Remember the story of the most-most? It’s the story of that club in New York where people are the most of every type. There is the hairiest bald man and the baldest hairy man; the shortest giant and the tallest dwarf; the smartest idiot and the stupidest wise man. They are all there, including honest thieves and crippled acrobats. On Saturday night they have a party, eat, drink, dance. Then they have a contest. “And if you can tell the (...) hairiest bald man from the baldest hairy man—we are told—you get a prize.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 78-88 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Beauty:Reflections on Kant and Cartier-Bresson for Aspiring Photographers Stuart Richmond In the past few decades beauty has become something of an endangered species in the Western art world. Indeed, beauty has never been a central aim of contemporary art, which has tended to focus on meaning and politics rather than formal values, conceptual art being a (...) case in point. Feminist artists and critics, reacting to the objectification of women in society have rendered attention to women's beauty, especially the nude, impolitic. This is perhaps understandable given the persuasive emphasis on beauty in marketing, that many argue socializes an unhealthy self-image in young people and distracts attention from important social issues. As well, techno-global-business practices increasingly invade our lives and private spaces with a virtual culture of information and efficiency. We do not know how this retreat from the sensual, concrete present will affect human sensibilities and values in the long run, although there are some disturbing signs. Seen as un-cerebral and allied with pleasure, beauty and its alter ego, appreciation, have acquired a decided regressive air. Having said that, for many people at the level of ordinary life — in human relationships, arts activities, and love of nature, for example — beauty never really went away because beauty is a source of pleasure and well-being that we cannot help wanting. As Plato pointed out, beauty is the only visible quality that inspires love. 1 A life of beauty in a free and ethical environment is an invitation to a life worth living. Though I cannot pursue the matter here, it is noteworthy that we often call a person of courage, goodness, and humility, a beautiful human being. Around the world people find many paths to beauty and of late in the Western artistic and academic worlds, beauty seems to be making a comeback. But beauty is a difficult thing to talk about, partly due to its being an experiential concept, partly because it has a long and complex philosophical history, and also because there is the risk in analysis of reducing it to something small and formulaic. Words in the end cannot replace the experience [End Page 78] of beauty. Despite these concerns, however, I believe that now, more thanever in the arts and education, we need to develop capacities for creating and appreciating beauty, if only to bring us back into contact with what is sensual and intrinsically worthwhile after so much arid theorizing, conflict in the world, and technocratic obsession. Through beauty we might be able to regain a stronger sense of human values and pleasure in living. Therefore, my aim here is to re-examine beauty in order to strengthen its role in aesthetic education. I do not expect to develop any precise definitions but I shall aim for a few signposts. Background to the Concept of Beauty "Beauty," "beautiful," or "the beautiful" refer primarily to a quality found pleasing to the senses. Here I shall restrict discussion to the visual domain, and later principally to art. As noted, beauty has a long philosophical history but the concept remains vague. From classical times on, beauty has been defined or associated with such properties as symmetry, balance, variety, harmony, proportion, order, unity, and perfection. And indeed, these features have long provided normative guidelines for the creation and appreciation of beauty. Over time we have learned the shape and proportions of a beautiful pot or supporting column. The golden section, a ratio of 1:1.6, has been used to good effect in design for millennia, the Parthenon being a prime example, the 35 mm negative another. However, as is well known, differences in beauty in individual cases tend to elude definition on account of this or that property or collection of properties. Exceptions can always be found. A painting may be well balanced but lacking in a certain élan vital, or unbalanced but beautiful. The variability of beautiful things seems to rule out a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 78-88 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Beauty:Reflections on Kant and Cartier-Bresson for Aspiring Photographers Stuart Richmond In the past few decades beauty has become something of an endangered species in the Western art world. Indeed, beauty has never been a central aim of contemporary art, which has tended to focus on meaning and politics rather than formal values, conceptual art being a (...) case in point. Feminist artists and critics, reacting to the objectification of women in society have rendered attention to women's beauty, especially the nude, impolitic. This is perhaps understandable given the persuasive emphasis on beauty in marketing, that many argue socializes an unhealthy self-image in young people and distracts attention from important social issues. As well, techno-global-business practices increasingly invade our lives and private spaces with a virtual culture of information and efficiency. We do not know how this retreat from the sensual, concrete present will affect human sensibilities and values in the long run, although there are some disturbing signs. Seen as un-cerebral and allied with pleasure, beauty and its alter ego, appreciation, have acquired a decided regressive air. Having said that, for many people at the level of ordinary life — in human relationships, arts activities, and love of nature, for example — beauty never really went away because beauty is a source of pleasure and well-being that we cannot help wanting. As Plato pointed out, beauty is the only visible quality that inspires love. 1 A life of beauty in a free and ethical environment is an invitation to a life worth living. Though I cannot pursue the matter here, it is noteworthy that we often call a person of courage, goodness, and humility, a beautiful human being. Around the world people find many paths to beauty and of late in the Western artistic and academic worlds, beauty seems to be making a comeback. But beauty is a difficult thing to talk about, partly due to its being an experiential concept, partly because it has a long and complex philosophical history, and also because there is the risk in analysis of reducing it to something small and formulaic. Words in the end cannot replace the experience [End Page 78] of beauty. Despite these concerns, however, I believe that now, more thanever in the arts and education, we need to develop capacities for creating and appreciating beauty, if only to bring us back into contact with what is sensual and intrinsically worthwhile after so much arid theorizing, conflict in the world, and technocratic obsession. Through beauty we might be able to regain a stronger sense of human values and pleasure in living. Therefore, my aim here is to re-examine beauty in order to strengthen its role in aesthetic education. I do not expect to develop any precise definitions but I shall aim for a few signposts. Background to the Concept of Beauty "Beauty," "beautiful," or "the beautiful" refer primarily to a quality found pleasing to the senses. Here I shall restrict discussion to the visual domain, and later principally to art. As noted, beauty has a long philosophical history but the concept remains vague. From classical times on, beauty has been defined or associated with such properties as symmetry, balance, variety, harmony, proportion, order, unity, and perfection. And indeed, these features have long provided normative guidelines for the creation and appreciation of beauty. Over time we have learned the shape and proportions of a beautiful pot or supporting column. The golden section, a ratio of 1:1.6, has been used to good effect in design for millennia, the Parthenon being a prime example, the 35 mm negative another. However, as is well known, differences in beauty in individual cases tend to elude definition on account of this or that property or collection of properties. Exceptions can always be found. A painting may be well balanced but lacking in a certain élan vital, or unbalanced but beautiful. The variability of beautiful things seems to rule out a... (shrink)

Does ‘remembering that p’ entail ‘knowing that p’? The widely-accepted epistemic theory of memory answers affirmatively. This paper purports to reveal the tension between ETM and the prevailing anti-luck epistemology. Central to my argument is the fact that we often ‘vaguely remember’ a fact, of which one plausible interpretation is that our true memory-based beliefs formed in this way could easily have been false. Drawing on prominent theories of misremembering in philosophy of psychology, I will construct cases where (...) the subject vaguely remembers that p while fails to meet the safety condition, which imply either that ETM is false or that safety is unnecessary for knowledge. The conclusion reached in this paper will be a conditional: if veritic epistemic luck is incompatible with knowledge, then ‘remembering that p’ does not entail ‘knowing that p’. (shrink)

The importance of memory as a metaphysical concept throughout the history of thought was first discovered by Plato and elaborated in his famous though controversial doctrine of recollection. Various myths and metaphors in the dialogues Phaedrusand Theaetetus refer to the divine origin of memory and the a priori nature of true ‘scientific’ knowledge, as different from the ‘second-hand’ knowledge acquired from external sources, as well as to the function of earthly beauty, which is to remind the soul of the eternal, (...) transcendent beauty of truth itself. The philosophical practice of recollection aims – as we read in the Phaedo– at turning away the mind from beguiling sensuous appeareances. It is an ascetic self-purification finally culminating in death, which is but the liberation of the soul from the bodily impediment, so that it can fly back to its homeland to be reunited with its divine origin, the transcendent Good. This is the true destiny of mankind. This divine origin is vaguely remembered and longed for, thanks to the divine gift of memory, the metaphysical place where heaven meets the earth and – as Saint Augustine put it – the seeker can find God. (shrink)

Hefty and serious—that is how this book feels when you pick it up. That was my subjective aesthetic experience anyway. Aesthetic judgment is, after all, one key to assessing our thoughts and perceptions. More on that soon, as you might expect.Hefty and serious also describes the questions with which the volume grapples: Is there, or can there be, a clear American Aesthetics, not merely aesthetics practiced by Americans? What would that look like? How would such a process affect the minds (...) and actions of Americans?The answers? It's complicated.The twenty essays in this volume trace the possibility of an American Aesthetics from foundational ideas of the past to the contemporary landscape. The goal is not only articulating an aesthetics that is distinctively American—aesthetics as a method for examining the arts and the artful—but also the possibility of aesthetics as a dynamic tool for pursuing a flourishing life within our hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture.Constant amongst the scholars gathered here is the assertion that aesthetics is not an abstract academic pursuit interesting only to the privileged and interested few but rather that aesthetics is the key element in the human pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives. Aristotle would approve!Speaking of ancestors, the scholars here trace the work of grandparents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Pierce, and William James, and parents such as the pragmatist John Dewey and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. (Whitehead is from the UK but “American” in that he died in the US after a long career at Harvard and wrote his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in the US.) From these ancestors, the scholars gathered in this volume see a path forward: Art as conscious experience, as Dewey posited, and/or art as committed immersion in the process, as Whitehead claimed.Whitehead's process approach—process aesthetics—reminds us that each moment of our experience in this at once mundane and amazing world is an occasion of beauty and a telos—each moment is in the larger process of reality quite literally our last.William James attempted to map how we might free ourselves from the everyday and from everyday-ness: “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up” (109). Yet, according to James, there is hope due to the fact that we human beings seek art and do art first and foremost because we enjoy it.Enjoyment was not the angle from which John Dewey approached the subject. According to Dewey our aesthetic reactions and interactions create the experience of art (and life) that re-accesses “an underlying harmony... that we vaguely remember” (112). For pragmatists, noticing a “thing” is entering a relationship with that thing, what David Strong terms in his essay, “correlational coexistence” (371).From these building blocks the scholars assembled propose ways to change US culture from one prone to ask, “What does it do?” into one in which it is increasingly possible to ask, “What does it mean?” This would be a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigms in US culture.How to get there? Randall E. Auxier offers a concise definition of “bad”—bad is something that is “lifeless and too much indebted to the actual.” My attempts at singing fall into that category, as do many American experiences conceived in the mode of what they do, not what they mean.That works of art escape or repel descriptions of their constitutive elements has proven to be a persistent philosophical conundrum through the centuries, as has the question of whether human feelings create an object or an object creates feelings, or both/and—Dewey's interaction of “organism and environment.” From whichever philosophical direction we approach this crux, aesthetic thinking can lead us to recognize and experience the inwardness of what we view as things—objects—and this examination can realign our personal axiology—our personal valuation of reality—the “ten thousand things” of ancient Chinese philosophy.Several authors cite Suzanne Langer's theory of symbol, broadening the scope of “art” well beyond Art with a capital A into the aesthetic and the ritualistic.The scholars gathered here are optimistic that aesthetic examination can create more of those rare moments (moments art can reliably create) in which our very being adjusts to the reality of existence, and we feel exhilarated and a part of the whole process of existence. We call this “nirvana” or “enlightenment.”That is another thing that feels hefty about this volume: the persistent optimism among the scholars that psychic wholeness and human flourishing are possible for more Americans. Robert S. Corrington terms this the “selving process,” roughly what Carl Jung termed “individuation.” This collection adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, as one idea inflected in a particular way by one author sparks off the same idea approached from a different perspective in another. This collection contains scholars on the cutting edge of process theology, pragmatism, aesthetics, and religion, many of whom are adept at crossing the traditional fences between academic fields. The US needs an American Aesthetics. As American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there. (shrink)

There is an old and persistent tendency in the human mind to conceive of the causal relation as rationally explanatory, and therefore to assimilate it, vaguely or explicitly, to the logical relations of inclusion, implication, or equivalence. That ‘ there cannot be more in the effect than there is in the cause’ is one of the propositions that men have been readiest to accept as axiomatic; a cause, it has been supposed, does not ‘ account for ‘ its effect, (...) unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its effect, unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its mark deep and wide upon the history of thought; it appears, indeed, at the very outset of Western speculation in the struggles of the physiologers with the supposed difficulty of admitting qualitative change. Two of the later phases of what may be named the preformationist assumption about causality may pertinently be remembered here. (shrink)

To read into the mind of another person has for a long time been a fantasy—and sometimes a vague possibility. In science fiction, there are stories of aliens who are able to decipher the thoughts of other beings using some type of device. When I was a boy, I remember reading a cartoon of Bibi Fricotin, in which Bibi, a young boy like me, found some glasses that allowed him to read other people’s thoughts. For a time, I was (...) afraid when I came across adults wearing glasses. With such devices, privacy and childish innocence would be in jeopardy, but fortunately, this was only a remote possibility. The idea would be worrying for lay people, ethicists and lawyers, but it is only a fantasy. Recently, with the development... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t (...) spell it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

“What is this journal Speculum?” the prospective graduate student asked me. “Is it some sort of radical feminist journal? I saw copies of it in Professor So-and-So's office, and I can't imagine that he would subscribe to a feminist publication. . . . So, what is Speculum?” To understand this question, I had to remember myself at twenty-two years of age, educated but not professionalized, more familiar with speculum as an instrument used in gynecological examinations than with Speculum, the (...) premier journal for medievalists. Vaguely recalling my own puzzlement at first encountering a journal for medievalists called Speculum, I explained to the student the Latin derivation of the title, the importance of the journal in medieval studies, and the absolute absence of a connection between the title of the journal and anything gynecological. We chuckled a bit—in female solidarity—about the naivete of Speculum's founders , who had chosen to title their journal with a name that resonated so strongly for modern women. (shrink)

There is an old and persistent tendency in the human mind to conceive of the causal relation as rationally explanatory, and therefore to assimilate it, vaguely or explicitly, to the logical relations of inclusion, implication, or equivalence. That ‘ there cannot be more in the effect than there is in the cause’ is one of the propositions that men have been readiest to accept as axiomatic; a cause, it has been supposed, does not ‘ account for ‘ its effect, (...) unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its effect, unless the effect is a thing which the eye of reason could somehow discern in the cause, upon a sufficiently thorough analysis. This antipathy to the notion of an absolute epigenesis has left its mark deep and wide upon the history of thought; it appears, indeed, at the very outset of Western speculation in the struggles of the physiologers with the supposed difficulty of admitting qualitative change. Two of the later phases of what may be named the preformationist assumption about causality may pertinently be remembered here. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154. 1 HUME AND THE GOD-HYPOTHESIS Interpretation of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion has always been contentious. While some think it obvious that Philo is Hume's spokesman, others think it is Cleanthes. Whether or not Philo is Hume's spokesman, he certainly produces the better argument. Nonetheless, that argument is flawed by an assumption which I doubt Hume ever questioned. I want to consider that assumption, but want to make (...) it clear that it is not my intention to defend Cleanthes' position. The second thing I want to do in this paper, which I have not seen done elsewhere, is to connect Hume's arguments in the Dialogues with his anthropological account of religiosity. Perhaps the least contentious thing about the Dialogues is that Demea's a priori position is not taken too seriously, nor is much time spent on the first cause argument, so important from Aristotle to Leibniz. What is given serious attention is what might be described as the 'God-hypothesis', which is more or less the Argument from Design. Philo rejects the argument for reasons we shall review below, but makes a concession. The concession is basically that it is intelligible to contend that the cause or causes of order in the world bear some resemblance to human intelligence. The catch, which is the point driven home against Cleanthes, is that, while intelligible, the idea is utterly pointless. Philo says: If the whole of Natural Theology... resolves itself into one simple...proposition, That_ the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence : If this proposition be not capable of extension...If it affords no inference that affects human life... if the analogy... can be carried no farther... (203) then it is without point. Hume is willing to let the theist have his vague analogy, for it serves no point. In fact, the theist cannot 155. win, for to the extent that the God-hypothesis might have explanatory power, it approaches the status of an empirical hypothesis, and as such loses theological import. The Dialogues should be devastating, yet seem to miss the mark. Suppose we look a bit more closely at what is going on. The position Cleanthes elaborates is an hypothesis to the effect that the world exhibits order and that that order is best explained by the postulation of an orderer. Cleanthes' moves are a bit more complicated, as we shall see in a moment, but this is the essential point. The hypothesis is conceived by Hume as either competing with or completing science. In the Enquiry we read that The religious hypothesis...must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe : but no.just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular. (237) The passage is virtually a summary of Philo's thesis. There can be no move from an inferred cause to anything further in terms of either facts or properties. Cleanthes may be grudgingly granted his causal supposition, but he is not allowed to use it. Again: And what can you say more, allowing all your suppositions and reasonings?... (0)ur conduct and deportment in life is still the same... You persist in imagining, that, if we grant that divine existence,...you may safely infer consequences from it... You seem not to remember, that all your reasonings... can only be drawn from effects to causes... (238) The crucial failure is that All the philosophy...and all the religion... will never be able to carry us beyond the usual cause of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life. (244) God, as putative cause simply makes no difference, so long as we conform to the standards of rational thought. 156. It is important to be clear that what is being rejected is God as "a fruitful rival to scientific explanatory notions, such as gravity". The rejection of God as explanatory principle turns on the illegitimacy of Cleanthes' moves. As Peter Jones puts it, Cleanthes makes two inferences... (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Narcissists Are Morally ResponsibleAleksandar Fatic, PhDIn his insightful commentary of ‘Narcissism as a moral incompetence,’ Professor Pies proposes several principal objections to my line of argument. First, Pies mentions that I embrace a Platonic essentialism and a ‘binary’ view of narcissism, whilst in fact narcissistic traits present themselves in degrees, within a continuum of pathology.Let us clarify the meaning of essentialism. When applied to the phenomenology of narcissism, (...) Platonic essentialism would imply that there is an idea, or ideal, of ‘pure’ narcissism, which governs our cognition of narcissistic phenomenology. Without an ‘essentialist’ understanding of what narcissism as a more or less pure phenomenon would look like, it would make no semantic or logical sense to speak of various ‘types’ or ‘degrees’ of narcissism. In the 1940s, in The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle offered the now infamous logical analysis of ‘false’ and ‘true coins’: if there were not true coins of which we had some idea, it would be logically impossible to speak of counterfeit coins (McDermid, 2004; Ryle, 1949, pp. 94–99). There are shoddily produced coins that bear only a vague resemblance to the original idea or mint of the real coin, however, for each we would ultimately have to decide whether the resemblance is sufficient for it to be considered a real coin. Shoddily produced coins represent various ‘degrees’ of resemblance of the idea, or form, of a coin, but to call them coins, and to decide whether they are true coins or not, it is a logical presupposition that we must first have an ‘idea’ of what an ‘ideal’ real coin is like. This, at its core, is essentialism.There is no escape from this type of essentialism in any rigorous argument, because Platonic essentialism is the foundation of the very meanings of the concepts we use. Plato’s ideas are paradigms, where the particular instantiations of their qualities are called ‘phenomena’ (Sedley, 2016; Taylor, 2016). Thus, the nuanced expression of ideas or forms in their various phenomena is the very substance of the essentialist theory of ideas. It appears that Professor Pies is also a Platonic essentialist, as am I.So why is it often impossible in clinical practice to ascribe necessary and sufficient conditions to narcissism? Well, let us remember Rosenhan’s experiments (1973). Rosenhan illustrates how the same individuals were diagnosed with very different disorders by different clinicians at roughly the same time, and how healthy individuals, once they had been instructed to ‘fake’ psychotic symptoms, remained under the same or more serious [End Page 177] diagnoses even when they stopped pretending and behaved completely normally. The reason for the arbitrariness of psych-diagnoses is the insufficiency of the psych-diagnostic language, including the actual diagnostic criteria, a kind of Lacanian ‘lack’ that is built into the very structure of psychodiagnostics (Ruti, 2008), and not a metaphysics behind such use of diagnostic language, whether it is essentialist or non-essentialist. Whether a particular patient actually has NPD or not in practice comes down to a consensual judgement—one that has been notoriously lacking in the history of psychiatry (Verhaeghe, 2008, pp. 71–125).Second, Pies suggests that empathy is ‘a complex, multidimensional construct comprising cognitive and affective components.’ I do not think this is a correct understanding of empathy. In fact, it is a conceptual revision of the original concept of empathy, which is one of a moral emotion (Kauppinen, 2014). What Pies calls ‘cognitive empathy,’ namely the ability to recognize and influence the emotions of others is an entirely different quality capacity that has recently been called ‘emotional intelligence’ (e.g., Conte, 2005). Many Cluster B personality disorders are characterized by an exceptionally high emotional intelligence and an almost complete lack of empathy, which allows them to use their emotional intelligence to manipulate and mistreat others. Surely such emotionally intelligent, but highly malignant strategies would not be considered ‘empathy.”Relatedly, Pies objects to Slote’s alleged view that only actions arising from factual empathy are morally justifiable. This is a ‘naturalist fallacy’ in reading Slote. The natural fallacy is a confusion between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ Slote actually argues that only actions that are consistent with... (shrink)

Is Deleuze really in debt to Kant? If so, in which feature of Deleuze's thought can it be traced?The Deleuzian idea of philosophy meant as a creative process for constructing concepts may be deeply rooted in Kant's thought. In his lectures on Kant held at Vincennes in 1978, he acknowledged that Kant first attributed the act of thinking a new absolute meaning: the power to create concepts and no longer a vague meaning to create images or to remember.According to (...) Deleuze the originality of Kant's philosophy lies in creating new words and giving them a new meaning. Although Deleuze had dedicated Kant a significant study in 1963 and four lectures at Vincennes, he did not fully admit to being influenced by Kant, not even in What is Philosophy?, the last monography he wrote with Félix Guattari. (shrink)

Il importe de situer les enjeux humains de ce mouvement que d'aucuns qualifient de « nouvel ordre mondial » : quel souci de l'être humain en tant que tel manifeste-t-il ? L'homme est un être d'appartenances individuelles et collectives, il s'éprouve dans sa liberté et dans sa participation à l'histoire qui se fait. La société qui s'annonce sera-t-elle pour lui, offerte à son engagement, ou contre lui, le contraignant à se soumettre ou à se démettre ? Des penseurs contemporains montrent (...) que l'homme se construit en habitant l'écart entre particulier et universel , individualité et solidarité , « territoire » et « planète » . Comment cette « dialectique » pourra-t-elle s'exercer demain dans un univers aux contours flous et aux logiques opaques? On ne peut fonder un « contrat » éthique et politique avec d'autres si le temps social, économique ou culturel dissout les particularités et rend l'avenir improbable. Il se pourrait que la mondialisation oblige les « instances de sens » à faire mémoire, à raconter comment on devient hommes ensemble dans la complexité d'une histoire à faire. L'urgence est à la transmission. It is important to situate the human stakes of this movement that some people qualify as « new world order » : what concern of the human being as such does it manifest ? Man is a being of individual and collective belonging. He tests himself in his freedom and in his participation in history in the making. Will future society be for him, inviting him to participate, or against him, forcing him to submit or to give up ? Contemporaneous thinkers show that man constructs himself in living the gap between the particular and universal , individuality and solidarity , « territory » and « planet » . How can this « dialectic » be practiced tomorrow in a universe with vague outlines and opaque logics ? One cannot establish an ethical and political « contract » with others if the social, economic, or cultural time dissolves particularities and makes the future improbable. Il is possible that globalization obliges the « moments of sense » to remember, to tell about how we become human together in the complexity of a history to be made. The urgency is the transmission. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Dutch Novel Messire (2008) by Els LaunspachEls LaunspachTranslated by Laura Vroomen (bio)The rooftops have just appeared out of the November night. First the white frames become visible, then the roof tiles, the walls and the gaping holes of the windows. A cluster of ravens alights on the far side of the tower. Three birds think better of it and fly from the eaves to the oak tree. (...) They are all awaiting the new day, as I am. The last remaining leaves on the trees—at night their vague contours can fool you into thinking it is summer—are shrivelled and yellow, the colour of the torches that are now being lit behind some castle windows. The mist presses against the walls of the watch house. Slowly, the dark-grey light turns a cooler shade.’How could he convey his experiences with a lump of charcoal? He threw it down on the table. His fingers had turned black and the characters, conceived with such conviction, were crude, with smudges everywhere. Yet he picked up his makeshift writing tool once more, this time to record two facts.‘I have lost my books. Cromwell sent Rich to take them away.’His books in Rich’s hands, his solace disappearing from view behind that pleated cloak. Naturally, their contents were all in his head. But his books were his friends; fellow travellers, silent witnesses, comrades. All gone, even God’s [End Page 249] word. Only a single sheet of paper remained, but what he wanted to tell his daughter Margaret, how the day began, refused to take shape.‘It’s funny,’ he had wanted to write. ‘I used to say that I’d wanted to be a monk, remember? Now I’ve got what I wanted. Peace and quiet. Few sounds penetrate my tower, save for the croaking of the ravens and the occasional cooing dove. I can meditate and pray and ponder to my heart’s content. The cries of the rowers and the seamen seem very distant, somewhere down below. No interruptions. At times the wind rattles the window and howls through the slit in the wall. I can hear John-a-Wood moving his stool or dropping a cup on the floor—wood and tin on stone. I have found my place in the world, Margaret. I have become pure spirit, just as I had wished. Still, I’m plagued by doubt and bad dreams.’ No, there was no need for them to know that. His family was worried enough as it was. The more steadfast he became, the more they worried. Humour no longer helped either. His eldest child’s letters pierced right through it.So now everything was laid bare. No more digression or embellishment; charcoal did not allow it. He had been reduced to straight talking, to facts. His days had become pure routine. Rise at six and pray. At times it felt as if he were in his own chapel at home, until he heard the rattling of John’s keys. The door would open: barley gruel and a jug of fresh water. The first and only smile of the day, unless he had a visitor. Then he was alone again to study and think.Now that his books were gone, there was every opportunity for thinking. Having had visitors just the week before, he could not expect any for a while. At the time he had not been able to summon the energy to listen and respond; his neck was stiff, turning his head painful. Howard had been there, asking question after question in an attempt to offer him a way out, when all he wanted was to enjoy the fire. Firewood and visitors went hand in hand, unbeknownst to Norfolk. The prisoner wanted to be alone and enjoy the fire. He wanted to close his eyes and not have to turn his head, to lose himself completely in the heat.So now he did not study after breakfast, but wrote a letter instead. Writing, debate and analysis were his reason for living, so he felt compelled to keep working, even here, even with a useless lump of charcoal. But prayer... (shrink)

Many people who have never read the works of Nietzsche possess some vague notion of what he taught. For them the philosophy of Nietzsche is represented by a few floating ideas—“Superman,” “Will to Power,” and even perhaps “blond beast.” Others again have learnt a little more about Nietzsche and perhaps read something of what he actually said; yet the net result is an impression of a passionate and destructive thinker, who launched his attacks on this side and on that, without (...) any regard for consistency. For them there can be no philosophy of Nietzsche: they know that he often wrote in the form of aphorism and they picture his thought in general as a series of detached utterances, many of which are mutually exclusive. It may then be of use to some, if we attempt to set forth the guiding inspiration and leading ideas of Nietzsche, for when these have been grasped, it will be seen that it is by no means absurd to speak of a philosophy of Nietzsche. It may well be impossible to reconcile all his utterances, at least so far as the words are concerned—though Nietzsche is of course not the only philosopher who betrays inconsistency in his thought—but it should be remembered that Nietzsche was not given to standing still: his thought developed. Moreover, he often spoke in an exaggerated form, so that some of the apparent inconsistencies may be ascribed to over-emphasis. In any case, even granting the presence of irreconcilable inconsistencies in his thought, Nietzsche's various theories not only may, but must, be seen as a whole, if they are seen in the light of his guiding ideas and inspiration. (shrink)

Many people who have never read the works of Nietzsche possess some vague notion of what he taught. For them the philosophy of Nietzsche is represented by a few floating ideas—“Superman,” “Will to Power,” and even perhaps “blond beast.” Others again have learnt a little more about Nietzsche and perhaps read something of what he actually said; yet the net result is an impression of a passionate and destructive thinker, who launched his attacks on this side and on that, without (...) any regard for consistency. For them there can be no philosophy of Nietzsche: they know that he often wrote in the form of aphorism and they picture his thought in general as a series of detached utterances, many of which are mutually exclusive. It may then be of use to some, if we attempt to set forth the guiding inspiration and leading ideas of Nietzsche, for when these have been grasped, it will be seen that it is by no means absurd to speak of a philosophy of Nietzsche. It may well be impossible to reconcile all his utterances, at least so far as the words are concerned—though Nietzsche is of course not the only philosopher who betrays inconsistency in his thought—but it should be remembered that Nietzsche was not given to standing still: his thought developed. Moreover, he often spoke in an exaggerated form, so that some of the apparent inconsistencies may be ascribed to over-emphasis. In any case, even granting the presence of irreconcilable inconsistencies in his thought, Nietzsche's various theories not only may, but must, be seen as a whole, if they are seen in the light of his guiding ideas and inspiration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t (...) spell it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

Previous chapter Towards a Rhuthmic Theory of Information? From a rhythmological viewpoint, Morin's doctrine of information was much more elaborated than the one we found in Serres' study on Lucretius. We remember that when Serres faced language and art, he vaguely alluded to a most questionable physical theory of “sound vortices” emerging from the “background noise” and banally confused poetry with music, as well as rhythm with music. Although he rightfully asked the - Linguistique et théorie du langage (...) – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Some time in the 1950’s I was invited to address a meeting of the English Institute which took place at Columbia University and, while I have but a dim recollection of the topic, a point came up in the discussion which I still remember very well and it bears very closely on the subject of this essay. I had said something in my opening remarks about how technical recent philosophy had become and what a formidable language was growing up (...) around it. In the audience was Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the distinguished literary scholar and author of, among others, that delightful book about science and literature, Newton Demands the Muse. She took the occasion to tell us that in her student days she could read and profit from philosophical works—Locke, Bergson, James—and went on to say that in her opinion any intelligent person could read these authors and others without having, as we would now say, “majored” in philosophy. She added, however, that she found herself no longer able to read with much comprehension the writing of the philosophers of the time because of the remoteness of the issues from concrete experience and the esoteric language in which they were presented. What Nicholson was perceiving, perhaps without knowing the background, was the about-face in philosophy that was taking place at the time. Largely in response to the charge that philosophy, unlike science, was making no “progress,” many philosophers decided to limit philosophy to areas—logic, semantics, semiotics—in which it was believed that progress was possible. One result was the abandoning of all the undeniably vague and stubborn issues—God, the self, freedom and determinism, values and facts and the like —that resist solutions of a scientific sort. Unfortunately for philosophers, these are the matters that interest everyone most. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pride in Giving Care and Other Life Lessons from Certified Nursing AssistantsDelese WearMy father spent the last three weeks of his life in a hospice care facility. It's funny, now reading these narratives written by Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), that I can't picture him without Gloria, the CNA who worked the 7-3 shift, floating quietly in and out of his room, tending to him, tending to us, speaking quietly (...) to Dad even when he was no longer conscious, offering us conversation, often her affectionate observations of Dad and curiosity about his life, sometimes about life on the "outside," a kind of respite from total attention on Dad and our grieving. I remember the smell of the lotion she rubbed on his body. I remember no other caregivers in his room; there obviously were, but I can't picture them now, only Gloria. We never spoke directly to the medical director of the hospice. He was a phantom, rounding at 5 or 6 a.m.; we came to believe he did so to avoid speaking to families.Those three weeks led to my conceptions about CNAs—the nature of the work they do, the kinds of people who do such work, the awesome responsibilities involved in such work, and not least, the physical and emotional resiliency of those who undertake such work. My and my family's often recited, "How does she do this every day?" was answered time and again in the narratives written by CNAs in this issue of the journal.But before moving forward, I want to make note of how I will refer to the authors of these narratives. The name of one's occupation, the title one uses, and how others refer to your occupation, is obviously meaningful. If the snapshots of CNAs provided in these narratives are somewhat representative, we find those who refer to themselves and their occupation as nursing assistants, nurse assistants, Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), State Licensed Nursing Assistants (SLNA), or simply aides, to name a few. While it is beyond the space offered here, I want to make note of this, recognizing that titles/labels matter, and to acknowledge that status. As CNA Nanci Robinson notes, "most of us are certified... I wouldn't call an LPN a PN and leave out she's licensed." Passage of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 (OBRA 87), required each State to establish State-approved nurse aide training programs and establish requirements for nurse aide competency. Thus, I will refer to all the authors here as Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs). I do wonder how significant of an issue these variations of titles are within the larger nursing assistant culture, and how it may contribute to disparities regarding pay schedules, duties, status, training and other relevant issues among all nursing assistants.In spite of problems, stressors, and other quality of life issues for CNAs, most of them spoke with pride and meaning regarding what was for many their "life's work," similar to what one might expect to find in other care giving occupations. Some spoke of a "love of the work," its "rewards" and "joys," [End Page 165] and the intense satisfaction of "making a difference" in patients' or residents' lives. These attitudes were not vague abstractions but were grounded throughout the narratives in rich examples of the affirming aspects of their work.It appears that much of the pleasure comes from what many refer to as the "hands on," "direct care," or "front line" nature of the work—often what other health professionals might view as things they would not want to do. And of course these other professionals—registered nurses, occupational therapists, and physicians—could make the same claim when describing the "hands-on" joys of their work. But the differences, it would seem, are profound between these other caregivers and CNAs. The CNA narratives report fundamentally intimate and often daily relationships with their clients/residents/patients. Danny Reed describes the "delight" he feels "in restoring dignity to every human in need of it regardless of cause," referring to himself as a "participant observer in a caring relationship," not as a "detached clinician." Many spoke directly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hamann and the Philosophy of David Hume CHARLES W. SWAIN There have been many and various interpretations of Hume's philosophy; no one, so far as I know, has ever viewed him as a romantic. On the other hand, Johann Georg Hamann, "the wizard of the North," has gained his modicum of notoriety mainly through his influence on German romanticism, plus the fact that Kierkegaard mentions him approvingly, and even (...) quotes him in the Philosophical Fragments. Hume has been regarded as a sceptic, an empiricist, a naturalist and a positivist; Hamann is usually regarded as an irrationalist and proto-existentialist. 1 These two thinkers were certainly very different; yet Hamann had a profound appreciation for the philsophy of Hume. I want to suggest in this paper that a study of the use to which Hamann put Hume's philosophy may raise some difficulties for the prevailing view of Hamann's thought, and may also open up a somewhat different perspective on Hume's thought. Hamann found himself in rebellion against the spirit of his age. He saw in Hume an ally in his struggle against the over-confident rationalism of the Enlightenment. As an apologist, Hamann set himself the task of "smoking out the stylish spirit of the century by means of doubt." e He set about this task in a series of strange apologetic works, written in a deliberately mystifying, sometimes shocking style. His anti-rationalism made him a hero to the later romantics, and a mystery to his friends and readersmamong them his fellow citizen, Immanuel Kant. Beginning as a university student, Hamann had become a disciple of the Enlightenment, seeking his place in the brave new world of the early eighteenth century. He tried a career as a tutor, along with many a young man seeking an independent and comfortable life. Eventually he accepted a vaguely defined position with the mercantile firm of Berens in Riga, operated by the family of his college friend Johann Cristoph Berens. Hamann undertook a "secret mission" for the Berens firm which brought him to London in 1758 where, lonely and disheartened, he underwent a personal crisis which changed the direction of his life and resulted in his career as a man of letters and an apologist for Christianity against the Enlightenment. Having been a devotee for over a decade, Hamann felt that he knew the spirit of the Enlightenment. His opposition, however, baffling it may have appeared to his contemporaries, was not intended as obscurantism. He had his 1Hamann has been much more in vogue on the continent than in the English-speaking world. According to Martin Sells, Theologische Aspekte zur gegenw~irtigen Hamann-deutung (GSttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1957),p. 105,der Magus has been claimed as a spiritual ancestor by virtually every European intellectual movement of the last 150 yearst Philologische Einf~illeund Zwei]el, Iqadler iii, 41. [343] 344 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY "reasons," and a study of his use of Hume's philosophy will help to clarify this aspect of his thought. Hamann's acquaintance with the philosophy of Hume dates from his university days, where he was probably introduced to the world of English letters by his fondly remembered teacher, Heinrich Rappolt. Rappolt was a Wolffian, but not at all interested in the attempt to reconcile Wolffianism with pietistic Christianity --in contrast to his more renowned colleague, Martin Knutzen, Kant's teacher. Rappolt had traveled and studied in England, and apparently delighted in opening these new intellectual vistas to his students, s Hamann thus became familiar with Hume's political and economic writings, as well as his philosophical works. Already in 1756, during his Holmeister period, he had worked through an edition of Hume's works which contained various economic and political essays as well as the First Enquiry. 4 Hume's works were among the books which he bought (but perhaps never read) during his stay in London. In 1759, when he published his first apologetic work, Socratische Denku~rdigkeiten, he was (in his own words) "full of Hume." 5 He cites Hume throughout his literary career, and acknowledges his intellectual debt to Hume both publicly and privately. One of his last undertakings was a translation... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t (...) spell it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

Some time in the 1950’s I was invited to address a meeting of the English Institute which took place at Columbia University and, while I have but a dim recollection of the topic, a point came up in the discussion which I still remember very well and it bears very closely on the subject of this essay. I had said something in my opening remarks about how technical recent philosophy had become and what a formidable language was growing up (...) around it. In the audience was Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the distinguished literary scholar and author of, among others, that delightful book about science and literature, Newton Demands the Muse. She took the occasion to tell us that in her student days she could read and profit from philosophical works—Locke, Bergson, James—and went on to say that in her opinion any intelligent person could read these authors and others without having, as we would now say, “majored” in philosophy. She added, however, that she found herself no longer able to read with much comprehension the writing of the philosophers of the time because of the remoteness of the issues from concrete experience and the esoteric language in which they were presented. What Nicholson was perceiving, perhaps without knowing the background, was the about-face in philosophy that was taking place at the time. Largely in response to the charge that philosophy, unlike science, was making no “progress,” many philosophers decided to limit philosophy to areas—logic, semantics, semiotics—in which it was believed that progress was possible. One result was the abandoning of all the undeniably vague and stubborn issues—God, the self, freedom and determinism, values and facts and the like —that resist solutions of a scientific sort. Unfortunately for philosophers, these are the matters that interest everyone most. (shrink)

This is the sequel to the previously reviewed first volume of a proposed three volume study of Proust as philosopher. Good as the first volume is, this is even better. It is extremely difficult, unusually subtle, and demands slow and ruminative reading. For the present reviewer, the book falls naturally into two parts, each with its own peak or crescendo. The key to understanding the book is to hear the two crescendos in unison, or better, in harmony. The first crescendo (...) begins at about page 97 and culminates on page 112. A crucial passage: "Le point de création: le point instable et indécis, où la vague se lève, où le dessin, la plume en feront un duvet.... Tout est allégorie et possibilité de métaphore ou de métamorphose: les choses ne sont pas, elles ne savent pas; elles sont quelquefois l'attente, l'impatience. Il faut venir à point et dans le bon moment." And another: "C'est parce que rien n'est marqué dans une complexion définitive, imprimée dans l'espace, que l'art peut approcher, regarder, rectifier. Non pas décrire et reproduire: réinventer". The second crescendo begins with a distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory, with a long culminating passage extending from page 238 to page 265. This may be summarized as follows: I do not produce but await my memories, which come as if from another and construct what I am. Now to combine the two crescendos: I make the world, and the world makes me. The second crescendo is already anticipated in the first, e.g., p. 97: art does not invent but articulates and structures nature. The first crescendo is resumed or echoed in the second : the work of art is the most perfect form of reality. To give another formulation to the harmony of the two crescendos: in order to perceive, one must remember; yet one cannot remember unless one has perceived. Hence perception and memory remake each other. In sum, I am that spectator of the world who makes, and is made by, the world. We cannot really perceive things except via an image of them which we produce and which provides us, not with an objective representation of the perceived things, but with an equilibrium between our desires and emotions on the one hand, and the perceptions on the other. This produced image is presumably the aforementioned perception of a memory. And thus we respond to the uniqueness of our perceptions, via our produced images, by uniting them into a world, each of which is again unique, and yet, which is in each case the same single world in which we all dwell. On this reading, Proust's theme is the equilibrium between seeing and producing, or between theory and practice at the level of the constitution of the world. To oversimplify drastically, Proust teaches the Platonic demiurge but not the Platonic Ideas. As a consequence, one is intermittently reminded of a quasi-Husserlian phenomenology rooted in the primacy of intentionality as enacted in perception. But the mathematicism of Husserl is absent; the intentionality is that of a poet.-Stanley Rosen, Pennsylvania State University. (shrink)

Theodore Roszak wrote of the counter-culture, Charles Reich of Consciousness III, and Alvin Toiler of Future Shock. In Culture Out Of Anarchy, Judson Jerome, an eminently successful college teacher with all the sensitivity of an accomplished poet, brings all these concerns to bear upon the reconstruction of American higher education. Jerome, however, has no clear consistent thesis, and his proposals for academic change seem rather vague, general, and even undramatic. Part I, entitled "The Fifth Estate," describes the social/political context of (...) contemporary academe. Part II, "Threshold of Change," describes six recent experimental colleges. Part III, "Tomorrow's Schools...," is Jerome's prognostication for the reconstruction of American colleges and universities. It seems from evidence in the book that the author had students tape a number of interviews, these tapes forming the background for much of the book. There are no documentary references and index. The result is that much of the book reads like an interminable college-student bull session. The discussion is serious and intense, interspersed with many personal experiences and suffused throughout with high idealism. But the reader is apt to suffer from the same kind of hangover one feels after sitting through an all-night session. One remembers many personal details, but he can recall very few well-defined principles and has no carefully constructed proposals for genuine educational reform. Perhaps professional educators can read Culture Out Of Anarchy and distill enough essence to rejuvenate the old forms of education. Or perhaps today's anarchists can see in this book the emerging new culture. There are others who only feel dulled with a foggy hangover.--E. W. R. (shrink)

This paper explores some surprising effects of psychological trauma on memory and develops the puzzle of observer memory for trauma. Memory for trauma tends to have a third-person perspective, or observer perspective. But it appears observer memory, by having a novel visual point of view, tends to misrepresent the past. And many find it plausible that if a memory type tends to misrepresent, it cannot yield knowledge of, or justification for believing, details of past events. But it is also plausible (...) that, with respect to details of past trauma, observer memory can yield knowledge or justification. I argue for a novel set of views that offers a way out of the puzzle: observer memory does tend to misrepresent, but it still has epistemic power regarding details of the past, although with special limits; but observer memory for trauma has other epistemic powers too, in that it allows for a kind of self-awareness. (shrink)

We say that a sentence A is a permissive consequence of a set X of premises whenever, if all the premises of X hold up to some standard, then A holds to some weaker standard. In this paper, we focus on a three-valued version of this notion, which we call strict-to-tolerant consequence, and discuss its fruitfulness toward a unified treatment of the paradoxes of vagueness and self-referential truth. For vagueness, st-consequence supports the principle of tolerance; for truth, it supports the (...) requisite of transparency. Permissive consequence is non-transitive, however, but this feature is argued to be an essential component to the understanding of paradoxical reasoning in cases involving vagueness or self-reference. (shrink)

Vagueness provides the first comprehensive examination of a topic of increasing importance in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic and language. Timothy Williamson traces the history of this philosophical problem from discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece to modern formal approaches such as fuzzy logic. He illustrates the problems with views which have taken the position that standard logic and formal semantics do not apply to vague language, and defends the controversial realistic view that vagueness is a kind (...) of ignorance--that there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we cannot know which one it is. (shrink)

Stewart Shapiro's ambition in Vagueness in Context is to develop a comprehensive account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary according to their context: a person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall (even short) with respect to professional basketball players. The key feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions of vague terms (...) also vary in the course of conversations and that, in some cases, a competent speaker can go either way without sinning against the meaning of the words or the non-linguistic facts. As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak; but vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other. (shrink)

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases. The epistemology of vagueness concerns attitudes we should have towards propositions we know to be borderline. On this basis Andrew Bacon develops a new theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, explicated in terms of its role in thought.

This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.

Edward S. Casey provides a thorough description of the varieties of human memory, including recognizing and reminding, reminiscing and commemorating, body memory and place memory. The preface to the new edition extends the scope of the original text to include issues of collective memory, forgetting, and traumatic memory, and aligns this book with Casey's newest work on place and space. This ambitious study demonstrates that nothing in our lives is unaffected by remembering.

In VAGUENESS AND DEGREES OF TRUTH, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. -/- A predicate is said to be VAGUE if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates -- both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law (...) to psychology to engineering -- are vague. -/- Smith argues, based on a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of belief and their relationships with degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy -- the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings -- into the degree-theoretic framework. -/- As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the area -- both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the implications of moral vagueness (viz., the vagueness of moral predicates) for non-naturalist metaethical theories like those recently championed by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others. I characterise non-naturalism in terms of its commitment to 7 theses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience, Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. I start by offering a number of reasons for thinking that moral predicates are vague in the same way in which ‘red’, ‘tall’, and ‘heap’ are said to be. I then argue that (...) the moral non-naturalist seeking to countenance moral vagueness faces a dilemma: are moral properties vague, or perfectly sharp? On either horn of the dilemma, serious problems arise for some of the central tenets of non-naturalism: vague properties seem to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons. (shrink)

This paper investigates the way that linguistic expressions influence vagueness, focusing on the interpretation of the positive (unmarked) form of gradable adjectives. I begin by developing a semantic analysis of the positive form of ‘relative’ gradable adjectives, expanding on previous proposals by further motivating a semantic basis for vagueness and by precisely identifying and characterizing the division of labor between the compositional and contextual aspects of its interpretation. I then introduce a challenge to the analysis from the class of ‘absolute’ (...) gradable adjectives: adjectives that are demonstrably gradable, but which have positive forms that relate objects to maximal or minimal degrees, and do not give rise to vagueness. I argue that the truth conditional difference between relative and absolute adjectives in the positive form stems from the interaction of lexical semantic properties of gradable adjectives—the structure of the scales they use—and a general constraint on interpretive economy that requires truth conditions to be computed on the basis of conventional meaning to the extent possible, allowing for context dependent truth conditions only as a last resort. (shrink)

Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms -- such as 'tall', 'red', 'bald', and 'tadpole' -- have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate.This anthology collects for the first time the most important papers in the field. After a substantial introduction that surveys (...) the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent the best recent work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)