My conversion into a knower has been a long and winding road. From childhood reverie to the years of formal schooling, education has never ceased to lure me into its magical power. How do we really get to know/see/learn whatever happens on our educational journey? In this paper, I will re‐trace my quest for knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of traditional epistemology. My wonderings will take me to explore, via Jung, the possibilities of imaginative education through Gnosis and Sophia. (...) The paper intends to weave together several Jungian discourses with their versions by other thinkers who have contributed to the fields of depth psychology, esotericism, and educational philosophy. (shrink)

This paper addresses the unconscious dimension as articulated in Carl Jung's depth psychology and in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. Jung's theory of the archetypes and Deleuze's pedagogy of the concept are two complementary resources that posit individuation as the goal of human development and self-education in practice. The paper asserts that educational theory should explore the role of the unconscious in learning, especially with regard to adult education in the process of learning from life-experiences. The integration of the unconscious into consciousness (...) becomes a constitutive part of subject-formation and self-knowledge, which in turn serves as a basis for experiential self-education. (shrink)

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, (...) metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition. Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, in relation to Minima Moralia and to Dialectic of Enlightenment, this paper aims to interpret the tension between, on the one hand, Adorno’s scathing critique of occultism, and on the other, his subtle and elusive suggestions that authentic thoughthas certain elective affinities with modes of mind, such as are traditionally found in magical theory and practice. This surprising affinity has implications not only for how to read Adorno’s critical project, but also (...) for how to assess the relevance of spirituality for revolutionary and emancipatory politics. If immanent critiquelabors for a re-enchanted world, it may yet be linked to a genuinely spiritual vision of reality. (shrink)

Within the context of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, ketamine (C13H16CINO) has been increasingly used for therapeutic purposes. While ketamine clearly has healing powers, what interests me here is less ketamine for healing than what I will call the possibility of knowledge by ketamine. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's arguments for the centrality of metal and metallurgy as a perspective on matter, I speculate that knowledge by ketamine is not identical with, yet verges on, a kind of becoming-metal of consciousness, and (...) an intuition of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘nonorganic life’ proper to matter. Ketamine trips provide vantage, and in some sense experience of that metallic dimension Deleuze and Guattari claim is inherent in all matter, a fluidity and transformability which for them is the basis of a hydraulic as opposed to solid model of matter, and clue to a vitality that supersedes the distinction of life and death. Intuition of the fundamentally hydraulic or metallic nature of matter is essential to what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadic or ‘minor’ science, one that, because it centres continuous variation rather than discrete form, is capable of challenging the conservative tendencies of ‘major’ or State science. Without making claims for ketamine as in any sense sufficient for a becoming-metal of consciousness, ketamine may be constructively conjugated with other knowledges – knowledge by meditation, by dance, by music, or by martial arts, to name only a few. Such minor sciences of transformation and transmutation remain capable of a negative or corrosive relation to the State, despite the ever-present reality of recapture. (shrink)

Offers an interpretation of neoliberal ideology as a political theology of chance that both justifies and dissembles risk-laden market processes as obscure divination tools used both to determine fate and fortune and yet to deny that such determination is taking place by any accountable authority.

In this essay I critique the identification of contingency with sheer arbitrary possibility in Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. After offering logical and metaphysical reasons for why such an identification is a limitation on the speculative potential of reason, I draw upon Charles S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Giambattista Vico to articulate the outlines of a view of contingency which can underwrite a different speculative position to one that is grounded upon an absolute of (...) unreason. This form of speculation, a realism of contingency without an axiom of unreason, is indicated in outline by the structure of divination practices. I thus propose, without defending its actuality, at least the possibility of a divinatory form of speculation that is adequate to the absolute status of contingency. (shrink)

This volume takes a multi-disciplinary approach to continental philosophy of religion, engaging with philosophy, theology, religious studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and new religious movements, to explore patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix.

Nathan Widder’s Political Theory After Deleuze presents Deleuze’s political work in the context both of Deleuze’s ontology and a broader “ontological turn” in political theory. Contrasting Deleuze with both the “politics of lack” espoused by post-Hegelian and post-psychoanalytical theory, as well as with the “politics of abundance” proffered by pluralists such as William B. Connolly, Widder provides a subtle articulation of the contours and ultimate stakes of Deleuzian micropolitics. The book provides a powerful introduction both to Deleuze’s broader systematic work (...) and to the specifically political dimensions of that perspective. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Self‐education Affects and Experience How We Learn Becoming‐other New Ethics A Concluding Remark References.

This collection examines an aspect of Gilles Deleuze’s thought that has largely been neglected; whether or not Deleuze was a metaphysician. Answering this question may reveal the problematic nature of so-called postmodernism and the critique it leveled at the first philosophy, and it may help readers to better understand philosophy’s fate.

Hubert Dreyfus argues that explicit thought disrupts smooth coping at both the level of everyday tasks and of highly-refined skills. However, Barbara Montero criticises Dreyfus for extending what she calls the ‘principle of automaticity’ from our everyday actions to those of trained experts. In this paper, I defend Dreyfus’ account while refining his phenomenology. I examine the phenomenology of what I call ‘esoteric’ expertise to argue that the explicit thought Montero invokes belongs rather to ‘gaps’ between or above moments of (...) reflexive coping. However, I agree that the ‘principle of automaticity’ does not adequately capture the experience of performing such skills. Drawing on examples of expert performance in sport and improvised music and dance, I argue that esoteric action, at its best, is marked by a distinct state of non-conceptual awareness- an experience of spontaneity, flow and ‘owned-ness’- that distinguishes it from the automaticity of everyday actions. (shrink)

I argue that ordinary confabulation is a side-effect of an interpretive faculty that makes sense of the world by rationalising our experience within the context of a personal and cultural narrative. However, I argue that a hyperactivity of the same process manifests as schizotypy—latent schizophrenic tendencies—that can lead to extreme dissociation of interpretation from experience. I first give a phenomenological account of the process of interpretation, arguing that it is enacted through the creation of conceptual cognitive content from an originary (...) non-conceptual experience. I then ground this account in empirical evidence, showing how our direct perception is moulded and adapted as it is conceptualised to fit our individual and collective expectations. Finally, I argue that hyperactive over-interpretation results in schizotypic dissociation, thus suggesting that schizophrenia should be understood as a disorder of interpretation, the extreme end of a spectrum that includes ordinary confabulation. (shrink)

This article examines some of the story conventions of network television news to explain the ways in which healthcare interest groups develop and maintain their presence in this medium—a process that has significant implications for public understanding of healthcare issues, and therefore to bioethics. The article is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on three major normative conventions of television news: adherence to a simple narrative structure, the balance ethic, and avoidance of the “think-piece” and outlines the basic (...) strategies available to interest groups for exploiting these normative conventions. Section two introduces three case studies of organizations and individuals who have run high-profile media campaigns. Section three explores the implications for bioethics of the observations made in this article. (shrink)

A mass problem is a set of Turing oracles. If P and Q are mass problems, we say that P is weakly reducible to Q if for all Y ∈ Q there exists X ∈ P such that X is Turing reducible to Y. A weak degree is an equivalence class of mass problems under mutual weak reducibility. Let [Formula: see text] be the lattice of weak degrees of mass problems associated with nonempty [Formula: see text] subsets of the Cantor (...) space. The lattice [Formula: see text] has been studied in previous publications. The purpose of this paper is to show that [Formula: see text] partakes of hyperarithmeticity. We exhibit a family of specific, natural degrees in [Formula: see text] which are indexed by the ordinal numbers less than [Formula: see text] and which correspond to the hyperarithmetical hierarchy. Namely, for each [Formula: see text], let hα be the weak degree of 0, the αth Turing jump of 0. If p is the weak degree of any mass problem P, let p* be the weak degree of the mass problem P* = {Y | ∃X ⊆ BLR )} where BLR is the set of functions which are boundedly limit recursive in X. Let 1 be the top degree in [Formula: see text]. We prove that all of the weak degrees [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], are distinct and belong to [Formula: see text]. In addition, we prove that certain index sets associated with [Formula: see text] are [Formula: see text] complete. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Setting specific, challenging goals motivates employees to exert greater effort in their jobs. However, goal-setting may have unintended consequences of also motivating unethical behavior. The present study explores these consequences in the context of other features of goal-setting in organizations, how goals are framed and rewarded, to determine the tradeoff between performance and ethical behavior. Undergraduate students were incentivized to complete math problems using different outcome frames and incentive structures and were also provided an opportunity to cheat. Findings demonstrate (...) that when goals rewarded with piece-rate incentives are framed as a loss, performance increased, though cheating behavior increased as well. (shrink)

Decision Making Competence (DMC) reflects individual differences in rational responding across several classic behavioral decision-making tasks. Although it has been associated with real-world risk behavior, less is known about the degree to which DMC contributes to specific components of risk attitudes. Utilizing a psychological risk-return framework, we examined the associations between risk attitudes and DMC. Italian community residents (n = 804) completed an online DMC measure, using a subset of the original Adult-DMC battery (A-DMC; Bruine de Bruin, Parker, & Fischhoff, (...) 2007). Participants also completed a self-reported risk attitude measure for three components of risk attitudes (risk-taking, risk perceptions, and expected benefits) across six risk domains. Overall, greater performance on the DMC component scales were inversely, albeit modestly, associated with risk-taking tendencies. Structural equation modeling results revealed that DMC was associated with lower perceived expected benefits for all domains. In contrast, its association with perceived risks was more domain-specific. These analyses also revealed stronger indirect effects for the DMC  expected benefits  risk-taking than the DMC  perceived risk  risk-taking path, especially for risk behaviors that may be considered more antisocial in nature. These results suggest that DMC performance differentially impacts specific components of risk attitudes, and may be more strongly related to the evaluation of expected value of the given behavior. (shrink)

BackgroundThe process of peer-review in academia has attracted criticism surrounding issues of bias, fairness, and professionalism; however, frequency of occurrence of such comments is unknown.MethodsWe evaluated 1491 sets of reviewer comments from the fields of “Ecology and Evolution” and “Behavioural Medicine,” of which 920 were retrieved from the online review repository Publons and 571 were obtained from six early career investigators. Comment sets were coded for the occurrence of “unprofessional comments” and “incomplete, inaccurate or unsubstantiated critiques” using an a-prior rubric (...) based on our published research. Results are presented as absolute numbers and percentages.ResultsOverall, 12% of comment sets included at least one unprofessional comment towards the author or their work, and 41% contained incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critiques.ConclusionsThe large number of unprofessional comments, and IIUCs observed could heighten psychological distress among investigators, particularly those at an early stage in their career. We suggest that development and adherence to a universally agreed upon reviewer code of conduct is necessary to improve the quality and professional experience of peer review. (shrink)

Our recent paper reported that 43% of reviewer comment sets shared with authors contained at least one unprofessional comment or an incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critique. Publication of this work sparked an online conversation surrounding professionalism in peer review. We collected and analyzed these social media comments as they offered real-time responses to our work and provided insight into the views held by commenters and potential peer-reviewers that would be difficult to quantify using existing empirical tools. Overall, 75% of comments (...) were positive, of which 59% were supportive and 16% shared similar personal experiences. However, a subset of negative comments emerged, that provided potential insight into the reasons underlying unprofessional comments were made during the peer-review process. These comments were classified into three main themes: forced niceness will adversely impact the peer-review process and allow for publication of poor-quality science ; dismissing comments as not offensive to another person because they were not deemed personally offensive to the reader ; and authors brought unprofessional comments upon themselves as they submitted substandard work. Here, we argue against these themes as justifications for directing unprofessional comments towards authors during the peer review process. We argue that it is possible to be both critical and professional, and that no author deserves to be the recipient of demeaning ad hominem attacks regardless of supposed provocation. Suggesting otherwise only serves to propagate a toxic culture within peer review. While we previously postulated that establishing a peer-reviewer code of conduct could help improve the peer-review system, we now posit that priority should be given to repairing the negative cultural zeitgeist that exists in peer-review. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the question of agency in spontaneous action via a phenomenology of musical improvisation, drawing on fieldwork conducted with large con- temporary improvising ensembles. I argue that musical improvisation is a form of ‘participatory sense-making’ in which musical decisions unfold via a feedback pro- cess with the evolving musical situation itself. I describe how musicians’ technical expertise is developed alongside a responsive expertise, and how these capacities complicate the sense in which habitual action can be viewed (...) as pre-conscious or ‘automatic.’ Nevertheless, I shall argue that the self-awareness required for expert improvisation does not amount to highly reflective deliberation, arguing instead that the practice of musical improvisation involves an exercise of practical rationality, akin to what Aristotle called phronēsis. Musical decisions – as an expressive form of sense-making – are guided by feelings of ‘rightness’ that are experienced directly and intuitively, responding to the norms and reasons that are embedded in the instruments, sounds, and practices of a particular (sub)culture. (shrink)

Quality improvement is an important function of learning health systems, and public policy should promote QI activities. Use of systematic methodologies in QI has prompted substantial confusion regarding when QI is human subjects research under the Common Rule, and this confusion persists with the revised Rule. Difficulty distinguishing research from QI imposes costs on the quality improvement process. I offer guidance to IRBs to mitigate these costs and suggest a new regulatory exclusion for minimal risk quality improvement activities.

We show that there is a computable procedure which, given an ∀∃-sentence ${\varphi}$ in the language of the partially ordered sets with a top element 1 and a bottom element 0, computes whether ${\varphi}$ is true in the Medvedev degrees of ${\Pi^0_1}$ classes in Cantor space, sometimes denoted by ${\mathcal{P}_s}$.

In a recent paper, “Infinitism and Epistemic Normativity,” we have problematized the relationship between infinitism and epistemic normativity. Responding to our criticisms, John Turri has offered a defense of infinitism. In this paper, we argue that Turri’s defense fails, leaving infinitism vulnerable to the originally raised objections.

Respect for victims requires that we have social systems for punishing and condemning (reproving) serious crimes. But, the conditions of social marginalization and political subordination of the communities from which an overwhelming number of prisoners in the United States come place serious barriers in the face of effective reprobation. Mass incarceration makes this problem worse by disrupting and disrespecting entire communities. While humanities education in the prisons is far from a total solution, it is one way to make reprobation meaningful, (...) so long as the prison classroom is a place where the educators’ values are also put at risk. (shrink)

In the United States, patients who lose the ability to make their own medical decisions are subject to the laws of their respective states. Laws governing advance directives and physician orders for life-sustaining therapies (POLST), and establishing a surrogate in the absence of an advance directive, vary substantially by jurisdiction. This article traces those laws from their origins, describes current practices and challenges with their application to patient care, and considers future avenues for ethics research and legislative reform.

Whereas the political battle between literary activists and industry over the tenets of bioregionalism in the American West has ignored the question of social justice, effectively silencing a sizeable population—the working poor—by creating an economic situation in which labor must choose between two oppressors, mutual aid as championed by Petr Kropotkin offers more potential for reform than the model of political competition has yielded thus far. If literary activists were to extend Jared Diamond's call to social action in Collapse by (...) becoming advocates of laborers injured by industrial catastrophes, and if eco-activists were to imagine economic alternatives to the policies they oppose, then bioregionalism could hope to gain more ground as a grassroots movement. (shrink)

Advances in reproductive technology have already revolutionized our culture in various ways, and future potential developments, particularly in genetics, promise more of the same. The practice of surrogacy threatens to upend the way we understand the family. Germline engineering of human embryos could, among other things, lead to the treatment of genetic diseases hitherto incurable; but the widespread use of such engineering could have broader ramifications for our culture, for better and for worse. Parents may eventually be able to select (...) for desirable traits in their offspring, whether by genetic modification at conception or by choosing to implant one of several genetically profiled embryos. Authors in this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy address some of the ethical implications of these technological and cultural changes. (shrink)

This volume looks at tractate Menachot, which is concerned mostly with grain offered at the Temple to atone for various misdeeds. Fogel approaches the text, page by page, commenting with doses of humor and comparisons in a manner meant to explain the text for contemporary readers.

Introduction Marxism did not come to China simply as one of the many waves from abroad that inundated Chinese intellectual life during the late Ch'ing ...

Previous studies have shown that language contributes to humans' ability to orient using landmarks and shapes their use of frames of reference for memory. However, the role of environmental experience in shaping spatial cognition has not been investigated. This study addresses such a possibility by examining the use of FoRs in a nonverbal spatial memory task among residents of an Andean community in Peru. Participants consisted of 97 individuals from Ancash Quechua-speaking households who spoke Quechua and/or Spanish and varied considerably (...) with respect to the extent of their experience in the surrounding landscape. The results demonstrated that environmental experience was the only factor significantly related to the preference for allocentric FoRs. The study thus shows that environmental experience can play a role alongside language in shaping habits of spatial representation, and it suggests a new direction of inquiry into the relationships among language, thought, and experience. (shrink)

Let ${\mathcal{P}_s}$ be the lattice of degrees of non-empty ${\Pi_1^0}$ subsets of 2 ω under Medvedev reducibility. Binns and Simpson proved that FD(ω), the free distributive lattice on countably many generators, is lattice-embeddable below any non-zero element in ${\mathcal{P}_s}$ . Cenzer and Hinman proved that ${\mathcal{P}_s}$ is dense, by adapting the Sacks Preservation and Sacks Coding Strategies used in the proof of the density of the c.e. Turing degrees. With a construction that is a modification of the one by Cenzer (...) and Hinman, we improve on the result of Binns and Simpson by showing that for any ${\mathcal{U} < _s \mathcal{V}}$ , we can lattice embed FD(ω) into ${\mathcal{P}_s}$ strictly between ${deg_s(\mathcal{U})}$ and ${deg_s({\mathcal V})}$ . We also note that, in contrast to the infinite injury in the proof of the Sacks Density Theorem, in our proof all injury is finite, and that this is also true for the proof of Cenzer and Hinman, if a straightforward simplification is made. (shrink)

Since the mid-1980s there has been a great deal of scholarly interest focused on the history of modern Shanghai. In association with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, both the University of California at Berkeley and Cornell University were recipients of Luce Foundation grants that brought Shanghai scholars to North America, resulting in an outpouring of books and articles. In addition, there has been a simultaneous surge of interest among Japanese scholars and, on a smaller scale, French and German scholars. (...) A significant slice of this new research focuses on cultural and intellectual history. This essay examines much of that new material and suggests reasons for why such a development has taken place. (shrink)

A novel experimental paradigm that measured theory change and confidence in participants' theories was used in three experiments to test the effects of anomalous evidence. Experiment 1 varied the amount of anomalous evidence to see if “dose size” made incremental changes in confidence toward theory change. Experiment 2 varied whether anomalous evidence was convergent or replicating. Experiment 3 varied whether participants were provided with an alternative theory that explained the anomalous evidence. All experiments showed that participants' confidence changes were commensurate (...) with the amount of anomalous evidence presented, and that larger decreases in confidence predicted theory changes. Convergent evidence and the presentation of an alternative theory led to larger confidence change. Convergent evidence also caused more theory changes. Even when people do not change theories, factors pertinent to the evidence and alternative theories decrease their confidence in their current theory and move them incrementally closer to theory change. (shrink)