We show that every state on an interval pseudo effect algebra E satisfying an appropriate version of the Riesz Decomposition Property (RDP for short) is an integral through a regular Borel probability measure defined on the Borel σ-algebra of a Choquet simplex K. In particular, if E satisfies the strongest type of RDP, the representing Borel probability measure can be uniquely chosen to have its support in the set of the extreme points of K.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel on Pseudo-Philosophy: Reading the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit by Andrew Alexander DavisPaul T. WilfordDAVIS, Andrew Alexander. Hegel on Pseudo-Philosophy: Reading the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. ix + 214 pp. Cloth, $125In Hegel on Pseudo-Philosophy, Andrew Davis makes a convincing argument that just as the problem of how to distinguish sophistry from philosophy is a recurrent theme of (...) Plato's dialogues, so too is the problem of sophistry or "pseudo-philosophy" central to the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, the problem of how to recognize and guard against pseudo-philosophy is the common theme linking the prefaces to the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia, and the Philosophy of Right, each of which endeavors "to reveal something about the essence of philosophy... by highlighting the ways pseudo-philosophy fails to do justice to philosophical content." Such an undertaking is especially important to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, however, because the subject matter [End Page 543] of the work is nothing but the logos of the appearances of spirit. To arrive at knowledge of spirit requires attending to all the various ways in which spirit (or Geist) can appear, but, as Davis remarks, "like life, Geist may be thought as a source of appearances, but not as an appearance itself. It is always 'behind' what appears." As a result, the Phenomenology is an exercise in trying "to grasp what does not appear through appearances alone." Thus, just as the Phenomenology approaches the truth of spirit by considering spirit's partial, abstract, and one-sided modes of appearing, so too does the preface to the Phenomenology approach the truth of philosophy by investigating forms of pseudo-philosophy.As Hegel himself states, there are two principal tasks pursued in the preface: (1) to offer a preliminary sketch of what it would mean for "the cognition of absolute actuality to become perfectly lucid about its own nature;" and (2) to eliminate some "habitually accepted forms of thought" that prove obstacles to philosophic cognition. While most commentators take their bearings from the former, Davis's approach to the preface is unique (to my knowledge) in foregrounding the latter. Yet, as his book unfolds, it becomes clear that the latter is the route into the former. Indeed, one of the central lessons of the book is that, although the elimination of erroneous habits of thought may seem to be merely negative and therefore principally propaedeutic to the positive task of leading the reader toward "absolute knowing," the examination of error is an integral component of grasping the true. If the Phenomenology as a whole is a "highway of despair"—a comprehensive refutation of natural consciousness's pretensions to knowledge that is simultaneously a dialectical ascent to conceptually comprehending knowing (begreifende Wissen)—the preface initiates the reader into the via negativa that philosophic cognition must travel to attain self-knowledge.Davis's book is structured around seven forms of pseudo-philosophy, each of which is treated as a discrete, distinguishable problem in its own right and also as emblematic of the common failure to recognize that the form of philosophy is inseparable from the content of philosophy. As Davis argues, this failure lies at the root of the attempt (common to much of modern philosophy since Descartes) to establish a priori a universal method for thinking (what Leibniz called a mathesis universalis) that will secure certain and indubitable knowledge. But this effort proves self-undermining, always ultimately engendering the very skepticism it seeks to master. Through observing the aporiai generated by forms of pseudo-philosophy, we learn that "the method of philosophy is inseparable from the subject matter of philosophy. Method cannot be isolated and discussed on its own. Philosophy is thinking (form) about thinking (content)."Davis thus gradually discloses Hegel's positive answer to the question "what is philosophy?" through a series of determinate negations of philosophy's imitations. We learn that philosophy is the recollective, self-comprehending, self-moving thinking of thinking by attending to a set of tendencies that impede philosophy: "a tendency to explain rather than [End Page 544] present (chapter 1), a... (shrink)

456 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY or PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 of reflection about rhetorical practices that I suspect Aristotle was trying to elicit in his own time and that Garver is trying to elicit in his. DAVID J. DEPEW California State University, FuUerton Fran O'Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999. Pp. xvi + 3oo. Cloth, $8o.oo. The importance of doctrines found in the Latin translations of the late fifth-century Greek works of pseudo-Dionysius the (...) Areopagite for the formation of the theologi- cal and philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas is obvious to anyone well-versed in the texts of Aquinas. However, it is by no means obvious how Aquinas read, under- stood, and transformed the Christian Neoplatonic theology of this apparent disciple of Proclus or Damascius so as to make it an integral part of his understanding of God and creation. O'Rourke rightly conceived his task as twofold: first, the texts of Dionysius must be properly understood; second, the interpretation and use of these by Aquinas can itself be assessed and appreciated in its own thirteenth-century con- text. In the first part of the book he examines the question of knowledge of God, with one chapter devoted to Dionysius and a second devoted to Aquinas's use of "Dionysian Elements" in discovering God. Part Two examines their teachings on the "Transcendence of Being and Good" in chapters 3 and 4. Part Three contains three chapters on the "Unity.. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the false foundations of Soviet designs imaginable urbanization detects starting social places concepts of "classical" days of building socialism. Projected into the future the idea of permanent revolution, the destruction of "bourgeois barbarism" and desire the establishment of legal order Bolsheviks led the workers to the approval of a new type of state and the formation of a new anthropological type of person. This type - "eternal revolutionary", "architect of the new world" had to live with a (...) single purpose - to extend the principles of proletarian justice to the axis of the world. The epicenter of the factory or the formation of the new man was an industrial city - industrial zone heroically-miltarism work. The main method of the formation of cities and the new man was a total mobilization, the image of the antagonistic enemy of mythic-Titanic goal, collectively practice of collective responsibility, temporal-topeni the control of the state-party bodies the army-camp architecture, etc. The Communists sought to build the city for centuries, people, nomos chose to build incubators "eternal revolutionaries", the barracks of the unknown soldier or barracks devotees of "Stakhanovite". In the draft party not only needs to become an industrial base for future victories over bourgeois barbarism, but also a gathering place loyal fighters for a revolutionary breakthrough - the construction of communism all over the world. Social city - misguided or sinister space, which is not provided for the life of a healthy society. It is the fruit of pure nomos, state coercion, that denied cultural and national experiences, socio-economic patterns, cravings human being the ruins of the Communist concepts of permanent revolution and militarism of labor. The experience of the Communist daydreaming inspires the statement that as an axiom of the relationship of nomos and fuses in urban space is the right man for happiness. A key measure of their dialectical interaction is the reliance on the security and preservation of the integrity of human nature, national heritage, the experience of past generations. (shrink)

Philosophical theories about reduction and integration in science are at variance with what is happenign in science. A realistic approach to science show that possibilities for reduction and integration are limited. The classical ideal of a unified science has since long been rejected in philosophy. But the current emphasis on interdisciplinary integration in philosophy and in science shows that it survives in a different guise. It is necessary to redress the balance, specifically in biology. Methodological analysis shows (...) that many of the grand interdisciplinary theories involving biology actually represent pseudo-integration covered up by inappropriate, overgeneral concepts. Integrationism is not bad, but it must be kept within reasonable bounds. If the present analysis is appropriate, there will have to be fundamental changes in research strategy both in science and in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The paper reviews criteria which have been used to distinguish science from nonscience and from pseudo–science, and it examines the extent to which they can usefully be applied to “creation science.” These criteria do not force a clear decision, especially as creation science resembles important eighteenth–century forms of orthodox science. Nevertheless, the proponents of creation science may be accused of pious fraud in failing to concede in their political battles that their “science” is tentative and tendentious and will continue (...) to be so while it remains archaic and poorly integrated into the rest of science. (shrink)

Philosophical theories about reduction and integration in science are at variance with what is happenign in science. A realistic approach to science show that possibilities for reduction and integration are limited. The classical ideal of a unified science has since long been rejected in philosophy. But the current emphasis on interdisciplinary integration in philosophy and in science shows that it survives in a different guise. It is necessary to redress the balance, specifically in biology. Methodological analysis shows (...) that many of the grand interdisciplinary theories involving biology actually represent pseudo-integration covered up by inappropriate, overgeneral concepts. Integrationism is not bad, but it must be kept within reasonable bounds. If the present analysis is appropriate, there will have to be fundamental changes in research strategy both in science and in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Alors que le débat sur le caractère scientifique ou pseudo-scientifique de l’agriculture biodynamique occupe régulièrement le débat public, l’histoire et la philosophie des sciences ne semblent que très peu s’être emparées de ce sujet. La thèse défendue ici est double : tout d’abord, si l’agriculture biodynamique rencontre un relatif succès aujourd’hui, cela tient sans doute au fait que son théoricien, R. Steiner, a été un des premiers à critiquer le paradigme qui domine l’agronomie, ou en tout cas l’agriculture, depuis (...) plus d’un siècle. Cette critique semble d’ailleurs se maintenir dans ses motifs tout au long du XXe siècle, jusqu’à une certaine critique contemporaine de l’agro-industrie et de ses conséquences désastreuses sur l’environnement. Or, et c’est la seconde thèse défendue ici, cette critique semble méconnaître voire occulter la réalité des débats internes qui ont traversé l’agronomie au cours du XXe siècle et qui continuent de l’agiter aujourd’hui : l’agronomie système a ainsi par exemple intégré dans ses objets des éléments de l’agriculture biodynamique. Selon nous, le problème principal est que l’agronomie est souvent abordée selon une approche externaliste, qui doit impérativement être complétée par une approche internaliste afin tout d’abord de distinguer ce qui relève de la science et ce qui relève du mysticisme, et ensuite de saisir toute la richesse historique et épistémologique de l’agronomie. (shrink)

I argue for developing a unified moral framework for assessing human and nonhuman subjects research. At present, our standards for human subjects research involve treating humans with respect, compassion, and justice, whereas our ethical standards for nonhuman subjects research merely involve (half-heartedly) aspiring to replace, reduce, and confine our use of nonhuman animals. This creates an unacceptable double standard and leads to pseudo-problems, for example regarding how to treat human-nonhuman chimeras. I discuss general features that a more integrated moral (...) framework might have, assess the pros and cons of this kind of this framework, and suggest that the pros decisively outweigh the cons. (shrink)

Le Livre des Causes eut une influence considérable au XIIIe siècle. Considéré comme authentiquement aristotélicien, son origine néoplatonicienne fut démontrée par Thomas d’Aquin en 1272. Du fait de son origine, certaines thèses énoncées dans le texte posaient de redoutables problèmes d’intégration aux scolastiques. Parmi ces problèmes figure la définition de l’âme. Ceci est particulièrement visible dans le commentaire du pseudo-Henri de Gand, dont le commentaire date des années 1250-1255. Cet article étudie la caractérisation de «l’âme noble» du Livre des (...) Causes comme âme cosmique ou individuelle, puis, dans un second temps, s’attache au point particulier des rapports entre l’âme et le temps. (shrink)

What are the ethics of child genital cutting? In a recent issue of the journal, Duivenbode and Padela (2019) called for a renewed discussion of this question. Noting that modern health care systems...

Interdisciplinary integration has fundamental limitations. This is not sufficiently realized in science and in philosophy. Concerning scientific theories there are many examples of pseudo-integration which should be unmasked by elementary philosophical analysis. For example, allegedly over-arching theories of stress which are meant to unite biology and psychology, upon analysis, turn out to represent terminological rather than substantive unity. They should be replaced by more specific, local theories. Theories of animal orientation, likewise, have been formulated in unduly general (...) terms. A natural history approach is more suitable for the study of animal orientation. The tendency to formulate overgeneral theories is also present in evolutionary biology. Philosophy of biology can only deal with these matters if it takes a normative turn. Undue emphasis on interdisciplinary integration is a modern variant of the old unity of science ideal. The replacement of the ideal by a better one is an important challenge for the philosophy of science. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se busca exponer sintéticamente el meta-modelo de la Psicología integral de la persona. A partir de seis preguntas fundamentales se intenta mostrar sus principales planteamientos: (1) qué es la Psicología clínica, (2) qué es la salud psíquica, (3) qué es el desorden psíquico, (4) en qué consiste el diagnóstico clínico, (5) en qué consiste el proceso de sanar psíquicamente y (6) cuál es el rol del terapeuta.

In a time imbued with civilisation crisis, José Manuel Naredo's work is of particular relevance. Naredo, one of the most prestigious economists in Spain and a pioneer of ecological economics, first published his most popular book ( La economía en evolución. Historia y perspectivas de las categorías básicas del pensamiento económico) in 1987. This article reviews its most recent and updated version released in 2015. Beyond a brilliant criticism of neoclassical economics, he discusses the underlying ideology and implications of the (...) notion of economic system uncritically endorsed by most schools of economic thought. Transcending the usual dichotomy between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ economics, Naredo calls for an economic transition built on the integration of different kinds of scientific knowledge as well as other intuitive, metaphysical and ethical fields in favour of a truly inclusive economics. This is, he warns us, a sine qua non for a socioecological transformation to flourish. (shrink)

The article presents grounds for defining the fetish of artificial intelligence (AI). We highlight the fundamental differences of AI from all earlier technological advances, as they are primarily related to its introduction into the human cognitive sphere and generating fundamentally new uncontrollable consequences for society. We provide solid evidence that the leaders of the globalist project are the main beneficiaries of the AI fetish. This is clearly manifested in the works of philosophers who are close to major technology corporations and (...) their mega-projects. We suggest considering the problem of how to use the capabilities of AI to overcome the growing international conflicts and the global crisis. The focus is on the problem of agency, which solution from the standpoint of an anthropomorphic approach to AI is fraught with serious negative consequences. Endowing AI with agency, responsibility is implicitly removed from the person who uses the technology, and the established legislative practice is also destroyed. We present AI as an agent endowed with a set of invariant generalized qualities that is similar to natural subjects. These qualities include: the ability to deliberation, reflexivity, communication and elements of sociability. Such a representation of AI as an agent (pseudo-subject) is consistent with the principle of distributed control in biology and psychology, which was called the principle of a dual subject. In combination with the systems of principles and ontologies specified in the concept of post-nonclassical cybernetics of self-developing environments, this will allow the use of AI as a means of social innovation, while maintaining control over AI technologies. This will also help to pose and solve the problem of integrating formations of artificial and natural intelligence while maintaining the basic qualities of carriers of natural intelligence. (shrink)

The article presents grounds for defining the fetish of artificial intelligence (AI). We highlight the fundamental differences of AI from all earlier technological advances, as they are primarily related to its introduction into the human cognitive sphere and generating fundamentally new uncontrollable consequences for society. We provide solid evidence that the leaders of the globalist project are the main beneficiaries of the AI fetish. This is clearly manifested in the works of philosophers who are close to major technology corporations and (...) their mega-projects. We suggest considering the problem of how to use the capabilities of AI to overcome the growing international conflicts and the global crisis. The focus is on the problem of agency, which solution from the standpoint of an anthropomorphic approach to AI is fraught with serious negative consequences. Endowing AI with agency, responsibility is implicitly removed from the person who uses the technology, and the established legislative practice is also destroyed. We present AI as an agent endowed with a set of invariant generalized qualities that is similar to natural subjects. These qualities include: the ability to deliberation, reflexivity, communication and elements of sociability. Such a representation of AI as an agent (pseudo-subject) is consistent with the principle of distributed control in biology and psychology, which was called the principle of a dual subject. In combination with the systems of principles and ontologies specified in the concept of post-nonclassical cybernetics of self-developing environments, this will allow the use of AI as a means of social innovation, while maintaining control over AI technologies. This will also help to pose and solve the problem of integrating formations of artificial and natural intelligence while maintaining the basic qualities of carriers of natural intelligence. (shrink)

Most physicalists believe that physicalism is a thesis that denies the existence of fundamental mentality either as a substance or as a property. Therefore, since most physicalists also endorse a posteriori physicalism, according to them, if the future physical theory posits fundamental mentality as a fundamental physical concept, then physicalism will be falsified. In contrast, there are those who believe that the core idea of physicalism is an ontological deference to science (especially physics); the idea that is usually called scientism (...) and is closely related to methodological naturalism. According to them, if physicists posit fundamental mentality as an integral part of the future fundamental physical theory, physicalism will not be falsified, and physicalists may (or should) accept fundamental mentality as a genuine physical concept. In this paper, I argue that there is some historical evidence in support of the latter understanding of physicalism. First, I give some historical evidence that seems to suggest that the historical origin of physicalism is the failure of those explanations – or pseudo-explanations – that have appealed to supernatural non-physical entities. Second, I show that in some of the initial reflections on materialism – the predecessor of physicalism – in the first half of the twentieth century, philosophers understood materialism in terms of the very historical origin. (shrink)

Abstract:Frantz Fanon is best known as the author of two monographs: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a literary and psychological account of Black experience and anti-Black racism, and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a political manifesto arguing for the need to respond to colonial oppression with revolutionary violence. His critics contend that the disciplinary division evinces a failure to successfully integrate the psychological with the political, which detracts from his intellectual legacy. In this article, I employ criminologist Jon Frauley’s (...) theory of the analytic value of fictional film to demonstrate that Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) not only provides an empirical referent for Fanon’s psychological and political theories but also reveals an underlying coherence that is not always obvious. I begin with a summary of Frauley’s theory and then alternate between Fanon’s theories and the way in which the film provides those theories with empirical referents. My conclusion, which highlights an essential continuity between individual transcendence and collective action in Fanon, draws on both Blade Runner 2049 and the military tactic of pseudo operations, which was employed to devastating effect against anti-colonial struggles in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Dans cet essai inédit regroupant trois textes issus d'une conférence donnée en 1967 (sous le titre "Sens et fonction d'une communauté ecclésiale"), Paul Ricoeur s'intéresse en philosophe à l'idée d'Eglise. Il s'interroge d'abord sur la société, son obsession technique, son incapacité à produire du sens et sur la manière dont cette "communauté" pourrait être un contrepoint d'utopie en son sein. Il cherche ensuite un langage capable d'intégrer en même temps les critiques externes de la religion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud), et, d'une (...) manière interne à la foi, une "déconstruction" des pseudo-rationalisations qui masquent la vivacité des textes bibliques, déconstruction inspirée par la "démythologisation" du théologien Rudolf Bultmann. Il propose ainsi une parole porteuse de sens pour l'ensemble de la société. Jamais publiés jusqu'ici, ces textes de Paul Ricoeur offrent une réflexion philosophique rare sur le rôle d'une communauté confessante au coeur d'une société désenchantée et qui reste d'une troublante actualité. (shrink)

"Cover"--"Title" -- "Copyright" -- "Dedication" -- "Contents" -- "List of Figures" -- "Acknowledgements" -- "1 Introduction" -- "Limina" -- "Anticipation and Recapitulation" -- "Problems of Cinematic Paratext" -- "2 Narrative Exposition" -- "Pseudo-independence" -- "Intratextuality" -- "3 Expositional Modes" -- "The Allegory Mode" -- "Lexical Expertise" -- "4 The Comment Mode" -- "Narrative Futurity" -- "Intertextuality and Quotation" -- "5 The Summary Mode" -- "Complex Summary" -- "Narrative Restatement" -- "6 The Prologue Mode" -- "Realist Integration" -- "Expository (...) Texts" -- "7 Conclusions" -- "The Paradoxes of Cinematic Paratext" -- "Typography and Pseudo-independence" -- "The Ideology of Naturalism::Stylization. (shrink)

The topics approached in the 52 papers included in this book are: neutrosophic sets; neutrosophic logic; generalized neutrosophic set; neutrosophic rough set; multigranulation neutrosophic rough set (MNRS); neutrosophic cubic sets; triangular fuzzy neutrosophic sets (TFNSs); probabilistic single-valued (interval) neutrosophic hesitant fuzzy set; neutro-homomorphism; neutrosophic computation; quantum computation; neutrosophic association rule; data mining; big data; oracle Turing machines; recursive enumerability; oracle computation; interval number; dependent degree; possibility degree; power aggregation operators; multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM); expert set; soft sets; LA-semihypergroups; single valued (...) trapezoidal neutrosophic number; inclusion relation; Q-linguistic neutrosophic variable set; vector similarity measure; fundamental neutro-homomorphism theorem; neutro-isomorphism theorem; quasi neutrosophic triplet loop; quasi neutrosophic triplet group; BE-algebra; cloud model; Maclaurin symmetric mean; pseudo-BCI algebra; hesitant fuzzy set; photovoltaic plan; decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL); Choquet integral; fuzzy measure; clustering algorithm; and many more. (shrink)

Supporters of eliminative connectionism have argued for a pattern association-based explanation of language learning and language processing. They deny that explicit rules and symbolic representations play any role in language processing and cognition in general. Their argument is based to a large extent on two artificial neural network (ANN) models that are claimed to be able to learn the past tenses of English verbs (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, Parallel distributed processing, Vol. 2, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; MacWhinney & Leinbach, 1991, (...) Cognition, 40, 121-157). In this article we critically review Rumelhart and McClelland's as well as MacWhinney and Leinbach's ANN models and conclude that they do not succeed in the assigned task of learning the past tenses of English verbs. In order to answer their challenge to the symbolic processing approach, we present our symbolic pattern associator (SPA)-a general-purpose pattern associator that can learn to associate arbitrary discrete patterns. We carried out several experiments with the SPA using the same set of verbs that was used in MacWhinney and Leinbach's simulation with more realistic training and testing procedures. The SPA outperformed the connectionist models by a wide margin in the accuracy of learning, and successful inductive generalizations to unseen verbs. Our SPA has very natural and psychologically realistic explanations to many psychological effects such as U-shaped learning curve, and is much closer to human subjects in predicting past tense of the pseudo-verbs. In contrast to ANNs, whose internal representations are entirely opaque, the SPA can represent the acquired knowledge in the form of production rules that allow for further higher-level processing and integration, resulting in linguistically realistic associative templates for irregular verbs and production rules for regular verbs. In the light of these findings, we conclude that eliminative connectionists' vision of cognition as simple pattern association and pattern recognition without symbolic representation is inadequate. Pattern association as such does not imply rule-less or cue-based models of language acquisition or of human learning in general. (shrink)

This study was aimed at predicting individual differences in text reading fluency. The basic proposal included two factors, i.e., the ability to decode letter strings (measured by discrete pseudo-word reading) and integration of the various sub-components involved in reading (measured by Rapid Automatized Naming, RAN). Subsequently, a third factor was added to the model, i.e., naming of discrete digits. In order to use homogeneous measures, all contributing variables considered the entire processing of the item, including pronunciation time. The (...) model, which was based on commonality analysis, was applied to data from a group of 43 typically developing readers (11- to 13-year-olds) and a group of 25 chronologically matched dyslexic children. In typically developing readers, both orthographic decoding and integration of reading sub-components contributed significantly to the overall prediction of text reading fluency. The model prediction was higher (from ca. 37% to 52% of the explained variance) when we included the naming of discrete digits variable, which had a suppressive effect on pseudo-word reading. In the dyslexic readers, the variance explained by the two-factor model was high (69%) and did not change when the third factor was added. The lack of a suppression effect was likely due to the prominent individual differences in poor orthographic decoding of the dyslexic children. Analyses on data from both groups of children were replicated by using patches of colours as stimuli (both in the RAN task and in the discrete naming task) obtaining similar results. We conclude that it is possible to predict much of the variance in text-reading fluency using basic processes, such as orthographic decoding and integration of reading sub-components, even without taking into consideration higher-order linguistic factors such as lexical, semantic and contextual abilities. The approach validity of using proximal vs distal causes to predict reading fluency is discussed. (shrink)

Cancer is a singular cellular state, the emergence of which destabilises the homeostasis reached through the evolution to multicellularity. We present the idea that the onset of the cellular disobedience to the metazoan functional and structural architecture, known as the cancer phenotype, is triggered by changes in the cell's external environment that occur with ageing: what ensues is a breach of the social contract of multicellular life characteristic of metazoans. By integrating old ideas with new evidence, we propose that with (...) ageing the environmental information that maintains a multicellular organisation is eroded, rewiring internal processes of the cell, and resulting in an internal shift towards an ancestral condition resulting in the pseudo‐multicellular cancer phenotype. Once that phenotype emerges, a new local social contract is built, different from the homeostatic one, leading to tumour formation and the foundation of a novel local ecosystem. (shrink)

[What It’s Like, or What It’s About? The Place of Consciousness in the Material World] Summary: The book is both a survey of the contemporary debate and a defense of a distinctive position. Most philosophers nowadays assume that the focus of the philosophy of consciousness, its shared explanandum, is a certain property of experience variously called “phenomenal character,” “qualitative character,” “qualia” or “phenomenology,” understood in terms of what it is like to undergo the experience in question. Consciousness as defined in (...) terms of its phenomenal aspect is often called “phenomenal consciousness.” The major issue that occupies most thinkers is whether this phenomenal character happens to be a physical property, or whether it is rather sui generis. Those who believe the former are materialists; those who conclude the latter are dualists. As the currently dominant metaphysic is materialism – also sometimes called physicalism – the challenge appears to be to slot phenomenal properties among the physical properties that ultimately make up the world. David Chalmers argued powerfully that we can go very far in situating many mental properties in the physical world – namely, the properties that can be understood in functional terms – but that phenomenal properties resist such a treatment. Chalmers calls this “the hard problem” of consciousness. But there are also some quite powerful positive arguments for dualism. The two most influential ones are the modal argument, also offered by Chalmers, and the knowledge argument invented by Frank Jackson. Chalmers invites us to conceive of creatures that are exactly like human beings – physically, functionally, behaviorally – only bereft of phenomenal consciousness. If such creatures are conceivable, says Chalmers, they are metaphysically possible. And if they are metaphysically possible, materialism is false. Jackson, for his part, suggests we imagine Mary who has spent her entire life inside a black-and-white room and has seen the world through a black-and-white TV screen. But she also happens to know everything there is to know about the physics of color. And yet, Jackson suggests that once Mary is finally released from her room and sees a lawn outside, she learns something new: that this is what it is like to experience green color. The current work on consciousness is by and large characterized by attempts to answer these two dualistic arguments. I try to make sense of the positions within the domain of philosophy of consciousness by means of two major distinctions that mutually intersect. First, there is a distinction between dualism and materialism. An apparent third alternative currently on offer, the so-called Russellian monism, is unstable, collapsing into either dualism (panpsychism) or materialism (Russellian physicalism). Materialism comes in two main flavors: either the a posteriori physicalism, which detects an epistemic gap between phenomenal and physical truths, hence denying that the former could be derived from the latter; or the a priori physicalism, which does not acknowledge any such obstacle. The second major distinction is between phenomenism and representationalism. It’s true that Ned Block, who introduced this contrast, meant to distinguish between two kinds of materialism. But I believe that the distinction actually intersects the one between materialism and dualism. We thus arrive at a table with six slots, representing six main positions in the philosophy of consciousness: (1) dualist phenomenism (Chalmers, the early Jackson, and Tyler Burge); (2) dualist representationalism (René Descartes); (3) aposteriori materialist phenomenism (Block); (4) a posteriori materialist representationalism (Michael Tye, Fred Dretske, David Rosenthal); (5) a priori materialist phenomenism (David Lewis); and (6) a priori materialist representationalism (Daniel Dennett, Derk Pereboom). However, this scheme is in fact somewhat misleading. It is true that Dennett is usually classified as an apriori materialist (or, more precisely an apriori materialist representationalist), but I believe that needs to be corrected. In order to understand why, I first analyze varieties of materialist representationalism in detail, in particular various construals of phenomenal character in terms of representation, or intentionality, which includes a discussion of the identity of its content (the issue of externalism). By contrast, Dennett rejects the concept of phenomenal character. Consciousness has no intrinsic, publicly inaccessible properties. On that ground, Dennett builds an empirical, fully functionalist theory of consciousness, which he also tries to integrate within a general Darwinian framework. From that point of view, one can contrast Dennettian and representationalist views on the issue of animal consciousness. In addition to his rejection of phenomenal character, Dennett also abstains from the regular metaphysical departure point of regular materialism. He does not so much ask how an enigmatic property of consciousness fits an antecedently characterized world, but rather how far we can investigate all aspects of the world, including consciousness, using the scientific method. He is thus a methodological naturalist, rather than a metaphysical materialist. While this approach removes obstacles to the science of consciousness, it does not solve what might be called “the hardest problem” – of intentionality, not phenomenal consciousness. The hardest problem consists in the fact that our intentional discourse involves conflicting commitments that prevent a coherent metaphysic of representational states. However, it does not follow that we should give up on this discourse as a theoretical means of reduction as well as a practical tool of explanation. But it might be that intentional discourse is a somewhat pseudo one. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:36. A DISCUSSION ON PERSONAL IDENTITY Jane L. Mclntyre's original paper "Is Hume's Self Consistent?" was presented at the MoGiIl Hume Conference; it will be published in the forthcoming volume devoted to those preceedings. Tom Beauchamp" s paper is presented here as delivered. John Biro's paper has been revised since its original presentation. 37. SELF INCONSISTENCY OR MERE SELF PERPLEXITY? Professor Mclntyre's imaginative and constructive paper has three primary (...) parts (despite its division into six sections). First, she offers an interpretation of Hume's view of the self in Book I of the Treatise. Second, she explains why his own reservations in the Appendix create problems not only for this theory of self identity but for other parts of his philosophy as well. Finally, she tries to ease him out of these difficulties with her overlap interpretation of the bundle theory. My comments follow exactly this outline, though my conclusions, for the most part, do not coincide with hers. My reservations do not derive from her attempt to render Hume consistent. Rather, I question the foundations of the entire enterprise in which she, Robison, Nathanson, et. al. are engaged. That is, I remain unconvinced that the alleged problem, as presently framed, is more than a pseudo-problem. I. Hume's Theory in Book I In Book I Hume offers a variety of arguments about the nature of the self, most of which rely on other theories, such as those of causation, the association of ideas, and substance. Whatever the exact arguments and positions he may be advancing, at least the following six propositions are integral to his theory of personal identity: 1)The self is entirely reducible to a collection of perceptions. 2)The self is not characterized by strict identity. 3)There is nothing simple in which the collection of perceptions inheres. 4)Both identity and simplicity are attributed to the self because of relations between perceptions--the relations of causation and resemblance. 5)The relations of resemblance and causation unite these perceptions. 38. 6) There are no real (non-associational) connections or relations among these perceptions which unite them. Half of these six claims are critical denials of other philosophical claims; the other half are constructive philosophical theories. Hume's entire philosophical program in Book I is tied up with these claims. The criticisms are directed at numerous metaphysical theories of mind, substance and causation; and the constructive account of personai identity requires his theories of perception and association of ideas. I mention these obvious points only because it is so important to note that if_ the interpretation is correct which Professor Mclntyre and others give to (roughly) five sentences in the Appendix, where Hume mentions a possible inconsistency, then Hume is not only questioning his theory of personal identity in Book I, he is calling Book I itself into question. To be convinced that this strikingly implausible turnabout occurs in five sentences of the Appendix, we must be given a most compelling argument—one which I doubt is forthcoming. II. Hume's Alleged Inconsistency The alleged problem of inconsistency arises because Hume says in the Appendix that he does not know how to render his own former opinions consistent (T633, 636). However, when he comes to a formal statement of the inconsistency, as everyone is agreed, the propositions said to be inconsistent are not inconsistent. In the attempt to grasp Hume's meaning, a general consensus has emerged in recent Hume scholarship, including Professor Mclntyre in its company, that we ought both to move backward and forward a sentence or two in Hume's text. Hume says in those passages that his hopes for his theory are diminished because he is unable to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness (T636) ; and he then indicates that i_f perceptions could be shown to inhere in something simple or to be really connected, these prob- 39. lems would vanish. It is this textual setting which Robison, Nathanson, and Professor Mclntyre turn into the claim that "the concept of a self which is affected by experience, and therefore must persist through experience— is precisely the concept of the self that... (shrink)

The symplectic quantization scheme proposed for matter scalar fields in the companion paper (Gradenigo and Livi, arXiv:2101.02125, 2021) is generalized here to the case of space–time quantum fluctuations. That is, we present a new formalism to frame the quantum gravity problem. Inspired by the stochastic quantization approach to gravity, symplectic quantization considers an explicit dependence of the metric tensor gμν\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$g_{\mu \nu }$$\end{document} on an additional time variable, named intrinsic time at variance (...) with the coordinate time of relativity, from which it is different. The physical meaning of intrinsic time, which is truly a parameter and not a coordinate, is to label the sequence of gμν\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$g_{\mu \nu }$$\end{document} quantum fluctuations at a given point of the four-dimensional space–time continuum. For this reason symplectic quantization necessarily incorporates a new degree of freedom, the derivative g˙μν\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\dot{g}}_{\mu \nu }$$\end{document} of the metric field with respect to intrinsic time, corresponding to the conjugated momentum πμν\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\pi _{\mu \nu }$$\end{document}. Our proposal is to describe the quantum fluctuations of gravity by means of a symplectic dynamics generated by a generalized action functional A[gμν,πμν]=K[gμν,πμν]-S[gμν]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {A}}[g_{\mu \nu },\pi _{\mu \nu }] = {\mathcal {K}}[g_{\mu \nu },\pi _{\mu \nu }] - S[g_{\mu \nu }]$$\end{document}, playing formally the role of a Hamilton function, where S[gμν]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$S[g_{\mu \nu }]$$\end{document} is the standard Einstein–Hilbert action while K[gμν,πμν]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {K}}[g_{\mu \nu },\pi _{\mu \nu }]$$\end{document} is a new term including the kinetic degrees of freedom of the field. Such an action allows us to define an ensemble for the quantum fluctuations of gμν\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$g_{\mu \nu }$$\end{document} analogous to the microcanonical one in statistical mechanics, with the only difference that in the present case one has conservation of the generalized action A[gμν,πμν]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {A}}[g_{\mu \nu },\pi _{\mu \nu }]$$\end{document} and not of energy. Since the Einstein–Hilbert action S[gμν]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$S[g_{\mu \nu }]$$\end{document} plays the role of a potential term in the new pseudo-Hamiltonian formalism, it can fluctuate along the symplectic action-preserving dynamics. These fluctuations are the quantum fluctuations of gμν\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$g_{\mu \nu }$$\end{document}. Finally, we show how the standard path-integral approach to gravity can be obtained as an approximation of the symplectic quantization approach. By doing so we explain how the integration over the conjugated momentum field πμν\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\pi _{\mu \nu }$$\end{document} gives rise to a cosmological constant term in the path-integral approach. (shrink)

This book is based on the author's ten-year research into the politics of belief surrounding paranormal ideas. Through a detailed examination of the participants, issues, strategies and underlying factors that constitute the contemporary paranormal debate, the book explores the struggle surrounding the status of paranormal phenomena. It examines, on the one hand, how the principal arbiters of religious and scientific truths -- the Church and the academic establishment -- reject paranormal ideas as "occult" and "pseudo-scientific", and how, on the (...) other hand, paranormal enthusiasts attempt to resist such labels and instead establish paranormal ideas as legitimate knowledge. The author contends that the paranormal debate is the outcome of wider discursive processes that are concerned with the construction and negotiation of truth in Western society generally. More specifically, the debate is seen as an aspect of the "boundary work" that defines the contours of religious and scientific orthodoxy. The book paves new ground in understanding the nature of belief relating to a topic that has long held fascination to academics and lay people alike – paranormal ideas. It develops a discursive framework for understanding a contemporary social phenomenon, hence placing the study at the cutting edge of ethnographic development that seeks to integrate discursive perspectives with empirical accounts of sociological phenomena. Most importantly, the study is intended to contribute to the debate surrounding communicative action, by outlining a discursive perspective on the negotiation of ideational differences that goes beyond the incommensurability theories that have dominated the sociology of communication and knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Significance of R. G. Collingwood’s Principles of HistoryDavid BoucherThe Principles of History is the work that Collingwood saw as his principal philosophical enterprise, the book for which his whole intellectual life had been a preparation. It was to have been a work divided into three books. 1 In the first there was to be a discussion of the characteristics that make the special science of history distinctive. In (...) the second history was to be compared with other sciences. Third, he intended to investigate the relationship between history and practical life. He thought of beginning his project by giving a brief account of the different senses of the concept of history. Book one was divided into four chapters. The first was to concentrate on evidence and testimony relating them to scissors-and-paste history. Chapter two was to present a theory of action, res gestae, or action expressive of thought, in contrast with the idea of process, or change, associated with pseudo-history. In chapter three reenactment was to be discussed and contrasted with the idea of a dead past. Chapter four was to argue that history in contrast with other purported pretenders to the title can justifiably claim to be the science of the mind. Book two was divided into three chapters. Chapter one was to discuss history and natural science, showing that neither could be reduced to each other. He also wanted to contend that the natural sciences are themselves historical achievements in that they depend upon the historical facts of observation and thought. Chapter two was to deal with history and the human sciences, such as economics, which he describes as crypto-histories. In the third chapter Collingwood intended to explore the relation between history and philosophy. In book three, which is described less precisely, he wanted to argue that history overcomes the distinction between theory and practice, and that reenactment overcomes the dualism between mind and its objects. This, he thought, would enable him to give a characterization of historical morality and historical civilization in contrast with their utilitarian counterparts.He began writing the book on 15 February 1939 and had finished the first three chapters by 23 February. Over a month later, on 26 and 27 March, he began chapter four but was unable to formulate his thoughts on the past, and the relation between history and philosophy. At this point he stopped, never to return to the manuscript again. What we have left of The Principles of History deviates considerably from the original plan. Only three chapters were written, the third of which does not contain the crucial discussion of re-enactment. In addition, uncompleted fragments of the beginnings of a fourth chapter remain.In this paper I intend to look at why Collingwood’s explicit authorization to publish the Principles of History was disregarded by Knox and Oxford University Press. In addition, I want to look at three aspects of the rediscovered manuscript. In the second and third sections, on the method and subject matter of history respectively, I examine the extent to which Knox’s suppression of the Principles of History contributed to a good deal of the confusion surrounding the interpretation of Collingwood’s key ideas. What emerges from the pages of the Principles of History is how integral The Principles of Art and An Essay on Metaphysics are to understanding Collingwood’s later philosophy of history, a connection that is distorted by the patchwork nature of The Idea of History.In the fourth section of the paper I suggest that the most significant omission to which Collingwood never returned was the theory of reenactment. Reenactment more than any other aspect of his writings has been placed by interpreters at the centre of Collingwood’s philosophy of history. W. H. Dray’s new book is wholly focused upon this theme. Dray did not, however, see The Principles of History in time to incorporate the implications for reenactment theory of Collingwood’s broadening of the subject matter of history to include the emotions. 2 The theory of reenactment could no longer be sustained by the earlier argument found in The Idea of History, because Collingwood, in The Principles of... (shrink)

The “Adam Smith problem” has traditionally been concerned with the issue of authorial integrity: the issue of how a single author, Adam Smith, could have written two such apparently dissimilar, even contradictory, works as The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. As the problem to be resolved was the single authorial origin of two such works, the perceived incompatibilities between them were explained in terms of Smith's intellectual biography – for example, Smith's travels to France, Smith's meetings (...) with the physiocrats, or the mental incapacities of an aging man. The current consensus is that the Adam Smith problem is a “pseudo problem” and that Smith's works represent a unified project, but the same reference to authorial origins now provides thr opposite claim that “the same man” wrote both books. Here the postulate of authorial integrity, “of stable integrated character, not subject to deep intellectual doubts or fissures” provides an assurance that such a man is unlikely to have written two entirely different books, an assurance underwritten by a coherent authorial intentionality that guarantees the consistency of the two works. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Instead of wondering about the nature of robots, as if our thinking about humans was stable and straightforward, we should dig deeper in thinking about how we think about humans. Indeed, the emotions embedded in the ethical approaches to robots and artificial intelligence, are rooted in a long tradition of thinking about humans, either in an instrumental or in a pseudo-divine way. Both perspectives miss humanness, and are misleading when it comes to thinking about robots and their relationships with (...) humans. With the instrumental way to grasp humanness, humans are seen as machines and, by the same token, robots can easily be seen as human, as a matter of fact. With the quasi-divine way to grasp humanness, humans are seen as aspiring omniscient-omnipotent creatures and, by the same token, robots are projected to be, what men will always fail to become. Hence, our way to think about robots is mirroring our way to think about humans…as long as we hold rationality as a distinctive criteria for humanness. The text below flows from a TEDxULB talk that took place in Brussels on May 4, 2016. It calls for leaving behind the rational subject as proxy for humanness, and embracing instead the figure of the relational self. The relational self is rooted in the Arendtian concept of plurality. Embracing the relational self, instead of the rational subject, has several advantages: it allows to distinguish humans from artefacts; it allows to grasp the dynamics between control, orientation, and recognition and to understand how human freedom flows from this dynamics; it opens to the foregrounding of vulnerability, as a shared characteristic of humanness, instead of as a defect touching only some; last, and surely not least, it points to a new form of vulnerability: that of our attentional spheres, whose protection may deserve a new fundamental right, in order to ensure our integrity, besides and beyond body and home. (shrink)

En esta ponencia nos proponemos mostrar que ciertas tesis o consensos recibidos sobre pseudoprocesos causales , procesos cuya característica prominente parece ser superar la velocidad de la luz, deben ser cuestionados o seriamente modificados. Dos de dichos consensos son, primero, que los PSP deberían ser tratados simplemente como "basura espacio-temporal" y, segundo, que ellos no cumplen, aparte de permitir aislar procesos causales genuinos, ninguna función epistémica o metodológica en la descripción de cualquier estado físico, en particular, al interior de la (...) relatividad especial . Para ello, apelaremos a procedimientos de medición física bien conocidos tanto en física clásica como en RE. Como consecuencia de lo anterior, argumentamos que, una vez que los PSP son integrados en toda la escena física, se revela que ellos juegan un rol fundamental y más complejo en la física experimental de lo que hasta ahora se ha pensado. In this paper we show that some received contentions about causal pseudo processes , processes of which the most salient aspect seems to be travelling faster than the speed of light, must be rejected o seriously modified. Two of such contentions are, first, that PSPs should be considered just "spatiotemporal junk" and, second, that they do not meet, besides allowing us to isolate proper genuine causal processes, any other epistemic or methodological role in the description of a physical state of affair, in particular, in a special relativity setting. In order to do that, we are going to appeal to physical measure procedures, well known both in classic and relativistic physics. As a consequence of that, we contend that, once PSPs are integrated into the whole physical scenario, a fundamental and more complex role for them in experimental physics is revealed. (shrink)

A collective understanding that traces a debate between ‘what is science?’ and ‘what is a science about?’ has an extraction to the notion of scientific knowledge. The debate undertakes the pursuit of science that hardly extravagance the dogma of pseudo-science. Scientific conjectures invoke science as an intellectual activity poured by experiences and repetition of the objects that look independent of any idealist views (believes in the consensus of mind-dependence reality). The realistic machinery employs in an empiricist exposition of the (...) objective phenomenon by synchronizing the general method to make observational predictions that cover all the phenomena of the particular entity without any exception. The formation of science encloses several epistemological purviews and a succession of conjectures cum refutation that a newer theorem could reinstate. My attempt is to advocate a holistic plea of scientific conjectures that outruns the restricted regulation of experience or testable hypothesis to render the validity of a chain of logical reasoning (deductive or inductive) of basic scientific statements. The milieu of scientific intensification integrates speculation that loads efficiency towards a new experimental dimension where the reality is not itself objective or observers relative; in fact the observed phenomenon divulges in the constructive progression of preferred methods of falsifiability and uncertainty. (shrink)

Values formed in culture, reflecting social relations, fulfilling a regulatory role, are defined as norms fixed in the culture of society. Moral norms that combine such properties of morality as normativity, imperativeness and evaluativeness act as significant foundations of culture. Values and norms enshrined in culture contribute to the integration and spiritual development of society The transformational processes taking place in modern society have influence on the value system. The relevance of this study is determined by the dialectic of (...) emerging contradictions in modern Russian culture caused by the formation of ambivalent values, norms, and attitudes in mass culture that have a negative impact on collective consciousness, on changing the value foundations of culture in modern society, which jeopardizes the safety of culture. In the focus of the analyzed problem, kitsch culture as a phenomenon of mass culture acts as the subject of research. The purpose of the study is to identify threats to cultural security coming from kitsch culture, which transforms the value foundations of culture, and to identify strategies to protect Russian culture. The study of the voiced issues is carried out through the prism of socio-cultural, structural-functional, interdisciplinary approaches. The novelty of the studied problem lies in the fact that kitsch culture acts as a pseudo-culture, which is devoid of aesthetic and artistic value and moral content, as one of the sources that creates certain risks and poses threats to cultural security. In particular, we are talking about the organization of joint activities of government agencies, public organizations, scientific, cultural and educational spheres, based on the principles of optimizing the constructive impact on the consciousness of the younger generation through the mediation process and inculturation. (shrink)

A collective understanding that traces a debate between 'what is science?’ and ‘what is a science about?’ has an extraction to the notion of scientific knowledge. The debate undertakes the pursuit of science that hardly extravagance the dogma of pseudo-science. Scientific conjectures invoke science as an intellectual activity poured by experiences and repetition of the objects that look independent of any idealist views (believes in the consensus of mind-dependence reality). The realistic machinery employs in an empiricist exposition of the (...) objective phenomenon by synchronizing the general method to make observational predictions that cover all the phenomena of the particular entity without any exception. The formation of science encloses several epistemological purviews and a succession of conjectures cum refutation that a newer theorem could reinstate. My attempt is to advocate a holistic plea of scientific conjectures that outruns the restricted regulation of experience or testable hypothesis to render the validity of a chain of logical reasoning (deductive or inductive) of basic scientific statements. The milieu of scientific intensification integrates speculation that loads efficiency towards a new experimental dimension where the reality is not itself objective or observers relative; in fact the observed phenomenon divulges in the constructive progression of preferred methods of falsifiability and uncertainty. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam has discussed religion in his philosophical writings only since the early 1990s, While his approach is Wittgensteinian, Putnam seeks to avoid the pseudo-Wittgensteinian view which reduces religion to a language-game or form of life which cannot be rationally criticized from any external standpoint. In defending the possibility of critical philosophical discussion of religious issues, Putnam draws on the tradition of American pragmatism, especially William James, With classical pragmatists, he also shares a profoundly Kantian background, tightly connecting religion (...) with morality. Finally, Putnam's pragmatism may be interpreted as a form of existentialism Putnam way of philosophizing about religion-matters of vital importance to human beings while contradictory and paradoxical, may nevertheless offer a way of restoring critical philosophy in a fragmented postmodern world which has lost ethical integrity. (shrink)