Translated by Jordan Stump, introduction by Caleb Carr and original illustrations by Jules Ferat.

The question of violence and how society can emancipate oneself from it has occupied many philosophers. Walter Benjamin attempted to answer this question in 1920 through the notion of divine violence. This idea has recently been resurrected by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. Divine violence is turned to as a means of emancipating society from systemic oppression and coercive law. However, it is a notion that has been met by major critiques. Most (...) notable is Jacques Derrida’s critique given in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority. This article examines Judith Butler’s turn to divine violence in opposition to the critique of divine violence given by Derrida. Butler attempts to merge divine violence and non-violence to create a means of non-violent revolution capable of emancipating society from oppression and coercive law. However, to make this argument, Butler needs to overcome Derrida’s objection that suggests that divine violence is a dangerous notion with the potential to justify horrendous forms of political violence. Does Butler successfully create a non-violent divine violence capable of achieving this desired emancipation? Or does divine violence continue to be a notion with a dangerously destructive potential as Derrida suggests? These are the questions that this article attempts to answer through a detailed examination of both Butler’s and Derrida’s work on divine violence. Ultimately, it is established that divine violence should be jettisoned into the realm of the divine, rather than harnessed for political ends. (shrink)

Background We report a randomised controlled clinical trial of neurofeedback therapy intervention for ADHD/ADD in adults. We focus on internal mechanics of neurofeedback learning, to elucidate the primary role of cortical self-regulation in neurofeedback. We report initial results; more extensive analysis will follow. Methods Trial has two phases: intervention and follow-up. The intervention consisted of neurofeedback treatment, including intake and outtake measurements, using a waiting-list control group. Treatment involved $\sim$40 hour-long sessions 2-5 times per week. Training involved either theta/beta or (...) sensorimotor-rhythm regimes, adapted by adding a novel 'inverse-training' condition to promote self-regulation. Follow-up (ongoing) will consist of self-report and executive function tests. Setting Intake and outtake measurements were conducted at University of Helsinki. Treatment was administered at partner clinic Mental Capital Care, Helsinki. Randomisation We randomly allocated half the sample then adaptively allocated the remainder to minimise baseline differences in prognostic variables. Blinding Waiting-list control design meant trial was not blinded. Participants 54 adult Finnish participants (mean age 36 years; 29 females) were recruited after screening by psychiatric review. 44 had ADHD diagnoses, 10 had ADD. Measurements Symptoms were assessed by computerised attention test (T.O.V.A.) and self-report scales, at intake and outtake. Performance during neurofeedback trials was recorded. Results Participants were recruited and completed intake measurements during summer 2012, before assignment to treatment and control, September 2012. Outtake measurements ran April-August 2013. After dropouts, 23 treatment and 21 waiting-list participants remained for analysis. Initial analysis showed that, compared to waiting-list control, neurofeedback promoted improvement of self-reported ADHD symptoms, but did not show transfer of learning to T.O.V.A. Comprehensive analysis will be reported elsewhere. Trial Registration "Computer Enabled Neuroplasticity Treatment (CENT)", ISRCTN13915109. Partly funded by Finnish science agency TEKES, project #440078. (shrink)

Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style. Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get (...) at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life. Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all time. (shrink)

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did (...) such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal integration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptualizing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction. (shrink)

In a recent article, ‘Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong’, Savulescu and Cameron argue that a selective lockdown of older people is not ageist because it would treat people unequally based on morally relevant differences. This response argues that a selective lockdown of older people living in long-term care homes would be unjust because it would allow the expansive liberties of the general public to undermine the basic liberties of older people, (...) and because it would discriminate on the basis of extrinsic disadvantages. (shrink)

Virtue ethics or natural law? Most contemporary accounts treat these as rival approaches. This book argues both are necessary since virtue is commitment to objective human goods. It also argues integrity is planning one's life by commitment to reasonableness, rejects traditional natural law and virtue ethics for more deontological accounts of the human good and virtue, and explains human personhood accordingly. Part 2 then analyses Aquinas's accounts of emotion, the body and happiness in terms of integrity.

In this international and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, distinguished contributors examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own doctrines and arguments can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The authors argue in general and with reference to specific dialogues, that no character should be taken to be Plato's mouthpiece. This is essential reading for students and scholars of Plato.

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 36-37.

A discussion of the intersections between Aristotle's works: Ethics and Metaphysics. It debates the ways in which - and even the extent to which - the two texts illuminate one another, examine Aristotle's methods and intellectualism and analyse issues of matter, form, potency and art.

Thought experiments feature prominently in both scientific and philosophical methods. In this paper, I investigate two questions surrounding knowledge in the thought experiment process. First, on what implicit knowledge do thought experiments rely? Second, what provides epistemic justification for beliefs acquired through the process? I draw upon neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and Husserlian phenomenology to argue that essence is the object of implicit knowledge that anchors the imagined possibilities involved in thought experiments to the actual world, and that this essentialist knowledge enables (...) the possibility of prima facie justification being conferred by the phenomenological givenness of thought experiment scenarios. (shrink)

Study of space and time with special reference to the philosophy of languages.

Study on the view of Aurobindo Ghose on philosophy of education.

Seeking a Mnemonic Turn: Interior Reflections in Gadamer's Post-Platonic Thought This paper reflects on trajectories and pathways for philosophical hermeneutics, now, after the death of its founder, Hans-Georg Gadamer in 2002. More specifically, it challenges the notion that Gadamer's thought is simply tied to the linguistic turn of the 20th century. Instead, it considers the possibility that Gadamer's thinking makes for an implicit declaration of its own kind, calling for a mnemonic turn in modern philosophy and present day hermeneutics. Some (...) reference will be made to both rationalist and empiricist models of inquiry insofar as Gadamer attempts to take philosophy beyond, for example, the Ur-grammar of Chomsky's linguistic theories, and into a world of post-Platonic memory. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Andrew Sims (bio)In examining this interesting paper, we need first of all to understand what the authors are doing. They are not taking the conceptual vehicles of “spiritual experience” (SE) and “psychotic phenomena” (PP) for a gentle outing, but exposing both of them to the hardest road test they can devise. From 1,000 accounts of “spiritual experiences” that were already so dramatic that (...) those involved were prepared to describe them, the authors selected three which most successfully blurred the boundaries between SE and PP. So we are not exploring whether these concepts have general practical validity, but whether their mutual frontiers are discrete or overlapping. The authors’ task is legitimate, but it needs to be recognized for what it is.Unusual spiritual experiences are interpreted by the authors as psychotic symptoms, and the definitions of the Present State Examination (PSE) descriptions are cited to justify this. However, we have known for a long time that using instruments for purposes for which they were not designed can produce unexpected results; it is rather like washing socks in a dishwasher and being surprised that it does little good to the socks. The PSE was devised for categorizing and quantifying existing psychiatric disorders in epidemiological studies. The further one gets from this, its true purpose, the less satisfactory it becomes as an instrument. A better way of evaluating symptomatology in an individual case is a skilled and painstaking interview by a well-trained descriptive psychopathologist. One can only conclude from the authors’ use of the PSE in distinguishing SE from PP, that the instrument itself is not capable of doing this, which is not really very surprising. One can form no views on the concepts of SE and PP themselves, except that in some circumstances they may be difficult to tell apart.It would be easy to dispute whether Simon’s beliefs were delusions. Believers from many religious backgrounds “know” that God gives them thoughts or ideas, and it requires detailed psychopathological examination, and not the application of a questionnaire, to distinguish this from the much more concrete experience as described in PSE of “inserted thoughts.”Rating scales, be they assessments of the quality of teaching in primary schools or quantification of established psychotic symptoms, are necessarily only a pale reflection and an over-simplification of the skilled work that professionals undertake. To imply that because a score could be given on the PSE to an otherwise healthy woman who describes the frequent experience of hearing God’s voice, denies the validity of her experience, but also affronts the professional skills of a trained psychopathologist. When psychiatrists, or even [End Page 79] untrained research workers, use the PSE they are presumably doing so as part of an epidemiological research study, and the validity of their individual result is evened out by results from a number of other subjects. If a psychiatrist is trying to decide whether Sara had “true” hallucinations, he or she will carry out a psychopathological interview in which the criteria for establishing true hallucinations are much more sophisticated than is possible in a questionnaire, and the interview will be individualized. Sara’s significant statement, “but God doesn’t take your free will away,” immediately distinguishes her diagnosis from schizophrenia. It was good that Sara’s priest did not need detailed knowledge of psychopathology to come to a common-sense evaluation of her experience.It was with some feelings of disappointment that I realized that when the authors use the word “psychotic” they merely mean that a tick could be placed in an appropriate box for the PSE. If one were to carry out an investigation of serum electrolytes on a fit athlete on completion of a marathon, one would get bizarre and probably abnormal results. For a quantified investigation to be meaningful, one must always take account of the context.When I read these three cases as a psychopathologist, I find no convincing psychotic phenomena, and the three human beings were undoubtedly not psychotic at the time of expression of their religious experiences. The word psychosis is not helpful in psychopathology: if one looks more specifically in these cases for the phenomena... (shrink)

Which is better: a guarantee of a modest amount of moral value, or a tiny probability of arbitrarily large value? To prefer the latter seems fanatical. But, as I argue, avoiding such fanaticism brings severe problems. To do so, we must decline intuitively attractive trade-offs; rank structurally identical pairs of lotteries inconsistently, or else admit absurd sensitivity to tiny probability differences; have rankings depend on remote, unaffected events ; and often neglect to rank lotteries as we already know we would (...) if we learned more. Compared to these implications, fanaticism is highly plausible. (shrink)

In the Protagoras, Plato subjects virtue to examination starting from two main questions: Can it be taught? and Is it one thing or many? In the course of their discussion, Protagoras, Socrates, and the others who speak in the dialogue regard virtue from a variety of intriguing perspectives. A provisional conclusion is that the meaning assigned virtue in this dialogue remains elusive, but must certainly be more complex in character than is normally allowed in modernizing philosophical interpretations of it. If (...) it cannot be taught, we nevertheless find ourselves learning about it; and if it is not clearly a unity about which we read, we find ourselves prompted to look for an understanding of it that can in due course emerge as such. (shrink)

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter (...) of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to moral betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity's future is undefined--if, e.g., the probability distribution over possible values of the future resembles the Pasadena game, or a Cauchy distribution--then those views say that no option is ever better than any other. And, as (...) I argue, this holds in practice: our evidence supports such a probability distribution. Indeed, it supports a probability distribution that cannot be evaluated even if we adopt one of the various extensions of expected value theory proposed in the literature. Must we therefore reject all impartial, additive, risk-neutral moral theories? It turns out that we need not. I develop an alternative solution: a new method of extending expected value theory, which allows us to deal with this distribution and to salvage those moral views. I also examine how this solution affects one of the most notable implications of those views--namely, longtermism. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared (...) to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, non-representationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned. (shrink)

In recent years, social cognition approaches to human evolution and Material Engagement Theory have offered new theoretical resources to advance our understanding of the prehistoric hominin mind. To date, however, these two approaches have developed largely in isolation from one another. I argue that there is a gap between social- and material-centred approaches, and that this is precisely the sociomateriality of the appearance of ancestral hominin bodies, which evolved under selective pressure to develop increasingly complex, cooperative sociality. To get this (...) sociomaterial body in focus, I develop an esthesiological framework, appropriated from Merleau-Ponty (2003), for interpreting the expressive body in an evolutionary and comparative context. The guiding hypothesis of esthesiology is that before being rationality (social or material), “humanity is another corporeity” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 208). Esthesiology studies the appearance of the body and its sense organs as an intertwining locus of a sensing power (the ability to see, to touch, etc.) and a sensible character (the visible, touchable body). It is this dual-aspect character of the body that facilitates the most basic affective and sensorimotor modes of sociality. Examining these features from a comparative perspective, we find that the human body is distinctively suited to prosocial communication and cooperation: a more cooperative eye, an exposed and communicative skin. I thus propose a cooperative body hypothesis, by analogy with the cooperative eye hypothesis (Tomasello et al., 2007). Esthesiology provides a framework for integrating and interpreting a wide range of otherwise disconnected facts concerning human and nonhuman animal bodies, forms of life, cognition, and evolution, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and material engagement perspectives. In doing so, however, it not only solves problems and proposes new directions of investigation, but also demands theoretical revisions from each. (shrink)

Research on religion can advance understanding of social cognition by building connections to sociology, a field in which much cognitively oriented work has been done. Among the schools of sociological thought that address religious cognition are: structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, phenomenology, and, most recently, exchange theory. The gulf between sociology and cognitive science is an unfortunate historical accident.

I have two objectives in this article. The first is methodological: I elaborate a minimal phenomenological method and attempt to show its importance in studies of infant behavior. The second objective is substantive: Applying the minimal phenomenological approach, combined with Meltzoff’s “like-me” developmental framework, I propose the hypothesis that infants learn the pointing gesture at least in part through imitation. I explain how developments in sensorimotor ability (posture, arm and hand control and coordination, and locomotion) in the first year of (...) life prepare the infant for acquiring the pointing gesture. The former may directly enable the latter by allowing the infant to experience its own body as being “like those” of others, thus allowing it to imitatively appropriate a broader range of adult behavior. My proposal emphasizes the embodiment of mind in the development of cognition, contrary to latent dualistic tendencies in some developmental literature. (shrink)

An English language translation accompanies the original Greek text of Aristotle's book about the nature of the state, constitutions, revolutions, democracy, and oligarchy.

Evidential Decision Theory and Causal Decision Theory are the leading contenders as theories of rational action, but both face counterexamples. We present some new counterexamples, including one in which the optimal action is causally dominated. We also present a novel decision theory, Functional Decision Theory, which simultaneously solves both sets of counterexamples. Instead of considering which physical action of theirs would give rise to the best outcomes, FDT agents consider which output of their decision function would give rise to the (...) best outcome. This theory relies on a notion of subjunctive dependence, where multiple implementations of the same mathematical function are considered to have identical results for logical rather than causal reasons. Taking these subjunctive dependencies into account allows FDT agents to outperform CDT and EDT agents in, for example, the presence of accurate predictors. (shrink)

Dans ce long inédit, Benjamin Fondane révèle les implications philosophiques révolutionnaires qui découlent des travaux de Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) sur la mentalité primitive. En mettant à jour les mécanismes d'une logique différente, Lévy-Bruhl fait voler en éclat l'universalité de la logique d'Aristote sur laquelle repose notre pensée occidentale. Dès lors cette logique n'est rien d'autre qu'une arme politique qui fonde l'hégémonie de la rationalité.0La démonstration de Fondane est implacable et bouleverse notre conception de la philosophie. Il nous incite à reconsidérer (...) nos manières de penser et de vivre sous la contrainte de la raison, faisant écho à une tradition non aristotélicienne qu'incarnent des penseurs comme Michelstaedter, Lukasiewicz ou Alfred Korzybski. (shrink)

Sells encourages a radical departure from the usual introspection and self-centeredness of psychology in our time. By placing style first, Sells argues that we must turn our eyes and minds outward to the greater world. Emphasizing beauty over emotion and appreciation over feeling, he attempts to break the stranglehold of the self so as to reconstitute our proper place among the many things of the world.

Scientific models are used to predict and understand the target phenomena in the reality. The kind of epistemic relationship between the model and the reality is always regarded by most of the philosophers as a representational one. I argue that, complementary to this representational role, some of the scientific models have a constructive role to play in altering and reconstructing the reality in a physical way. I hold that the idealized model assumptions and elements bestow the constructive force of a (...) model on the reality. By recognizing the physical constructive force of some scientific models, the merit of these models could be judged by how successful they are in the reality construction, rather than by the traditional criterion of model-world representation. (shrink)