In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Flipping the DeckOn Totality and Infinity’s Transcendental/Empirical PuzzleJack Marsh (bio)How does one perceive a transcendental condition?— Martin Kavka... if it is legitimate to hold Levinas to the standards that he himself imposes on certain other philosophers.— Robert BernasconiI do not believe that there is a transparency possible in method. Nor that philosophy might be possible as transparency.— Emmanuel LevinasThe question of the precise methodological status of the face (...) has yet to be satisfactorily resolved. The best evidence for this claim perhaps lies in texts intended to introduce Levinas to a general philosophical audience. If even first-rate philosophers wrestle still with the puzzle Totality and Infinity bequeaths us, we seem to still await a full and precise diagnosis. For example, Michael Morgan holds the “face-to-face and the responsible self — they are one thing characterized from [End Page 79] two perspectives — are” “the transcendental condition for meaningful human life,” yet elsewhere concedes, “it is unavoidable that in some sense or other the face-to-face does occur as an actually lived experience.” If Morgan’s own nuanced treatment of this question still lands him in equivocation, the problem is certainly not Morgan’s own.1 As Atterton notes, Morgan must finally hold that Levinas’s method is a “transcendental enterprise of a certain sort.”2 But of what sort? Indeed, this question has been asked or analyzed in one way or another from the beginning of Totality and Infinity’s English-language reception.3 Of course, Derrida was the first to broach the question of Totality and Infinity’s general intelligibility, alleging that Levinas ultimately succumbs to a form of empiricism. Of course, de Boer was the first to mount a rigorous Cartesian reading of the text as an (apparently) “ethical transcendental philosophy.” Of course, Bernasconi’s response to de Boer, and his creative repetition of Derrida’s critical point, was the first to give the problem a precise formulation.4 Derrida, de Boer, and Bernasconi hand us the now canonical problem of what I will call the text’s “transcendental/empirico-metaphysical puzzle.”5 The issue boils down to Levinas’s dual insistence that the face “cannot... be stated in terms of experience,” yet is nevertheless “reflected within experience” (TI 25, 23, 67, 260). How should we understand Levinas’s references to various “formal structure[s]” — “of language,” “of interpellation,” “of the idea of infinity” — next to talk of “pure” or “concrete moral experience” (195, 79, 64, 53)? Does the Other occur in “pure experience,” or is she “deduced” as a condition of possibility for experience in general? In this essay, I will propose an internal explanation for Totality and Infinity’s longstanding methodological puzzle. By proposing to “explain” this puzzle, I am making at least three distinct claims: to show (1) that the text suffers from genuine incoherence, thus confirming the general criticism of Derrida, Bernasconi, and others, (2) precisely how this incoherence follows from the details of Levinas’s own explicit method, and (3) precisely why, philosophically, he may have constructed and performed his method as he did.6 By proposing to explain the book’s incoherence, I can [End Page 80] also make specific hermeneutic predictions. If Totality and Infinity’s transcendental/empirico-metaphysical puzzle is genuinely aporetic, it follows that no resolution to it is possible on the text’s own terms.7 As such, any attempt to resolve the puzzle must either (1) augment the text’s own descriptions, (2) utilize other philosophical resources to render its claims coherent, or (3) precisely attempt resolution in either a transcendental or empirico-metaphysical direction. As it turns out, extant scholarship reflects just these hermeneutic strategies.Over the years many philosophers have contributed to this longstanding debate, variously arguing for or against the general intelligibility of Levinas’s account of the face. On the one hand, scholarship that questions the text’s intelligibility does so from a variety of methodological perspectives.8 On the other hand, scholarship that mounts a defense of the text seems to proceed in one of three ways: by (1) apparently repeating Totality and Infinity’s methodological problems, (2) anticipating Levinas’s later work, read... (shrink)

Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant (...) conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives. (shrink)

There has been a groundswell of interest in the account of modality that Kant sets forth in his pre-Critical Only Possible Argument. Andrew Chignell's reconstruction of Kant's theistic argument in terms of what he calls has a prima facie advantage in that it appears to be able to block the plurality objection (namely, that even if every modal fact presupposes some ground, this does not entail that all modal facts share the same ground). I argue that it is both textually (...) and philosophically problematic to interpret Kant's argument in terms of real harmony. Then, I set forth an alternative response to the plurality objection which does not require the adoption of the problematic notion of real harmony. Instead, I argue that the objection can be overcome by observing that the argument seeks to ground modal facts as a totality and that, according to Kant, such relations can be accounted for only by their schematization in a single intellect. (shrink)

In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey offers a razor-sharp analysis of the split between public and private, fact and feelings.

This article explores the relationship between pragmatic encroachment and epistemic permissiveness. If the suggestion that all epistemic notions are interest-relative is viable , then it seems that a certain species of epistemic permissivism must be viable as well. For, if all epistemic notions are interest relative then, sometimes, parties in paradigmatic cases of shared evidence can be maximally rational in forming competing basic doxastic attitudes towards the same proposition. However, I argue that this total pragmatic encroachment is not tenable, and, (...) thus, epistemic permissivism cannot be vindicated in this way. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Kant remained committed to the necessity and fundamental importance of education throughout his career. Like Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–90), Kant holds that a ‘total transformation’ of schools is necessary, and he holds this view not only in the 1770s but in his later years as well. In building my case I try to refute two recent opposing interpretations – Reinhard Brandt’s position that Kant’s early ‘education enthusiasm’ was later replaced by a politics enthusiasm, and (...) Manfred Kuehn’s view that the increasing importance of autonomy in Kant’s mature ethics leads him to de-emphasize education. (shrink)

This paper introduces an interesting class of predicates that come in pairs, so-called total and partial predicates. It will be shown that such predicates contribute to an explanation for the weak and strong interpretations of donkey sentences. This paper proposes that the phenomenon of weak and strong interpretations is real, and that whether a sentence receives the weak or the strong interpretation depends on the predicate in the nuclear scope of the sentence. It also proposes that sum individuals are calculated (...) at some level before the nuclear scope of the sentence is processed. Once the sum individuals are calculated, it will be decided whether the nuclear scope is true of at least one element of the sum individual (weak interpretation) or true of all elements of the sum individual (strong interpretation). (shrink)

I develop and refine an argument for the total brain death criterion of death previously advanced by Germain Grisez and me: A human being is essentially a rational animal, and so must have a radical capacity for rational operations. For rational animals, conscious sensation is a pre-requisite for rational operation. But total brain death results in the loss of the radical capacity for conscious sensation, and so also for rational operations. Hence, total brain death constitutes a substantial change—the ceasing to (...) be of the human being. Objections are considered, including the objection that total brain death need not result in the loss of capacity for sensation, and that damage to the brain less than total brain death can result in loss of capacity for rational operations. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution.

It is shown that all the provably total functions of Basic Arithmetic BA, a theory introduced by Ruitenburg based on Predicate Basic Calculus, are primitive recursive. Along the proof a new kind of primitive recursive realizability to which BA is sound, is introduced. This realizability is similar to Kleene's recursive realizability, except that recursive functions are restricted to primitive recursives.

Berger, U., Total sets and objects in domain theory, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 60 91-117. Total sets and objects generalizing total functions are introduced into the theory of effective domains of Scott and Ersov. Using these notions Kreisel's Density Theorem and the Theorem of Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield are generalized. As an immediate consequence we obtain the well-known continuity of computable functions on the constructive reals as well as a domain-theoretic characterization of the Heriditarily Effective Operations.

INTRODUCTION Ever since the beginning of the modern phenomenological movement disciplined attention has been paid to various patterns of human experience as ...

In this paper we study applicative theories of operations and numbers with the non-constructive minimum operator in the context of a total application operation. We determine the proof-theoretic strength of such theories by relating them to well-known systems like Peano Arithmetic PA and the system <0 of second order arithmetic. Essential use will be made of so-called fixed-point theories with ordinals, certain infinitary term models and Church-Rosser properties.

The image of the hospital is presented to the public as a place of healing. Though the oft‐criticized total institutions of the past have been notably dismantled, the totalizing practices therein are now operationalized in the health care system. Through the lens of Erving Goffman, this article offers ways in which health care institutions operationalize totalizing practices, contributing to the mortification of patients and nurses alike in service to the bureaucratic machine. This article examines the ways in which totalizing practices (...) may disrupt the agency of both patients and nurses alike. (shrink)

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political (...) tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries. (shrink)

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in (...) terms of ontological parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative. (shrink)

In Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare, I argued, among other things, that preferences in economics are and ought to be total subjective comparative evaluations, that the theory of rational choice is a reformulation of everyday folk-psychological explanations and predictions of behaviour, and that revealed preference theory is completely untenable. All three of these theses have been challenged in essays by Erik Angner (2018), Francesco Guala (2019) and Johanna Thoma (2021a, 2021b). This essay responds to these criticisms and defends these three (...) theses. (shrink)

Armstrong appeals to the existence of totalities in order to solve the problem of negative truths. The totality of first-order states of affairs is a truthmaker for all negative truths, but it involves things which are irrelevant to many such truths. To solve this problem, Armstrong claimed that negative truths have minimal truthmakers which usually consist in totalities smaller than the totality of first-order states of affairs. Merricks objects to this claim by arguing that given Armstrong’s definition of (...) minimal truthmakers, the totality of first-order states of affairs is a minimal truthmaker for every negative truth. In this article, I respond to Merricks’s objection. I will first show that the definition of minimal truthmakers that he proposes is not plausible. However, Merricks’s objection, I will argue, also works on the standard definition of minimal truthmakers. I will then show that for independent reasons, the standard definition should be revised, and, given my revised definition, Merricks’s objection fails. (shrink)

We claim that Kant's doctrine of the "transcendental ideal of pure reason" contains, in an anticipatory sense, a second-order theory of reality (as a second-order property) and of the highest being. Such a theory, as reconstructed in this paper, is a transformation of Kant's metatheoretical regulative and heuristic presuppositions of empirical theories into a hypothetical ontotheology. We show that this metaphysical theory, in distinction to Descartes' and Leibniz's ontotheology, in many aspects resembles Gödel's theoretical conception of the possibility of a (...) supreme being. The proposed second-order modal formalization of the Kantian doctrine of the "transcendental ideal" of the supreme being includes some specific features of Kantian general logic like "categorical", "hypothetical", and exclusive disjunctive propositions as basic forms. (shrink)

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch declared, (...) "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)

This paper defends a novel account of how to determine the intrinsic value of possible worlds. Section 1 argues that a highly intuitive and widely accepted account leads to undesirable consequences. Section 2 takes the first of two steps towards a novel account by clarifying and defending a view about value-contribution that is based on some of W. D. Ross’ claims about the value of pleasure. Section 3 takes the second step by clarifying and defending a view about value-suppression that (...) is based on Ross’ claims about the interplay between prima-facie duties. Section 4 states and defends the account that I call Rossian Totalism. According to this account, the atoms of intrinsic value within a world only sometimes contribute their intrinsic value to the value of that world. (shrink)

Savulescu and Cameron supported selectively locking down the elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic on two grounds: first, that preserving total lockdown would entail levelling down and, second, that levelling down is wrong. Their first assumption has been thoroughly addressed, but more can be said about their wider antiegalitarian point that levelling down is simply wrong. Egalitarians are not defenceless against the levelling-down objection. Even though some consider it the most serious challenge to supporters of equality, egalitarianism possesses sound reasons to (...) assert, not only that something valuable is preserved when we level down, but also that preserving it may be, in certain circumstances, preferable to pursuing other fundamental moral goals. Although troublesome from a well-being maximising standpoint, levelling down ensures that healthcare policy reflects a commitment with the idea that people are equal in moral worth. That commitment is important enough to trump certain improvements in individual well-being. In the case of pandemic lockdowns, not all the interests protected by free movement are as fundamental as to pursue them at the cost of equality. Savulescu and Cameron’s framework is so reliant on the view that levelling down is wrong that it fails to account for the valuable loss that having the elderly suffer alone represents. (shrink)

In his masterpiece The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig shows as the notion of totality is a constant and central reference in the history of philosophy from Ionia to Jena. This paper aims to explain a different meaning of the concept of totality, reconsidering some aspects of the question starting from the philosophical reflection of Franz Rosenzweig and his opposition to the Hegelian thought. In particular, according to Rosenzweig, the concept of totality is the essential background in (...) which one could rethink the concept of community. For this reason, the second part of this paper is focused on the implications of a different concept of totality embodied by Judaism. (shrink)

A partial map f of a structure M is called almost total if |M — dom| = |M — ran| < ω. We study a difference between an almost total elementary map and an automorphism.

D. Alan Shewmon has advanced a well-documented challenge to the widely accepted total brain death criterion for death of the human being. We show that Shewmon's argument against this criterion is unsound, though he does refute the standard argument for that criterion. We advance a distinct argument for the total brain death criterion and answer likely objections. Since human beings are rational animals – sentient organisms of a specific type – the loss of the radical capacity for sentience involves a (...) substantial change, the passing away of the human organism. In human beings total brain death involves the complete loss of the radical capacity for sentience, and so in human beings total brain death is death. (shrink)

All the manifestos for a ‘total work of art’ after Wagner were political programmes: political, however, in a sense directly antithetical to the modern idea of the political. The goal of the total work of art was the formation of the people as a homogeneous political body, as the other of the social and political division, conflict and uncertainty inherent in the whole movement of democratic revolution since the 18th century. In each case the union or synthesis of the arts (...) prefigures the reconciliation of the classes as the condition of the unity of the people. But who is this people that will realize itself in the total work? Is it the same people for the artists of the Bauhaus as it is for the leaders of the Third Reich? These are the questions I try to answer through an interrogation of the continuities and breaks in the re-workings of the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the programmes of the Bauhaus and the policies of National Socialism. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate total correctness in Nonstandard Dynamic Logic . Here we show that despite of the celebrated Kfoury-Park [5] result, termination is a rst order notion if approached properly.

This essay focuses on the spatial organization of the genre of ‘Man.’ In particular, I investigate the spatial attitudes through which the genre of Man emerges as a racialized, geographically determined, and gendered category. There are two main arcs of analysis provided: the first arc follows the relation between the space of exploration and the space of totalization. The second arc focuses on the role of boundary markers such as the ‘Other’ and the ‘Outside,’ in the spatial organization of Man. (...) I argue, overall, that the totalitarian spatial attitude of the Modern State is formed on the basis of the transformation of the cosmogeny of Man from a spatially limited earth to one open to exploration. The racialized ladder of the State rests on such production of a spatial attitude that is at once open and totalitarian. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the concept of ‘shared meaning’, and the relationship between a shared understanding of signs within an animal social group and the Umwelten of individuals within the group. I explore the concept of the ‘Total Umwelt’, as described by Tønnesen, (2003), and use examples from the traditional ethology literature to demonstrate how semiotic principles can not only be applied, but underpin the observations made in animal social biology. Traditionally, neo-Darwinian theories of evolution concentrate on ‘fitness’ or (...) an organism’s capacity to survive and reproduce in its own environmental niche. However, this process also relies on underlying signs and sign processes, which are often over-looked in traditional ethology and behavioural ecology. Biosemiotics, however, places the emphasis on sign process, with signs and signals comprising a semiosphere. Significantly, whilst the semiosphere is formulated as physical phenomena, specifically energetic and material signs which can be detected and transmitted as signals from one individual to another, it is the Umwelten of living organisms which give those signals meaning. Further, two or more Umwelten can merge, giving rise to a ‘Total Umwelt’, which facilitates shared meaning of signs between two or more individuals. Across and within generations, this gives rise to cultural interpretation of signs within populations. I argue this is the fundamental basis for emergent group properties in social species, or indeed in solitary living species where individuals interact to mate, defend territories or resources, or in raising altricial young. I therefore discuss a fusion of traditional behavioural ecology- based theory with semiotics, to examine the phenomenon of ‘shared meaning’ in animal social groups. (shrink)

We discuss the total collision singularities of the gravitational N-body problem on shape space. Shape space is the relational configuration space of the system obtained by quotienting ordinary configuration space with respect to the similarity group of total translations, rotations, and scalings. For the zero-energy gravitating N-body system, the dynamics on shape space can be constructed explicitly and the points of total collision, which are the points of central configuration and zero shape momenta, can be analyzed in detail. It turns (...) out that, even on shape space where scale is not part of the description, the equations of motion diverge at (and only at) the points of total collision. We construct and study the stratified total-collision manifold and show that, at the points of total collision on shape space, the singularity is essential. There is, thus, no way to evolve the solutions through these points. This mirrors closely the big bang singularity of general relativity, where the homogeneous-but-not-isotropic cosmological model of Bianchi IX shows an essential singularity at the big bang. A simple modification of the general-relativistic model (the addition of a stiff matter field) changes the system into one whose shape-dynamical description allows for a deterministic evolution through the singularity. We suspect that, similarly, some modification of the dynamics would be required in order to regularize the total collision singularity of the N-body model. (shrink)

We discuss the total collision singularities of the gravitational N-body problem on shape space. Shape space is the relational configuration space of the system obtained by quotienting ordinary configuration space with respect to the similarity group of total translations, rotations, and scalings. For the zero-energy gravitating N-body system, the dynamics on shape space can be constructed explicitly and the points of total collision, which are the points of central configuration and zero shape momenta, can be analyzed in detail. It turns (...) out that, even on shape space where scale is not part of the description, the equations of motion diverge at (and only at) the points of total collision. We construct and study the stratified total-collision manifold and show that, at the points of total collision on shape space, the singularity is essential. There is, thus, no way to evolve the solutions through these points. This mirrors closely the big bang singularity of general relativity, where the homogeneous-but-not-isotropic cosmological model of Bianchi IX shows an essential singularity at the big bang. A simple modification of the general-relativistic model (the addition of a stiff matter field) changes the system into one whose shape-dynamical description allows for a deterministic evolution through the singularity. We suspect that, similarly, some modification of the dynamics would be required in order to regularize the total collision singularity of the N-body model. (shrink)

Let be a countable first‐order language and be an ‐structure. “Definable set” means a subset of M which is ‐definable in with parameters. A set is said to be immune if it is infinite and does not contain any infinite definable subset. X is said to be partially immune if for some definable A, is immune. X is said to be totally non‐immune if for every definable A, and are not immune. Clearly every definable set is totally non‐immune. Here we (...) ask whether the converse is true and prove that it is false for every countable structure whose class of definable sets satisfies a mild condition. We investigate further the possibility of an alternative construction of totally non‐immune non‐definable sets with the help of a subclass of immune sets, the class of cohesive sets, as well as with the help of a generalization of definable sets, the semi‐definable ones (the latter being naturally defined in models of arithmetic). Finally connections are found between totally non‐immune sets and generic classes in nonstandard models of arithmetic. (shrink)

Building upon his previous books about Marx, Hayek, and Rand, _Total Freedom_ completes what _Lingua Franca_ has called Sciabarra’s "epic scholarly quest" to reclaim dialectics, usually associated with the Marxian left, as a methodology that can revivify libertarian thought. Part One surveys the history of dialectics from the ancient Greeks through the Austrian school of economics. Part Two investigates in detail the work of Murray Rothbard as a leading modern libertarian, in whose thought Sciabarra finds both dialectical and nondialectical elements. (...) Ultimately, Sciabarra aims for a dialectical-libertarian synthesis, highlighting the need to think of the "totality" of interconnections in a dynamic system as the way to ensure human freedom while avoiding "totalitarianism". (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyScott Davidson and Diane Perpich set high standards for the assessment of this volume. Fifty years after its publication in 1961, Levinas's Totality and Infinity is going through a ‘midlife crisis’. Scholarship on Levinas ‘sometimes seems to do little more than plow familiar terrain, remaining stuck in the rut of well‐worn interpretations and overused phrases’. One response to a midlife crisis is to exchange one's established partner for a younger model. But the (...) editors do not recommend this solution to the ‘dull routine’ into which our relationship with Levinas has fallen. They believe that the essays they have collected will pep up our relationship with him by venturing ‘along unexplored pathways’. Other thinkers are introduced into the ménage – Karl Marx, Stanley Cavell... (shrink)

Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, conceives the world as ‘the totality of facts’. Type-stratification threatens that conception : the totality of facts is an obvious example of an illegitimate totality. Wittgenstein’s notion of truthoperation evidently has some role to play in avoiding that threat, allowing propositions, and so facts, to constitute a single type. The paper seeks to explain that role in a way that integrates the ‘philosophical’ and ‘technical’ pressures on the notion of an operation.

In the following contribution we will investigate the digital divide with respect to a philosophically and ideologically founded concept of universalisation. The documents of the World Summit on the Information Society show that the creation of a global information society not only concerns a technical structural transformation, but also a technical implementation of a normative guiding principle. I will show that overcoming the digital divide corresponds to the inner logic of universalisation as an ethical model of reasoning. Furthermore, we will (...) see that in reality this formal approach to reasoning proves to be a means of realising certain ideological perspectives. This interdependency of cultural dispositions and technical developments in the global information society will be shown in five aspects: • The creation of a global social utopia based on the concept of the information society. • The objectification of the concept of universalisation in information and communication technology. • The linking of global internet use to a normative idea of the public sphere. • The tendency towards totality as a problem of the public sphere and ICT. • Possible reasons for demanding ICT-free areas. (shrink)

The thesis presented here focuses on the concept of totality in the work of the contemporary cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1934–). By totality, we mean how the human heart enables the human body, but without the body, the heart has no part concerning the whole; they are mutually dependent. This work shall argue that totality is the allegorical figuration framing Jameson’s political critiques of modernity in The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism (1991). The postmodern world today as (...) an absent totality represents the contradiction in Jameson: We live in a complex world despite its unrepresentability. Whilst studies of early Jameson have interpreted his works through postmodernity and cognitive mapping, their unsubstantiation of Jameson’s later totality has resulted in not being able to explicate Jameson’s view of the a-historicity of postmodernity. Part One shall examine Jameson’s readings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, demonstrating that Hegel’s critique of Kant concerning the boundary of knowledge includes its overcoming and that Hegelian totality is not closed, permitting Jameson to represent the world as an open totality. Part Two shall argue that Jameson’s reading of the works of Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin reinforces totality in their writing styles, which allows Jameson to glimpse totality through writing. Part Three shall argue that totality in Jameson’s interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is at work and that Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) elucidates a counterpoint to totality which can be used to understand non-dialectical thinkers which Jameson examines such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Part Four shall argue that Jameson’s reading of these thinkers is justified in critiquing their productive misreadings of totality as closed, informing their political quietism, thereby re-politicising totality as an allegory. (shrink)

The story of Huayan Buddhism intertwines in many ways with many other more well‐known forms of Buddhist thought. The Buddhist concepts of upāya or “skillful means,” prajnapti from Yogācāra and paramārtha satya from Madhyamaka, justify a range of pragmatic propositions, which represent a healthy way of viewing the world. Upāya refers to the diagnostic and prescriptive skill of a buddha or bodhisattva, who is ostensibly able to discern a particular person's problem and recommend a helpful strategy for solving it. This (...) is a completely contextual approach, though, because different problems lead to different strategies. The metaphysics underlying Huayan's philosophy of totality is based on the central Buddhist model of interdependent causality known as prātityasamutpāda. (shrink)

Total work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction -- Total stage: Wagner's festspielhaus -- Total machine: the Bauhaus theatre -- Total montage: Brecht's reply to Wagner -- Total state: Riefenstahl's triumph of the will -- Total world: Disney's theme parks -- Total vacuum: Warhol's performances -- Total immersion: cyberspace.

Dummctt argues that classical quantification is illegitimate when the domain is given as the objects which fall under an indefinitely extensible concept, since in such cases the objects are not the required definite totality. The chief problem in understanding this complex argument is the crucial but unexplained phrase 'definite totality' and the associated claim that it follows from the intuitive notion of set that the objects over which a classical quantifier ranges form a set. 'Definite totality' is (...) best understood as disguised plural talk like Cantor's 'consistent multiplicity', although this does not help in understanding how a totality could be anything other than definite. Moreover, contrary to his claims, Dummett's own notion of set is not intuitive and he does not demystify the set-theoretic paradoxes. In conclusion, it is argued that Dummett's context principle is responsible for the incoherent projection of the haziness of a conception of some objects onto reality. (shrink)

This article investigates the connection and dependence between the definiteness of the totalities involved in mathematical structures and the determinateness of statements about that structure. From a logical perspective, we investigate whether logical principles expressing the definiteness of totalities license the use of classical logic. From a philosophical perspective, this article provides a reconstruction of Solomon Feferman’s claim that the definiteness of the natural number conception implies the determinateness of arithmetical statements and therefore justifies the adoption of classical logic for (...) arithmetical theories. (shrink)

Dummctt argues that classical quantification is illegitimate when the domain is given as the objects which fall under an indefinitely extensible concept, since in such cases the objects are not the required definite totality. The chief problem in understanding this complex argument is the crucial but unexplained phrase 'definite totality' and the associated claim that it follows from the intuitive notion of set that the objects over which a classical quantifier ranges form a set. 'Definite totality' is (...) best understood as disguised plural talk like Cantor's 'consistent multiplicity', although this does not help in understanding how a totality could be anything other than definite. Moreover, contrary to his claims, Dummett's own notion of set is not intuitive and he does not demystify the set-theoretic paradoxes. In conclusion, it is argued that Dummett's context principle is responsible for the incoherent projection of the haziness of a conception of some objects onto reality. (shrink)

Pragmatic encroachment in epistemology is the idea that whether one knows some proposition depends on whether one can rely on it practically. Total pragmatic encroachment affirms that practical considerations of this sort encroach not just on knowledge but on all interesting normative epistemic statuses a belief might have. Ichikawa, Jarvis, and Rubin (2012) have argued that this stronger thesis conflicts with mainstream belief‐desire psychology. Worse still, they argue that attempting to defend the thesis gets one caught in vicious circularities. The (...) aim of this paper is to show that, if we are careful in how we understand the key idea of being sensitive to practical considerations, we can defend total pragmatic encroachment and avoid the circularities. In fact, depending on how it is understood, we can even square mainstream belief‐desire psychology with total pragmatic encroachment as well. (shrink)

Essays by 14 Levinas scholars provide a fresh acount of the argument and purpose of Emmanuel Levinas's major work, Totality and Infinity, drawing parallels between Levinas and other thinkers; considering Levinas's relationship to other disciplines such as nursing, psychotherapy, and law; and bringing this seminal text to bear on specific, concrete issues of present-day concern"--Provided by publisher.