed out that... it is clear that hypothetical principles like always dress in woolens can only motivate us if we already have a desire to be warm. Strictly speaking, hypothetical principles do not motivate us by themselves. They are only useful in specifying the means to an end that a rational person would follow if she wanted to satisfy a certain desire. (My emphasis.) I was assuming, then... (shrink)

The Synoptic Problem is a puzzle that scholars have desired to solve since the 18th century. The discussion has a religious background, because it is about the first three canonical Gospels of the Church, namely Matthew, Mark and Luke, which came to be called the Synoptic Gospels. The discussion, in the most basic context, concentrates on the point that there is a possible relationship or connection between the Synoptic Gospels and that each one is substantially similar to another (...) but at the same time includes different aspects. This theoretical discussion separates the Gospel of John from the Synoptic Gospels and does not see it as a main source for the history of Jesus. The method of discussion is based on the reading of the Synoptic Gospels from a birds-eye-view, as seen together, and as comparatively in relation to each other. The aim of the discussion is to reach accurate historical information about Jesus and the birth of Christianity by analyzing the possible relationship between the Synoptic Gospels through their sources. Several hypotheses have been proposed for the solution of the Synoptic Problem. However, all the modern studies in the context of the problem are carried out by Western scholars. In other words, Synoptic Problem is a relatively unknown subject in the Turkish academic circles. So in this paper the aim is to draw the attention of the Turkish academy to the substance and framework of the Synoptic Problem through an introductory survey. In addition, some results that can be reached in this context will be exemplified by getting help from the redaction criticism. Summary: The Synoptic Problem is a puzzle that scholars have been trying to solve since the 18th century. The discussion has a religious background, for it is about the first three canonical Gospels of the Church (namely Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are called the Synoptic Gospels). The discussion, in the most basic context, concentrates on a possible relationship or connection between the Synoptic Gospels and that each one is substantially similar to another one, but at the same time including different aspects. This theoretical discussion separates the Gospel of John from the Synoptic Gospels, and does not see it as a main source for the history of Jesus. The method of this discussion is based on the broad reading of the Synoptic Gospels as well as a comparison in relation to each other. The aim of the discussion is to reach accurate historical information about Jesus and the birth of Christianity by analyzing the possible relationship between the Synoptic Gospels through their sources.The traditional four Gospels have been debated since ancient times. There have been many dimensions of these discussions. However, whether the Gospels contain contradictory information or not has always been at the forefront. Pagan writers, such as Celsus or Porphyry, criticized the Gospels in this respect. Christian writers, such as Marcion or Tatian who lived in the second century when the Gospels were not seen as canon yet, raised some suggestions based on the doubts that the Gospels were incompatible with the Jewish scriptures and contained contradictions among themselves. Marcion included a single Gospel that was close to the Gospel of Luke in his New Testament canon. Tatian made a mixed version of the four Gospels. In the next stage, the contradictions in the Gospels were explained by the Christian writers, such as Origenes or Augustine. However, the four Gospels were more prominent in this new era and they were regarded as canons by the Church. Therefore, the Christian writers’ approach to the Gospels also began to change. Origen emphasized allegorical interpretation which had been known since the Jewish philosopher Philo (d. 50) in Alexandria. Thus, he wanted to protect the contradictory texts from being seen as the source of the problem. He argued that the problem was the human mind that could not grasp the allegorical mystery of the text or the narrative in the text. Augustine had a similar approach with the suggestion that the Gospels should be read by a faithful heart. According to Augustine, it is natural that the Gospels reflect different characters because the Gospel writers describe Christ differently. In order to be able to comprehend the divine meaning in these texts, the Gospels must be read in a spiritual mood. After all, all these Christian writers aimed to respond to the criticism by the pagan writers regarding the Gospels, as well as the current suspicions in the minds of Christians.Origen was the first Christian thinker to devote an effort to solve the debates on the Gospels in a logical and systematic way. As for Augustine, he was the starting point of the Synoptic Problem since Augustine was the first to mention the links between the Gospels texts, namely the idea that the authors of the Gospels may have used each other as sources. However, in the modern sense, the Synoptic Problem has been transformed into an academic discipline by the intellectuals who followed the path of Enlightenment thinkers, such as Reimarus (1684-1768), Lessing (1729-1781), Griesbach (1745-1812), and Eichhorn (1752-1827). Because modern researchers differ from old writers based on Church ideologies, they began to demolish traditional beliefs about the Gospels. Thus, the effort to harmonize incompatible narratives in the Gospels is left aside. Indeed, the ancient writers put a lot of effort into it. Now, in the places where indirect relations can be established between the Gospels, the idea of finding the common hypothetical sources of these Gospels is prominent. The claim that the Gospels were directly connected to Jesus as a historical figure has been gradually faded away. The basis of the Synoptic Problem is the comparative reading of the Synoptic Gospels. In the modern sense, this comparison and its interpretation was made by J. J. Griesbach (1745-1812) for the first time. Griesbach was the first scholar to compare Matthew, Mark, and Luke in a way to create a synopsis. His comparison is based on a reading done by placing several passages or narratives from the Gospels side by side.Many hypotheses have been put forward for the solution of the Synoptic Problem. Two-Source Hypotheses, Four-Source Hypotheses, and Farrer Theory are the most popular ones among researchers. These views are based on Marcan Priority. In this context, independently from each other, Matthew and Luke used Mark’s text as their sources. Also, according to the Two-Sources and Four-Source Hypotheses, the authors of Matthew and Luke used another written document as their sources. This document is named the “Q” which derives from the German word “Quellen.” In this way, it is assumed that the Q-document and the Gospel of Mark are the sources of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.The writers of the Gospels wrote their own texts by using written and oral sources. One of the scholarly methods is the redaction criticism that explores how the Gospel writers shaped the old literary documents by arranging, re-shaping, and revising them. This theory looks at whether the source used by an author is known and available today in order to understand whether how the author used his sources would provide important clues about his tendencies or ideologies. In this regard, the theory of the Marcan priority can be rendered functional along with the redaction criticism. In doing so, it is possible to reach important conclusions about Jesus and the birth of Christianity, as well as the theological and ideological ideas of the unknown authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. First of all, the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark’s text as their sources. Secondly, we have these three Gospels today. And finally, the ways in which the writers of Matthew and Luke shaped the text, phrases, or expressions of Mark reveal important results about their thoughts. The analysis shows that the authors of Matthew and Luke sometimes made additons that could be called interpolation to Mark’s text; sometimes they wanted to censor some statements in Mark; sometimes they tried to explain or clarify some statements in the Mark, or sometimes they tried to blur clear expressions and expositions in Mark's text. These authors did not do such things without a reason. They wanted to reshape Mark’s text in accordance with their theological understanding of Jesus as Christ. In this context, according to some expressions in Mark, Jesus' power had a limit. The authors of Matthew and Luke did not find these statements appropriate, because they changed Mark’s some statements to create an impression that Jesus’ power was not limited. This proves that the authors of Matthew and Luke re-arranged their resources to present Jesus as a superhuman being. Similarly, in Mark, there are lines in which Jesus declares his loyalty and servitude to the God of Israel. In such passages, he presented his personality in a low Christology context against God. However, the authors of Matthew and Luke were disturbed by such statements, because they intervened in these statements in Mark. They wanted to change some of the meanings and contexts in Mark’s text through such interventions and presented Jesus as Christ in a high Christological context to their readers. In the end, all these researches also responded to the question of to what extent the Gospels provide reliable information on a historical basis. (shrink)

The iltifāt (reference switching) is one of the arts of high literary value, widely practiced in the Qurʾān. This art takes place in the form of switching to another person, verb mode, number, preposition or sentence type contrary to the necessity of the situation, while continuing the word as a certain person, verb mode, number, preposition or sentence type. The art of iltifāt adds certain meanings to words such as certainty, continuity and movement. It keeps the curiosity, desire, excitement and (...) shiver alive. Similar to those who read the Qurʾān, those who read the translation of the Qurʾān are expected to be able to notice these meanings as much as possible and feel the literary pleasure of this art. There are important structural differences between Arabic and Turkish. In addition, the text that needs to be translated into Turkish is Holy Qurʾān, which has a divine infinite dimension, and it is a limited human mind attempts to translate it. This situation requires an advanced level of caution and diligence in transferring the art of iltifāt to the translations of Qurʾān. The issue of the art of iltifāt and the transfer of this art to the translations of the Qurʾān has also been studied in scientific research in different world languages such as Arabic, English and Indonesian. As far as we can determine, the only study in Turkish that examines the reflection of the iltifāt in the Qurʾān is the article titled "The Translation Problem of the Art of iltifāt in the Translation of the Qurʾān" by Haşim Özdaş. In the mentioned article, five different Qurʾān translations of eight verses from different types of the art of iltifāt were examined. It has been claimed that there is no art of iltifāt in Turkish language and literature, and that the translation of the art of iltifāt in the verses into Turkish is an obstacle to understanding the verses and leads to a wrong or incomplete understanding. As a solution, while the verses are being given and translated, it is suggested that the art of iltifāt in the verses be ignored. In this research article, the cases of the translations of the Qurʾān reflecting the art of iltifāt, as an example of iltifāt between māzī (past tense) and muzāriʻ (present tense) verbs modes in the verses are discussed. In addition, it discusses the opinions that say there is no art of iltifāt in the Turkish language, that the exact transfer of the art of iltifāt found in the Qurʾān to the translations of the Qurʾān causes wrong or incomplete understanding, therefore, the art of iltifāt should be ignored when the verses are being translated. As a result, the present study argues that the art of iltifāt is also a subject of Turkish rhetoric, which should be reflected in the translations of the Qurʾān as much as possible, and the transfer of the art of iltifāt in the translations of the Qurʾān does not constitute an obstacle to understanding the verses, on the contrary, the reference to this art in the verses will contribute to the realization of the divine purpose and wisdom. The data sources of the research were created from 6 verses and their 22 different translations, using various sampling methods. The data collected from these were analysed using the comparative text analysis method on the basis of the inductive approach. Qualitative data was converted into quantitative data, processed in the SPSS application, and the findings were presented as numerical figures in tables. At the end of the research, it was determined that iltifāt between māzī and muzāriʻ verbs modes studied in the science of rhetoric was also a subject of grammar as the phenomenon of time shifts in verbs. It was seen that the art of iltifāt was applied in an average of 800 places in the Qurʾān, and the iltifāt between māzī and muzāriʻ verbs modes accounted for 6.9% (55 pieces) of this amount. Most of these fifty-five iltifāts were iltifāt from the māzī verb mode to the muzāriʻ verb mode (63.6%), while the amount of iltifāt the muzāriʻ verb mode to the māzī verb mode was less (36.4%). In the analysed translations of the Qurʾān, it was determined that the iltifāt between māzī and muzāriʻ verbs modes was not reflected at a rate of 90.9%, and the art of iltifāt was completely abandoned in 14 of the 22 translations. It was concluded that the reason why the art of iltifāt in the verses was not reflected in the translations of the Qurʾān was the belief that this art was not found in Turkish and that the transfer of this art leads to wrong and incomplete understanding. In the research, it was proposed to increase the number of scientific studies in which various translation strategies and techniques were tested in the transfer of the art of iltifāt in the verses in the translations of the Qurʾān. In this respect, this research article is expected to pave the way for more research on the issue of transferring the arts used in the Qurʾān and to be useful for future translations of the Qurʾān. (shrink)

Despite quantum theory’s remarkable success at predicting the statistical results of experiments, many philosophers worry that it nonetheless lacks some crucial connection between theory and experiment. Such worries constitute the Quantum Measurement Problems. One can broadly identify two kinds of worries: (1) pragmatic: it is unclear how to model our measurement processes in order to extract experimental predictions, and (2) realist: we lack a satisfying metaphysical account of measurement processes. While both issues deserve attention, the pragmatic worries (...) have worse consequences if left unanswered: If our pragmatic theory-to-experiment linkage is unsatisfactory, then quantum theory is at risk of losing both its evidential support and its physical salience. Avoiding these risks is at the core of what I will call the Pragmatic Measurement Problem. Fortunately, the pragmatic measurement problem is not too difficult to solve. For non-relativistic quantum theory, the story goes roughly as follows: One can model each of quantum theory’s key experimental successes on a case-by-case basis by using a measurement chain. In modeling this measurement chain, it is pragmatically necessary to switch from using a quantum model to a classical model at some point. That is, it is pragmatically necessary to invoke a Heisenberg cut at some point along the measurement chain. Past this case-by-case measurement framework, one can then strive for a wide-scoping measurement theory capable of modeling all (or nearly all) possible measurement processes. For non-relativistic quantum theory, this leads us to our usual projective measurement theory. As a bonus, proceeding this way also gives us an empirically meaningful characterization of the theory’s observables as (positive) self-adjoint operators. But how does this story have to change when we move into the context of quantum field theory (QFT)? It is well known that in QFT almost all localized projective measurements violate causality, allowing for faster-than-light signaling; These are Sorkin’s impossible measurements. Thus, the story of measurement in QFT cannot end as it did before with a projective measurement theory. But does this then mean that we need to radically rethink the way we model measurement processes in QFT? Are our current experimental practices somehow misguided? Fortunately not. I will argue that (once properly understood) our old approach to modeling quantum measurements is still applicable in QFT contexts. We ought to first use measurement chains to build up a case-by-case measurement framework for QFT. Modeling these measurement chains will require us to invoke what I will call a QFT-cut. That is, at some point along the measurement chain we must switch from using a QFT model to a non-QFT model. Past this case-by-case measurement framework, we can then strive for both a new wide-scoping measurement theory for QFT and an empirically meaningful characterization of its observables. It is at this point that significantly more theoretical work is needed. This paper ends by briefly reviewing the state of the art in the physics literature regarding the modeling of measurement processes involving quantum fields. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Legacy: Minds and Meaning in Early Modern Philosophy by David B. Hausman, Alan HausmanDaniel E. FlageDavid B. Hausman and Alan Hausman. Descartes’s Legacy: Minds and Meaning in Early Modern Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 149. Paper, $19.95.David and Alan Hausman have written a fascinating study of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume. It is an examination of what the Hausmans call the “information problem,” (...) that is, “how an information-processing entity receives input from a source outside itself and processes it” (1), and how those philosophers attempted to solve the problem. It does not examine the writings of these philosophers in their historical context.At the heart of their work is an argument that Cartesian ideas are intentional. Noting the remark in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet that all ideas—including ideas of color—are innate, they argue that innate ideas intend exemplars or archetypes, entities whose existence is eternal but in principle, even if not in fact, independent of God. Only such a position, they argue, can solve the semantic problem posed by the third Cartesian demon, namely, that “if our thoughts could mean something other than what we believe they mean, then no proof for the actual existence of anything, including God and the cogito, could give us results” (38). This implies that all ideas are meaningful, have objective reality, and represent genuine possibilities, a point that Descartes himself came to recognize only in the years following the publication of the Meditations (39). Further, it solves the problem posed by the ex nihilo principle: “If the ex nihilo principle as a constraint on efficient causality requires that the meaningfulness of ideas have an intentional structure such that a complex of such ideas necessitates which possibilities must be actualized in order for the ideas to be true; there are necessary connections between ideas and their intentions” (40). Contending that the ex nihilo principle is the basis for Cartesian rationality (41), they argue that their position disposes [End Page 465] of a significant element of the Cartesian circle: the meaningfulness of an idea is independent of the existence and goodness of God (42). Since ideas intend exemplars, it is possible to explain the notion of eminent containment of extension without contending that God is extended (43–46). With the introduction of ideas as intentional entities—not entities which inherently resemble their objects—the mind/body distinction becomes a logical outgrowth of the necessity of solving a new philosophical problem, viz., how to deal with the fact that intentional entities have an entirely different logical structure from physical entities.Descartes’s second demon concerns individuals (49). The Hausmans attempt to solve this problem by way of a discussion of the distinction between simple and complex ideas: “Complex ideas will get meaning as a function of the simple ideas they ‘contain’ ” (49). Simple ideas intend exemplars. Complex ideas are ideas of complex individuals. The Hausmans argue that Descartes deals with the problem of individuation on the basis of some version of a substratum theory of substance, a claim based in part on an analysis of the piece of wax argument (54–57). “[G]iven the causal principles of the Third Meditation, the only way we can account for our judgements about individual physical things is to posit the existence of a physical world” (57): the problem is a semantic problem resting on the necessity of the ex nihilo principle (58).Their first Cartesian demon is discussed in terms of the “inverted spectrum” problem, e.g., the possibility that cubes produce sphere ideas and vice versa, a possibility that results systematically in false judgments: there is a physical world, but it is systematically different from the way we believe it to be (58–61). Unlike the earlier demons, the first demon can be exorcised only if there is a good God, although behaviorally such a systematic deception would be indistinguishable from behavior based on ideas corresponding to a physical reality.In their last three chapters, the Hausmans focus on related issues in the philosophies of Berkeley and Hume. They argue that Berkeley’s account of reality blurs the distinction between idea... (shrink)

This article reviews the possible role of the universal basic income in the transformation of experience in gender and age perspectives. The universal basic income has been particularly hotly debated in recent decades. Regardless of the position, the common tone of the debates is the imperative “we must experiment.” Such a close interest in the universal basic income derives from the fact that it threatens to change the “generic” for humans situation of finiteness of resources and the need to work. (...) Thus, it is able to change the experience of what it means to be human. Since the universal basic income allows to separate labor from income, it is likely that its introduction will return value to the currently stigmatized or devalued types of labor, such as child care, elderly care or domestic work. It creates opportunities for experience redistribution in gender perspective: care and leaving, affective connection, and sensitivity could become the business of both parents, not just mothers. Another experience redistribution is possible in age perspective. Along with automation of labor, population ageing is a universal process that will sooner or later affect all the countries. Alarmist narratives that present this process as a threat and a problem now prevail. They are largely based on outdated ideas about old age and what it means to be old. However, in fact, ageing is the maturation of the population as a whole. With a proper re-evaluation of the meaning and significance of old age, the introduction of the universal basic income could create material conditions for the transfer of experience from the elderly to the younger – for the first time since traditional societies. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the shifts in Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘critical philosophy of values’ as it developed hand in hand with his understanding of relativism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by analyzing the role that relativism played in his philosophical project, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Windelband's intellectual development in the context of historicism and Neo-Kantianism. On the other hand, by highlighting Windelband’s contribution to the understanding of relativism, it sheds light on an important (...) episode in the history of that problem. The paper distinguishes between three phases in Windelband’s thinking and shows that his views about relativism changed in close connection with his conception of history. The early Windelband thought that historicism was compatible with absolute validity because he was firmly convinced of historical progress. The mature Windelband rejected progress as a means for justifying validity and put the problem of relativism into sharp relief. In response to the failure of his mature philosophy to fend off relativism, the later Windelband strengthened the role of history again. The paper concludes that Windelband’s significance lies not in his arguments against relativism, but rather in having furthered philosophical understanding of the problems at stake. (shrink)

In this article we study how members of an interdisciplinary research team use an online forum for communicating about their research project. We use the concepts of "community of practice" and "connectivity" to consider the online interaction within a wider question of how people from different academic traditions "do" interdisciplinarity. The online forum for this Grey and Pleasant Land project did not take off as hoped, even after a series of interventions and amendments, and we consider what the barriers were (...) and how they might be overcome. Barriers to involvement included participants' expectations of interaction and collaboration--expectation that real interaction happens elsewhere, tensions between academic discourse and forum talk norms, unfamiliarity with the technology, and different conceptions of appropriate academic discussion. We suggest that common academic practice does not prepare us well for creating interdisciplinary research communities through online collaboration tools, whereas such tools are our best bet currently for including geographically dispersed members in collaborative projects. Therefore, careful planning and competence building would be necessary if such tools are to be used in collaborative research. Suggested interventions, based on our experience, include providing a more focused forum, making technical support easily available, and setting up particular tasks or items to debate, within a preset, synchronous timeframe, focusing on issues relevant to the project at that time. (shrink)

First published in 1982, Means and Ends in Education explores the contrasts between approaches to teaching where teaching is simply a means to some other end; approaches in which the end determines the means; and approaches in which means and ends are integrated and education serves an intrinsic purpose. The book considers the concept of education and evaluates different processes and techniques of teaching and learning. Divided into three parts, it covers instrumentalist approaches, (...) learner-oriented approaches, and liberal approaches to education. It puts forward differing views as to what the term 'education' means to different professions and in different contexts, and how different approaches result in a very different experience for the recipient. It also discusses the extent to which an evaluation of methods of education and an evaluation of the aims of education are linked. Means and Ends in Education will appeal to those with an interest in the philosophy of education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor and (...) the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

Many forms of virtue ethics, like certain forms of utilitarianism, suffer from the problem of indirection. In those forms, the criterion for status of a trait as a virtue is not the same as the criterion for the status of an act as right. Furthermore, if the virtues for example are meant to promote the nourishing of the agent, the virtuous agent is not standardly supposed to be motivated by concern for her own flourishing in her activity. In this paper, (...) I propose a virtue ethics which does not suffer from the problem. Traits are not virtues because their cultivation and manifestation promote a value such as agent flourishing. They are virtues in so far as they are habits of appropriate response to various relevant values. This means that there is a direct connection between the rationale of a virtue and what makes an action virtuous or right. (shrink)

In connection with the failures in the reorganization of the Soviet economy, increasingly frequent attempts have been made recently not only to rethink the path traversed by the Soviet economy and the difficulties it has experienced but also to clarify its place within the historical process as a whole. This is not accidental: even as it deals with the very concrete questions of Soviet history, our social thought has again and again encountered general problems whose lack of resolution (...) simply blocks further progress. "Anyone who tackles particular problems without first resolving the general ones," wrote V.I. Lenin at one time, "will inevitably ‘stumble’ upon these general questions at each step without being aware of it. But to stumble blindly upon them in each particular case means to condemn one's policies to the worst vacillation and lack of principle" . We shall try to keep this methodological principle in mind in analyzing the historical interaction between Soviet politics and economics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Dialectics of Emptiness: Overcoming Nihilism and Combatting Mechanization in Nishitani Keiji’s Postwar ThoughtGriffin WernerIn his postwar writings on nihilism in modernity, Nishitani Keiji (1900–90) does not explicitly articulate the structure of the relationship between the mechanization of the world and nihilism. Instead, he discusses mechanization with respect to his critique of modern worldviews such as atheism, scientism, and liberalism and how they have contributed to the (...) advent of nihilism and the loss of human autonomy in modern Europe and Japan.1 According to Nishitani, before the advent of scientism and the subsequent progression of unfettered technological development, pre-Western-Enlightenment and pre-Meiji-period worldviews consisted of a fundamental embodied connection between a people or culture and their spiritual traditions. In Europe’s case, due to the death of God and the subsequent shift from a Christian worldview to an atheistic and scientistic one, a historical period of nihilism began. Modern mechanistic worldviews like Descartes’s, Nishitani argues, present the world as consisting of dead matter that is fundamentally separated from the indubitable ego. No longer is the world considered to be “alive” in the sense of there being a fundamental connection between human life and the living, breathing world around it. Rather, from the perspective of the ego, the modern world is simply a cold and lifeless world of dead machines.As discussed in Religion and Nothingness, the development of structurally Cartesian worldviews led to or caused the advent of nihilism in Europe. Consequently, European culture lost its cultural ground in Christianity and individuals lost their foundational meaning which supported their understanding of themselves in relation [End Page 129] to others, the world, and a transcendent God. As Japan began to modernize, or, arguably, “Westernize,” it inherited a Cartesian-like worldview and, over time, subsequently lost touch with its traditional philosophical and religious ground as well. As a result, the modern period of nihilism began in both Europe and Japan as both peoples lost touch with the traditional meaning that supported them.While this description between mechanization and nihilism implies a causal relationship, I argue that the relationship between nihilism and the mechanization of the world can be more accurately articulated in terms of a dialectical relationship. In the modern context, not only does the mechanization of the world lead to or exacerbate a culture’s plunge into nihilism or an individual’s confrontation with the abyss of nihility, but nihilism also reinforces and exacerbates the mechanization of the world. As partners in this dialectical oscillation, each reinforces the other as one (culture or person) continuously spirals deeper and deeper into meaninglessness, ultimately to the culminating point that Nishitani calls the “mechanization of man.”2Just as Nishitani argues that the problem of nihilism can only be solved by way of radicalizing nihilism to the “field of emptiness,” the structural oscillation between nihilism and mechanization will continue at the levels of the individual and the culture unless nihilism and mechanization are overcome. However, rather than only overcoming nihilism to reach emptiness in the individual, and that leading to social and political change, I argue that overcoming the dialectical tension between nihilism and mechanization will require a “dialectics of emptiness.” Such a dialectic will combat nihilism and mechanization with a mutually reinforcing tension between personal transformation, which overcomes nihilism by way of stepping back to the field of emptiness, and socio-political transformation by way of a politics of emptiness. Solving the problem of nihilism in modernity—insofar as it is always already in relation to mechanization—will require more than individual existential confrontation and transformation. Through one’s individual overcoming of nihilism, one must also aim to “empty” those institutions which contribute to the mechanization of the world. While Nishitani highlights the individual’s religious quest as the impetus for the social and political change necessary to overcome the problem of nihilism at the cultural level, an analysis of how that might be done and what [End Page 130] may be politically necessary in order to do so is missing from his thought.As such, my aim in this article is twofold: I attempt to shed light on the structure of nihilism and... (shrink)