Hidden in Historicism considers how the nineteenth-century philosophy of historicism depicts three "forgotten time regimes": a time of rise and fall, an ambiguous time of synchronicity of the non-synchronous, and a time in which decisive moments dominate. Before the eighteenth century, time was past-oriented. This inversed in the Enlightenment, when the future became dominating. Today, this time of progress continues to be embraced as a "time of the modern". Yet, inequality, increasing violence and (...) climate change lead to doubts over a bright future. In this book, Harry Jansen moves away from the heritage of Reinhart Koselleck and his single time of the modern towards a historicist, threefold temporal approach to history writing. In the time regime of the twenty-first century past, present and future coexist. It is a heterogeneous time that takeson the three forms of historicism. Jansen's study shows how all three times exist together in current historiography and contribute to a better understanding of the world today. Based on the idea that an incarnated time rules everything that happens it reality, the book offers a fresh perspective on the ongoing discussion about time and time regimes in contemporary philosophy and theory of history for students and scholars, both time specialists and the non-specialist. (shrink)

The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense and meaning out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and see Nothing? This book redefines Nothing as a historical object and reorients historical consciousness in terms of an awareness of what has and has not been considered worth remembering. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that (...) is supposedly uninteresting, not happening, all that we have skipped over or is just not there. It will take some (possibly considerable) mental adjustment before we can see Nothing in the way this author has come to think of it, with a capital N. But if we are to transform Nothing into a legitimate historical object, something that exists in the present and has existed in the past, we must see it that way. For Nothing has actually been there all along, in plain sight. When nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when nothing happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being disappointed when nothing happens-for instance, when a forecast end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup and recalibrate their predictions. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Visually driven, this book explores the ways that modern photographers, artists and writers have depicted ruins, emptiness, and a lack of action. It shows us how the perception that "nothing is the way it was" has produced images and art about memories. The book also analyzes such phenomena as fake historical markers that joke about how "On This Site Nothing Happened" to reflect on our everyday awareness that important events and places from the past be remembered. Most of all, it uncovers the mistake of taking Nothing for granted--because Nothing is happening all the time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project by Ann HartleVicente Raga RosalenyHARTLE, Ann. What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2022. ix + 178 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $30.00Why are we witnessing increasing social polarization in Western societies? What has happened to make our liberal democracies so ideologically charged? Professor Ann (...) Hartle's book tries to answer these and other questions in line with the concept of civility that, according to her thesis, Michel de Montaigne created in early modernity and that is about to disappear in our day. Not in vain is Montaigne the protagonist of this book, given that Professor Hartle is a world-renowned specialist on the author of the Essays, although in this case she is interested in the transformations that gave rise to modernity in order to understand our present day. She reads Montaigne for a better interpretation of some central problems of our time, such as the difficulty to speak freely that is experienced on university campuses and, in general, the increasing politicization of our civil societies.Thus, in the first place, Professor Hartle's work interrogates the origins of civility, the social bond created in modernity. To this end, she exposes what happened in the time of Montaigne, when societies, based on the classical and Christian tradition, were plunged into a general crisis. This is what the French essayist detected, and it led him to propose a new type of bond. For this, it is necessary to free oneself from tradition, which had legitimized the division between masters and slaves, the source of all conflicts.Montaigne's movement is philosophical in character: It consists of a split carried out in his Essays between the natural human being and the philosophical observer, which leads to a break with traditional moral standards, identified with Nature. The new human being, thus unfolded, can choose his own hierarchy of values and address the good he chooses with his own will (although this will be a will purified of particularisms, without excessive self-esteem). Such self-awareness, achieved by Montaigne as an accidental philosopher, is concretized in the predominance of the concept of judgment, in the ability to freely choose our possibilities (and not ends dictated by Nature).The new world thus created, Hartle explains, gave rise to the liberal order. It is true that Montaigne was not a theorist, but in his work it is possible to find the rupture of the traditional hierarchy between masters [End Page 351] and slaves, now considered as equals before the law, which is above all, and which is the fruit of reason. In this civil society, human beings no longer dominate each other, and each peacefully pursues his purposes. It is the state, as the embodiment of the law, that regulates everything, except the space of freedom gained with the emergence of the modern public sphere.In this context, the concept of authenticity makes sense, which, according to Professor Hartle, is the best reflection of the breakdown of the traditional order and the disappearance of its moral community. Now each individual pursues his purposes and is no longer to fulfill the ends of a universal human nature. That is why the bond of civility, in which the absolute autonomy of the subject is recognized, as well as his equality before the law, replaces the moral ties of the traditional community and its hierarchies. It is the French thinker who best exemplifies this transit, by showing himself openly in his Essays as a common subject who pursues his purposes and who relates to others as equals, no longer as someone superior, capable of disputing merit, and dominating others.However, this new society and its civil bonds are in crisis; civility fades, or that is Professor Hartle's pessimistic conclusion. Today we are witnessing an ideologization of previously depoliticized areas, such as the university, with the demand for the use of politically correct language and the fear of expressing oneself freely, especially when one's own opinions do not align with the current political trends. The failure... (shrink)

"Works of art sometimes leave us speechless. But they almost never shut us up. They can't. There's just too much to say. Talking about art doesn't leave things as they are; it changes everything. To look, to think, to say what you see, or why you respond as you do, this changes what you see and it changes your response. The effort and the caring remake us. They remake us, in real time, as we listen to the song, (...) or examine the painting, or watch the movie. This is not unique to art, of course. What I have just outlined goes for all experience and is really life's first principle: life is a process of growth and reorganization, a process that commences right then when we first act, for we reorganize ourselves and develop in response to the ways what we do changes what we undergo, as Dewey might have said. But art aims at this; there is art so that we may remake ourselves, and also, so that we may catch ourselves in the act of this remaking. Art requires creation, even from its beholder. Yogi Berra was right: you can see a lot by observing. But observation - the effort and the caring - this requires thought, attention, focus. It can be play, but it is also work-like. Art always proposes a task, and the task is neither easy nor quite well-enough defined. The task, though, is only this: try to perceive, try to bring what is there into focus. If you do this, you will find yourself unveiled and, to whatever little extent, put together anew. The crucial thing to accept is that we don't get all this - the wow, the pleasure, the unveiling, and the reorganization - just for the price of admission. We have to join in, turn on, throw thoughts and reactions at the works themselves, position ourselves to catch them on the rebound, and allow room for emotions, not always positive. This is something we typically do with other people, and in the field cast by their responses and their words and argument. Works of art are always strange provocations; sometimes they offend us; more often they leave us untouched, unaffected, even bored. And this is where their value lies. Each of the short writings collected here is an exercise in giving art and myself the time to let something happen; I try to do this work so that art may do its work. Some of them were written while I was working on my 2015 book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, and they flow from the same well of curiosity that nourished that project. The title is borrowed from Joshua C Taylor's famous Learning To Look, which was the first book about art that I ever read"--. (shrink)

The target article focuses on the predictive coding of and something happened and the and response to make. We extend that scope by addressing the aspect of perception and action. Successful interaction with the environment requires predictions of everything from millisecond-accurate motor timing to far future events. The hierarchical framework seems appropriate for timing.

Time is woven into the fabric of our lives. Everything we do, we do in and across time. It is not just that our lives are stretched out in time, from the moment of birth to the moment of our death. It is that our lives are stories. We make sense of ourselves, today, by understanding who we were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that; by understanding what we did and why (...) we did it. Our memories shape our present selves, since we are the product of who we were, and who we remember being. Yet who we are lasts for but a moment. It is who we will be that demands attention. We are forever projecting ourselves into the future. We painstakingly plan for the needs of our future selves, all the while knowing that while what we do will make those future selves who they are, still, our future selves are elusive. So it is not simply that we happen to live our lives in time, the way, say, one might happen to live in Australia, or Singapore. It is hard to fathom how things could be otherwise. What would it be to live a life without time? Yet time itself is intangible. Though we are keenly aware of what has been ‒ of pain and loss, regret and pride ‒ and of what might be ‒ of anticipation, and dread, and longing ‒ time itself seems unaffected by anything we do. Though we can anticipate a future birthday cake, time itself cannot be tasted. Though we can dread a future dentist’s appointment, time itself cannot be touched. Though we remember the crunching of leaves this past autumn, time itself cannot be heard. How can it be that something so central to each of us, to who we are, and what we care about, can be so spectral? What, in the end, is time? Is time real, like a substance in which each of us, like insects in amber, finds ourselves trapped? Is time a dimension through which we can move? Is time not a thing at all, but some connection between events? If time is real, what is it like? Does it flow like a river, taking each of us prisoner in its current, washing us ever closer to the end of our lives? Is time like a cresting wave, coming ever closer to each of us from the future, engulfing us, and then receding into the past? Or is time static? Like a one-way road that each of us might wander, with no chance to turn back? Or perhaps time is like none of these things. Perhaps time is more like space; something we can navigate freely, so that we can visit different times just like we visit different places. Perhaps we can we travel in time the way we can travel in space. These questions, and many more, are the focus of this book. Now, you might wonder what philosophers are doing writing a book about time. Surely that’s a job for physicists! It is true: a great deal of what we know about time stems from our understanding of physics. However, even in physics we find that there are questions about time that go unanswered. Moreover, increasingly, physicists are turning to philosophers for help in understanding the role that time plays in current physical theories. Our goal is to get the reader up to speed on some of the central issues that influence our understanding of time so that they too may play a role in this ongoing discussion between science and philosophy. We hope that in doing so it will become clear what philosophy can bring to the study of time. There is a natural narrative in philosophy regarding the study of time, and we have chosen to organise this book according to that narrative. However, the book may also be approached in a ‘choose-your-own adventure’ spirit. While later chapters build on material introduced in earlier chapters, you can skip around, reading the book in any order you choose. For the instructor, this means that she can design her course around this book in any number of ways, depending on the particular topic she wishes to focus on. (shrink)

This is a book about everything and how anything whatsoever happens. By answering the question what is a thing?, the book reveals what it is to exist, what any being at all is. Such profound matters require a special method of inquiry. The method employed herein – original inquiry – begins with no assumptions about reality. It is, then, a method independent of any figure, trend, or tradition in the history of philosophy. Via this method, one simply confronts all (...) this, the world, an all-encompassing diverse array of whatnot, and on this basis can come to a secure account of what it is to be. In simply confronting the world, however, one’s experience shifts, is transient: all this goes from one way—with, say, a cat here—to some other way—the cat being over there. This manifest inconstancy must be accounted for in any comprehensive account of the world. Yet so must a manifest constancy. If the cat is now, at this moment, over there, that the cat is now, at this moment, over there is forever true. These seemingly contradictory phenomena, inconstancy and constancy, demonstrate the importance of time to understanding the world. Since any legitimate inquiry is directed at something or other and since many objects of inquiry (including inquiry itself) occur over time, correct accounts of temporal reality and of being – of time and the world – provide insight into all inquiry. These accounts provide constraints on and, hence, guidelines for investigating any subject matter in any field. (shrink)

In this chapter the author examines the idea of time's motion, or flow, more carefully, by comparing it to the motion of ordinary objects. Ordinary objects move with respect to time. So if time itself moves, it must move with respect to some other sort of time. But what would that other time be? Most motion takes place with respect to the familiar timeline, but time itself moves with respect to another timeline, hypertime. Hypertime (...) is supposed to be a sort of time. Hypertime must move with respect to yet another sort of time, hyper‐hyper time. Space‐time diagrams can be used to represent all of history; everything that has ever happened or ever will happen can be fit into a space‐ time diagram somewhere. According to the space‐time theory, time and space are analogous in many ways. Finally the author argues against the space‐time theory. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine how specific aspects of Bakhtin's theoretical perspective might inform our understanding of improvisation. Moreover, it outlines the possible educational implications of such a perspective. Specifically, a sketch of a Bakhtinian conception of improvisation is proposed, a sketch which emphasizes the cultivation of an attitude of consciousness that leads to an understanding of improvised music making as an obligation to explore the unknown, to search for freedom through the responsibility to attend to the uniqueness of irrevocable (...) musical acts. Moreover, emphasis is given to the potential of improvisation to create a music-making context that counters monologic musical discourses, providing a site of resistance to fixity and closure. It is argued that improvisation is dialogic exactly because it creates a very special sense of interaction, which is characterized by unfinalizability and openness. At the same time, improvisation is in need of temporary finalizations which occur through the presence of the audience and the musicians' struggle to raise their minds 'above' their playing, looking at their music from outside and getting 'back in' again. It is hoped that such a perspective might provide the necessary theoretical tools for re-thinking the role of improvisation in music education. A Bakhtinian view on the experience of improvisation would, it is suggested, be educationally valuable exactly because it regards improvisation not as a problem-solving method but a problem-positing approach: as a musical practice that involves children and young people in the experiential pursuit of freedom and the understanding of the "ought" of imagining ways forward, countering monologue by allowing the flourishing of a polyphony of unmerged voices, constituting a distinctive chronotope which provides the possibility of an enactment of everyday living in musical terms. The decision to improvise marks the initiation of a search for a public musical space which is marked by the absence of fear, where exploration of musical freedom is pursued, where everything might happen but not anything goes. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine how specific aspects of Bakhtin's theoretical perspective might inform our understanding of improvisation. Moreover, it outlines the possible educational implications of such a perspective. Specifically, a sketch of a Bakhtinian conception of improvisation is proposed, a sketch which emphasizes the cultivation of an attitude of consciousness that leads to an understanding of improvised music making as an obligation to explore the unknown, to search for freedom through the responsibility to attend to the uniqueness of irrevocable (...) musical acts. Moreover, emphasis is given to the potential of improvisation to create a music-making context that counters monologic musical discourses, providing a site of resistance to fixity and closure. It is argued that improvisation is dialogic exactly because it creates a very special sense of interaction, which is characterized by unfinalizability and openness. At the same time, improvisation is in need of temporary finalizations which occur through the presence of the audience and the musicians' struggle to raise their minds 'above' their playing, looking at their music from outside and getting 'back in' again. It is hoped that such a perspective might provide the necessary theoretical tools for re-thinking the role of improvisation in music education. A Bakhtinian view on the experience of improvisation would, it is suggested, be educationally valuable exactly because it regards improvisation not as a problem-solving method but a problem-positing approach: as a musical practice that involves children and young people in the experiential pursuit of freedom and the understanding of the "ought" of imagining ways forward, countering monologue by allowing the flourishing of a polyphony of unmerged voices, constituting a distinctive chronotope which provides the possibility of an enactment of everyday living in musical terms. The decision to improvise marks the initiation of a search for a public musical space which is marked by the absence of fear, where exploration of musical freedom is pursued, where everything might happen but not anything goes. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 69. In this issue of continent. , which takes as its theme the idea of the moraine, or that which is left behind, we attempt to think, and look beyond that horizon of the possible cataclysm, not in naive ways of hope and gleeful sounds, but in an attempt to present different directions in thought and looking and hearing. Beyond the cataclysm, or within it—or even, precisely anterior to it (anterior to an event not yet happened)—there are (...) new ways of thinking “beyond” already becoming apparent. These ideas are speculative, in a sense irresponsible: Graham Harman writes about Quentin Meillassoux’s God who does not exist now, but may do so in the future while Paul Ennis describes the speculative line backwards to Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. Michael O'Rourke assesses the future of Queer Theory and we are compelled to ask if queer theory is a theory of everything. Karen Spaceinvaders “maps” the brain through sound leaving us to wonder where is the mind, while Phillip Stearns, as though echoing Spaceinvaders’ work, remaps digital photography, creating images from the stray electrical currents in the apparatus. In fiction, Ben Segal gathers the blurbs of the books yet possible. And there is more. And so we proudly offer forth continent. ’s second issue. Whereas issue 1.1 took the theme of isthmus (that which connects land to land, or even, throat to voice), in issue 1.2 we look at what remains after the crushing weight of slow, glacial time has passed. It is geological (which is genealogical) and it is archeological, but it is architectural too. In his later work, Heidegger describes the open ( das offen ) as a lightening ( lichtung ) in terms of a forest clearing which is not only “free for brightness and darkness, but also for resonance and echo, for sounding and diminishing sound. The clearing is the open for everything that is present and absent.” In continent. 1.2, we imagine that clearing, that lichtung which is both a lightening and a clearing, a space of being from which to observe (or even participate in) the coming, very possibly banal, cataclysm(s). (shrink)

The problem of free will has fascinated philosophers since ancient times: Do we have free will, or at least the kind of free will that seems necessary for moral responsibility? Does determinism - the idea that everything that happens is necessitated to happen, given the past and the laws of nature - threaten the commonly held assumption that we are indeed free and morally responsible? Although these questions have been widely discussed in the past, the present volume offers a (...) variety of new perspectives from philosophers who have made significant contributions to this debate over recent years, including Derk Pereboom, Robert Kane, Ishtiyaque Haji, Michael McKenna, John Martin Fischer, David Widerker and Saul Smilansky. The emphasis in these essays is not merely on free will, but on allied notions such as moral responsibility, moral obligation, fairness and meaningfulness, and on whether any room can be made for these notions in a deterministic or an indeterministic universe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:396 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lisa Rofel A View of Women’s Studies from Afar and Near As a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Studies, I have had the pleasure of reading the submissions to this special issue on the state of women’s, gender, feminist, and sexuality (WGFS) studies programs. All the accepted articles highlight why WGFS studies programs have (...) been, and continue to be, a vital part of intellectual training in US academies. I read the submissions from a particular perspective: that of having been trained in a discipline I happen to love, cultural anthropology, and at the same time always having been a feminist scholar within my discipline. When I was deciding which PhD program to enter, feminist anthropology was beginning to garner much attention. Along with feminist historians, feminist anthropologists were not only trying to include women in the picture, but were asking instead how attention to gender transforms the big questions about politics, social relations, and cultural meanings. This feminist approach would forever change how anthropologists analyze culture and power. Since I was both a feminist and an anti-imperialist activist, anthropology felt like the right discipline to choose. That might seem like a strange juxtaposition—anti-imperialism and anthropology—for those not familiar with the history of the discipline. When I entered graduate school, some anthropologists had already begun the self-critique of the discipline and its collusions with colonialism. As I moved through my graduate program, I was part of the creative efforts to figure out what kind of anthropology we could Lisa Rofel 397 foster that would be anti-colonial as well as post-colonial. It was a heady and exciting time to experience how we could develop a critique of culture and power. Reading over the submissions for this special issue, I was reminded of feeling troubled by those students in interdisciplinary programs (and not just from WGFS studies programs) who approach faculty in conventional disciplines only for training in methods. Frankly, I am very tired of being treated this way. In my discipline, methods are tied to the kinds of theoretical questions someone wants to ask. Texts that explain, for example, how to do an oral life history demonstrate how the method is tied to analytical/political questions. One of the best texts in this vein is Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai’s Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History.1 We never train our students merely in how to engage in participant-observation or how to conduct an interview, but rather how to think analytically about what the student wants to ask in the first place. For example, one of the graduate students I work with, Kali Rubaii, just finished her PhD dissertation, “Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province,” for which she also did analogous research in the Palestinian territories. In such conditions, one has to think very carefully about how one works with—rather than does research on—the people whose horrendous living conditions (thanks to US imperialism) under what Rubaii calls “less-than-lethal counterinsurgency” matter a great deal for the rest of us to understand.2 Rather than interview them or do something called participant-observation, Rubaii did what she calls “transhumant ethnography,” which meant she decided that ethically she had to live through everything that her interlocutors were living through, including constantly moving from one unsafe or only temporarily safe place to another. Rubaii’s work, as an example, reminds us that methods are inextricably linked with the power dynamics infusing the worlds we study. In addition to the matter of methods, I am concerned about a problematic assumption that what distinguishes and even defines WGFS 1. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 2013). 2. Kali Rubaii, Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2018). 398 Lisa Rofel studies programs is attention to power. This assumption reflects the need for students in interdisciplinary programs to learn more about the genealogy of the theoretical... (shrink)

'Thoughts on Life and Religion' is a compilation of essays by F. Max Müller, a renowned scholar who lived with the belief that everything in life happens for our own good, even if we cannot always understand it. This collection includes passages from his published works, as well as his private letters and unfinished writings. Müller's unwavering trust in a higher power gave him strength through difficult times, including the loss of loved ones and his own illness. The (...) book covers a wide range of topics, from Christianity and the Bible to language and music, providing insights into Müller's views on life and religion. (shrink)

There isn’t one conversation about animal ethics. Instead, there are several important ones that are scattered across many disciplines. This volume both surveys the field of animal ethics and draws professional philosophers, graduate students, and undergraduates more deeply into the discussions that are happening outside of philosophy departments. To that end, the volume contains more nonphilosophers than philosophers, explicitly inviting scholars from other fields—such as animal science, ecology, economics, psychology, law, environmental science, and applied biology, among others—to bring (...) their own disciplinary resources to bear on matters that affect animals. -/- The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics is composed of 44 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and organized into the following six sections: -/- I. Thinking About Animals -/- II. Animal Agriculture and Hunting -/- III. Animal Research and Genetic Engineering -/- IV. Companion Animals -/- V. Wild Animals: Conservation, Management, and Ethics -/- VI. Animal Activism -/- The chapters are brief, and they have been written in a way that is accessible to serious undergraduate students, regardless of their field of study. The volume covers everything from animal cognition to the state of current fisheries, from genetic modification to intersection animal activism. It is a resource designed for anyone interested in the moral issues that emerge from human interactions with animals. (shrink)

A profoundly inspiring yet practical guide to well-being from one of modern Judaism's most beloved sages.As a congregational rabbi for half a century and the bestselling author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People and twelve other books on faith, ethics, and how to translate the timeless wisdom of religious thought into dealing with everyday challenges, Harold Kushner knows a thing or two about living a good life. In this compassionate new work, Kushner distills nine essential lessons (...) class='Hi'>from the sum of his teaching, study and experience, offering a lifetime's worth of spiritual food for thought, pragmatic advice, inspiration for better living, and strength for trying times. With vital, original insights into everything from belief ("there is no commandment in Judaism to believe in God"), to conscience (the Garden of Eden story as you've never heard it), to mercy ("forgiveness is a favor you do yourself, not a favor to the person who offended you"), grounded in Kushner's brilliant readings of Scripture, history and popular culture, Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life is a capstone addition to Kushner's oeuvre. (shrink)

From the beginning, the implications of quantum theory for our most general understanding of the world have been a matter of intense debate. Einstein argues that the theory had to be regarded as fundamentally incomplete. Its inability, for example, to predict the exact time of decay of a single radioactive atom had to be due to a failure of the theory and not due to a permanent inability on our part or a fundamental indeterminism in nature itself. In (...) 1964, John Bell derived a theorem which showed that any deterministic theory which preserved locality would have certain consequences for measurements performed at a distance from one another. An experimental check seems to show that these consequences are not, in fact, realized. The correlation between the sets of events is much stronger than any local deterministic theory could allow. What is more, this stronger correlation is precisely that which is predicted by quantum theory. The astonishing result is that local deterministic theories of the classical sort seem to be permanently excluded. Not only can the individual decay not be predicted, but no future theory can ever predict it. The contributors in this volume wrestle with this conclusion. Some welcome it; others leave open a return to at lease some kind of deterministic world, one which must however allow something like action-at-a distance. How much lit it? And how can one avoid violating relativity theory, which excludes action-at-a-distance? How can a clash between the two fundamental theories of modern physics, relativity and quantum theory, be avoided? What are the consequences for the traditional philosophic issue of causality explanation and objectivity? One thing is certain; we can never return to the comfortable Newtonian world where everything that happened was, in principle, predictable and where what happened at one measurement site could not affect another set of measurements being performed light-years away, at a distance that a light-signal could not bridge. Contributors: James T. Cushing, Abner Shimony, N. David Mermin, Jon P. Jarrett, Linda Wessels, Bas C. van Fraassen, Jeremy Butterfield, Michael L. G. Redhead, Henry P. Stapp, Arthur Fine, R. I. G. Hughes, Paul Teller, Don Howard, Henry J. Folse, and Ernan McMullin. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s (...) view, philosophy of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

Is blue food desirable or disgusting? The answer, it would seem, is both, but it really depends on the food in which the color happens to be present. It turns out that the oft-cited aversive response to blue meat may not even have been scientifically validated, despite the fact that blue food coloring is often added to discombobulate diners. In the case of drinks, however, there has been a recent growth of successful new blue product launches in everything (...) class='Hi'>from beer to tea, and from wine to gin, arguing that coloring food products blue is more than simply a contemporary fad. In fact, the current interest in blue food coloring builds on the color's earlier appearance in everything from blue curacao to blue-raspberry candyfloss, and thereafter a number of soft drinks. Over the years, the combination of blue coloring with raspberry flavoring has also appeared in everything from bubble-gum to patriotic pop rocks. Ultimately, it is the rarity of naturally-blue foods that is likely what makes this color so special. As such, blue food coloring can both work effectively to attract the visual attention of the shopper while, at the same time, being linked to a range of different flavors depending on the food format in which it happens to appear. Note also that the basic descriptor “blue” covers a wide range of hues having a range of different associations, hence eliciting different reactions. While blue was once associated with artificiality, a growing number of natural blue food colorings have come onto the market in recent years thus perhaps changing the dominant associations that many consumers may have with this most unusual of food colors. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

Locke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a monstrous (...) birth. But what about materialism? Well, beginning with the anatomical interest into ‘monstrous births’ in the French Académie des Sciences in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, there is a shift away from ‘imaginationist’ claims such as those of Malebranche, that if a woman gives birth to a monstrous child it is a consequence of something she imagined. Anatomists such as Lemery and Winslow try to formulate a strictly mechanical explanation for such events, rejecting moral and metaphysical explanations. Picking up on this work, materialist thinkers like Diderot are compelled to reject the very idea of monsters. We are all material beings produced according to the same mechanisms or laws, some of us are more ‘successful’ products than others, i.e. some live longer than others. In his late Eléments de physiologie he says “L’homme est un effet commun, le monstre un effet rare.” Ultimately he arrives at a materialist version of Leibniz’s position: there are no monsters, we are all monsters in each other’s eyes, at one time or another. This conclusion is a pregnant one in light of twentieth century interest in the problem of ‘the normal and the pathological’ (Canguilhem), and the broader question of how materialism relates to the biological world. (shrink)

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

Introduction. War as a social phenomenon has always been an object of philosophical reflection, since its results largely determine the further de- velopment of society and have a profound impact on all spheres of social life. In connection with the ongoing so-called special military operation which Russia is conducting in Ukraine and which is at the same time a proxy war of the collective West against our country, the modern philosophical discourse of war is clarified. One of the important (...) aspects of the ontology of war is considering its chronotopos. The space-time factor has a signifi- cant impact on the course and outcome of hostili- ties in modern warfare, which makes its study very relevant. The purpose of the study is to describe the chrono- topos of modern warfare, to show the influence of the space-time factor on the course and result of hostilities. Methods. Being supporters of the relational concept of space and time, the authors consider the chronotopos of war as its internal attributive property. In addition, they rely on the methodology of synergetics, which makes it possible, in addition to the external universal space-time, to single out the internal space-time of open complex non-equi- librium systems. The authors apply structural-func- tional analysis to study material and ideal objects that influence the characteristics of space and time in modern warfare. They also use general scientific methods: abstraction, comparison, description and explanation. Scientific novelty of the research. The authors give characteristics of the war chronotopos at the beginning of the 21st century, and consider the tendencies of its changes. The necessity of taking into account spatio-temporal changes in planning and conducting hostilities in modern warfare is substantiated. Results. New means of warfare, as well as the cor- responding changes in tactics, operational art and strategy, will significantly reformat the chronoto- pos of war. The space of modern warfare is being radically transformed due to the fact that the confrontation simultaneously takes place not only on the plane, but also in the air, in space, under water, and even in social networks. New capabili- ties of strike systems are changing the perception of such characteristics of the war space as the front and rear. What was previously considered a deep safe rear, in the era of using missiles and combat drones, is no longer such. The time of war is also changing. An increase in the flight speed of ammu- nition, aircraft, and missiles increases the dynamics of battles and intensifies all processes on the bat- tlefield. Hypersonic systems are changing the pace of war, space satellites, reconnaissance drones and new technologies make it possible for the com- mander officer of the battle to see everything that happens on the battlefield in real time, regard- less of the distance from objects. Each new war is fought in its own space-time continuum. To win the war, all this must be taken into account. Conclusions. The chronotopos of war within the framework of the relational concept of space and time prevailing in modern philosophy is changing due to the emergence of fundamentally new means of warfare with new capabilities, which requires a significant adjustment in combat management, ensuring the adequacy of human behavior in war, training troops, taking into account the character- istics of the space-time continuum of a particular war, understanding on the part of the command staff of the essence of changes in the space and time of modern war. Old stereotyped ideas about the chronotopos of war can cause disorientation of a person on the battlefield, which requires not only a philosophical reflection of the ongoing spatio- temporal changes, but also the practical consid- eration of new knowledge in training troops, in planning and conducting combat operations. (shrink)

This essay attempts to render intelligible (you will pardon the pun) Kant's peculiar claims about the intelligible at A 539/B 567 – A 541/B 569 in the first Critique, in which he asserts that (1) ... [t]his acting subject would now, in conformity with his intelligible character, stand under no temporal conditions, because time is only a condition of appearances, but not of things in themselves. In him no action would begin or cease. Consequently it would not be subjected (...) to the law of all determination of everything alterable in time: everything which happens finds its causes in the appearances (of the previous state). In a word, his causality, in so far as it is intellectual, would not stand in the series of empirical conditions which the event in the world of sense makes necessary. (A 539/B 567 - A 540/B 568) ... in so far as it is noumenon, nothing happens in him, no alteration which requires dynamical determination in time .... One would quite rightly say of him, that it of itself begins his effects in the world of sense, without the action's beginning in him himself ... (A 541/B 569)2 What does Kant mean by claiming that intellectual causality is such that in one's intelligible character as noumenal agent, actions neither begin nor end, nor does anything happen in one? Do these claims have meaning merely by contrast to the familiar experience of empirical causality, in which actions have discrete durations and events occur? Is he merely inferring from this familiar sensible experience an ontologically and metaphysically independent, epistemically inaccessible "world," which can be conceptualized only through the negation of those terms and propositions that characterize this one? Or is he offering a.. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 60–63 Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. From the forthcoming book Post-History , Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013. It is not necessary to have a keen ear in order to find out that the steps we take towards the future sound hollow. But it is necessary to have concentrated hearing if one wishes to find out which type of vacuity resonates with our progress. There are several types of vacuity, and ours must be compared to others, if the (...) aim is to understand it. The incomparable is incomprehensible. If we affirm that our situation is incomparable, we give up the effort to grasp it. The comparison that imposes itself is to the vacuity of the Baroque. There are innumerable traces in the present that evoke the Baroque. We bear the mark of the same somber rationalism (logics, informatics, cybernetics), and of the same magic and fanatic irrationalism (mass media, phantastic ideologies). But there is a decisive difference. Humanity advanced over a stage during the Baroque. All of its gestures, even the most sincere, were marked by theatricality. The vacuity that resonated under its feet was of the void under the stage. Baroque man represented. 1 For example he represented faith in waging religious wars. Baroque vacuity was the consequence of a medieval loss of faith in dogmas . Our vacuity is different. We do not represent anything. Our world is not a stage. We are not actors, and if we act, it is not to represent a drama, but to divert the audience's attention and our own from the subjects that really matter. We act like criminals that try to hide their tracks. We pretend. Our progress is a farce. The vacuity under our feet is not Baroque. We have not lost our faith in dogmas: we have lost faith in ourselves . We are as counter-reformists as was the Baroque (we want to cover up the recent revolution with warm cloths), but for different reasons. Although comparable with the Baroque, in certain aspects, our situation is in fact incomparable to any other. That is because an incomparable, unheard of, never before seen event happened recently, which emptied the ground we tread. Auschwitz . Other posterior events; Hiroshima, the Gulags, are nothing but variations of the first. Therefore every attempt to grasp the present leads to the following questions: how was Auschwitz possible? How can we live after this? Such questions relate not only to the ones directly or indirectly responsible, and not only to those who were directly or indirectly hit by it: they relate to everyone who takes part in our culture. Because what is so incomparable, unheard of, never before seen and therefore incomprehensible in Auschwitz, is that it was there that Western culture revealed one of its inherent virtualities. Auschwitz is a characteristic realization of our culture. It is neither the product of a particular Western ideology, nor of specific “advanced” industrial techniques. It springs directly from the depths of culture and of its concepts and values. The possibility to realize Auschwitzes is implicit within our culture from the very start: the Western “project” already harbored it, although as a remote possibility. Auschwitz lies within the initial program of the West, which progressively realizes all of its virtualities as history unfolds. That is why the question that Auschwitz poses before us is not: how did it happen? It serves no purpose to “explain” Auschwitz. The fundamental question is: how was it possible? Because what is being questioned is not the extermination camp, but the West. Thus one other question: how to live within a culture henceforth unmasked? Everything that happened afterwards resonates with such a question, with such vacuity. Every economic, social, political, technical, scientific, artistic, philosophic event is corroded by such an undigested question. The distance that separates us from the event does not mitigate the abyss, it erodes it even deeper. Because the distance progressively dissolves the aura of the horror that envelops the event, and it progressively opens up a vision of the scene. It progressively reveals that there all of our categories, all of our “models”, suffered an irreparable shipwreck. Auschwitz was a revolutionary event, in the sense that it overthrew our culture. Insofar as we seek ways to cover up such revolution with trips to the moon or with genetic manipulations, we are counter-revolutionaries: we are inverting the course of history in order to cover up the past. The unspoken in Auschwitz is not the mass murder, it is not the crime . It is the ultimate reification of people into amorphous objects, into ashes. The Western tendency towards objectification was finally realized and it was done so in the shape of an apparatus . The SS were functionaries of an extermination apparatus, and their victims functioned in function of their own annihilation. The extermination camp's program, once it started functioning, developed in an automatic fashion, autonomous from the decisions of the initial programmers, even if, as it effectively did, it contributed to the defeat of the programmers. The SS and the Jews functioned one in function of the other like cogwheels. The models for such functionality were provided by the highest of Western values: the SS behaved like “heroes” and the Jews like “martyrs”. This is an apparatus that functions at a borderline situation: objective even beyond death. What has just been said is intolerable. We cannot accept it and so we mobilize arguments against it. Good arguments. The SS behaved like criminals: they removed the gold teeth from the cadavers. The Jews behaved like victims: they rose up in the Warsaw ghetto. Such arguments are true, but they do not reach the nucleus, the “ eidos ” of the phenomenon: they do not grasp it. Although there was “normal” behavior: (theft, murder, revolt, heroism), there was also “abnormal” behavior: functionality during a borderline situation. And this is what counts. There, for the first time in the history of humanity, an apparatus was put into operation that was programmed with the most advanced techniques available, which realized the objectification of man, together with the functional collaboration of man. The previous horrors committed by Western society against other societies and against itself (and there are many) were crimes . They were violations of Western models of behavior: anti-Christian, anti-human, irrational. So that it is possible to condemn them and continue to be Western, even if the horror is so colossal, such as the enslavement of Africans. However, it is not possible to condemn Auschwitz and continue to adhere consciously to the West. Auschwitz is not a violation of Western models of behavior, it is, on the contrary, the result of the application of such models. Our culture allowed its mystifying mask to fall and must be rejected in toto if we admit that the purpose of every culture is to allow for the convivial existence of men that recognize each other mutually as subjects. However: it is not possible to reject one's own culture. It is the ground we tread . Those who seek to reject their own culture (as Nietzsche did in rejecting Judeo-Christianity), fall victim to madness. Those who reject their culture's models, are incapable of grasping the world in which they live. Cultural models are traps to catch the world. Those who seek to substitute their own models for other's (for example by shouting “Hare Krishna”) will find that such exotic models have already been caught by the very models to be substituted. There is no exit: we are condemned to use our models and to serve such models, even after they have been unmasked, if we wish to continue living. The only alternative would be to commit suicide. That is: we must continue our economic, political, scientific, artistic, philosophic activities despite Auschwitz. We must continue progressing despite everything . That is why there are those who recommend that we should seek to forget what happened, that we should repress the event. They sustain that enough has already been said and written about the subject and that it is time to “overcome” it. But such an ostrich strategy reveals itself disastrous. Because the result is that Auschwitz transfers itself from Poland of the 1940s to the post-industrial society of the future. What characterizes the extermination camp is precisely that it is not an event that can be “overcome”, because it is the first realization of an inherent virtuality within the Western project, which will repeat itself in other formats unless we become totally conscious of it. The advantage (if this is an appropriate term) that Auschwitz offers us, is to give us a concrete example of the West’s tendency towards the apparatus. For the first time in our history it is possible for us to experience concretely the utopia inherent in our culture. For the first time in our history we have the experience that utopia, no matter in what form, towards which we progress, is the extermination camp. Everywhere we can observe, as of now, the emergence of variations on the theme “Auschwitz”. Everywhere apparatus spring, just like mushrooms after a Nazi rain, from the ground that has become rotten. Certainly: such new apparatus are not externally similar to the Nazi extermination camps. Their labels are different, as are the ideologies that pretend to inspire them. Even the apparatus that admittedly envision extermination, such as the Gulags, the ones of a future nuclear war, or the ones that functioned in Vietnam, claim to be different from Auschwitz. Others claim to be “friends of mankind”, such as the scientific, technical and administrative apparatus. But such labels and such ideologies are deceptive and serve only to cover up the essence of apparatus. They are all just like Auschwitz, black boxes that function with complex inner-workings in order to realize a program. They all function according to an inertia that is inherent to them and such functionality escapes , from a certain point, the control of their initial programmers. In a final analysis such apparatuses function, all of them, towards the annihilation of all their functionaries, including their programmers. Exactly because they objectify and dehumanize man. Thus Western culture reveals itself as a project that seeks to transform itself into an apparatus. What characterizes the West is its capacity for an objectifying transcendence. Such transcendence allows for the transformation of all phenomena, including the human phenomenon, into an object of knowledge and manipulation. The space for such transcendence opened up thanks to Judeo-Christianity and resulted, in the course of our history, in science, technique and recently, in Auschwitz. The ultimate objectification of the Jews into ashes is the ultimate victory of the spirit of the West. It is social technique taken to the extreme. Certainly: the transformation of men into ashes is primitive, incipient social technique that progressively refines itself. It will be followed by less brutal objectifications, such as the robotization of society. But it does not matter which form it will assume: it will always be an objectifying manipulation of mankind. Although the apparatus of the immediate future are not necessarily incineration ovens, all will be, and not only the nuclear ones, apparatus for the annihilation of man. The Western program contains several virtualities, not only apparatus. Numerous virtualities have not yet been realized. In this sense the “history of the West” has not ended yet, the Western game continues. But all not-yet realized virtualities are infected by apparatus. That is why it has become currently impossible to engage ourselves in the “ progress of culture .” As it would be to engage ourselves in our own annihilation. We have lost our faith in our culture, in the ground we tread. That is: we have lost faith in ourselves. It is this hollow vibration that follows our steps towards the future. What remains is for us to analyze the event “Auschwitz” in all its details in order to discover the fundamental project that realized itself there for the first time, so that we may nurture the hope to project ourselves out of that project. Out of the history of the West. This is the “post- historical” climate in which we are condemned to live from hereon. NOTES 1. In Portuguese representar (to represent) also means “to act” or “to play a role.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Had Never Heard Someone Use That Word BeforeAdrienne Feller NovickThe patient was dying. As the social worker, I had arranged the meeting and sat shoulder to shoulder with the family and the attending physician in the small nondescript room. The family was grief-stricken and asked intelligent questions as they made difficult decisions about end-of-life care for their loved one. The doctor spoke with gentle kindness, acknowledging their difficult (...) decision as he completed the neon pink Medical Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (MOLST) form and left the room. I was tangled up with emotions; I felt relieved that the meeting had gone smoothly, sad for the patient and family, and in awe of the doctor for his ability to lead the difficult conversation. I stayed behind to ask the family if there was anything I could do to help them. [End Page E4]Before I could speak, the patient's wife turned to me and said, "I am so glad that k--- left the room." (Using a derogatory word for a person of the Jewish faith). My brain began processing the statement. I am a Jewish woman. Did I hear that right? Did she say what I think she said? Should I say something? I froze, and time seemed to stop. She was looking at me expectantly, waiting for a response. Her face reminded me of someone waiting for the other person to return a "high five." I was flooded with emotion. A succession of thoughts ran through my head, everything from being rude in response or getting physical. I did neither. I said nothing. I smiled and left the room feeling like I had been gut-punched.I was in denial. I made excuses for the wife; she was stressed. I kept thinking I must not have heard her correctly and that I was overreacting. I continued to work with the family as though nothing had happened until the patient died five days later. I felt ashamed and never told anyone about what happened. I regretted not saying anything. I replayed the conversation in my mind and felt depressed and angry. Inside I felt complicit for not speaking up, but I had no words. I assumed bias in healthcare was rare. I did nothing.Years later, after I completed a patient visit in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), I observed a group of surgical residents doing rounds. The attending welcomed me to join this valuable clinical learning experience. As the group approached the next bed, the patient pointed to one resident and loudly said, "I don't want a doctor who looks like that to come near me." I gasped aloud and froze, waiting to see what would happen next. The attending looked directly at the patient and said calmly, "We are all here to help you. That is not an appropriate thing for you to say." Then, he turned to the resident and nodded, directing them to resume their bedside assessment. The patient mumbled something inaudibly and said nothing.To my astonishment, the doctor acknowledged the microaggression (a microaggression is a statement, action, or incident regarded as discrimination), addressed the issue, respectfully supported the resident, created a safe space for everyone on the healthcare team and resumed quality patient care without missing a beat. He modeled a strategy to address patient bias and taught a valuable skill. This was a learning moment for me. It helped me refocus my past experience and provided me with a useful strategy to address bias in the future.As a member of the medical ethics consultation service, I listen, provide support, and aid in challenging communications. I had the opportunity to model the communication strategy I acquired in the ICU. The medical ethics team was consulted for a patient refusing treatment. The patient was disrespectful to healthcare team members, cursing at nurses and residents, using ethnic slurs, and saying he "would rather die than let one of them touch him. I entered the patient's room with the healthcare team, introduced myself, and explained the reason for my visit. The patient defiantly agreed he had used slurs, saying he wanted to go home. I continued, everyone here... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

I have three main objectives in this essay. First, in chapter 2, I shall put forward and justify what I call worldlessness, by which I mean the following: All truths (as well as falsehoods) are wholly independent of any circumstances, not only time and place but also possible worlds. It follows from this view that whatever is actually true must be taken as true with respect to every possible world, which means that all truths are (in a sense) (...) necessary. However, the account I shall propound is different from what is known in the trade as necessitarianism, i.e. the view that there is only one possible world, viz. the actual one, for the doctrine of the worldlessness of truth values, despite its commitment to the necessity of truths and falsehoods, is quite compatible with the idea of there being other possible worlds. Another important issue in chapter 2, explored in particular in section 2.12, is the claim that there is no real change in the world. Secondly, in chapter 3 I consider the eminent traditional argument for determinism, deriving from Aristotle, namely, logical determinism, i.e. determinism justified by an appeal to the logical principle of bivalence (that all proper statements, including those concerning the future, are either true or false). In this connection I try to show that, (i), the formulation of the conclusion of this argument as "Whatever will happen will happen of necessity" is implausible, at least from the modern point of view, (ii), the formulation as "Whatever will happen will happen inevitably" is more to the point, and (iii), on the basis of the worldless and timeless aspect advocated in chapter 2, this latter formulation is quite harmless, essentially amounting to the trivial statement, "Whatever will happen will happen". Thirdly, in chapter 4 I study theological determinism, or determinism that arises from God's supposed providential control over everything that happens. In this connection, I shall survey some historical accounts of the relation between human free will and determinism (not only theological but also causal determinism); the philosophers the views of whom I shall attend to include Chrysippus, St. Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas. I shall in particular consider G.W. Leibniz' theodicean aspirations, viz. his solution to the problem of evil and, especially, his compatibilist attempts to reconcile human free will with the strictly deterministic flow of actual events. I think it is important to try to explicate Leibniz' ingenious account of these matters, since it seems that it has not been fully appreciated in the literature, not even by contemporary Leibniz scholars (such as B. Mates, R.C. Sleigh, C. Wilson, R.M. Adams and D. Rutherford). In providing the Leibnizian compatibilist solution of the problem of determinism and freedom in chapter 4, I shall utilize the approach of chapter 2. (shrink)

A perennial subject of dispute in the Western philosophical tradition is whether human agents can be responsible for their actions even if determinism is true. By determinism, I mean the view that everything that happens is completely determined by antecedent causes. One of the least impressive objections that is leveled against determinism confuses determinism with a very different view that has come to be known as “fatalism”: this is the view that everything is determined to happen independently of (...) human choices, efforts, and deliberations. It is a common fallacy, among students contemplating the implications of determinism for the first time, to argue: “But if everything is determined in advance, then it doesn't matter what we decide to do; what is determined to happen will happen no matter what.” This argument fallaciously infers fatalism from determinism. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of (...) the themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

In the modern world of total technologization, scientific knowledge devoid of worldview correction (humanitarian expertise) carries a threatening tendency of self-denial: without a constant, philosophically correct transformation of objective knowledge about certain fragments (branches) of the surrounding reality into human knowledge (questions) about itself, the practical effectiveness of such knowledge inevitably accumulates in itself the threat of practical helplessness. Aim and the tasks of the research. Based on an in-depth analysis of the category of existence, as well as on modern (...) philosophical reflections on the methodological and cognitive insolvency of the idea of the world, to find out the real meaning of those changes that this idea meaningfully undergoes in the conditions of the modern total technologization of human life. The research methodology. From a methodological point of view, the author prefers a dialectical approach, considering the analyzed phenomena, regardless of the mode of their reality, in their development and internally contradictory essence. H. Plesner’s theory of eccentric positionality serves as a certain base point for the analysis of human nature and, accordingly, the world of human existence. Research results: The problematic existence of the world and the epistemological «failure» of the corresponding category, declared in some modern philosophical reflections, are connected exclusively with its anthropological and worldview function, which is based on the fundamental uncertainty of a man’s place in the world. The «worthlessness» («futility») of worldview thematization is derived from the allencompassing inability of the human figure in the world, from that «emptiness» and «invisibility» (specific own transparency) of the spiritual dimension of human existence, on which, however, this existence is based. Discussion. The human «option» of fulfilling the unity of living being can be characterized as extremely intense. In this variant, the phylogenetic line of development turns into an ontogenetic point of worldliness devoid of predetermined content, a fundamentally new type of integration. The horizons of such integration far exceed primarily because of its understanding. And the subject of such a meaningful life is forced to integrate everything that happens to him every time into a certain system (synthesis) of the world. That subjectivity the world has distinguishes the subject from the thing. Subjectivity and the world mutually belong to each other - they are correlative. A thing exists because it is what it is. The subject (and with it his world) does not exist like that. A subject is how and to what it relates. But the relation «how» and «to what» is not carried out completely anew and isolated every time, but exists in its multiplicity in a certain relationship. Each individual case, each individual action (method of action) acquires its meaning from a wider, structured context – in whole or in part. This context is the «world», the «life world» of the real subject, or the «world» as an anthropological idea. Conclusions. The task of modern humanitarianism is not only to find opportunities for rational use of the fact of the fundamental openness of the human being, but also to cultivate the ability to reconcile a man with himself, to accept himself. This gives us certain reasons to hope for the enduring significance of worldview thematization. Criticism regarding the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that to become a man, one must already be one, could be considered fair, but only if one does not take into account the principled nature of such an aphoristic position, because this is exactly how the human world exists - as the art of tolerance uncertainty. (shrink)

These essays defend Christian, socialist and realist positions against Nietzsche’s critiques. Each essay addresses a problem in Nietzsche’s work. The first deals with perspectivism. On his view, the idea of objectivity disappears, becoming no more than simply a multiplicity of perspectives. The essay shows how Nietzsche’s approach to knowledge commits the epistemic fallacy, i.e. evades questions about truth by collapsing them into questions about knowing. The second essay addresses Nietzsche’s moral psychology in which there is no being behind doing, no (...) agent distinct from her actions. The essay demonstrates how this actualist account of persons is false by showing that the distinction between agent and action is needed for any understanding of moral action. The final essay concerns the history of ideas, rather than philosophical analysis. First, it looks at Nietzsche’s account of slave morality couched in terms of envy. Social justice, however, cannot be understood in this way. A section on class, religion and morality in late antiquity reinforces this with evidence that it was far more likely to find vindictiveness in the master class than the servant. The section on theism and ethics deals with Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal recurrence’: the idea that everything that happens will happen again an infinity of times, a notion that sustains an ethic of passive acceptance. The final part decries contemporary attachments to the Nietzschean virtues of pride, self-assertiveness, competitiveness and contempt for the less successful, preferring a Christian path to self-perfection through the pursuit of goals outside ourselves. (shrink)

Innovative, accessible, and easily implemented, One Degree Revolution is acclaimed yoga educator and leadership coach Coby Kozlowski's holistic program for self-inquiry and personal transformation. Her philosophy is deeply connected to living yoga-not just doing yoga. In fact, readers don't need to have ever attended a yoga class to dive into this book: her thoughtful teachings are for anybody interested in learning to navigate the waves of life more skillfully and gracefully. Imagine sailing a boat with a course set for a (...) lifetime. If that route changes by just one navigational degree, what would happen to the journey? How far from the original trajectory would we be in one year? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Well, we would end up in a totally different place. In much the same way, we can change the course of our life by making a one degree shift. In other words, we don't have to change everything about ourselves or our world to make a difference. Coby inspires readers to dig deep, to ask powerful questions and to dive into the insights, experiments, and inquiries of living yoga: how can I best be with life? How can the teachings of yoga direct us to see the most aligned choices, let go of past hurts, and discover deep and meaningful connections? And what are the most skillful ways we can learn to savor all that life presents? These yoga philosophies are infused with practical strategies for creating the life you truly want and having a positive impact on the world. One Degree Revolution will guide readers to access infinite personal possibilities, celebrate their authentic selves, find meaning and purpose, trust the unfolding of life, and foster transformational change, one degree at a time. (shrink)

This paper aims to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when (...) Plato says that something both is and is not, he is applying difference on being which is interpreted here as saying, borrowing Aristotle’s terminology, 'is is (esti) in different senses'. I hope this paper can show how Pollachos Esti can bring forth not only a new approach to Plato’s ontology in Sophist and Republic but also a different approach to being in general. -/- Keywords Plato; being; difference; image; pollachos esti; pollachos legetai 1. Being, Not-Being and Difference The three dialogues where the notion of "difference" attaches to the notion of being, namely Parmenides II, Sophist and Timaeus,and specifically the first two we try to discuss here. In these dialogues, Plato is going to achieve a new and revolutionary understanding of being which is not anymore based on the notion of "same" as it was before in Greek ontology. It was his discovery, I think, that the notion of being in the Greek ontology is attached to the notion of the "same" and it is because of this attachment that there have always been many problems understanding being especially after Parmenides. That being has always been relying on the "same" can be found out from the way most of the Presocratics understood it. It was based on such a relationship between being and "same" that a later Ionian, Heraclitus of Ephesus, rejected Being by rejecting its sameness: unable to be the same, being cannot be being anymore but becoming. Heraclitus’ criticism of his predecessors’ understanding of being was due to his discovery that what they call being is not the same but different in every moment. The relation of being and sameness reaches to its highest point in Parmenides. What Plato does in using the "difference" is nothing but the establishment of a creative relation between being and "difference". In this new relation, although he is in agreement with Heraclitus that being is not the same but different, he does not do it by use of becoming. He disagrees, on the other hand, with Parmenides that such a relation between being and difference leads to not being. At Parmenides 142b5-6 it is said that if One is, it is not possible for it to be without partaking (μετέχειν) of being (οὐσίας), which leads to the distinction of being and one: -/- So there would be also the being of the one (ἡ οὐσία του̑ ἑνὸς) which is not the same (ταὐτὸν) as the one. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be its being, nor the one would partake of it. (142b7-c1) -/- The fact that what is (ἔστι) signifies (σημαῖνον) is other (ἀλλο) than what One signifies (c4-5), is being taken as a reason for their distinction. The conclusion is that when we say 'one is', we speak of two different things, one partaking of the other (c5-7). Having repeated these arguments of the otherness of being and one at 143a-b, Parmenides says that the cause of this otherness can be neither Being nor One but "difference": -/- So if being is something different (ἕτερον) and one something different (ἕτερον), it is not by being one that the one is different from being nor by its being being that being is other than one, but they are different from each other (ἕτερα ἀλλήλων) by difference (τῷ ἑτερῳ) and otherness (ἄλλῳ). (143b3-6) -/- The fifth hypothesis, 'one is not' (160b5ff.) is also linked with the notion of difference. When we say about two things, largeness and smallness, that they are not, it is clear that we are talking about not being of different (ἕτερον) things (160c2-4). When it is said that something is not, besides the fact that there must be knowledge of that thing, we can say that it entails also its difference: 'difference in kind pertains to it in addition to knowledge' (160d8). Parmenides explains the reason as such: -/- For someone doesn’t speak of the difference in kind of the others when he says that the one is different from the others, but of that thing’s own difference in kind. (160e1-2) -/- Although the theory of being as "difference" is not fulfilled yet, an exact look at what occurs in Sophist can make us sure that this was the launching step for "difference" to get its deserved role in Plato’s ontology. The notion of the "difference" is not yet well-functioned in Parmenides because we can see that being is still attached to the same: -/- For that which is the same is being (ὄν γὰρ ἐστι τὸ ταὐτόν) (162d2-3). -/- The notion of difference in Sophist is the key element based on which a new understanding of being is presented and the problem of not being is somehow resolved. The friends of Forms, the Stranger says, are those who distinguish between being and becoming (248a7-8) and believe that we deal with the latter with our body and through perception while with the former, the real being (ὄντως οὐσίαν) with our soul and through reasoning (a10-11). Being is then bound with the "same" by adding: -/- You say that being always stays the same and in the same state (ἣν ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχειν) but becoming varies from one time to another (δὲ ἄλλοτε ἄλλως). (248a12-13) -/- That the theory of the relation of being and capacity (247d8f., 248c4-5) matches more with becoming than with being (248c7-9) must be rejected because being is also the subject of knowledge which is kind of doing something (248d-e). It does, however, confirm that 'both that which changes and also change have to be admitted as existing things (ὄντα) (249b2-3). I believe that this is what Socrates would incline to do at Theaetetus 180e-181a, that is, putting a fight between two parties of Parmenidean being and Heraclitean becoming and then escaping. The solution is that becoming is itself a kind of being and we ought to accept what changes as being. This is what must be done by a philosopher, namely, to refuse both the claim that 'everything is at rest' and that 'being changes in every way' and beg, like a child, for both and say being (τὸὄν) is both the unchanging and that which changes (249c10-d4). This kind of begging for both is obviously under the attack of contradiction (249e-250b). For both and each of rest and change similarly are (250a11-12) but it cannot be said either that both of them change or both of them rest, being must be considered as a third thing both of the rest and change associate with (250b7-10). The conclusion is that 'being is not both change and rest but different (ἕτερον) from them instead' (c3-4). The notion of difference helps Plato to take being departed from both rest and change because it was their sophisticated relation with being that made the opposition of being and becoming. Plato is now trying to separate being from rest and, thus, from "same" by "difference". Such a crucial change is great enough to need a 'fearless' decision (256d5-6). The possibility of being of not being is resulted (d11-12) comes as the answer to the question 'so it’s clear that change is not being and also is being (ἡ κίνησις ὄντως οὐκ ὄν ἐστι καὶ ὄν) since it partakes in being?' (d8-9). It is then by the notion of difference that becoming is considered as that which both is and is not. This coincidence of being and not being about change is apparently similar to Socrates’ paradoxical statement at Republic 477a about what both is and is not. -/- Introduction The Republic 476-477 has always been a matter of controversy mainly about two interwoven points. The first problem is the meaning of being here; that whether what he has in mind is a veridical, existential or propositional sense of being. The second problem is his distinction between the objects of knowledge and opinion which seems to lead, some believe, to the Two Worlds (TW) theory. The crucial point in Republic is that what is considered between knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) and ignorance (α͗γνοιας), namely opinion, must have a different object that leads Socrates to draw the distinction of knowledge and opinion between their objects. The problem of understanding being in the fifth book of the Republic is that when it is said that the Form of F is F but a particular participating in F, both is and is not F, it sounds too bizarre and unacceptable. It cannot be imaginable how a thing can be existent and non-existent at the same time. At the first sight, the only solution seems to be the degrees of existence which is called by Annas (1981, 197) a 'childish fallacy' and a 'silly argument'. Kirwan (1974, 118) thinks that Republic V does not attribute 'any doctrine about existence' to Plato and Kahn (1966, 250) claims that the most fundamental value of einai when used alone (without predicate) is not "to exist" but "to be so", "to be the case" or "to be true". The problems of understanding being in Republic and Sophist besides the difficulties of the existential reading led scholars to the other senses of being, mostly related to the well-known Aristotelian distinctions between different senses of being. In the predicative reading, Annas, for example, refers this difference to the qualified and unqualified application. Whereas the Form of F is unqualifiedly F, a particular instance of F can be F only qualifiedly (1981, 221). Vlastos’ well-known substitution of 'degrees of reality' for 'degrees of being/existence' must be categorized as a predicative reading. Kahn thinks that the basic sense of being for Plato is 'something like propositional structure, involving both predication and truth claims, together with existence for the subject of predication' (2013, 96). Believing that the complete-incomplete distinction terminology is misleading about Plato, he thinks that semantic functions are only second-order uses of the verb and it is the predicative or incomplete function which is fundamental. Suggesting a veridical reading, Fine (2003, 70 ff) thinks that while both existential and predicative readings separate the objects of knowledge and belief, it is only her reading which does not force such separation of the objects and thus does not imply TW. Stokes (1998, 266) thinks that though Fine is right saying that Plato does not endorse TW in book V, she is wrong in rejecting existential in favor of the veridical reading. The reception of existential reading can be seen more obviously in Calvert who thinks, in agreement with Runciman, that 'it would be safer to say that Plato’s gradational ontology is probably not entirely free from degrees of existence' (1970, 46). At Sophist 254d-e Plato singles out five most important kinds (or Forms!?) in which the same (ταὐτὸν) and difference (θάτερον) are regarded besides being, rest and change. They are, therefore, neither the same nor the difference but share in both (b3). Being (τὸ ὄν) cannot be the same also because if they 'do not signify distinct things' both change and rest will have the same label when we say they are (255b11-c1). We have then four distinct kinds, being, change, rest and same, none of them is the other. The case of difference is more complicated. When the stranger wants to assess the relation of being and difference, he can say simply neither that they are distinct nor that they are not. He has to make an important distinction inside being to get able to draw the relation of being and difference: -/- But I think you'll admit that some of the things that are (τῶν ὄντων) are said (λέγεσθαι) by themselves (αὐτὰ καθ’ αὑτά) but some [are said] always referring to (πρὸς) other things (ἄλλα) (255b12-13) -/- The difference is always said referring to other things (τὸδέγ’ ἕτερον ἀεὶ πρὸς ἕτερον) (255d1). It pervades all kinds because each of them should be different from the others and is so due to the difference and not its own nature (253e3f.) After asserting that change is different from being and therefore both is and is not (256d), the difference is described as what makes all the other kinds not be, by making each different from being. Given that all of them are by being, this association of being and difference is the cause of their being and not-being at the same time, the issue that its version at RepublicV made all those controversies we discussed above: -/- So in the case of change and all the kinds, not being necessarily is (Ἔστιν ἄρα ἐξ ἀναγκης τὸ μὴ ὄν). Τhat’s because as applied to all of them, the nature of the difference (ἡ θατέρον φύσις) makes each of them not be by making it different from being. And we’re going to be right if we say that all of them are not in the same way. And conversely [we’re also going to be right if we say] that they are because they partake in being. (Sophist 256d11-e3) -/- Plato’s new construction of five distinct kinds and the role he gives to thedifference among them is aimed to resolve the old problem of understanding being which has always been annoying from the time of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Both the ontological status of becoming and that of not being were, in Plato’s mind, based on the absolute domination of the notion of the Same over being. Now, not only becoming is understandable as being but also not being which is not the contrary of being anymore but only different (ἕτερον) (257b3-4). Though I agree partly with Frede that the account of not being which is needed for false statements is more complicated than just saying, as Cropsey (1995, 101) says, that Plato is substituting 'X is not Y' with 'X is different from Y', I totally disagree with him that when we say X is not beautiful, Plato could not have thought that it is not a matter of its being different from beautiful because 'it would be different from beauty even if it were beautiful by participation in beauty' (1992, 411). Conversely, as we will discuss, it is exactly the relation of the beautiful thing, X, and the beautiful itself, in which X shares that is to be solved by the notion of not being as difference. Though it is beautiful because of sharing in beauty, X is not beautiful because it is different from beautiful itself. What the difference is to do is to show how something can both be and not be the same thing. The difference is what makes one thing both be and not be a certain other thing. This equips the difference with the ability to explain a certain thing’s not-being when it is. Thanks to the notion of difference, it is now possible to explain not only not being but also the simultaneous being and not being of a thing: 'What we call "not-beautiful" is the thing that ἕτερόν ἐστιν from nothing other than του̑ καλου̑ φύσεως' (257d10-11). The result is that not beautiful happens to be (συμβέβηκεν εἶναι) one single thing among kinds of beings (τι τῶν ὄντων τινὸς ἑνὸς γένους) and at the same time set over against one of the beings (πρός τι τῶν ὄντων αὖ πάλιν ἀντιτεθὲν) (257e2-4) and thus be something that happens to be not beautiful (εἶναί τις συμβαίνει τὸ μὴ καλόν); a being set over against being (ὄντος δὴ πρὸς ὄν ἀντίθεσις) (e6-7). Neither the beautiful is more a being (μα̑λλον ... ἐστι τῶν ὄντων) nor not beautiful less (e9-10) and thus both the contraries similarly are (ὁμοίως εἶναι) (258a1). This conclusion, it is emphasized again (a7-9), owes to θατέρου φύσις now turned out as being. Therefore, each of the many things that are of the nature of the difference and set over each other in being (τῆς τοῦ ὄντος πρὸς ἄλληλα ἀντικειμένων ἀντίθεσις) is being as being itself is being (αὐτοῦ τοῦὄν τοςοὐσία ἐστιν) and not less. They are different from, and not the contrary of, each other (a11-b3). This is exactly τὸμὴὄν, the subject of the inquiry (b6-7). Hence, not being has its own nature (b10) and is one εἶδοςamong the many things that are (b9-c3). Such far departing from Parmenides’ ontological principle is done on the basis of the nature of the difference. It was the discovery of such a notion that made the stranger brave enough to say that not being is each part of the nature of the difference that is set over against being (258d7-e3, cf. 260b7-8). That the relation of being and difference is difference is the key element of the new ontology. The difference is, only because of its sharing in being, but it is not that which it shares in but different from it (259a6-8). Not being is exactly based on this difference: ἕτερον δὲ τοῦ ὄντος ὄν ἔστι σαφέστατα ἐξ ἀνάγκης εἶναι μὴ ὄν (a8-b1). 2. Difference and the Being of a Copy We discussed above that the sense of being of particulars in Republic V made so many debates that whether being is there used in an existential sense or not. Particulars in Republic are regarded as images in the allegories of Line and Cave. The being of an image/copy makes, thus, the same problem. Plato’s analogy of original -copy for the relation of Forms and their particulars in Republic has obviously a different attitude to being. The main question is that what is the ontological status of a copy in respect of its original? Are there two kinds of being, 'real being' versus 'being' as Ketchum says (1980, 140) or only one kind? What is the difference of being in an original and its copy? Is it a matter of degrees of being or reality as some commentators have suggested? Is it a matter of being relational? By reducing the ontological issue to an epistemological one, Vlastos’ suggestion of degrees of reality in an article with the same name does neither, I think, pay attention to the problem nor resolve it. He agrees that Plato never speaks of "degrees" or "grades" of reality (1998, 219). What allows him to entitle it as such are some of Plato’s words in Republic as well as Plato’s words in some other dialogues (1998, 219). When Plato states that the Forms only can completely, purely or perfectly be real he means, Vlastos says, they are cognitively reliable (1998, 229); an obvious reduction of the issue to an epistemological one. He thinks that when in Republic we are being said that a particular’s being F is less pure than its Form, it is because it is not exclusively F, but it is and is not F and this being adulterated by contrary characters is the reason of our confused and uncertain understanding of it (1998, 222). Ketchum rightly criticizes Vlastos’ doctrine in its disparting from ontology thinking that 'to understand Plato’s talk of being as talk of reality is to obscure the close relation that exists between "being" and the verb "to be"' (1980, 213). He thinks, therefore, that οὐσία must be understοοd as being rather than reality, τὸὄν as "that which is" and not "that which is real" and … (ibid). His conclusion is that degrees of reality cannot interpret Plato correctly and we must accept degrees of being. Allen believes that a 'purely epistemic' reading of the passage in Republic is patently at odds with Plato’s text (1961, 325). He thinks that not only degrees of reality but also degrees of reality must be maintained (1998, 67). What Cooper suggests gets close to this paper’s solution: -/- Plato does not I think wish to suggest that existence is a matter of degree in the way in which being pleasant or painful is a matter of degree. Rather there are different grades of ontological status. (1986, 241) -/- A more ontological solution for the problem of understanding the being of a copy and its relation with the being of its original is suggested by the theory of copy as a relational entity. Based on this interpretation, 'the very being of a reflection is relational, wholly dependent upon what is other than itself: the original…' (Allen, 1998, 62). As relational entities, particulars have no independent ontological status; they are purely relational entities which derive their whole character and existence from Forms (ibid, 67). Although these relational entities are and have a kind of existence, we must also say that 'they do not have existence in the way that Forms, things which are fully real, do' (ibid). Allen (1961, 331) extends his theory to Phaedo where it is said that particulars are deficient (74d5-7, 75a2-3, 75b4-8), 'wish' to be like (74d10) or desire to be of its nature (75a2); an extension that, like F.C. white (1977, 200), I cannot admit. He correctly states that Plato did not start out with a doctrine of particulars as images and semblances but come to such a view after Phaedo, or perhaps after Republic V (1977, 202). Though we may not agree with him about Republic V, if we have to consider its last pages also, we must agree with him that not only the ontology of Phaedo but also that of Republic II-V (except the last pages of the latter book) are somehow different from (but at the same time appealing to) the ontology of original-copy which should exclusively assign to Sophist, Timaeus and RepublicVI-VII besides the last pages of book V. The answer to the problem of Plato’s sense of being in RepublicV can be reached only if we read Republic V based on and as following Sophist. We can find out his meaning of that which both is and is not only by the ontological status he assigns to a copy in Sophist. The kind of being of a copy in Sophist reveals as Plato’s key for the lock of the problem of not being. Let’s see how the ontological status of a copy is the critical point of Plato’s ontology. In the earlier pages of Sophist, we are still in the same situation about not being. To think that that which is not is is called a rash assumption (237a3-4) and Parmenides’ principle of the impossibility of being of not being is still at work (a8-9). At 237c1-4, the problem of "not being" is noticed in a new way which shows some kinds of a more realistic position to the problem of not being. Nevertheless, not being is still unthinkable, unsayable, unutterable and unformulable in speech (238c10). Soon after mentioning that it is difficult even to refuse not being (238d), the solution to the problem appears: the being of a copy (εἴδωλον) (239d). A copy is, says Theaetetus, something that is made referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν) but still is 'another such thing (ἕτεροντοιου̑τον)' (240a8). Nevertheless, this 'another such thing' cannot be another such real or true thing. In answer to the question of the Stranger that if this 'another such thing' is the true thing (240a9), Theaetetus answers: οὐδαμῶς ἀληθινόν γε, ἀλλ’ ἐοικὸςμὲν (240b2). A copy’s being 'another such thing' does not mean another true thing but only a resemblance of it. Not only is not a copy another true thing besides the original, but it is the opposite of the true thing (b5) because only its original is the thing genuinely and being a copy is being the thing only untruly. The word ἐοικὸς is opposed to ὄντως ὄν in the next line (240b7): 'So you are saying that that which is like (ἐοικὸς) is not really that which is (οὐκ ὄντως [οὐκ] ὄν)'. But still a copy 'is in a way (ἔστι γε μήν πως)' (b9). While it is not really what it is its resemblance, it has its own being and reality because it really is a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως) (b11). The Stranger asks: -/- So it is not really what is (οὐκ ὄν ἄρα [οὐκ] ὄντως ἐστὶν) but it really is what we call a likeness (ὄντως ἣν λέγομεν εἰκόνα)? (b12-13) -/- This is Plato’s innovative ontological solution to the problem of not being. Theaetetus’ answer confirms this: 'Maybe that which is not is woven together with that which is' (c1-2). Therefore, a copy neither is what really is nor is not-being but only is what in a way is. Thanks to the ontological status of a copy, the third status intermediate between being and not being is brought forth. The essence of an image, in Kohnke’s words, does not consist 'solely in the negation of what is genuine and has real being' because otherwise 'it would be an ὄντως οὐκ ὄν,essentially and really a not being' (1957, 37). The characteristics of a copy can be summed up as folows: i) A copy is a copy by referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν). ii) A copy is different from that of which it is a copy (ἕτερον). iii) A copy is not itself a true thing (ἀληθινόν) as that of which it is a copy but only that which is like it (ἐοικὸς). iv) It is not really that which really is (ὄντως ὄν) but only really a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως). The conclusion is that: v) A copy in a way (πως) is that means it both is and in not, the product of interweaving being with not being. This leads to the refutation of father Parmenides’ principle, accepting that 'that which is not somehow is (τό τε μὴ ὄν ὡς ἔστι)' and 'that which is, somehow is not (τό ὄν ὡς οὐκ ἔστι) (241d5-7). Besides copies and likenesses (εἰκόνων), we have also imitations (μιμημάτων) and appearances (φαντασμάτων) as the subjects of this new kind of being and thus false belief (241e3). In Timaeus, the world of becoming which cannot correctly be called and thus we have to call it "what is such" (τὸ τοιου̑τον) (49e5) or "what is altogether such" (τὸ διἀ παντὸς τοιου̑τον) (e6-7), consists solely of imitations (μιμημάτα) (50c5) which are identifiable only by the things that they are their imitations. The word τοιου̑τον which had been used to determine the situation of a copy in respect of its original, now becomes the definition of the world of becoming in which everything is an image of another thing, a Being, that stays always the same and is different and separated from its image. Cherniss, in my view rightly, draws attention to the very important point about the ontological status of an image that can at the same time be considered a criticism of the relational theory. What we are being said in Timaeus, he thinks,cannot be explained by saying that an image is not self-related and making its being relational. What is crucial about an image is that it 'stands for something, refers to something, means something and this meaning the image has not independently as its own but only in reference to something else apart from it' (1998, 296). This function finds its best explanation in the theory we are to suggest in the following. 3. πολλαχῶς ἔστι The best way to understand the ontological status of an image in Plato is to see first how his most clever pupil, Aristotle, resolved the same problem that Plato brought his theory of image for its sake. Aristotle’s theory of pollachos legetai is a brilliant and, at the same time, deviated version of Plato’s theory that is able, however, to help us read Plato in a better way. We discuss Aristotle’s theory to reach to a full understanding of Plato’s theory because it is, firstly, constructed in Aristotle in a more clear way and, secondly, it can also be taken as an evidence that our reading of Plato is legitimate. The phrase τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, a so much repeated phrase in Aristotle’s works, is his resolution for some of the ontological problems of his predecessors all treating being as if it has only one sense. Aristotle is right in his criticism of the philosophical tradition specially Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato since all did presuppose only one sense for being and his theory is, thus, a creative and revolutionary solution for many problems that all the past philosophers were stuck in. But it is at the same time somehow a borrowed theory. As we will discuss, both the structure of the doctrine and the problems it tries to resolve are the same as Plato’s doctrine (and even is comparable in its phraseology) though it is in Aristotle, as can be expected, a more clear and better structured doctrine. 1) Associated with the theory of pros hen and the theory of substance, the theory of several senses of being provides a structure which, I insist, is the best guide to understand Plato’s theory of Being in Sophist, Timeaus and Republic. a) Although the theory of pollachos legetai is not necessarily based on the theory of pros hen, they become tightly interdependent about being: -/- Being is said in many ways/senses (τὸ δὲ ὄν λέγεται μὲν πολλαχῶς) but by reference to one (πρὸς ἕν) [way/sense] and one kind of nature (μίαν τινὰ φύσιν). (Metaphysics 1003a33-34) -/- The doctrine of pros hen which is Aristotle’s initiative third alternative besides the homonymous and synonymous application of words, is primarily a linguistic theory that tries to provide a new theory to explain the different implementations of the same word. The pros hen implementation of being is to provide an alternative for the theory of the synonymous (in Plato: homonymous) implementation of being which says being is said in one sense (kath hen) (1060b 32-33). That both the pros hen and the kath hen implementation of a word has one thing (hen) as what is common, makes them in opposition to the homonymous implementation which does not consider anything in common. Whereas both pros hen and kath hen assume a common nature, with which all the implementations of the word have some kind of relation, their difference is that while kath hen takes all the implementations of the word as the same with the common nature, pros hen makes them different. Substance is called πρῶτον ὄν because it is said to be primarily: -/- For as is (τὸ ἔστιν) is predicated of all things, not however in the same way (οὐχ ὁμοίως) but of one sort of thing primarily and of others in a secondary way. So too τὸτί ἐστιν belongs simply (ἁπλῶς) to substance but in a limited sense (πῶς) to the others [other categories] (1030a21-23). -/- The word ἁπλῶς standing against κατὰ συμβεβηκός tries to make substance different from the accidents. When we are being said that τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, it means that only the substance that is simply (ἁπλῶς) the ἕν, the common nature, τὸὄν. When we use the word 'being' about a substance, the being is said differently from when we use 'being' about an accident. The distinction between the substance and the other categories is a distinction between what simply is said to be and what only with reference to (pros) the substance is said to be. The doctrine of pros hen, changing kath hen to pros hen in respect of to on, makes a distinction that wants to show that while there is a kind of implementing the word being that is simply being, there is another kind which is called being only by reference to that which is simply being. In the doctrine of pros hen it is not so that all the things that are said to be are only by reference to a common one thing, but that while one thing is called being because it is that thing itself, the other things are called so without being that thing itself but only by referring to it. At the very beginning of book Γ, it is said that: -/- Being is said in many senses but all refer to one arche. Some things are said to be because they are substances, others because they are affections of substances, others because they are a process towards substances or destructions or privations or qualities of substances … (1003b5-9, cf. 1028a18-20) -/- Substance is what really is said to be and all other things that are said to be are said only in favor of it. This difference of substance from all other senses of being is what is, I believe, primarily aimed in Aristotle’s interrelated theories of pollachos legetai,pros hen and the theory of substance. b) The difference of the implementation of being in the case of substance and the accidents goes so deep that while substance is considered as the real being, the accidents are almost not being. An accident is a mere name (Metaphysics 1026b13-14) and is obviously akin to not being (b21). Aristotle adds that Plato was 'in a sense not wrong' saying that sophists deal with not being (τὸ μὴ ὄν) because the arguments of sophists are, above all, about the accidental (1026b13-16). At the beginning of book , he says about quality and quantity (which look to be more of a being than other accidents) that they are not existent (οὐδ̕ ὄντα ὡς εἰπεῖν) in an unqualified sense (ἁπλῶς) (1069a21-22). The two above-mentioned points, Aristotle’s (a) interwoven theories of pollachos legetai, pros hen and the theory of substance and (b) taking accidents almost as not being, comparedwith substance, brings forth a structure that I shall call Pollachos Legetai (with capital first letters). What is of the highest importance in this structure for me is the difference of substance from accidents and the kind of relation which is settled between them. There is a substance that without any qualification is said to be and the accidents that are said to be only by reference (pros) to it. Adding Aristotle’s point about accidents that they are nearly not being to this relation and difference, we can obviously see how much this structure is close to Plato’s original-copy ontology. We spoke of the relation of being and difference in Plato’s model and the way Plato construes the being of a copy. A copy is a copy only by referring to (pros) a model; it is different from (ἕτερον) that of which it is a copy; it is not itself a true thing as its model and not really that which is (ὄντως ὄν) but only is in a way (πῶς). If we behold the difference of substance and accident in the context of the theory of pollachos legetai and pros hen, we can observe its fundamental similarity with Plato’s original-copy theory in its structure. Allen draws attention to the fact that the relation between Forms and particulars in Plato’s original-copy model is 'something intermediate between univocity and full equivocity' (1998, 70, n. 24) and the same as what Aristotle calls it pros hen (ibid). What made us compare the two structures was not, of course, the complete similarity of two structures (we have to agree with many possible differences of the two theories) but exactly the specific relation between an original and its copy on the one hand, and a substance and its accident on the other hand. As substance and accident do not share a common character and the substance -accident model hints that they stand in a certain relation, there is no common character between the original and copy in Plato’s model as well. Furthermore, their similarity is not confined to their structure only; they are also aimed to solve the same problem. The central point of the theory is that all the predecessors took being in one sense and this was their weakness point. Besides the mentioned above passages about the relation of pollachos legetai and presocratics’, as well as Plato’s, ontology, the relation of the theory with the problem of not being is clear in several passages. In Metaphysics, it is said: 'Being is then said in many senses… It is for this reason that we say even of not being that it is not being' (1003b5-10). Discussing the accidental sense of being, Aristotle points that it is in the accidental way that we say, for example, that not-white is because that of which it is an accident is (1017a18-19, cf. 1069a22-24). We mentioned that he thought Plato was right saying that sophistic deals with not being because sophistic deals with accidental, which is somehow not being (1026b14-16). Plato turned sophistic not-being to what both is and is not and Aristotle to what accidentally is said to be. What helps Aristotle to resolve the problem of not being is his distinction between ἁπλῶς and κατὰ σθμβεβηκός. Aristotle’s "qua" (ᾕ) which is directly linked with his distinction between καθ’ αὑτο λέγεται and κατὰ συμβεβηκός λέγεται, is used to resolve the old problem of coming to be out of not being (Physics 191b4-10). He strictly asserts that his predecessors could not solve the problem because they failed to observe the distinction of "qua itself" from "qua another thing" (b10-13). He then continues: -/- We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said simply (ἁπλως) to come from not being (μὴὄντος). But nevertheless we maintain that a thing may come to be from not being in an accidental way (κατὰ συμβεβηκός). For from privation which ὅ ἐστι καθ’ αὑτο μὴ ὄν, nothing can become. (Phy. 191b13-16, cf. b19-25) . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Creative Writing ContributionsAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekinewhen i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women Are (...) White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, I imagined a wealth of examples of the world and the work made possible by these two groundbreaking anthologies. I wondered what their editors and contributors were writing now. I wondered about the work of their students and people like me: those of us who understand everything we write as indebted to the path-making, silence-clearing, generative, and bodacious work of the participants in the miracles that are This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave.But today as I reread the contributions that actually emerged from this process, I realize that my dream was too small. I imagined writing that would provide evidence of the ongoing impact made by these two anthologies. Instead, the creative writing in this special issue offers something more crucial and beautiful than I had imagined. These works are not mere evidence of a transformed world; these works are continuing to transform the world in urgent and visionary ways. As repeated again and again by participants in the 2022 celebration for the fortieth anniversary celebration of This Bridge Called My Back, the work that inspired these anthologies is not over. The writings featured in this issue not only show [End Page 198] how this work continues, but they feed, nurture, and provoke us as we honor our responsibility to transform this world.For example, when Akasha Gloria Hull, coeditor of But Some of Us Are Brave, shares her daily early morning meditative writing in "Writing and Rebirth: A Set of Journal Poems," we remember not only her fundamental work excavating the daily lives of Black women writers from the nineteenth century—most notably in Give Us Each Day, her edited book based on the diaries of poet Alice Dunbar Nelson—but also our own imperative. Hull's reflections on health challenges, interpersonal conflict, resurrection, collaboration, and writing itself remind us that our feminist praxis is impactful because of its dailyness. Those of us who wake up tomorrow will need to ask the same critical questions the editors of But Some of Us Are Brave asked of the fields of Black studies and women's studies. We will find surprises and repetitions in the days we meet, and then we will have to do it again.When we read two new prose poems by Cheryl Clarke, an original contributor to This Bridge Called My Back, we have an opportunity to time travel. In "Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style," we venture into a critical engagement with the term "hardcore lesbian," displacing the desires of the person who needs to classify others using that term with those of someone who has been hailed by it. Clarke's poem is a reminder that as we work in literary traditions and fields of study made possible by the revolutionary identity politics of an earlier era, we are still responsible for centering the experiences of those most impacted by our fluent and fluid naming practices. In "History," Clarke offers us a timely Black lesbian feminist lens on many iterations of responding to police violence, centering the perspective of a lesbian, her lover, and her lover's husband.The poem "On Being an hbcu Graduate, Teacher, Professor-Scholar at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, in May 2015" by doris diosa davenport—an original contributor to But Some of Us Are Brave—highlights the intimacy, hilarity, and poignancy of the daily work of intergenerational critical and creative praxis. In particular, she considers the context of institutions and regions that are sometimes excluded from the imaginary of how and where feminist work happens. davenport transmits the lessons and energy gained through her practice of thinking and gathering otherwise... (shrink)

Philosophers of all times and peoples tried to describe the mystery of magic, each time giving humanity their own images of magical practices, on the one hand, and the attitude to magic from the side of public consciousness, on the other. Turning to the problem of magic even today, in the era of worldview pluralism and the crisis of traditional ideas about the world, turns out to be quite relevant. Magic, which actually originated with humanity itself and passed (...) through centuries and millennia, continues to exist in the consciousness of modern human.Some researchers talk about the onset of a «new magical era» and the formation of a whole subculture of magic followers. Yes, today in the individual and mass consciousness there is a sharp increase in interest in everything mysterious and supernatural: on the pages of newspapers, magazines, and social networks there are many ads from magicians and fortune tellers who promise to fulfill almost any wishes of people for a fee, television channels actively broadcast projects that talk about some magical events and phenomena, and even celebrities in their interviews tell how certain mysterious events happened to them, or how they personally turned to the mystery of magical practices. That is, we can say with confidence that the thinking and behavior of modern man is rightfully considered magical. Therefore, magic is not a relic of the past, but an integral part of the consciousness of a modern people. The aim of the publication is to analyze the influence of magic and magical practices on the consciousness and behavior of modern human. Research methodology. Research methods are comprehensive and based on a philosophical-anthropological and philosophical-cultural analysis of magic as an integral part of human consciousness. Discussion. Magic in the mind of a modern people exists in the form of: something prohibited, anti-social, anti-religious, dangerous and harmful; one’s native achievement of a certain goal or fulfillment of desires; everyday rituals and superstitions, which, although some do not associate the direction with magic, somehow have a strong connection with it.Conclusion. Magic is an integral part of the consciousness of modern human. For some, it is something dangerous, frightening, anti-religious and anti-social, and for some, magic appears to be an excellent means of learning about the surrounding world, a tool for subduing supernatural forces and obtaining certain benefits or fulfilling wishes. One way or another, each of us consciously or subconsciously performs certain magical rituals every day. Magic is so firmly entrenched in human consciousness that some philosophers speak of the onset of a «new magical era», which is associated with the open promotion of magical practices, supernatural forces and phenomena in modern society and the formation of such a phenomenon as a «magical worldview», which will perspective of our further research. (shrink)

Although we never made time to talk it out thoroughly, Margaret Wilson and I shared an interest in, and enthusiasm for, the tenth chapter in Locke’s Essay IV, entitled ‘Of Our Knowledge of the Existence of a GOD.’ In the present paper, written in sad tribute to her work and her person, I shall expound that deep, subtle, intricate, flawed chapter. While I shall evaluate its arguments as I go, I chiefly aim just to make clear what happens in (...) those nineteen sections, which I shall refer to by their numbers alone. They aim to show that ‘we are capable of knowing . . . that there is a GOD’ by cogently inferring this from secure premises. A god is any being that is ‘eternal, most powerful, and most knowing;’ given such a being, Locke adds laconically, ‘it matters not’ whether we call it God. This line of argument will be my topic in sections B through E. Two subsidiary themes in the chapter concern matter. One is this: given that there is a god, is it (or he) material or immaterial? Although he argues at length for God’s immateriality, Locke remarks in 13 that this in itself is of little moment. Someone with an otherwise correct theology is in good shape even if he wrongly thinks God to be made of matter - except, Locke adds, for a risk that he runs. Philosophers who are ‘devoted to matter,’ if they think God to be material, will comfortably conclude that everything is matter and will then ‘let slide out of their minds’ their theology, i.e. their view that the material world includes ‘an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being.’ Section 13 also argues that if the materialists do thus drift into atheism, ‘they destroy their own [materialist] hypothesis.’ This is too clever by half; it is neither well done nor instructive, and I shall not expound it. Some of the Chapter’s richest treasures concern God’s immateriality.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tracing the Anthropocene and Entangled Trauma in Yashar Kemal's NovelsMore-Than-Human Lives in the Post-Ottoman WorldDeniz Gündoǧan Ibrişim (bio)Yashar Kemal (1923–2015), one of Turkey's most prominent Kurdish-Turkish novelists and human rights activists, largely engages with the southern Turkish countryside, which the author himself had known well in his early life.1 Kemal is commonly recognized as the writer of Çukurova or the Clician Plain (Cilicia Pedias in antiquity), a large fertile (...) plain in southern Turkey. The plain covers the easternmost areas of Mersin Province, southern and central Adana Province, Western Osmaniye, and Northwestern Hatay, and it has been a major place of anthropogenic change and industrialization since the 1930s, in the aftermath of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Republic. Kemal presents the severe impact of the destruction of the forests and the draining of the swamps on the nature of the local people, whose way of life was transformed by this anthropogenic uprooting during the modernization and industrialization brought about by successive political and environmental administrations in post-Ottoman Turkey:The earth was covered with woods from Misis to the Mediterranean Sea in the olden days. There is a tree called Kars. Due to the fact that the Kars tree grows there the place was called Kars for a long time.... Now there is nothing; not one single tree until the Mediterranean. Historians write that the land was a great forest even in the 19th century. This was stated in a letter of Cevdet Pasha written in 1865.... Hundreds, even thousands of [End Page 32] tractors entered the Çukurova, everything happened overnight, so to say. Farm workers digging the earth to a depth of 75 centimeters were left with nothing to eat and nowhere to dwell, left with no forest, no Kars, no tree, no cane thickets, no bushes, and no swamps. I witnessed unbelievable destruction. The Çukurova turned into a desert of agriculture. This is the reality of our century, the actual conditions of our times.(qtd. in Andaç 61–62; my translation)I suggest that Kemal's lamentation here introduces non-Western stories, placing post-Ottoman vulnerability and resilience into the Anthropocene, our current geological era in which humans as a collective are said to have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale.2 The above excerpt encourages the reader to embark on an alternative reading in which the anthropogenic changes have deep and environmentally damaging roots in the Middle Eastern region, including Turkey (see Inal and Turhan 1–9). Despite the global and universal staging of the Anthropocene within North America and Western Europe, it is crucial here to underscore how the Anthropocene renders both a global process of anthropogenic climate change and a local laying down of industrial change in other landscapes and cities beyond its Eurocentric roots and routes.Within this context, this article argues that Kemal's literary works speak well to the concerns of the Anthropocene epoch, characterized by rapid and fundamental human-driven alterations of Earth, revealing longue duree linkages between weather, war, industrialization, empire, agriculture, urbanization, and deforestation that have created extraordinary changes on local and global scales. In the above passage, where we read the loss of the woods from Misis to the Mediterranean, Kemal manifests an acute awareness that the tree already disappears amid a vanishing ecosystem. Elsewhere, Kemal recounts the destruction of the forests and swamps that grants the Çukurova region its richness and vitality. At the same time, he shows how the particular process of deforestation dramatically changes ordinary lives of both human and nonhuman communities in the area during the modernizing and westernizing processes in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. This dramatic change is illustrated in Hüyükteki Nar Ağacı (The Pomegranate Tree on the Knoll). Andaç quotes Kemal as follows: [End Page 33]Çukurova was a whole forest of pomegranate trees from here to the sea at one time. In spring and summer time, these trees would be covered with red blossoms, so that the whole area from here to Ayas would be all red and would wave like the sea. Black snakes used to mate... (shrink)

The Growing Block Theory of time asserts that temporal reality encompasses all present and past things. The world grows as things come to be present. When something becomes past it does not cease to be, it simply moves away from the growing edge of reality. Thus past things are just like present ones, except not present. But if past things are just as real as present ones, and qualitatively just like them, how can I tell if what is (...) happening is present and not past? It seems everything would look the same to me whether I was past or present. And so I don’t know that I am present. To avoid this intolerable result, I argue on behalf of the Growing Block Theorist that the present does not look the same as the past. Experiences exemplify the property of presentness when they are present, and I can be directly acquainted with that fact. My direct acquaintance enables me to be justified in believing my experiences are present and to know the same. I develop this view and conclude by responding to objections. (shrink)

Chapter 1: An Introduction: The ‘Semantic Sting’ Argument Describes Dworkin’s theory as concerning the conditions of legal validity. “A legal system is a system of norms. Validity is a logical property of norms in a way akin to that in which truth is a logical property of propositions. A statement about the law is true if and only if the norm it purports to describe is a valid legal norm…It follows that there must be certain conditions which render certain norms, (...) but not others, legally valid. Hence it also follows that there can be two types of disagreement over the truth or falsehood of propositions about the law. People can disagree over the question ‘What are the conditions of legal validity?’, in which case their disagreement is a theoretical one. Or they can agree on the conditions of validity, and disagree as to whether or not those conditions actually obtain in a given case or not.” Argues that the best way to interpret Dworkin’s ‘semantic-sting argument’ is as a general argument against conventionalism in legal positivism. Summarizes the outcome of Dworkin’s argument as follows: “[I]f Dworkin is right about the legal reasoning of lawyers and judges, conventionalism would be self-defeating: if lawyers and judges recognize as legally binding not only those norms which are uncontroversially identifiable under the Rule of Recognition, that is, if what they recognize as binding is not only source-based law, then conventionalism turns out to be false on its own terms. In other words, either law is not what lawyers and judges think that it is, in which case law is not a matter of conventions, or – if it is what lawyers and judges think – conventionalism is false, as they do not see the law as purely a matter of conventions.” Dworkin’s theory, then, is a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a rival to conventionalism. The book will be concerned with re-examining positivism in light of the interpretative challenge. Chapter 2: Meaning and Interpretation “[R]oughly, interpretation can be defined as an understanding or explanation of the meaning of an object.” Interpretation in this narrow sense is distinct from a less formal and broader use of interpretation that makes it equivalent to explanation. “Hence also, only those objects which are capable of bearing some meaning qualify as objects of interpretation.” [Why shouldn’t we think of interpretation as object-identification? This seems to be closer to what Dworkin has in mind.] Thus, a consideration of the philosophical work on meaning is appropriate. First, a consideration of Davidson on interpretation. The thesis is that Davidson’s “radical interpretation” can only account for sentence meaning and not for linguistic interpretation in general. Davidson cannot account for the non-rule-governed aspects of communication. “Semantics, as opposed to interpretation, concerns those aspects of communication which are rule or convention governed…but such rules are normally unavailable as reasons or justifications for an interpretation. On the contrary, interpretation is usually required because the issue is not determined by rules or conventions.” Interpretation, rather, is parasitic with understanding the meaning of an expression and not equivalent with it. As Dummett notes, any reflection on the meanings of words assumes prior knowledge of ordinary meanings. “This leads to the conclusion that understanding or explaining the meaning of an expression and interpreting it, are two conceptually separate things. It also indicates that seman ics can only be employed, if at all, to elucidate the concept of interpretation by way of contrast: interpretation concerns those aspects of communication which are under-determined by semantic rules or conventions.” Pragmatics, the study of problems posed by discrepancies between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, would seem to be closer to inquiry into interpretation. Both are concerned with understanding how meaning is possible where conventional rules leave off. Contemporary pragmatics, moreover, recognizes the logically indeterminate character of communicative inferences beyond conventional meaning and that the contextual conditions that account for the possibility cannot be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. However, different criteria of success may be at work in pragmatics than interpretation. Pragmatics is concerned with how communication is achieved and thus the criteria of success would be grasping a speaker’s intentions. Many think, however, that communication is unimportant in certain spheres of communication, e.g. artistic interpretation, and that in these cases the aim of interpretation is not to uncover the actual artist’s intentions. What kind of meaning is interpretation aimed at then? It cannot be the meaning the object has for the interpreter. “Interpretation purports to be a statement about the object interpreted, not about the subject who offers the interpretation…it is crucial to remember that not everything we say about a work of art, or any other text, amounts to an interpretation of it. Only those aspects of a text which can shed light on its meaning form part of the text’s interpretation. What the text means for someone rarely entails anything about what the text means.” [This is puzzling to some extent for it remains somewhat ambiguous what it means to talk of subject-independent meaning.] Interpretive meaning attribution is, rather, counterfactual. “In general, I will suggest that the answer to this question consists in the fact that meaning is assigned by a counterfactual statement. Given that x is the meaning attributed to, for instance a text T, and x is not the literal meaning of T, nor is it the meaning of T intended by its author, then the attribution of meaning x to T can only be understood as the contention that on the basis of certain assumptions a certain fictitious or stipulated speaker would have meant x by expressing T.” Thus, on this account, interpretation, when it does not concern an actual speaker, turns out to be a kind of counterfactual intention attribution. Twofold point: “First, that interpretation is essentially a matter of attributing intentions, that is, in the pragmatics sense of ‘meaning’, namely, meaning that such-and-such by an act or expression. At the same time, interpretations need not be based on the intentions of actual authors; the meaning of an act or expression is understandable in terms of counterfactual intentions.” [Are we really restricted to understanding the coherence and integrity of meaning in such a way? Presumably the author is a kind of device for organizing meaning, much like Dworkin’s integrity, but need it take that format?] The logic of interpretation is typically reducible to intention attribution. [What role does the counterfactual author play in structuring meaning?] The criteria of interpretive success will depend upon the object, whether it is the real author or the counterfactual author. If the former, success will depend upon the retrieval of the author’s actual intentions. “Likewise, if the author is characterized in terms of some ideal representative of a certain genre, for instance, the presumptions which are taken to determine this c aracterization would provide the criteria of success for the particular interpretation offered.” [The criteria of success would seem, then, to be the principles, ideals, etc. that we attribute to the counterfactual author. These attributed qualities would be doing all the work – is the attribution of intention to the hypothetical author, then, really necessary at all?] [Does this account presuppose a weird dichotomy between what an object is and what it means? This dichotomy is different, if present at all, in Dworkin.] Chapter 3: Dworkin’s Theory of Interpretation and the Nature of Jurisprudence Three main insights of Dworkin’s theory of interpretation: “First, that interpretation strives to present its object in its best possible light. Second, that interpretation is essentially genre-dependent. And third, that there are certain constraints that determine the limits of possible interpretations of a given object.” Why the best light? Dworkin doesn’t really address this question in depth but claims that otherwise we are left with no way of justifying and choosing an interpretation or we are left with the author’s intention model, which we should reject. [Marmor doesn’t seem clear on what precisely it means to present something in its best light – seems to conflate it with most appealing light which, I take it, is different than what Dworkin has in mind.] “Dworkin is quite right to maintain that without having some views about the values inherent in the genre to which the text is taken to belong, no interpretation can take off the ground. The values we associate with the genre partly, but crucially, determine what would make sense to say about the text, what are the kinds of meaning we could ascribe to it.” There is no necessity for an interpretation to present an object in its best light with regards to the genre it is taken to be part of. Interpretations “could simply strive to present it in a certain light, perhaps better than some, worse than others, but in a way which highlights an aspect of the meaning of the text which may be worth paying attention to for some reason or another.” [What kind of reasons would count in choosing to present it in one light rather than another?] There is simply zero grounds for Dworkin’s assertion that we have no reason to pay attention to an interpretation that does not present it in its best light. Take a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet, for example – not the best light, but a legitimate one. [This seems related to the next criticism – clearly Dworkin would have to loosen his insistence on the best, though not to detriment.] Moreover, especially with regards to art, it doesn’t appear possible to make an all things considered judgment about the best interpretation given the incommensurability of different values that are taken to inhere in a given genre. [Dworkin can respond here that we may have different available interpretations that could be justified with respect to the relevant value. Moreover, a lack of common denominator does not prevent any comparison whatsoever.] Constructive interpretation concerns social practices constituted by norms – it imposes a purpose or value rendering intelligible the normative character of the practice. There is a separate aspect of constructive interpretation that maintains that elements of the practice are sensitive to the point of the practice. It is important to note that different social practices will institutionalize themselves in different ways – thus, different practices will establish varying conditions on how the practice can be altered. The position of the positivists is that evaluative judgments concerning what the law should be are insufficient for determining what the law is given the nature of law’s institutionalization.&nb p; [This would seem to reside on a certain conception of law, i.e. an interpretation about where the value of law lies.] “[T]his being one of the main points of dispute between Dworkin and his positivist opponents, Dworkin cannot at this initial state presume law to be sensitive to its value in the manner that other, non-institutional practices might be, without incurring the charge of having assumed the very point at issue.” The upshot for Dworkin is that any explanation of a social practice such as law requires the same kind of reasoning as participation in that practice. This will be called the hermeneutic thesis. We can try to reconstruct a justification for this view based on the necessity of shared background assumptions – but this will not do since Dworkin’s claim is stronger: it contends that participants’ and theorists’ must “adopt one and the same normative point of view.” [The sense of normative here is unclear. It is true, though, that shared background assumptions do not imply viewing the law as valuable in any particular way, or at least it does not imply this in any strong sense.] Dworkin makes two distinct points with the hermeneutic thesis: “First, that the explanation of a social practice, like law or the arts, is essentially interpretative, and as such, necessarily value laden. Second, that the interpretation of such social practices, which Dworkin calls ‘argumentative’, is unique in the sense that the practice itself is an evaluative enterprise, and that therefore the interpreter of such a practice must form an evaluative judgment of her own about those values which are inherent in the practice that she purports to interpret.” [As stated, the first thesis is terribly ambiguous – for Dworkin, it clear implies a commitment to constructive interpretation. For Marmor, who accepts it, it is totally unclear what commitment he intends to make. He seems to mean simply that we have criteria for success concerning what counts as a successful explanation.] Mamor denies the second thesis. “What Dworkin seems to ignore here is that there is a crucial difference between forming a view about the values which are manifest in a social practice, like law, and actually having evaluative judgments about them.” [The problem, however, it that it is a contentious matter what values are part of the law – a theorist’s account of what values are constitutive of a particular legal system must rely on the kind of arguments which participants rely on. Of course, a theorist might simply note a debate about values and attempt to remain agnostic, but this will fail to be a full theoretical account of what law is!] Dworkin’s thesis seems to depend exclusively on his account of constructive interpretation. [This seems exactly right.] Chapter 4: Coherence, Holism, and Interpretation: The Epistemic Foundation of Dworkin’s Legal Theory Begins with discussion of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Sums up dual criticism as follows: “[T]he assumption that intuitions are independently true and the converse one, that their truth depends on fitting a coherent scheme, both seem to yield paradoxical results.” Dworkin, in his article “The Original Position”, claims that Rawls cannot commit himself to ethical realism. “[T]he natural model presupposes some form of ethical realism, while the constructive model does not. One important difficulty arising from an attempt to apply the natural model to Rawls is, that under the natural model, any theory which dopes not account for an intuition, at least for one which is held firmly, cannot be wholly satisfactory, just as scientific theory which does not account for certain observational data it is supposed to cover, would not be satisfactory in a familiar way.” Rawls, rather, is committed to a constructivist view of morality. Moreover, the reason we value coherence epistemically in moral theory is that it itself is a value of political morality – fairness requires consistency and publicity in the application of moral standards. Marmor notes the following problem with such a view: “[I]f coherence is justified, as it is here, with reference to certain moral values, that is, a specific conception of fairness, then we face the following problem: the presupposed values of fairness must themselves be based upon intuitive convictions, in which case the question of their truth cannot be ignored. If they are taken to be true…we are driven back to the perplexities of the natural model.” Discusses, helpfully, the Fish/Dworkin debate. The upshot is that Dworkin’s interpretive model is best off if it commits itself to a Quineian holism. However, this undermines his distinction between internal and external skepticism since holism must deny that moral judgments constitute a closed system. [This analysis seems exactly right.] Endorses Simmonds view that Dworkin’s theory does not meet the requirements of complexity he identifies as necessary to avoid vicious circularity in interpretive judgments of fit and identity. Coherence is doing the work through and through and therefore the interpretive theory of law is circular. [Will require further investigation, though it is unclear how coherence is doing any work in the pre-interpretive stage. At this stage, the judgments, if interpretive, seem to be derived from different sources. In any case, using coherence as a value seems to be highly suspect.] Why doesn’t Dworkin just reject Fish’s assumptions: because of his jurisprudence. “If legal texts can have a meaning that is not entirely dependent on a process of interpretation, then it is at least sometimes the case that the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation. And if that is the case, then the argument from interpretation against legal positivism collapses. It is no longer the case that every conclusion about what the law is, depends on evaluative considerations about what it ought to be.” Chapter 5: Semantics, Realism, and Natural Law Assessment of Michael Moore’s legal realism and its implications. [The final criticisms of Moore are not decisive.] Chapter 6: Constructive Identification and Razian Authority A consideration of Dworkin’s denial that the communication model of interpretation is appropriate for legal interpretation. Marmor argues that intentions do play a crucial role in the identification of legal norms in a way that is incompatible with Dworkin’s “coherence thesis”. Marmor takes Dworkin to be committed to the constructive identification thesis: that the identification of something as part of the legal, artistic, etc. genre can be done sufficiently by evaluative considerations. “Here, one must maintain that evaluative considerations are sufficient to determine whether something is a legal norm or a work of art”. [Fit, however, constrains possible evaluative considerations – thus evaluative considerations are not sufficient in themselves.] “Now the crucial point here is this: if you maintain the possibility of constructive identification in art, you must assume that works of art can be identified as such on the basis of certain features they happen to possess, features which contain no reference to any particular intention to create a work of art…unless we take intentions into account, how can we discriminate between the concept of an aesthetic artifact and the con ept of a work of art?” [It is unclear, and I think false, that constructive interpretation of anything requires identifying something irrespective of an artificers intentions. Those intentions may be relevant, dependent upon the genre under which we are trying to classify the object. Nothing, seemingly, about constructive interpretation in general excludes this possibility.] Marmor’s point is that it turns out to be impossible to identify art as art without reference to an artist’s intentions – especially given the state of contemporary art. [It is notable that Marmor’s response to counterexample implicitly depends upon a fully developed theory of aesthetics. His cursory comments on the matter of identifying art seem insufficient to say the least.] The rest of the chapter considers the incompatibility of Raz’s account of authority with constructive interpretation. The incompatibilities mentioned do not move beyond what Raz identifies in his article “Authority, Law and Morality”, but a defense of this notion of authority is defended in several [inconclusive] respects. [Raz and Marmor want to separate identification from content. This is not clearly a defensible separation.] Chapter 7: No Easy Cases? Chapter defends notion that there is a distinction between easy and hard cases in the positivist sense. Takes a Hartian approach and ultimately defends the distinction by associating it Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following. The point is that one need to look the purpose of rule in order to understand what the rule requires. Chapter 8: Legislative Intent and the Authority of Law Examines the following doctrine concerning the role of legislative intent in adjudication: “[F]irst, it would hold that laws, at least in certain cases, are enacted with relatively specific intentions, and that this is a matter of fact which is discernible through an ordinary fact-finding procedure. Second, that in certain cases the presence of such a fact, namely, that the law was enacted with a certain intention, provides judges with a reason to decide the legal dispute in accordance with the relevant legislative intent.” [It is important that for Marmor, interpretive strategies are only appropriate in hard cases. However, we should wonder what grounds positivism can offer for deciding a hard case in any manner which is not the morally best manner according to the judgment of the judge. There are no legal grounds, by definition, in hard cases and so what justificatory strategy would endorse any judicial decision except for the morally best one?] We can ascribe intentions to a legislative body, when this is possible at all, by taking the shared intentions of the majority, rather than some group intention, to be the significant intentions. Moreover, we should expect a good deal of consensus about intentions for otherwise it is hard to explain how legislative bodies are able to produce so much legislation. Discussion of kinds of intentions concludes as follows: “I have distinguished between three main types of intention that are potentially relevant from the legal point of view. Apart from the intentions that are manifest in the language of the law itself, legislators typically have further intentions in enacting a given law, and sometimes they would have certain intentions bearing on its proper application. I have also suggested that some of these further intentions may be essentially non-avowable, in which case they are rendered initially irrelevant. Finally, I have pointed out that considerations of consistency require that the legislator’s application intentions be taken into account only if, and to the extent that, they are in accord with his further intentions.” The manner in which intentionalism is to be justif ed relies on the distinction, Marmor maintains, between expert and mere collective action authority. “The point I wanted to make is strictly conditional: if, and only if, a certain law is justified on the basis of the expertise branch of the normal justification thesis, would it make sense to defer to the legislature’s intentions in the interpretation of the law, that is, to the extent that there is, in fact,; such an intention and it can clarify something that needs clarification.” Insofar as a legislature can be considered an expert on the matter requiring adjudication and interpretation should the body’s intention be taken into account. Chapter 9: Constitutional Interpretation Begins by laying out general necessary features of a constitution. Then Marmor moves on to consider general questions of constitutional legitimacy. First, he considers what grounds might be offered for the legitimacy of a constitution at all. He notes that the central question is what permits a single generation to bind future generations. He then examines four arguments to avoid this problem. The first is based on the moral legitimacy of the constitution; Marmor rejects this solution for the [truly dubious] reason that the constitution would make no practical difference because it would not supply reasons in addition to those provided by morality [but, presumably, the point is that these legally valid rules would be institutionally enshrined]. The second is based on the moral authority of the framers and Marmor rightly rejects this on the basis of the idealization of the framers it requires and less rightly on the basis that there cannot be moral authorities. Third is the “argument from interpretation” which claims that “as long as the particular content of the constitution is determined by its interpretation, and the authoritative interpretation at any time correctly instantiates the values which ought to be upheld in the community, the constitution would be morally legitimate”. The fourth is Raz’s which argues that a constitution is valid so long as its constraints are morally permissible because conventions of this type might aid the continuity of the legal system, i.e. it is important to have a convention of this type and the constitution is a kind of this type. Marmor appears to endorse these two approaches and concludes: “The conditions for the legitimacy of a constitution must comprise the following conditions. First, the values and principles enshrined in it must be morally permissible…Second, when certain choices are made in particular cases, they would be legitimate if they are either morally underdetermined, or else, morally correct…It follows from this that both arguments must assume that at least in those areas in which the constitution would make a moral difference, it can be interpreted to make the difference that it should, that is, according to the true moral principles that should apply to the particular case...the moral legitimacy of constitutions very much dependent on the practices of their interpretation. In other words, a great deal of the burden of moral legitimacy is shifted by these arguments to the application of the constitution, thus assuming that the constitution is legitimate only if the courts are likely to apply the constitution in a morally desirable way.” [This implies that the only significant value constitutions have is in providing a conventional practice where some such practice is required.] Moves on to argue that courts typically rely, and rightly so, on moral considerations when deciding constitutional issues because typically, in cases of the kind that reach the supreme or constitutional court, there is no law on the case. Much of this relies on his earlier discussion about the nature of interpretation in the law – that legal interpretation is always a matter of cha ging the law. (shrink)

In conclusion, then, the notion of temporal necessity is certainly queer and perhaps a misnomer. It really has little to do with temporality per se and everything to do with counterfactual openness or closedness. We have seen that the future is as unalterable as the past, but that this purely logical truth is not antithetical to freedom or contingency. Moreover, we have found certain past facts are counterfactually open in that were future events or actualities to be other than (...) they will be, these past facts would have been different as a consequence. God's beliefs about the future are such past facts. Moreover, the effects of actions which God would have taken had He believed differently are also such past facts. Oddly enough, then, virtually any past fact is potentially counterfactually open, and the only necessity that remains is purely de facto. We, of course, do not in general know which events of the past depend counterfactually on present actions, and those cases we do know about seem rather trivial. Our intuitions of the necessity, unalterability, and unpreventability of the past as opposed to the future stem from the impossibility of backward causation, which is precluded by the dynamic nature of time and becoming. But the counterfactual dependence of God's beliefs on future events or actualities is not a case of backward causation: rather future-tense propositions are true in virtue of what will happen, given a view of truth as correspondence, and God simply has the essential property of knowing all and only true propositions. With regard to the future, virtually all facts are counterfactually open, and therefore future-tense propositions are not temporally necessary. Propositions thus move from being temporally contingent to being temporally necessary when all the opportunities to affect things counterfactually have slipped by. Hence, the mere fact that an event is past is no indication that it is counterfactually closed. This is especially evident in the case of God's foreknowledge. If we say that God foreknows that I shall do x and therefore I cannot refrain from doing x, lest I change God's past foreknowledge, we are being deceived by a modality which has nothing to do with my power or freedom. All that is impossible is the conjunction of God's foreknowledge that p and of ~ p; but this modality in sensu composito has no bearing on my ability to act such that ~ p would be true and God would have foreknown differently. Temporal necessity, then, turns out to be only obliquely temporal and modally weak, certainly no threat to freedom or divine foreknowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth in WritingAmandaAn excerpt from my journal during a dark period in my life reads:I am a survivor of sexual mutilation, of coerced gender roles, and of perpetual lies all in the name of normalization. Sometimes I have a hard time even thinking about the true extent of what all happened. It’s like my mind doesn’t have that type of scope, like when I think about (...) the word “eternity.”I wrote this after combing through old medical records, reading comments like “her introitus has healed nicely and looks normal, but my exam suggests that her vagina is shortened,” and “reduction clitoroplasty... removal of testes.” The records go on to say that my “external genitalia is quite satisfactory,” and “on perineal exam, her neovaginal orifice is quite compliant and easily accepts my second and third digits.”My journal continues:I chose this fake hole when I was a teenager because I didn’t know there was another option. I was told from day one to be a female, to be heteronormative, to act like all the other girls, and the only way I could fully accomplish this is by looking the part. A fake hole would be necessary, I thought, to go along with the rest of the lies. Sometimes I think about how the doctors told me to lie about my surgeries and my scars. Sometimes I wonder what my parents would have told the world if I had died during one of surgeries. Maybe they would have said “we were just trying to make her fuckable.”My strength is growing from the stories and experiences I write and share. My journal started about four years ago, when I was in my early 20s, near the beginning of medical school. My initial purpose in writing the journal was to help sort through my feelings and experiences related to a newly discovered sexuality and a changing gender identity. Medical school was thousands of miles away from my previous life, my family, and my friends. Away from my old social network, I was free to self–discover on my own terms. In the first journal entry, I lay out reasons why I decided to get in contact with a therapist, something I had not done previously. Some of the reasons were fairly standard reasons one seeks out a therapist, such as moving away from home. But the fundamental reasons I sought out a therapist, and why I chose to journal, had to do with exploring feelings after my first sexual encounter with a woman, and then [End Page 98] accepting my intersexuality. My relationship with that therapist did not last, but the journaling did.In the beginning of the journal, I write:I am from a small, religious, white, non–diverse, family oriented suburb of Milwaukee. I was raised to be the picture–perfect daughter in a household that did not talk about feelings, sex, cultural or religious differences, etc. My brother and I also never talked about personal issues (and still don’t), which is quite remarkable since we are twins, and have grown up doing most everything together, from sharing birthday parties, to being locker buddies... [When my mother told me about having Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS)] knowing this little fact about my body kept me wanting to become as perfectly female in all ways possible.Growing up without being able to talk about having AIS was stifling to say the least. Closing communication implied great shame, and with the shame came even greater repression. My skate-boarding, baseball card collecting, and model car building interests disappeared after learning about my AIS, which I believe was when I was 12 years old, but I cannot remember exactly. Granted, it’s tough to say whether my interests just changed as I grew older, but I do remember having a fear of portraying any masculine tendencies that other girls in my town weren’t displaying (for example, playing soccer was okay, but I had to shave my legs). I also had crafted some pretty good covers for my AIS, including stories about when I first had my (fake) period, or how I acted fearful about a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stories of Families with Chronically Ill Pediatric Patients during the War in UkraineVita VoloshchukFebruary 24th was a day that has left a mark in the memory and on the lives of every Ukrainian person. My husband and I work together [End Page E5] in a hospital. He had gone into work early to conduct a kidney transplant that had been scheduled for that day. Suddenly, whilst on my way (...) to work that morning, I heard a strange sound—it was an air-raid siren. Before that, I had never heard such a sound. I went through all the possible options of what it could be. Of course, watching the morning news had never been a habit either. The next thing that astonished me was that the taxi I had ordered was taking an unnaturally long time to turn up. When I got into the taxi, I noticed that the taxi driver was really upset and silent for half of the journey. He then said, “A war has begun...”“War? So? The war has been going on since 2014.”“You don’t understand,” he said. “Russia is launching missile attacks all over the territory of Ukraine; Russian troops are coming from the east and north of Ukraine. They want to capture the capital of Ukraine.” (Kyiv).Arriving at the hospital, I saw confused faces everywhere. The morning meeting began with a discussion of how we were to act in any possible situation that may occur. We were to discharge patients from the hospital, as many as possible. The arrangement of a bomb shelter began (although I didn’t even think that such a thing existed in our hospital), along with the strengthening of the hospital’s windows, and the increase of supplies such as medicine and food. Of course, the boy who expected a kidney transplant did not receive it because no one knew what to expect at any second or where a hostile Russian missile might hit, as Russian missiles hit not only military objects but residential buildings, hospitals, and memorials as well.Children who had to continue therapy remained in the hospital. As soon as we heard the sound of an air-raid siren, we had to go down into the bomb shelter. This happened 5-10 times per day. Families with palliative and chronically ill children began to call and ask for advice on how to proceed in such a situation. As many children were on artificial respiration devices, others needed oxygen therapy, and sputum of mucus from the upper respiratory tract. All this required uninterrupted power supplies and appropriate equipment. Later that day, a doctor from Poland called me and asked if our pediatric patients needed help, saying it would be better if they were moved to Poland, where they would be safer and have the correct equipment. We started organizing evacuations for chronically ill and palliative patients.Seven days after the war began, parents from other regions, where the situation was more dangerous, began calling, asking for help evacuating. The hospital began to work intensively round the clock. Some patients moved in, and others were evacuated abroad. Some did not want to go. They continued treatment in the hospital, which turned into a hub for patients who had come from more dangerous, occupied territories; patients who were forced to leave their motherland to continue treatment.Since the beginning of the war, I have been responsible for transferring palliative patients and other patients with gastrointestinal diseases abroad. After the massive invasion, everything changed in our country. It is important to say that during the war, Lviv is safer than any other Ukrainian city, still air-raid sirens often go off, and everyone needs to run immediately to shelters for their safety. Palliative patients need special care. It is very difficult to run with patients several times per day during an air-raid siren or live with these children for a long time (2-3 weeks) in shelters because of the explosions occurring around them.It is impossible to move some patients to safety because they need appropriate medical equipment or mechanical ventilation is necessary. In shelters, there are crowds, and the high risk of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Music, Mind, and Morality:Arousing the Body PoliticPhilip Alperson (bio) and Noël Carroll (bio)I. IntroductionIf like Aristotle one agrees that the responsibility of philosophy is to offer as comprehensive a picture of phenomena as possible, then one must admit that sometimes the methods and goals of analytic philosophy stand in the way of getting the job done properly; they may even distort one's findings. This is not said in order (...) to eschew analytic philosophy. It is simply a reminder that sometimes we need to stand back and check to reassure ourselves that the tail is not wagging the dog.One example of where this danger looms is in the philosophy of art. In the eighteenth century the Modern System of the Arts was born.1 It included the practices that we think nowadays are the appropriate inhabitants of art schools and art centers and the legitimate beneficiaries of programs like the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States. These arts included poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance, and sometimes gardening. These are what we might call the arts with a "capital A."This is a different way of understanding the notion of the arts and the nomenclature from which they derive in Latin and Greek. For Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, arts were simply any skilled practice. Poetry, for Aristotle at least, was an art, but so were navigation, medicine, and statecraft. And there were, of course, the martial arts. What happens with the emergence of the Modern System of the Arts—otherwise known as the Fine Arts, or the Beaux Arts, or, for us, the Arts with a capital A—is that a subset of the arts in the Greco-Roman sense were selected out and christened as a class unto itself, [End Page 1] different from the other "small a" arts. Whereas once upon a time chemists and painters might have been grouped together in the same guild in virtue of the fact that both types of workers ground substances, such as pigment; with the advent of the Modern System of the Arts, chemists and painters became first and foremost categorically different.However, the consolidation of the class of Arts with a capital A demanded a theoretical answer to the question of what criterion an art form had to meet in order to gain membership in the Modern System of the Arts. The first suggestion was that a candidate practice had to possess the capacity to imitate the beautiful in nature. This was not a definition that had legs. For when absolute or pure instrumental music—or, as Peter Kivy calls it, music alone2 —took center stage as the most important form of music as well as the Art with a capital A to which all the other arts putatively aspired, the criteria for entry into the Modern System of the Arts had to be reconceived. Since music alone could not creditably be described as the imitation of the beautiful in nature (or, for that matter, the imitation of anything else), a new license for practicing Art with a capital A had to be found. And this has become one of the animating tasks of the analytic philosophy of art.But the analytic philosophy of art comes with a certain bias toward discharging this task. It is committed to finding an essentialist answer to resolving the question of what warrants citizenship in the republic of Art (with a capital A). That is, what makes something an Artistic practice or, for that matter, a work of Art such that it is different from other things? What separates the Arts and the artworks from everything else?Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most popular and recurring proposals here is that the Arts are what are primarily intended to promote aesthetic experience where that has formerly been characterized as disinterested pleasure but, more recently, as experience valued for its own sake. Experience valued for its own sake, of course, is virtually by definition conceptually independent from any other end, whereas the practices that do not belong to the Modern System of the Arts are primarily devoted to securing other ends—useful or utilitarian ends, knowledge... (shrink)

Clare, the titular character of The Time Traveller's Wife, reflects that "Everything seems simple until you think about it." This might well be a mantra for the whole of philosophy, but a fair few terms tend to stick out. "Knowledge", "goodness" and "happiness" for example, are all pervasive everyday terms that undergo significant philosophical analysis. "Luck", I think, is another one of these terms. Wishing someone good luck in their projects, and cursing our bad luck when success seems (...) so close to our reach or failure could have so easily been otherwise, happens so often that we rarely stop to reflect on what we really mean. Philosophical reflection on the nature of luck has a rich tradition, that is by no stretch confined to the Western philosophical canon. However, it has only very recently become one of the goals of philosophy to provide a clear account of what luck actually amounts to. This, in part, is the goal of this thesis. The thesis has two primary motivations. The first is to offer and defend a general account of luck that overcomes the problems faced by the current accounts of luck that are available in the current philosophical literature. The second is to apply this general account of luck to the areas of metaethics and epistemology where luck has been a pervasive and problematic concept, and demonstrate how this account of luck may resolve or further illuminate some of the problems that the notion has generated. The thesis is roughly split into two parts. The first half of the thesis focuses on the former objective of offering an account of luck. Chapter 1 offers a selected history of the philosophy of luck that spans from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, so that we might properly situate the current work on luck as part of the broader historical importance of the concept. Chapter 2 will set out the major rival to the theory of luck that I will offer - the lack of control account of luck. LCAL has various iterations across the literature, but is most clearly articulated by Wayne Riggs and E.J. Coffman. Both Coffman and Riggs add and adapt their own conditions to LCAL specifically so that the account may overcome several problems that have been levied against it. These further conditions are not incompatible so, to provide the strongest lack of control account possible, I have combined them to form a lack of control account I have called Combined LCAL - LCAL. The latter part of the chapter pits LCAL against some of the problems that have been raised against LCAL. However, despite the efforts of both Riggs and Coffman, even LCAL fails to counter some of these objections. For these reasons I have rejected LCAL has a viable candidate for an account of luck. Chapter 3 sets out a modal account of luck, as argued for by Pritchard, where an event is lucky only if it occurs in the actual world, but not in a relevant set of nearby possible worlds. Here I further elaborate on how we should understand the modal distances using Lewisian possible world semantics, and what worlds should be taken into consideration when fixing the relevant set of nearby possible worlds. I argue that these relevant sets of worlds should be fixed according to the domain of inquiry of which the luck is being applied - this I call the type of luck. Examples of this is the current literature are resultant luck - the type of luck concerned with the results of our actions, and veritic luck - the type of luck concerned with the modal safety of our belief formation. Due to the multitude of types of luck across disciplinary areas, a general modal account of luck requires flexibility in what factors should fix the relevant sets of possible worlds. I achieve this by providing a [TYPE] function for the general modal account of luck, which is used as a mean of inserting the relevant fixing conditions for any domain of inquiry. Chapter 3, in a similar vein to Chapter 2, pits the general modal account of luck against some of the problems that have been levied against MAL, specifically the Buried Treasure problem raised by Lackey and the agent causation problem as raised by Levy. More successfully, the modal account offered stands up against these criticisms. For these reasons, the modal condition understood with the [TYPE] function and Lewisian semantics concerning modal distances, will be adopted to make up one half of the conditions for my account of luck. Chapter 4 will look at the second condition for an account of luck - the significance condition. The chapter will set out the reasons for adopting a significance condition at all, and some of the ways in which the condition has been articulated by Rescher, Pritchard and Ballantyne. All of these current views of the significance condition will be found wanting due to their inability to make sense of certain kinds of luck in specific normative domains. For example, Ballantyne's account of significance focuses on the interests of an agent, yet for certain types of moral luck, the interests of the agent are irrelevant. Instead, I propose a relativised significance condition, where the value of the event is relative to the value of the normative domain in which the luck is being ascribed. Epistemic luck requires a focus on the epistemic significance of the event for the agent, moral luck requires a focus on the moral or ethical significance of the event for the agent, and so on. This I call the kind of luck. Similar to the [TYPE] function for the modal condition for luck, the significance condition requires a [NORMATIVE DOMAIN] function where the relevant normative domain can be inserted depending on the kind of luck. This version of the significance condition will be conjoined with the modal condition as set out in Chapter 3 to form the correct general account of luck. Chapter 5 is the first chapter of the second half of the thesis that concerns applying the account of luck set out in part 1 to more specific domains of inquiry. Chapter 5 concerns moral luck, more specifically, resultant moral luck. Moral luck has traditionally been understood in terms of lack of control. This chapter looks at how Pritchard and Driver have attempted to understand moral luck using modal conditions. However, it is argued that these attempts would be more successful if we adopted the account of luck that I have offered in previous chapters. The chapter will go on to look at two possible problems that may be faced by this modal account of luck, and how it may resolve these problems. Chapter 6, the final chapter, looks at epistemic luck, specifically how the adoption of the modal account I have offered resolves a particular problem targeted at anti-luck epistemology by Ballantyne. The problem, Ballantyne argues, is that given that luck requires a significance condition, the degree of significance affects the degree of luck and that the degree of luck involved in our belief formation affects whether we are in a position to know the target proposition, that the result is that degree of significance affects our ability to know. For at least some instances of this - such as the aesthetic significance that we assign to the target proposition - the result will be that non-epistemic factors that have no relevance at all whether an agent is in a position to know will affect that agent's position to know. The resolution to this problem can be found in a two part solution. The first part is to demonstrate that any degree of veritic epistemic luck results in the agent failing to know. The second is that through the relativisation of the significance condition, any type of value will not affect an agent's position to know, only the epistemic value. With these two considerations in mind, the latter of which that can only be held through the adoption of the modal account of luck I have offered, the problem may be resolved. (shrink)

In New Essays on Human Understanding, book II, chapter xxi Leibniz presents an interesting picture of the human mind as not only populated by perceptions, volitions and appetitions, but also by endeavours. The endeavours in question can be divided to entelechy and effort; Leibniz calls entelechy as primitive active forces and efforts as derivative forces. The entelechy, understood as primitive active force is to be equated with a substantial form, as Leibniz says: “When an entelechy – i.e. a primary or (...) substantial endeavour – is accompanied by perception, it is a soul” (NE II, xxi, §1; RB, 170). What about efforts, then? One is certainly the will. In NE, II, xxi, §5 Leibniz argues that volition is the effort (conatus) to move towards what one finds good and away from what one finds bad and that this endeavor arises from the perceptions we are aware of. As an endeavour results in action unless it is prevented, from will (which is always directed to the good) and power together follows action. However, this is not so simple. Leibniz argues that there is also a second class of efforts: “There are other efforts, arising from insensible perceptions, which we are not aware of; I prefer to call these ‘appetitions’ rather than volitions” (NE II, xxi, §5; RB, 173). Although there are appetitions of which one can be aware, usually these appetitions arise from the insensible petite perceptions and are consequently affecting us subconsciously. Now, although all minute perceptions are confused perceptions, they are always related to pleasure and displeasure and also to perfection and imperfection. From this follows that there can be different efforts present in the soul at the same time: the will which is directed to apperceived good and several separate appetitions which lead to different goals, both to those which bring about perfection and pleasure of the mind (joy) and those which bring about displeasure and imperfection (sorrow). These efforts are not only in conflict with each other but may also be in conflict with entelechy. A typical case is perceiving a sensual pleasure. Our entelechy which is always directed to final causes (perfection) may be in conflict with several different appetitions which are related in different ways to the sensual pleasure in question. If our understanding is developed enough, our will resists the temptation posed by the pleasure (agreeing with entelechy), but if the temptation is too strong, the appetitions outweigh the will and the resulting action bring about imperfection and sorrow as it is related to imperfection. In this paper I will argue that deliberation in the human soul is a battle of different endeavors described above: the entelechy in the soul strives according to its law-of-the-series towards its telos (perfection) and the will accompanies it by being automatically directed to the good. This thrust towards the apparent good is aided or hindered by the appetitions which can be thought as derivative forces in the Leibnizian dynamics. Depending on whether the predominant appetitions are related to good or bad desires, the deliberation succeeds or fails in achieving the real good which is the goal of human deliberation. The successs can be facilitated beforehand by developing our understanding so that we are less easily swept away by the derivative forces (NE II, xxi, §19). A central role in this task is played by strong willing. As Martha Bolton has noted in her recent paper, an essential feature of the basic, standing endeavors is that they are continuous – although the power balance in the soul changes from moment to moment, something lingers from our previous volitions. That is why Leibniz argues that we pave way for the future deliberations by our previous voluntary actions (NE II, xxi, §23). In contrast, the appetitions are temporary, fliegende Gedanken as Leibniz says in NE II, xxi, §12. Therefore there is a constant, always changing power balance between two kinds of endeavors in the soul: primitive active force versus derivative forces. I will argue that the behavior of the forces in the soul can be understood with a vectorial model which is related to Leibniz’s early ideas of calculus of variations and which was anticipated by Arnauld and Nicole’s Port-Royal Logic. The central idea in the model is that the options are in tension towards each other and the ratio between them at each moment determines the consequent outcome. The proper relationship between the endeavors is not a simple balance, two options which exhaust each other, but a case where different efforts complement each other: “Since the final result is determined by how things weigh against one another, I should think it could happen that he most pressing disquiet did not prevail; for even If it prevailed over each of the contrary endeavours taken singly, it may be outweighed by all of them together.” Leibniz continues : “Everything which then impinges on us weighs in the balance and contributes to determining a resultant direction, almost as in mechanics” (NE II, xxi, §40; RB, 193). The different endeavors can be understood as vectors leading to different directions and the end result is a certain direction that deliberation takes. The dynamical tension between the different endeavors presents a situation where everything affects everything and the following direction, the resulting volition follows more or less automatically. In Theodicy, §325 Leibniz describes the deliberation as follows: “One might, instead of the balance, compare the soul with a force that puts forth an effort on various sides simultaneously, but which acts only at the spot where action is easiest or there is least resistance” (Huggard, 322) This kind of dynamical tension can be understood in terms of the calculus of variations where there are several possible variations available but where the dynamics of the situation results in the decision taking the “easiest” route which is more or less objectively good depending on the level of the deliberator’s understanding. In his comments to Bayle’s note L of “Rorarius” Leibniz says: “The soul, even though it has no parts, has within it, because of the multitude of representations of external things, or rather because of the representation of the universe lodged within it by the creator, a great number, or rather an infinite number, of variations (Woolhouse & Francks (ed.), ‘New System’ and Associated Texts, 101). This kind of deliberation is comparable to God’s choice of the best world with the difference that God’s understanding is infinite which again results in the fact that the choice is the best possible. Whereas in nature the easiest route taken is always optimal as nature is God’s creation, in men the goodness or badness of men’s actions is dependent on their state of wisdom, that is, how developed their understanding is. The more wise men are, the more metaphysical goodness or perfection follows from their actions. (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a (...) foreclosed home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Not the End We Planned ForAnonymous FourIn 1997, my four–year–old daughter was diagnosed with a high–risk medulablastoma. She underwent the current treatment program at that time. She suffered multiple complications from the treatment and developed seizures, which caused her to lose her sight and 80% of her hearing. These all contributed to her manifesting many behavioral issues, making her a danger to herself and others. Also during (...) this time, she developed large amounts of brain atrophy from the maximum radiation dose she had been given. In August of 2010, Emily was still deteriorating, her seizures were uncontrollable, and her quality of life was extremely poor. A meeting to discuss how to care for my child if an acute crisis presented was held. The meeting included her parents, oncologist, endocrinologist, pediatric neurologist, social worker and the head of medical ethics. We discussed what course of action would be best for her nothing could be done to reverse her condition or prevent further deterioration. A POLST is a physician order for life sustaining treatment and is appropriate if the doctor feel that the patient has a good chance of death in the next year. The purpose of this document is to have a plan in place in case the patient has a life threatening crises. We chose to put a POLST in place with specific instructions not to intubate. This was a hard decision to make for a parent, but we all felt it was the best choice for her.A few months after the POLST was entered, in November, 2010, I came home from the store and my daughter’s caregivers told me she had complained of a headache different from her usual headaches. They gave her Tylenol with codeine and she went to bed about 4 p.m. When I checked her later she seemed fi ne, merely sleeping her headache off. We [End Page 30] decided to let her sleep some more. Around 8 p.m the caregivers came and got me because they could not wake her up to go to the bathroom, which was her normal routine. I immediately went to try and wake her up but could not. I ran my thumb up the bottom of her foot and there was no reflex response. I yelled for her father that we needed to immediately go to the hospital.We took her to the ER at the local hospital that treated her close to the house. We told them we did know what was happening with her but that there was a POLST in place in her chart. They started lines, a nasogastric tube, and sent her for a CT, which showed massive amounts of blood in her brain. I repeated again to the ER staff and physician that there was a POLST in place but no one acknowledged my statement. I asked for a different physician, one that would respect the POLST, and was told there was no one else nor was there a neurosurgeon available. The attending physician insisted she be intubated in order to be transferred to a partner hospital (more than 20 minutes away) where there was a neurosurgeon on duty. I asked him to please call her oncologist at which point he yelled at me that, “he was not calling anyone else and that she needed to be intubated and transferred to the other hospital.” By this time, four hours had passed and I knew she had not gotten any medication for pain, so I told the physician to go ahead and transfer her since I knew the hospital we were at would not admit her for palliative care. She was then intubated, in violation of the POLST, and transferred to the other hospital where the neurosurgeon there told us what we already feared: That she had experienced a massive bleed in her brain. We requested she be extubated and be given palliative care to make her comfortable until she passed away.It is tragic that our daughter’s last hours involved aggressive medical treatment. As parents we hoped to avoid any additional suffering for our child, we did everything we knew to do to insure aggressive... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parables of Narrative ImaginingDavid Herman (bio)Mark Turner. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.The literary mind? The literary mind? The literary mind? Any which way you parse it, the title of Mark Turner’s provocative, elegantly written study seems to beg important questions, assume things that do not by any means go without saying. First parse: is there in fact a literary (part of the) mind? That is, is there (...) some nondiscrete but semi-autonomous module of cognitive capacities required for using and understanding literary discourse—a module that takes information (as its input) from other modules, operates on that information in some way, then feeds the transformed information (as its output: “literature”) into yet other modules, which in turn take that information as their input? 1 Second parse: assume that there is some module involved in the production and interpretation of literary discourse. Then of what nature, exactly, are the operations performed within that module, and how do they operate on the input in a way that makes the output specifically literary? How precisely is literature born from this process or set of processes? Doesn’t this kind of account suffer from all the disadvantages (inexplicitness, for example) that it inherits from its parent model, the black-box explanation? Third parse: should we even be talking about “minds” at all in connection with literature and the study of literature? Hasn’t “The Intentional Fallacy” and everything that has happened since in the fields of critical and cultural theory—from Marxism and poststructuralism to New Historicism and cultural studies—taught us to center critico-theoretical discourse anywhere but in “the mind”? Hasn’t all this research exposed the mind (of the author, reader, subject, or postsubject, as the case may be) as a construct with more or less noxious political and cultural properties? Are not the discourses of and about the mind so many strategies of interpellation—vehicles by which ideology can work to implant the illusions of inviolable inwardness, unchanging essence, and predetermined identity within a subject that takes such imagined realities to be its real conditions of existence? 2Turner does not directly address any of these questions—at least in the way that I have framed them. That may be grounds for criticism: if you are using a title that can be construed as polemical, then the onus is on you to explain just how the title positions your work in a wider context of argumentation. But at the same time, Turner’s analysis reformulates the underlying problems to which some of my questions point, thus raising [End Page 20] other, equally important issues. Coming to terms with these other issues may change the way we ask questions about things like literature and the mind. Specifically, as part of a larger “cognitive revolution” now unfolding in social-scientific and humanistic disciplines ranging from linguistics to literary and narrative theory, Turner’s book provides ample reasons for not thinking the idea of mind tantamount to an ideology of mind. 3 After all, reducing mind to an ideology of inwardness leaves unexplained any number of basic facts about perception, cognition, and language processing. There is, for example, our ability to use “image schemata” such as motion along a path and bounded interior to make sense of events like milk being poured into a cup, on the one hand, and contained spaces like the ones inside bottles, heads, and houses, on the other hand [Turner 16]. Relying on such schemata, I don’t regularly try to pour wine into a cutting board or to measure, in miles per hour, the speed of an asparagus stalk as it sits on the kitchen counter.There is also—to invoke a slightly different cognitive-scientific vocabulary—our ability to make predictions about emergent situations and sequences of events on the basis of prior, stereotypical situations and sequences stored in the memory as knowledge representations sometimes called frames and scripts [see Schank and Abelson]. For example, the script associated with making a purchase guides me in my interaction with the person at a cash register, such that I can make seemingly effortless predictions about what this person wants me to do... (shrink)