Philosophers and behavioral scientists discuss what, if anything, of the traditionalconcept of individual conscious will can survive recent scientific discoveries that humandecision-making is distributed across different brain processes and ...

This book addresses key Whiteheadian texts and secondary interpretations of Whitehead.

“This is my major thesis. Mystery is inherent in both the nature of things and the nature of rationality. I will sustain this thesis by a review of some of the central issues of philosophy to elucidate their mysterious qualities. More important, however, I will develop in detail an explanation of mystery and trace some of its important ramifications.” “I will argue that an ordinal metaphysics, with its associated theory of query, provides an account of mystery that no other theory (...) can provide. “While the theory presented here is a theory of philosophical mystery, it has fundamental implications for all branches of knowledge, including the physical and social sciences. “In short, I speak against a simplistic view of the world and of experience based on a simplistic and narrow conception of understanding and rationality. Mystery calls not for veneration and awe, but for a full and complex activity of mind, broaching all established conditions in its pursuit of answers....Reason is fulfilled as completely in mysteries which persevere throughout our efforts to resolve them as in mysteries which are resolved and dissipated, passing into new questions to which we must find new answers, in an unterminating process of rational interrogation.” — From the Preface by Stephen David Ross. (shrink)

Ross (philosophy, SUNY Binghamton) attempts to rethink metaphysical traditions in terms of continental and pragmatist critiques, viewing the major work in the tradition as heretical. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Ross (philosophy and comparative literature, State U. of New York, Binghamton) explores how it might be possible to represent representation. Interpretations of a wide range of modern philosophical works combine with original contributions.

This work completes Ross 's trilogy examining the inexhaustible complexity of the world and our relation to our surroundings.

This book presents the principles and categories of an ordinal metaphysics in relation to the metaphysical tradition and contemporary issues. It represents the only current systematic and metaphysical effort to resolve the difficulties that have made metaphysics suspect through most of the twentieth century. Ross begins with a summary of Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, where the theory was first formulated, and then expands and develops Buchler’s ideas in important new directions. He seeks to replace the “cosmological view” (...) that reality is single-valued and wholly determinate with a plural, functional, and ordinal ontology that avoids the major deficiencies of the metaphysical tradition and resolves many contemporary issues. (shrink)

This anthology has been significantly expanded for this edition to include a wider range of contemporary issues.

The four parts of this anthology comprise a remarkably wide array of positions on the nature and importance of art in human experience. Part I, from the history of philosophy, includes selections by the essential writers: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. Part II contains significant selections from Dewey, Langer, Goodman, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The major selections in Part III are from Hirsch and Gadamer on the nature of interpretation, supplemented by selections from Pepper, Derrida, and Foucault. Selections in Part IV (...) sharpen the issues that emerge from the more theoretical discussions in the preceding sections. Significantly revised for this second edition, Part IV now presents discussions of major contemporary importance. In recognition of the increasing influence of Bakhtin and his notion of linguistic multiplicity, materials from The Dialogic Imagination are included. A new section on postmodernism presents some of Lyotard’s definitions of the phenomenon. The Frankfurt School is more adequately represented with the addition of the essays by Benjamin and Adorno to the selection from Marcuse. Perhaps the most important additions are the essays by Gottner-Abendroth, Cixous, and Owens. Crucial contributions to the contemporary discourse, these writings from feminist theory represent a mode of thought that questions male-centered structures of authority and expression. These changes result in a more provocative and representive second edition. (shrink)

This anthology has been significantly expanded for this edition to include a wider range of contemporary issues.

The general theory of art and aesthetic value developed in this book is based on the notions of inexhaustibility and contrast and has important forebears in Kant, Coleridge, and Whitehead.

The phenomenology of memory proposed here is structured around two questions: Of what are there memories? Whose memory is it? (Ricoeur, MHF, 3)in the margins of a critique of imagination, there has to be an uncoupling of imagination from memory . . . . (5–6).

Now let us imagine, if you please, a tiny worm living in the blood, . . . . The worm would be living in the blood as we are living in our part of the universe, and it would regard each individual particle as a whole, not a part, and it would have no idea as to how all the parts are controlled by the overall nature of the blood and compelled to mutual adaptation as the overall nature of the (...) blood requires, so as to agree with one another in a definite relation. . . .Now all the bodies of Nature can and should be conceived in the same way as we have here conceived the blood; . . . . Now since the nature of the universe, unlike the nature of the blood, is not limited, but is absolutely infinite, its parts are modified by the nature of this infinite in infinite ways and are compelled to undergo infinite variations. (Spinoza, ESL, Letter 32, 245–6). (shrink)

Without the mind of a seer, I now maintain that I can predict (vorhersagen) from the aspects and precursor—signs (Vorzeichen) of our times, the achievement (Erreichung) of this end, and with it, at the same time, the progressive improvement of mankind, a progress which henceforth cannot be totally reversible . . . a phenomenon of this kind in human history can never be forgotten (vergisst sich nicht mehr). (Kant, CF; quoted in Lyotard, SH, 408).

Explores how we might think and live in the enchantment of the secular, modern world.

_Explores how we might think and live in the enchantment of the secular, modern world._.

[T]he common character of the mildest, as well as the severest cases, to which the faulty and chance actions contribute, lies in the ability to refer the phenomena to unwelcome, repressed, psychic material, which, though pushed away from consciousness, is nevertheless not robbed of all capacity to express itself. (Freud, PEL, 146).

Zen-Buddhist nothingness is the nowhere is there something that is I, or conversely: the I that is the nowhere is there something. (Hisamatsu, FN, 25-26; quoted and trans. in Stambaugh, FS, 76)... it is empty of being. That means that it is beyond all measure ....... it is empty without emptiness. That means that it does not cling to itself.... it possesses nothing. That means that it doesn't possess and also cannot be possessed. (Hisamatsu, FN, 31; quoted and trans. in (...) Stambaugh, FS, 77-8)The emptiness of what is called "emptiness" is referred to as "the emptiness of emptiness" (ʼsūnyatāʼsūnyatā), and it is explained in this way for the purpose of controverting any understanding of emptiness as a[n ontological reference to] "being." (Candrakīrti, EMW, 180)A skillful Zen student will strive to be awakened to an identity with all phenomena, the student him- or herself emptyand continually changing as the phenomena come forth. (Codiga, ZPSP, 108)Zen practice is a means for the enlightenment of bushes and grasses, an activity that has no beginning or end in the vastness of any empty universe. (p. 110). (shrink)

The image sees.The image feels.The image acts. (Bennett, CB, 195)The image gives.The image is given.The image proliferates.The image betrays.The image for gives.The image is for giving.The image is for exposition.The image is for beauty.The image is from the good.The image is mother, and is father, is both mother and father, and neither mother nor father; for it is the child. The image is the parent, and the children, both parent and children, and neither parent nor children.

LOCALITY AND JUDGMENT THE GENERAL THEMES OF THE VIEW OF PRACTICE I will develop here are expressed in the triangle of locality, inexhaustibility, ...

This book addresses the nature and injustice of authority, retracing the ideas of reason and law from ancient Greece to the present, pursuing a line of thought begun with Anaximander, who speaks of the ordinance of time as restitution for ...

This book is an ethic of inclusion leading from gender and sexual difference through the social world of race and culture to the natural world.

The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone. (Levinas, S, 104)Responsibility carries within it, and must do so, an essential excessiveness. It regulates itself neither on the principle of reason nor on any sort of accountancy. (Derrida, EW, 272)differance, trace, iterability, ex-appropriation, and so on ... are at work everywhere, which is to say, well beyond humanity. (p. 274).

To take up only the most beautiful, as yet to be made manifest in the realm of time and space, there are angels. These messengers who never remain enclosed in a place, who are also never immobile .... Endlessly reopening the enclosure of the universe, of universes, identities, the unfolding of actions, of history.The angel is that which unceasingly passes through the envelope(s) or container(s), goes from one side to the other, reworking every deadline, changing every decision, thwarting all repetition (...) ... they come' to herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning. (Irigaray, ESD, 15)In the absence of civil laws positively defining their real rights and duties, the only criteria women have to refer to are subjective ones....But as long as there are no laws or rules which all women-and all men-may refer to and invoke when making their decisions, there can be no democracy, however attractive the immediate allegiance of a collectivity to a proposition may be. (Irigaray, ILTY, 1-2). (shrink)

Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible. (Foucault, OT, 318)Man is a mode of being which accommodates that dimension-always open, never finally delimited, yet constantly traversed-which extends from a part of himself not reflected in a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends that part; and which, in the inverse direction, extends from that pure (...) apprehension to ... the whole silent horizon of what is posited in the sandy stretches of non-thought .... The question is no longer: How can experience of nature give rise to necessary judgements? But rather: How can man think what he does not think, inhabit as though by a mute occupation something that eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that figure of himself that takes the form of a stubborn exteriority? (pp. 322-3). (shrink)

At the centre of the principle, always, the One does violence to itself, and guards itself against the other. (Derrida, PF, ix)The One betrays itself in betraying the other.The self double crosses itself in double crossing the others.

I wish to take up the subject ... in relation to a set of practices in late antiquity. Among the Greeks, these practices took the form of a precept: epimeleisthai sautou, "to take care of yourself," to take "care of the self," "to be concerned, to take care of yourself."The precept of the "care of the self" [souci de soi] was, for the Greeks, one of the main principles of cities, one of the main rules for social and personal conduct (...) and for the art of life. For us now, this notion is rather obscure and faded. (Foucault, TS, 19). (shrink)

IF MODERN philosophy began with Cartesian doubt, it threatens to end not with a resolution of skepticism but with its dissipation. The skeptic's demand for total justification has been replaced by a repudiation of foundations. Such repudiation has been formulated in terms of holism, contextualism, pragmatism, and interpretationism. Yet some of these approaches display significant difficulties even if we accept their denial of foundations. The approach I will examine in particular here is Richard Rorty's version of holism. I will criticize (...) it not for its denial of foundations--with which I am in complete agreement--but for its incompleteness. I will argue that if we take Rorty's anti-foundationalism seriously, we must develop his theory in certain directions much further than he takes it himself. The directions to be pursued in such developments will become clearer in the course of the discussion. I am particularly concerned to explore the possibility of a systematic but anti-foundational theory--one similar in certain ways to but fundamentally incompatible with holism. I will argue that a metaphysical theory can be developed which accommodates the force of Rorty's, Heidegger's, and Dewey's contextualism--a theory which might be called a perspectival realism. (shrink)

The image, at first sight, does not resemble the cadaver, but it is possible that the rotting, decaying, cadaverous strangeness might also be from the image. (Blanchot, EL, 344; [my translation])But what is the image? When there is nothing, the image finds in this nothing its necessary condition, but there it disappears. The image needs the neutrality and the fading of the world: it wants everything to return to the indifferent deep where nothing is affirmed; it tends toward the intimacy (...) of what still subsists in the void. This is its truth. But this truth exceeds it. (Blanchot, SL, 254). (shrink)

Possession is preeminently the form in which the other becomes the same, by becoming mine. (Levinas, TI, 46)If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together. But no connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding. We only feel a connexion or determination of the thought to pass from one object to another. It follows, therefore, that the thought alone feels personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions that compose a (...) mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together, and naturally introduce each other. (Burne, T, App., 635)The I think must accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought: .... they must conform to the condition under which alone they can exist altogether in a common self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me. (Kant, CPR, 76-7). (shrink)

When one is asked "What is the most important moral principle in ancient philosophy?" the immediate answer is not "Take care of oneself" but the Delphic principle gnōthi sauton ("Know thyself"). (Foucault, TS, 19)I can't as yet "know myself," as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. (Plato, Phaedrus, 230a)I certainly do not yet know myself, but whithersoever the wind, as it were, of the argument (...) blows, there lies our course. (Plato, Republic, 394d). (shrink)

The ownership condemned with such rigor by the mystics, and often called impurity, is only the search for one's own solace and one's own interest in the jouissance of the gifts of God, at the expense of the jealousy of the pure love that wants everything for God and nothing for the creature .... Ownership, of course, is nothing but self-love or pride, which is the love of one's own excellence insofar as it is one's own, and which, instead of (...) coming back completely and uniquely to God, still to a small extent brings the gifts of God back to the self so that it can takepleasure in them. (Fénelon: quoted in Nancy, SL, 94)Love defines itself as the absolute opposite and as the destruction of self-love. Self-love is not simply the love of the self; .... One can love oneself with a real love, and it might even be that one must do so .... But self-love, understood according to the signification the spiritual authors gave to it, .... is the love (which, from this moment on, is no longer one) of possession. It is the love of the self as property. (pp. 94-5). (shrink)