Publication date: 22 December 2020 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 89 Author: Temitope A. Ogunweide The study sought to assess the social context of solid waste disposal pattern of residents in Ibadan metropolis, in order to assess the Solid waste disposal patterns of people in Ibadan metropolis, Oyo State, Nigeria. Specifically, the study identified solid waste disposal habits of residents, frequency of clearing the dumpsters, accessibility of waste dumpsters to (...) people determines the waste disposal pattern of people; and analyze the willingness of people in Ibadan to pay for improved service. Solid waste management has been part of human activities right from time. Efforts by Oyo State Government is seen in the collection of dirt that have been placed on the medians. Waste generation is an unavoidable product of man activities, however, sustainable management of such waste is a challenge faced in many countries today. Nigeria, a developing country in Africa, has been in a quandary of how to efficiently manage the municipal solid waste its population generates. Many states in the country lack adequate plans and infrastructure required for efficient and sustainable management of municipal solid waste. For Ibadan, the largest city in Nigeria, the problem is further compounded by its rather large and still increasing population. In this research, Ibadan metropolis is taken as a case study; the rate of solid waste handling in households as regards solid waste management from household collection to final disposal are focused upon. The study found out that 45.6% drop their refuse in the dumpsters as 18.8% burns their refuse, 17.7% of the respondents drops their waste on the median, 12% in the drainage while 6% opts to drop their waste in the streams. On the effectiveness of the Private operators collecting waste from the respondents, the study found out that 7.6% effective, 37.5% of the respondents says the operators waste collection is poor, 7% says it is abysmal while 43.5% said it is not applicable to them because they do not have storage containers in their houses and as a result did not subscribe to their service. Many countries, particularly the developed ones, have employed options in the waste management hierarchy for sustainable management of their municipal solid waste and the blend of options employed is usually highly dependent on local factors. Following the waste management hierarchy, possible options for sustainable municipal solid waste management in Ibadan are discussed. It is concluded that waste reduction, reuse, and recycling are potential management options for the state. Landfilling will remain an important option for final disposal but reliance on this method could be significantly reduced if management options are exploited to the maximum in a sustainable solid waste management structure in Ibadan metropolis. Key Words: Waste handling, Ibadan Metropolis, Landfill, Municipal Solid Waste Word Count: 435. (shrink)

El estudio persigue el objetivo de contribuir a la capacitación para elevar la competencia de los trabajadores del hospital general de Kuanza Sul, Angola, en la educación ambiental para la gestión de residuos sólidos en consonancia con la preservación del medio ambiente y la promoción de la salud de los pueblos. Se caracteriza al Hospital en sus dimensiones estructural y funcional. Contiene el análisis, la interpretación y el tratamiento de los datos obtenidos a través de encuestas, entrevistas y observación. This (...) study has the objective to contribute to train the workers at Kuanza Sul, General Hospital in environmental education for the management of solid waste in keeping with the protection of the environment and peoples health promotion. The hospital is characterized in its structural and functional dimensions. it contains the analysis, the interpretation and treatment of the data obtained by means of surveys, interviews and observation. (shrink)

The neutrosophic cubic hesitant fuzzy set can efficiently handle the complex information in a decision-making problem because it combines the advantages of the neutrosophic cubic set and the hesitant fuzzy set. The algebraic operations based on Dombi norms and co-norms are more flexible than the usual algebraic operations as they involve an operational parameter. First, this paper establishes Dombi algebraic operational laws, score functions, and similarity measures in neutrosophic cubic hesitant fuzzy sets. Then, we proposed Dombi exponential operational laws in (...) which the exponents are neutrosophic cubic hesitant fuzzy values and bases are positive real numbers. To use neutrosophic cubic hesitant fuzzy sets in decision-making, we are developing Dombi exponential aggregation operators in the current study. In the end, we present applications of exponential aggregation operators in multiattribute decision-making problems. (shrink)

A new trend in the production technology of solid biof uels has appeared. There is a wide consensus that most solid biofuels will be produced according to the new production methods within a few years. Numerous samples were manufactured from agro-residues according to conventional methods as well as new methods. Robust analyses that reviewed the hygienic, environmental, financial and ethical aspects were performed. The hygienic and environmental aspect was assessed by robust chemical and technical analyses. The financial aspect (...) was assessed by energy cost breakdown. The ethical point of view was built on the above stated findings, the survey questionnaire and critical discussion with the literature. It is concluded that the new production methods are significantly favourable from both the hygienic and environmental points of view. Financial indicators do not allow the expressing of any preference. Regarding the ethical aspect, it is concluded that the new methods are beneficial in terms of environmental responsibility. However, it showed that most of the customers that took part in the survey are price oriented and therefore they tend to prefer the cheaper—conventional alternative. In the long term it can be assumed that expansion of the new technology and competition among manufacturers will reduce the costs. (shrink)

Canada is the world’s highest per capita municipal solid waste producer. By 2000, Canadians produced more annual waste per person than Americans; and by 2005, Canada produced nearly twice as much garbage as Japan (Conference Board of Canada 2008). By 2006, Canadians produced over 1000 kg of waste per person; 35 million tons of waste in a single calendar year (Statistics Canada 2008). The bulk of this waste ended up in landfills (ibid). In 2010, (...) thirty percent of existing Canadian landfills reached or surpassed capacity. Over one million tons of waste were exported out of Canada in 2002, much of it headed from southern Ontario to rural regions of Canada or to the United States (Statistics Canada 2005). Some cities .. (shrink)

From the 5th edition of Beauchamp and Childress' Principles of Biomedical Ethics, the problem of common morality has been given a more prominent role and emphasis. With the publication of the 6th and latest edition, the authors not only attempt to ground their theory in common morality, but there is also an increased tendency to identify the former with the latter. While this stratagem may give the impression of a more robust, and hence stable, foundation for their theoretical construct, we (...) fear that it comes with a cost, namely the need to keep any theory in medical ethics open to, and thereby aware of, the challenges arising from biomedical research and clinical practice, as well as healthcare systems. By too readily identifying the moral life of common morality with rule-following behaviour, Beauchamp and Childress may even be wrong about the nature of common morality as such, thereby founding their, by now, classic theory on quicksand instead of solid rock. (shrink)

Various debates in bioethics have been focused on whether non-persons, such as marginal humans or non-human animals, deserve respectful treatment. It has been argued that, where we cannot agree on whether these individuals have moral status, we might agree that they have symbolic value and ascribe to them moral value in virtue of their symbolic significance. In the paper I resist the suggestion that symbolic value is relevant to ethical disputes in which the respect for individuals with no intrinsic moral (...) value is in conflict with the interests of individuals with intrinsic moral value. I then turn to moral status and discuss the suitability of personhood as a criterion. There some desiderata for a criterion for moral status: it should be applicable on the basis of our current scientific knowledge; it should have a solid ethical justification; and it should be in line with some of our moral intuitions and social practices. Although it highlights an important connection between the possession of some psychological properties and eligibility for moral status, the criterion of personhood does not meet the desiderata above. I suggest that all intentional systems should be credited with moral status in virtue of having preferences and interests that are relevant to their well-being. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the philosophical issues underlying disputes about the siting of hazardous industrial facilities. The case the paper focuses on involves the siting of a hazardous waste treatment plant, but many of the same issues and arguments arise in the siting of other potentially dangerous and controversial facilities, such as nuclear power plants. Because the siting of such facilities always poses risks to residents nearby, questions of justice immediately arise in such siting proposals. In the case (...) I examine here, residents of a community proposed as the site of a hazardous waste treatment plant raise the question of decision making structure and community control as a primary question of justice. (shrink)

E-waste, also known as waste from electrical and electronic equipment, is a solid waste that accumulates quickly due to high demand driven by the market for replacing newer electrical and electronic products. The global e-waste generation is estimated to be between 53.6 million tons, and it is increasing by 3–5% per year. Metals make-up approximately 30% of e-waste, which contains precious elements Au, Ag, Cu, Pt, and other high-value elements, valued at USD 57 billion, (...) which is driving the e-waste recycling industry. It is noteworthy that the recycling of precious elements from e-waste has emerged as a profitable enterprise in several parts of developing nations. E-waste contains 50–100 times higher levels of precious metals compared to natural ores, making it suitable for mining. E-waste recycling in developing nations, mostly occurs through the informal sector comprising manual collection, crushing, segregation and selling of precious elements, such as Au, Ag, Cu, Pb, Pt, and other rare elements (Nd, In, and Ga). The organized sector, on the other hand, mostly employs mechano-chemical methods, such as pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, and bio-hydrometallurgy, which have serious environmental consequences. Both the informal and formal sectors of e-waste processing lead to the leaching of toxic elements into groundwater and soils. Owing to the lesser efficiency of greener technologies, such as phytoremediation and bioremediation, their use in precious metal extraction is very limited. However, this review explores several hyper-accumulating and tolerant plants viz. Brassica juncea and Berkheya coddii, which holds great potential in phytomining of precious metal from e-waste. Thus, the state of the art in precious metal extraction from e-waste as well as the advantages and disadvantages of different metal extraction technologies has been reviewed. (shrink)

This essay engages critically with Adrian Pabst’s ‘Liberal World Order and Its Critics’, Christian Reus-Smit’s ‘On Cultural Diversity’, and Hal Brands’ and Charles Edel’s ‘The Lessons of Tragedy’. What holds these three (very different) books together is that they revolve around the theme of ‘the crisis of liberal world order’. In this essay, I do not wish to dispute the claim that the liberal world order is in crisis – indeed, I accept this common starting-off point of the four (...) authors as a fact. What distinguishes my take on the ‘crisis of liberal world’ order from the books under review, however, is that I develop an alternative angle on the very idea of ‘crisis’: By understanding crisis as an incitement to judgement, deliberation and, ultimately, political action, I excavate the constructive potential of crisis; and, through the critical engagement with the three books under review, I seek to lay bare the intimate bond that connects ‘crisis’, ‘human diversity’, and ‘tragedy’, and to revive the constructive potential of these themes as ‘opportunities not to be wasted’. (shrink)

This article explores the technoenvironmental politics associated with government-sponsored climate change mitigation. It focuses on England’s New Technologies Demonstrator Programme, established to test the “viability” of “green” waste treatments by awarding state aid to eight experimental projects that promise to divert municipal waste from landfill and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The article examines how these demonstrator sites are arranged and represented to produce noncontroversial and publicly accessible forms of evidence and experience and, ultimately, to inform environmental policy (...) and planning decisions throughout the country. As in experimental science, this process requires that some bear witness to the demonstrators, but in a disciplined way. Whether through the extrapolation of facts about technical performance by affiliated third-party consultants, or the orchestration of visitor centers open to the general public, making the demonstrators public involves controlling the ways in which they are interpreted and perceived. However, the unstable publicity of waste management facilities proliferates unofficial accounts as well. These acts of counterwitnessing, as I refer to them, not only potentially dispute the official evidence collected from the demonstrators, they also can pose a challenge to the understanding of technology upon which such government initiatives are based. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical implications of the Clean Development Mechanism, the United Nation’s climate change initiative that provides incentives to countries and firms in developed countries to motivate investments in greenhouse gas reduction projects in developing countries. Using the tenets of agency theory, we present a solid waste management project in El Salvador as an illustrative example of how the CDM can produce a disproportionately high social cost for the most marginalized populations in the developing world. We (...) suggest that the UN needs to reformulate the CDM so that it more effectively aligns the divergent goals of multiple actors and upholds the UN’s principles for sustainable development, including ethical firm-level behavior. By providing incentives for environmental, economic, and social value creation, the CDM would not only promote ethical norms for profit-seeking firms that participate in the program but also reinforce the UN’s twin pro-poor and environmental objectives. (shrink)

Food Services generate solid waste from the production process and distribution of meal. The raw material, after a rational flow, is transformed into meals for consumption generating solid waste of variable composition and quantity. Waste recovery actions in the recycling and selective collection in these services act as inhibitors of the inadequate disposal of these wastes in the environment, contributing to environmental sustainability. The objective of this study is to analyze the generation and viability of (...) commercialization of recyclable solid waste in Food Services of companies located in Cuiabá and Várzea Grande, Mato Grosso – Brazil. This is a cross-sectional exploratory study with a convenience sample. The analysis of the generation of residues was carried out using the weighing method and generation indices using descriptive statistics. In order to verify the economic potential of recyclable waste, the value of intermediate consumption was used and sales price data were obtained by means of the publication "Compromisso Empresarial para Reciclagem" CEMPRE. It was found that in six services the largest part of waste was made of plastic, and in two services it was paper and cardboard. The generation of aluminum was more significant in one service, being the residue that added more economic value in the commercialization. The generation of glass and tetra pack packaging were not significant, and the recycling of both is not of interest to the scavengers. The results indicate that the commercialization of recyclable solid waste is viable. (shrink)

Growth in entrepreneurial activity has been associated with the establishment of new markets, the development of new products, and increases in national and international income disparity. Before embracing all market activity as good and beneficial, we should carefully consider the environmental and social impacts that have followed the adoption of social values, which confer status with increased ownership and consumption. These impacts include severely entrenched poverty, increased consumption of disposable products leading to increased solid waste, increased consumption of (...) nonrenewable resources, and high rates of personal bankruptcy. To counteract these trends, a balance of ecologizing and economizing drives is required within entrepreneurial activity. (shrink)

The choice of new technology in a resource-based industry has far-reaching implications for its ethical performance. The kraft pulping industry uses considerable amounts of wood as raw material, and regulatory agencies have been tightening their control limits for effluent, solid waste and air emissions. The technological solutions required to reduce the environmental impact of the industry are shown to have the potential of causing social hardship for the mill's employees, the affected communities, lenders, and owners. In some instances, (...) the technological solutions give rise to new environmental challenges. Forestry practices are influencing the public's perception of the kraft pulping industry, its ethical and environmental performance, its profitability, and the properties of its product, which may increase wood requirements. New forestry practices have the potential to reduce the forest land area required to sustain the kraft pulp production at a given level but ethical problems associated with genetic manipulation, phenodiversity, and biodiversity are identified. This paper analyzes the interface between environmental protection, ethics, and choice of technology. (shrink)

Growth in entrepreneurial activity has been associated with the establishment of new markets, the development of new products, and increases in national and international income disparity. Before embracing all market activity as good and beneficial, we should carefully consider the environmental and social impacts that have followed the adoption of social values, which confer status with increased ownership and consumption. These impacts include severely entrenched poverty, increased consumption of disposable products leading to increased solid waste, increased consumption of (...) nonrenewable resources, and high rates of personal bankruptcy. To counteract these trends, a balance of ecologizing and economizing drives is required within entrepreneurial activity. (shrink)

A test was administered to 102 engineering students to ascertain how engineering education influences their environmental knowledge and attitudes. Answers to definitional and factual questions in a forced-answer section demonstrated that students were improving their technical knowledge, but responses to more subtle questions were mixed. Answers to attitudinal questions exhibited a trend towards increased environmental awareness. For open-ended questions, posttest results showed an increase in knowledge of engineering work. Over 80% of the students considered themselves to have a caring attitude (...) toward the environment, with the “three R’s” and green transportation choices most commonly cited. Engagement in research, education, or advocacy doubled from pretest to posttest. Air pollution and solid waste disposal most frequently influenced students’ attitudes toward the environment. Outdoor experiences were the most frequently mentioned source of information; university courses rose from 4% to 15% on the posttest. Only 40% of the students could name an environmental role model. (shrink)

This study examines the hydrolysis of lignocellulose extracted from poultry manure for the purpose of investigating low-cost feedstocks for ethanol production while providing an alternative solid waste management strategy for agricultural livestock manures. Poultry manure underwent various pretreatments to enhance subsequent enzymatic hydrolysis including untreated, alkaline pretreatment with 0.5N KOH, drying, and grinding. The KOH-treated, dried, and grinded poultry manure yielded the highest glucose conversions. When poultry manure without pretreatment was hydrolyzed at 40°C with an enzyme loading 400 (...) units/g feedstock, 7.1 ± 0.3% was converted to glucose in 24 hours. This increased to 27.6 ± 1.2% when a KOH pretreatment followed by drying and grinding was applied. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analyses were used to examine differences in the composition of the pretreated feedstock before and after enzymatic hydrolysis. These indicate that the cellulose content in pretreated poultry manure was removed during enzymatic hydrolysis. (shrink)

Technological innovation has an important impact on environmental pollution. In this paper, first, we analyze the influence mechanism of technological innovation on environmental pollution and then design the index system of technological innovation. Then, we use the entropy method to calculate the technological innovation level of different regions in China based on provincial panel data from 2004 to 2016. Finally, the panel vector autoregression model is adopted, and taking the discharge of sewage, solid waste, and exhaust gas as (...) the research objects, the impact of technological innovation on them is empirically analyzed. The results show that China’s technological innovation level is steadily improving, but there are significant differences in the impact of technological innovation on wastewater, waste gas, and solid waste. Specifically, technological innovation can contribute to an increase in wastewater and solid waste emissions. However, the impact of this technological innovation on them is not equal. Secondly, the impact of technological innovation on exhaust emissions is to inhibit exhaust emissions in the short term and promote exhaust emissions in the long term. Finally, there are clear differences between them in terms of the specific impact of changes in wastewater, solid waste, and exhaust emissions. Changes in wastewater discharges and solid waste generation are largely derived from their own effects, while the role of technological innovation is supportive and insignificant. The change in exhaust emissions is initially influenced by itself, but in the long run, the influence of technological innovation gradually increases and eventually exceeds its own influence. Based on these research results, this paper puts forward corresponding policy suggestions to speed up environmental pollution control. (shrink)

Along with urban development globally, the NIMBY crisis has been a complex social problem, which requires urgent remedial action. The inevitable management of Municipal Solid Waste has been one of the toughest risk management tasks in the worldwide modernization process. At present, certain fuzzy and unstructured results and methods have been formed for MSW-NIMBY crisis response, mainly focusing on the sociology and politics which scatter in complex and sensitive reports and news. Aiming at enhancing the effectiveness of data (...) mining from specific sparse text of MSW-NIMBY crisis, an improved knowledge extraction method is developed. Through rule-based text mining and complex network analysis, the Entity Relationship network of MSW-NIMBY crisis is reconstructed. Meanwhile, a novel transitivity for relationship between entities in semantic analysis is proposed to improve the feasibility and accuracy of information extraction. Characteristics and regularity of MSW-NIMBY crisis evolution and experience of crisis governance could be identified effectively. Results show that knowledge integration and ER transitivity can enhance knowledge recognition and major other factors, which could help formulate the governance strategies of NIMBY crisis from academic texts. (shrink)

Discourse-based processes seek to arrive at socially acceptable decisions by adhering to a specific set of procedures. In this case study, we empirically test how successful the,Cooperative Discourse' was in identifying a socially acceptable site for a solid-waste landfill in Switzerland. Our results indicate that even individuals living in the community designated as the prospective site think highly of the,Cooperative Discourse', but they know close to nothing about this procedure. This ignorance is rational, because, under Swiss laws, the (...) recommendations of the discourse are not legally binding and siting projects can easily be thwarted by town hall meetings. In this case, the,Cooperative Discourse' may have reached a consensus proposal because this proposal is socially not very relevant. (shrink)

Discourse-based processes seek to arrive at socially acceptable decisions by adhering to a specific set of procedures. In this case study, we empirically test how successful the,Cooperative Discourse' was in identifying a socially acceptable site for a solid-waste landfill in Switzerland. Our results indicate that even individuals living in the community designated as the prospective site think highly of the,Cooperative Discourse', but they know close to nothing about this procedure. This ignorance is rational, because, under Swiss laws, the (...) recommendations of the discourse are not legally binding and siting projects can easily be thwarted by town hall meetings. In this case, the,Cooperative Discourse' may have reached a consensus proposal because this proposal is socially not very relevant. (shrink)

Para las empresas recolectoras de residuos sólidos es indispensable controlar los factores de riesgos asociados a la calidad del aire del entorno laboral de sus empleados con el objetivo de minimizar las afecciones de salud de sus trabajadores. El propósito del estudio es desarrollar un prototipo de un sensor inalámbrico de medición de calidad de aire. Este instrumento de medición será implementado en ambientes laborales para trabajadores de recolección de residuos sólidos. A partir del estudio se concluye que para empresas (...) de este sector es indispensable el control de factores de riesgos asociados a la exposición a gases y vapores. (shrink)

The river Portoviejo crosses four cantons of the province of Manabí and is the main source of water for the inhabitants of the area to be used in various uses. The objective of this bibliographic review article is to carry out a historical analysis of the water pollution of the Portoviejo River. The qualitative and descriptive documentary research methodology was used. The authors conclude that the factors that influence the pollution of the Portoviejo River are the constant direct discharges of (...) wastewater and solid waste along its route by the residents of the area and the contribution of the water treatment plant waste from the area. (shrink)

Ecological and livable cities need an objective method to be judged. This paper is in search of a method to determine the level of livability, ecology, and energy efficiency, beginning with ecovillages, ecocities, ending with Tirana capital of Albania. Examples chosen for this methodology are: Ecovillages: 1. Auroville; India; 2. Sieben Linden, Europe; 3. Ecovillages at Ithaca, USA; 4. Ecoovila, Brazil; 5. Mbam and Faoune, Senegal. Ecocities: 1. DongTang, Shangai, China; 2. Masdar, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; 3. Arcosanti, Arizona, (...) USA; 4. Chang Chun, China; 5. Zira island, Baku Azerbaijan; 6. Globe Town, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. A special device is introduced for comprising analyze of this paper. Weighing and final score are evaluated in the conclusion. The livable city should be merged with the overall development, ecological progress, sustainable, passive, and bioclimatic design in order to withstand the test of time. Ecological and sustainable cities need to properly make up for the existence weakness of cities construction under fine ecological environment. The intention of this comparative study is an attempt to assess, even improve the lives of the citizens of Tirana, Albania. There are some attempts nowadays to environmentally render the city but due to the lack of a genuine ecological and renewable energy study in Tirana, the city suffers the consequences. The first settlements which consider the renewable energies are known as Ecovillages. They demonstrate their impact on the community and the energy consumption. Ecovillages have evolved into ecocities of the future, most of them not completed yet or in design phase. For both groups (ecovillages and ecocities) tables of matrixes are constructed in order to better understand their potential and functionality, and their special features and characteristics. This chapter is in search of analyzing the eco-potential and renewable energies for further development of future cities, considering ten case studies all over the world and ending with Tirana. The fossil fuel age is quickly coming to an end, so, the world must be prepared for the implementation strategies and utilization of renewable and alternative energies. (shrink)

To practice environmental awareness is to leave a legacy for a better world and this will be achieved with the support of students and society, for this reason the main objective of this research is to describe and analyze the perspectives of environmental awareness in university students, for which the methodology of quantitative approach is used, correlational between its elements and predictive, in which 1324 university students who responded to a survey of 17 questions divided into four dimensions participated.

There are not enough solid organs available to meet the needs of patients with organ failure. Thousands of patients every year die on the waiting lists for transplantation. Yet there is one currently available, underutilized, potential source of organs. Many patients die in intensive care following withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment whose organs could be used to save the lives of others. At present the majority of these organs go to waste.In this paper we consider and evaluate a range (...) of ways to improve the number and quality of organs available from this group of patients. Changes to consent arrangements (for example conscription of organs after death) or changes to organ donation practice could dramatically increase the numbers of organs available, though they would conflict with currently accepted norms governing transplantation.We argue that one alternative, Organ Donation Euthanasia, would be a rational improvement over current practice regarding withdrawal of life support. It would give individuals the greatest chance of being able to help others with their organs after death. It would increase patient autonomy. It would reduce the chance of suffering during the dying process. We argue that patients should be given the choice of whether and how they would like to donate their organs in the event of withdrawal of life support in intensive care.Continuing current transplantation practice comes at the cost of death and prolonged organ failure. We should seriously consider all of the alternatives. (shrink)

The paper is an extended discussion of what I call the ‘dismissive attitude’ towards metaphysical questions. It has three parts. In the first part, I distinguish three quite different versions of dismissivism. I also argue that there is little reason to think that any of these positions is correct about the discipline of metaphysics as a whole; it is entirely possible that some metaphysical disputes should be dismissed and others should not be. Doing metametaphysics properly requires doing metaphysics first. I (...) then put two particular disputes on the table to be examined in the rest of the paper: the dispute over whether composite objects exist, and the dispute about whether distinct objects can be colocated. In the second part of the paper, I argue against the claim that these disputes are purely verbal disputes. In the third part of the paper, I present a new version of dismissivism, and argue that it is probably the correct view about the two disputes in question. They are not verbal disputes, and the discussion about them to date has not remotely been a waste of time. At this stage, however, our evidence has run out. I argue that neither side of either dispute is simpler than the other, and that the same objections in fact arise against both sides. (For example, the compositional nihilist does not in fact escape the problem of the many, and the one-thinger does not in fact escape the grounding problem.). (shrink)

This article examines two disputes within sex and gender movements, using them to think through inclusion/exclusion processes, the place of such explosions in the construction of collective identity, and the gendered nature of social movements. Literatures on collective identity emphasize the ways boundary negotiation reinforces the solidarity necessary for collective action and note benefits of solid boundaries, yet downplay the role of internal conflict in the making of collective identities. The cases examined here both involved the explicit expulsion of (...) some “members”: the North American Man/boy Love Association from the International Lesbian and Gay Association, and transsexuals from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. An incongruence between practical participation and symbolic exclusion suggests that internal movement debates are best understood as public communications, depending heavily on the communicative environment. Finally, these stories raise questions about the gendered nature of collective identity construction in social movements more generally. (shrink)

We may now ask the question: In what historical perspective should we place the work of Richard Goldschmidt? There is no doubt that in the period 1910–1950 Goldschmidt was an important and prolific figure in the history of biology in general, and of genetics in particular. His textbook on physiological genetics, published in 1938, was an amazing compendium of ideas put forward in the previous half-century about how genes influence physiology and development. His earlier studies on the genetic and geographic (...) distribution of the various species and races of Lymantria contributed soundly to an understanding of the inheritance and development of sex, as well as the genetics of speciation. He was a curious mixture of the experimentalist, empiricist, and theorizer, who could grasp both the large and the small at once and wrap them into the same integrated and coherent package.In insisting on trying to relate genetics to development, Goldschmidt was continually forced to speculate and to forsake experimental fact for generalized theory. In refusing to reconcile a physiological and developmental conception with a corpuscular theory of the gene, he forced himself to substitute for a large body of experimentally verified evidence, vague and general speculations which did not lead in any precise direction. L. C. Dunn summarizes succinctly the effect of Goldschmidt's thinking on the development of genetic theory: Although Goldschmidt's ideas had a considerable influence in directing attention to the developmental processes intervening between genes and characters, they did not lead to the establishment of a general theory of development in genetical terms. In fact, at the end of the period, as signalized by Goldschmidt's book of 1938 [Physiological Gentics] doubt remained whether there was a field with a defined problem which could be identified as developmental genetics.Yet the frequency with which Goldschmidt is cited by later writers suggests that there is a more positive side to his contribution than this. The early Mendelians had recognized the genic constitution of organisms and the Drosophila workers had uncovered in detail the chromosomal mechanism of heredity. These great discoveries were of classical character, solidly based on a multitude of well established facts. By themselves, however, they would not have been sufficient to place genetics in the central position within biology which it was to assume. Beyond the “static” analysis of gene transmission an insight was needed into the dynamic role of genes in cellular physiology, biochemistry, and development. Goldschmidt recognized this aspect and outlined in brilliant generalizations a physiological theory of genetics. Necessarily the prophetic nature of this achievement — romantic in the sense of Ostwald's classification of great scientists and their discoveries — transcended its factual basis. It was the audacity of the theoretician unimpeded by the still scanty data which gave a new focus to biological thought.Some have called Goldschmidt an “obstructionist” in the history of genetics—one whose efforts were largely directed toward useless and continual criticism — challenge for the sake of challenge. As this line of argument goes, time wasted answering Goldschmidt's poorly conceived criticisms could have been better used to pursue new lines of thought within the classical gene theory. Sometimes historians are upbraided for studying the work of such “obstructionists,” or even the work of those whose ideas have later proved to be inadequate. This argument misses the point of history and the lessons which it can teach. Perhaps Goldschmidt did take the time of a number of the classical geneticists who tried to answer his objections to the gene theory; and perhaps many of his own ideas about genes were, by today's view, “wrong.” These are always easier judgments to make by hindsight than at the moment. But that is not the point. Goldschmidt had a considerable influence on his contemporaries, and to dismiss him as an obstructionist because his opponents later proved to be more nearly right, distorts history and obscures significant questions which we might well be asking. It might be valuable to know why Goldschmidt felt compelled to be an iconoclast —and how that impulse, psychological in orgin, led him to overlook critical items of evidence which his opponents considered more carefully. It might also be valuable to try and understand how a contemporary of Goldschmidt or. Morgan really viewed the gene theory — what were its strong and weak point? Such questions are not readily answered by studying the work of only those men who were correct by later standards.Answers to some of the above questions can be gleaned from this study of Goldschmidt — though the first, and most psychologically oriented, question is largely untouched here.On the one hand, Goldschmidt forced classical geneticists to reexamine the foundation of their ideas about the nature, inviolability, and even physical dimensions of genes. He also kept alive the very real problems of gene physiology and its relations to development — a relationship that was given less attention by the Drosophila school in their pursuit of the transmission process. On a broader level he emphasized to the biological community a principle that was in danger of being lost in the enthusiasm surrounding the expansion of the Mendelian-chromosome theory. The point was that all theories in science are transient, logical constructs which should not be held as sacred. Time and again, as the history of science has shown, theories become rigid structures which retard new modes of thought. From Goldschmidt's perspective, the gene theory was in danger of performing just that function, for it was preventing workers from viewing the gene in a functional as well as a structural light.On the other hand, examining the work of critics (or even of outright “obstructionists”) gives the historian an opportunity to observe how the more established community of scholars at some point in time reacts to challenges of its cherished ideas. The fact that many workers in his own day (such as Beadle, Luria, Delbruck, Sturtevant, Bridges, and others), as well as most geneticists today, saw Goldschmidt as having been largely “obstructionist” is useful historical (and/or sociological) data. Clearly, as this paper has tried to show, Goldschmidt's ideas were not all obstructionist, and his viewpoint that genes must be considered functionally was one which was clearly valid, premature as it may have been from an experimental and technique point of view. Perhaps Goldschmidt's major fault was that he developed alternative theories which were not easily testable. Nonetheless, his challenge to a fundamental and established idea brought forth a reaction from many members of the genetic community which indicates how unwilling they were to reconsider the formalized theory on which their work was based. While many of Goldschmidt's criticisms — and particularly his way of making them — arose out of his own idiosyncrasies, they were also a product of his times. His view of the nature of theory-construction, and his rejection of old-style reductionism and mechanism, were part of a growing awareness within the world scientific community that explanations based on reducing complex phenomena to ultimate particles or units were clearly inadequate. The success of the Mendelian-chromosome theory had obscured that fact for many geneticists, but to Goldschmidt it was a point that could not be allowed to pass unnoticed. (shrink)

Thomism is solidly based on the assumption that we know the world first through our senses and then through concepts formed on the basis of our sense experience. In this informally discursive introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, Ralph McInerny shows how this basic assumption contrasts with dominant modern alternative views and is developed by Thomas into a coherent view of ourselves, of knowledge, and of God. McInerny first places Thomism in context within philosophical inquiry, discussing the relationship between philosophy and (...) theology, and between modern and classical views of philosophy. He then describes the challenges Thomas faced with the introduction of Aristotle’s works into the Christian West. The reader is subsequently guided through such key concepts as art, nature, causes, and motion and shown how Thomas used these concepts to resolve the problems presented by Aristotle. Each chapter is tied to a specific Thomistic text, providing a sample froma number of Thomas’s works. In addition to articles from both _Summas_, there are sections from the Disputed Questions and the Commentaries, among others. McInerny also provides an annotated list of the writings of Thomas available in English. Bibliographical notes provivded by the author, grouped by subject and following his general chapter divisions, will be particularly helpful for further reading. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to stress the significance of ethics for engineering education and to illustrate how it can be brought into the mainstream of higher education in a natural way that is integrated with the teaching objectives of enriching the core meaning of engineering. Everyone will agree that the practicing engineer should be virtuous, should be a good colleague, and should use professional understanding for the common good. But these injunctions to virtue do not reach closely enough (...) the ethic of the engineer as engineer, as someone acting in a uniquely engineering situation, and it is to such conditions that I wish to speak through a set of specific examples from recent history. I shall briefly refer to four controversies between engineers. Then, in some detail I shall narrate three historical cases that directly involve the actions of one engineer, and finally I would like to address some common contemporary issues. The first section, “Engineering Ethics and the History of Innovation” includes four cases involving professional controversy. Each controversy sets two people against each other in disputes over who invented the telegraph, the radio, the automobile, and the airplane. In each dispute, it is possible to identify ethical and unethical behavior or ambiguous ethical behavior that serves as a basis for educational discussion. The first two historical cases described in “Crises and the Engineer” involve the primary closure dam systems in the Netherlands, each one the result of the actions of one engineer. The third tells of an American engineer who took his political boss, a big city mayor, to court over the illegal use of a watershed. The challenges these engineers faced required, in the deepest sense, a commitment to ethical behavior that is unique to engineering and instructive to our students. Finally, the cases in “Professors and Comparative Critical Analysis” illuminate the behavior of engineers in the design of structures and also how professors can make public criticisms of designs that seem wasteful. (shrink)

The term “euthanasia” is used in conflicting ways in the bioethical literature, as is the term “assisted suicide,” resulting in definitional confusion, ambiguities, and biases which are counterproductive to ethical and legal discourse. I aim to rectify this problem in two parts. Firstly, I explore a range of conflicting definitions and identify six disputed definitional factors, based on distinctions between (1) killing versus letting die, (2) fully intended versus partially intended versus merely foreseen deaths, (3) voluntary versus nonvoluntary versus involuntary (...) decisions, (4) terminally ill versus non-terminally ill patients, (5) patients who are fully conscious versus those in permanent comas or persistent vegetative states, and (6) patients who are suffering versus those who are not. Secondly, I distil these factors into six “building blocks” and combine them to develop an unambiguous, value-neutral taxonomy of “end-of-life practices.” I hope that this taxonomy provides much-needed clarification and a solid foundation for future ethical and legal discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Josiah Royce's "Enlightened" Antiblack Racism?Dwayne A. TunstallThis article has not been written by some ideal Roycean mediator whose interpretive acts can help heal the deep-seated racial and ethnic divisions of contemporary American society. Nor has it been written by an impartial judge adjudicating a dispute. Rather this article has been written by a Roycean scholar and a philosopher of race who feels compelled to examine Royce's social philosophy (...) in order to determine whether his positions on race in the United States of America and on racialized colonialism in the British Caribbean presuppose the legitimacy of antiblack racism. What has compelled me to examine Royce's social philosophy critically are the presentations made by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley and Tommy J. Curry at the joint Josiah Royce Society and Personalist Discussion Group session for the 2008 American Philosophical Association (APA) Central Division meeting.For those readers who might be familiar with Royce's philosophy, this entire article may seem pointless. I can imagine quite a few readers asking themselves the following questions: Why should we waste our time reading an article investigating whether Royce's social philosophy presupposes antiblack racism? Do we not already know that Royce's philosophy is an antiracist one? This response has been nurtured by those Roycean scholars who have interpreted his philosophy to be antiracist. Indeed, this has apparently been the standard approach to interpreting Royce's philosophy since the publication of his 1905 address to the Chicago Ethical Society, "Race Questions and Prejudices," in Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems. These scholars have included American pragmatists, African-American philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers of race. Over the last forty years alone, these scholars have included William T. Fontaine, Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Alain Locke, Shannon Sullivan, and Jacquelyn Kegley. [End Page 39]In this article I argue that the standard antiracist interpretation of Royce's philosophy is a mistaken one. This is an understandable mistake, though, given that many of those who interpret Royce this way presuppose that (1) one can analyze certain concepts and principles from Royce's ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics (e.g., his theory of interpretation) apart from his concrete social philosophy and (2) one can ignore his tacit acceptance of early twentieth-century, British-style racialized colonialism. I think Kegley's writings on Royce and race are paradigmatic examples of this reading of Royce.Kegley's recent APA presentation can be read as a further articulation of one of the central contentions in her 2005 article, "Is a Coherent Racial Identity Essential to Genuine Individuals and Communities?": "… Royce advocates and provides the foundation for an anti-essentialist and nonracialist understanding of race" (216). Following her earlier analysis, Kegley's presentation takes these two contentions for granted: First, when one criticizes an essentialist conception of race (that is, regarding race as a natural kind), that person is not racist. Second, when one regards the concept of race as a social kind, one is antiracist, if not an outright nonracist. However, I think that it is possible for one to criticize an essentialist conception of race and regard race as a social kind and still accept a form of cultural antiblack racism. Moreover, I think that Royce's social philosophy is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon, with him being a nonessentialist with regards to the concept of race but yet being a cultural antiblack racist.Here, the significance of Curry's presentation for Royce scholars is obvious. In it he asks us Royce scholars if Royce's social philosophy, with regards to race issues, is an accomplice for the cultural perpetuation of white supremacy. I think that the answer to that question hinges on whether Royce's acceptance of British-style racialized colonialism in the West Indies is based on a misguided ethnocentrism or on a form of cultural antiblack racism.I take it for granted that Royce's recommendation that Southern Euro-Americans learn from the British colonial rule of Jamaica and Trinidad in "Race Questions and Prejudices" is evidence that he had accepted the legitimacy of British-style racialized colonialism. What I would like to do now is explain how Royce's... (shrink)

‘Water is H2O’ is one of the most frequently cited sentences in analytic philosophy, thanks to the seminal work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam in the 1970s on the semantics of natural kind terms. Both of these philosophers owe an intellectual debt to the empiricist metaphysics of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while disagreeing profoundly with Locke about the reality of natural kinds. Locke employs an intriguing example involving water to support his view that kinds (or ‘species’), such (...) as water and gold, are the workmanship of the human mind. This is the point of his story about a winter visitor to England from Jamaica, who is astonished to find that the water in his basin has turned solid overnight, and proceeds to call it ‘hardened water’. Locke criticizes this judgement, maintaining that it is more consonant with common sense to regard water and ice as different kinds of substance. Putnam, by implication, disagrees. Deploying his imaginary example of Twin Earth—a distant planet where a watery-looking substance, XYZ, rather than H2O, fills the oceans and rivers—he maintains that common sense supports the judgement that XYZ and H2O, despite their superficial similarity, are not the same kind of substance, precisely because their molecular compositions are different. Here it will be argued that both views are mistaken, but that, in this dispute, Locke has more right on his side than his modern opponents do. (shrink)

What could be more certain than the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Since the time of the ancient Greeks mathematicians have believed there is little---if anything---as unequivocal as a proved theorem. In fact, mathematical statements that can be proved true have often been regarded as a more solid foundation for a system of thought than any maxim about morals or even physical objects. The 17th-century German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz even envisioned a ``calculus'' of reasoning (...) such that all disputes could one day be settled with the words ``Gentlemen, let us compute!'' By the beginning of this century symbolic logic had progressed to such an extent that the German mathematician David Hilbert declared that all mathematical questions are in principle decidable, and he confidently set out to codify once and for all the methods of mathematical reasoning. (shrink)

Ijmā is ranked as the third shariah evidence after the Qur’ān and Sunnah in the science of Uṣūl. Shafi was the first one who made Uṣūl which had been known and used by the Islamic scholars, into a written document and who ascertained that Ijmā was the third of the shariah evidences. Kalām is one of the sciences in which Ijmā evidence is used. The scholars of Kalām used this evidence as far as the science of Uṣūl made it possible. (...) They always used it without changing any basics of religious beliefs and acceptances. That the aqidah of Ahl al-Sunnah has been supported with Ijmā which is regarded as one of naqly evidences, played an important role in eliminating suspicions which were tried to be aroused in momins’ mind. In this article, the function and importance of Ijmā evidence, which is one of the primary sources of the science of Uṣūl, in the science of Kalām and Aqidah of Ahl al-Sunnah has been studied.SummaryWhat the Qur’ān demands from us is to emphasize the spirit of unity among ummah and to keep out the factors that could trigger separation and division. Indeed, Allah emphasizes in the following verses in the Qur’ān on the protection of the unitary structure of the ummah: “And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided” (Āl a-Imrān 3/103) and “And do not be like the ones who became divided and differed after the clear proofs had come to them” (Āl al-Imrān 3/105). Allah has commanded the Ulul ‘Azm Prophets to hold the religion upright and to avoid division. (al-Shūrā 42/13). The command of holding the religion upright and not to be divided in this religion means to certify what needs to be confirmed in the religion of Allah and to obey those that must be obeyed. This is also the proclamation of the principle of religion that all the prophets have consensus over.Ahl al-Sunnah understanding of Islam is identical to the understanding of the Prophet and his companions. For this reason, Ahl al-Sunna is the school that represents the main backbone of Islam. In Ahl al-Sunna, in many subjects, be it usūlî / primary or furū’ī / secondary, there has been ijmā. These ijmās are Sahaba ijmās and deductive ijmās that come from mutakallimūn (theologians) ijtihāds. Therefore, ijmā and ijtihād are closely connected to each other. Ijmā is supported by ijtihād and ijtihād is also the source of ijmā. Thus, the issue is no longer just a pure ijtihād; it turns out to be a degree that gives a solid knowledge after it has risen to some degree just after the nass/texts.Ahl al- Sunnah theologians are talking about two kinds of ijmā. The first is “ijmā taṣdīqī” (approval consensus) which is the consensus based on Sahaba İjmā. These are the ijmās that occur on the principles called ḍaruratal-diniyya (necessities of the religion), and accepted as solid proofs in religion. Issues such as the principles of faith, obligation of prayer and the fasting are the subjects that are determined by the solid/definite ijmā. Such ijmās are valid approvals on existing provisions. These ijmās based on solid nass (verses and hadiths). Such ijmās do not give any new information. The existing information is strengthened by the alliance of Muslims. In these areas, ijtihād cannot be done and Muslims do not need ijtihād on these issues. There is an consensus of Ahl al-Sunnah scholars about the unfaithfulness of the one who denies one or more of the principles which are accepted as the main obligatory principles in Islam. The other is the “deductive ijmā which the ijtihāds have roles over. This kind of ijmās, are formed as a result of mujtahids’ consensus over the same opinion on the issue of theological secondary issues. The issues related to the secondary theological issues which were open to the ijtihāds and the different results obtained on matters are not accepted as the cause of takfīr. However, depending on the subject he/she can be a sinner. Istidlālī/deductive ijmās are not considered as an independent proofs in ‘Ilm al-Kalām, rather a supportive ones and are considered as textual evidences.Since, texts that are accepted as sources give supposed information. In this regard, the Ahl al-Sunnah scholars accepted other members of the sect who have in secondary theological issues opposed the ijmā of the salaf / predecessor as Ahl al-Qibla, but named them as Ahl al-Bid’a (innovator in religion) because of their opposition to Salaf’s İjmās. Moreover, the scholars of the Ahl al-Sunnah did not see them appropriate to participate in the Ijmās, which could occur between the generations that come after Sahābas/companions.Not all disputes have been criticized in Islam. It is a blessing for the ummah to claim different opinions on the issues subject to ijtihād. Since the ummah, in this way, will bring new solutions to emerging issues and as a result, Islam will have a mechanism to produce a dynamic solution. This can only be possible through ijtihād. Dispute is to propose different views on a subject. If this view is not in the actual matters that could harm the unity of the Ummah, rather in the case of ijtihādi issues, this conflict could turn to be mercy.The reason why the methodists evaluate the ijmā within the scope of the authorized evidence is that because they think it is essential that the ijmā be based on a proof. From this point of view, the alliances that occurred in mental matters were not considered as ijmā. The theologians always tried to support their claims with nass/textual proofs. When the ijmā is realized, whether known or not, they have stated that there is certainly a religious proof behind it. Because, the provisions that were reached through ijmā, cannot be against the provisions of the Prophet.Many issues in Islamic Belief and Kalām works are supported by the mental and textual evidences as well as by deductive ijmā. However, many of the claims of Ijmās in these works reflect the inter-sect ijmās of the Ahl al-Sunnah. The sects outside the Ahl al-Sunnah were excluded. This attitude is, above all, the aim of ensuring the integrity within the sect, and trying to protect the Ahl al-Sunnah belief. Since the ijmā evidence has a function that prevents all kinds of arbitrary and divisive thoughts and turns the supposed knowledge into the qat’ī/certain one, it raises the provision to the next level just after the nass, rather than merely being a ijtihādi provision. In the case of the forerunner of the Ahl al-Sunnah, the Māturīdes and Ash‘arites have not differed in in understanding of ijmā in terms of methodology.Although they have different views on the definition and content of the ijmā, they have a common understanding of alliances of Mujtahids on the same view. The mutakallims (theologians) of Māturīdī and Ash’arī schools have used the proof of ijmā as supportive evidence in the cases related to Kalām. al-Ash’arī not only adopted the proof of ijmā but also used it in practice in. He did not make any distinction in proof of ijmā as practical, theological, methodological or sub-divisional; he used it freely in every field. Māturīdī and Ash’arī scholars decided that the ijmā could occur in religious matters and that there would be evidence when it was formed; In the case of mental issues, they have required the knowledge to be based on solid information. In the case of ijmā in purely mental issues, they have disputed over the issue. While some Ahl al-Sunnah scholars stated that since purely mental matters were certain knowledge and therefore don’t need ijmā, they also ruled that because the mujtahids could get this knowledge from religious texts, therefore ijmā could occur in mental matters as well. (shrink)

In a letter drafted at age forty-eight, Jean-Jacques Rousseau confessed that he passed his days "vainly looking for solid attachments."1 Two years later, he again lamented that he had wasted much time pursuing attachments that "did not exist."2 At age fifty-eight, he confessed that he had "always felt some void."3 And, at the very end of his life, he still bemoaned that he had been cast "into the whirlwind of the world" only to discover that he "was not made (...) to live in it."4 In response to these persistent disappointments, Rousseau undertook a careful examination of his formative experiences. In so doing, he founded a science of consciousness.I argue that Rousseau's Confessions and epistolary novel, Julie, are a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proust and the Phenomenology of MemoryThomas M. Lennon"I still believe that anything that I do outside of literature and philosophy will be so much time wasted." Thus did the twenty-two year old Marcel Proust (1871–1922) write to his father, reluctantly agreeing to consider a career in the foreign service as an alternative to the legal profession otherwise being urged upon him. ("I should vastly prefer going to work for (...) a stockbroker," was his comment.)1 Happily for us all, Proust was obliged to do neither, and in fact was able to do both philosophy and literature. As André Maurois puts it, "[Proust's] great novel is philosophy incarnate."2 Certainly, In Search of Lost Time is saturated with philosophy, the appreciation of which cannot help but enhance our understanding of this great work. The thesis here will be that a loosely phenomenological account of the work's central concept of memory gives us the structure of the work as a whole.The biographical facts suggest such an approach. Proust received a license from the Sorbonne in 1895, and, more importantly, had previously been a student of the philosopher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet. Although he published very little, Darlu was a charismatic, inspirational figure for his students—not least of all for Proust himself, who described him as "the great philosopher whose inspired words, more certain to last than any writing would, gave birth in me as in so many others to thought itself."3 A touching artifact of Proust's time with Darlu is his report card, preserved in the Proust Museum at Illiers-Combray. Not incidentally, it shows a concentration on the classical authors who will be deployed here. We also have a wonderful little text that argues a kind of phenomenalism influenced perhaps by Hume, and certainly by Kant.4 The one author important to our account whose name does not figure as such in any of this material is Malebranche; but we know [End Page 52] that Proust was familiar with the great Oratorian since he quotes him.5 In fact, the only author appearing below who could not have been on Proust's shelf is Kundera, the most philosophical and Proustian of all recent novelists.We begin with a text; it is the most famous of all in French literature, the episode of the madeleine from the Search. The text has become so well known—through hearsay more than from having been read, no doubt—that it has invited "kitchification."6 Even so, it is an exquisite piece of writing, which, in any case, is essential to the thesis here.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray... had any existence for me, when one day in winter as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing that I did not ordinarily take.... She sent out for one of those plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines'.... I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body.... And suddenly the memory [le souvenir] returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of 'madeleine' which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my Aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea.... Immediately the old grey house upon the street rose up like the scenery of a theatre... in a moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.7There are other such episodes of the past springing into being, but not many, and they occur but infrequently, until the very end of this vast work, when they come upon the narrator rapidly and almost... (shrink)

The concern people are now expressing about the human environment, ecology, pollution, and overpopulation, though admittedly legitimate from a moral point of view, has not attracted much attention from philosophers. This is notable particularly inasmuch as the United States civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, and various responses of civil disobedience and violence to social problems have all aroused philosophers to careful thought on rights and obligations. I do not want to suggest that a social problem is interesting only if (...) it is philosophically interesting; nor do I want to make light of the way in which the problems of waste, noise, and overcrowding have captured the popular imagination. Yes, we must protect and use wisely the human environment and natural resources. But still, saying it seems banal, and philosophers do not feed on banalities. Here we have a modern moral commandment which speaks to an urgent and serious matter but which, like “Do not steal,” seems so obvious as to be trite. Yes, we must plan the world’s population in a rational way. Even that commandment, though disputed by some, seems trite. (shrink)

To whom do sperm and ova belong? Few tissues are produced by the human body with more waste than the germ cells. Yet dominion over the germ cells, and over the early embryo that results from their union in vitro, is behind much of the emotion that modern reproductive intervention can engender. The germ cells differ from other human tissues that can be donated or transplanted because they carry readily utilizable genetic information. Eventual expression of the germ cells' genetic (...) potential is the legitimate concern and responsibility of their donors, although in the right circumstances the responsibility can by agreement be entrusted to institutions administering gamete or embryo donor programmes; these institutions, in turn, may need to assume responsibility for decisions if, in the case of embryo storage, the wishes of the two donors conflict. The fact of sperm and ovum ownership (and the genetic potential that goes with it) before individuals part with these tissues is beyond dispute. Some contentious issues may be clarified if this area of human dominion, namely control over genetic expression among offspring, is acknowledged to be the legitimate persisting concern of those who have produced sperm and ova after storage commences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Stumbling Block its IndexBrian Catling (bio)The Stumbling Block is a graphic font. This black plinth was once a brush or similar terminal that was the lips of an intense electrical arc. Industries proud and violent need spoke through it to turn the wheel or smelt and cast the constructed challenge. Now abandoned it finds benediction in seclusion. It has softened its mouth to hold water, so that small (...) animals and disjointed humans may drink or sign themselves in their passage. [End Page 218]The Stumbling Block has been used like an entrance step to sharpen knives on. Its fossil bristle of bright stone forcing the heavy blades down to a hiss along one edge. These are knives of gleaming hubris, long intentions honed for malice. They are magnetized and have been placed to construct a lectern. Each blade holding the next to form the platform. It may hold this index at its centre, hovering, placed outside in the aorta of streets. The removal of any of the blades from the assembled cluster will spill their fish bodies to the ground. The paper will drink any of the stains of their usage. [End Page 219]The Stumbling Block is an ark of extinction. A bouillon hive of the murdered past, frozen dry to a mass. Something has warmed its corner, the oxoed grit bleeds a vein of contagion, virulent in its passion to embrace and swim in human tides. [End Page 220]The Stumbling Block is unfound to the stained and unclear eye. But its nest, its negative hollow can be discovered in the mounds of waste and detritus that choke the streets. Its possible wedge, sphere or beam form is there; a vacant socket, easily trampled, destroyed or cleared away. It is watching. Its obstinate grace squinting across the demonstrations of power. It is the light in the eye of the needle grown solid with anger, a fat sugar that clogs the passage to any kind of paradise. [End Page 221]The Stumbling Block is a bell that sounds a deeper voice than the throats of men. Their image and cry shrinks the world.The communication of global gossip becomes a barbed wind of trivial penning; television enclosures of wired indifference, the reduction of memory removes the open field and causes blurred shivers to be understood as the same thing. The bell hums as acceleration eradicates silence, the foundation for stillness is removed. The speed of language clones its own restless manic hunger. The portable telephone, miniature televisions, satellites and their collection dishes are the cutlery for this gluttony.The inedible thinness they devour is obvious. To feed this addiction soapy fictions are boiled from the skin and bone of poverty. Tribes, villages, jungles and the very air itself can be wasted or burnt to secure a dry armpit in puppeted dramas of nightmare lives. Condensation is sweating inside the bell; a human modes sound that is unwelcome. It drips from the rim in whispers and pools beneath its limited protection. [End Page 222]The Stumbling Block is a shape shifter, a spirit bench that dwells in the cuffs of the expanding city. Over its warn layers of woven scars many forms have been stretched, clamped and tasted, licked and cut; reshaped. Anointed by abstraction, they are put back on the blinking streets, patted and set loose. In the deep pocketed burrows of the bench, termite-size clones dream white directions to colour the tiredness of their somnambulistic donors. [End Page 223]The Stumbling Block is a barrel organ dragged to the site of a crime. Its tin cup catching rain as it judders on the pounding box. The moon is caught between its throat and the water, and in the black gleam of its varnished vibration. It spills dance into the causeways, sucking revelers along the spindle of its cranked tune. They will spin and curl their lumpen massed centrifuge around the bellowing thing. The laughter is momentary but has soaked away the blood, only the scuffs of shoes and the scratched cobbles sing on. [End Page 224]The Stumbling Block is not a coffer, disguised by a wig of artifice. It cannot offer erudition or... (shrink)