The Politics of Orientation provides the first substantial exploration of a surprising theoretical kinship and its rich political implications, between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Through their shared theories of sense, Hannah Richter draws out how the works of Luhmann and Deleuze complement each other in creating worlds where chaos is the norm and order the unlikely and yet remarkably stable exception. From the encounter between Deleuze and Luhmann, Richter develops a novel take on (...) postfoundational ontology where subjects and societies unfold in self-productive relations of sense against a background of complexity. The Politics of Orientation breaks and rebuilds theoretical alliances by reading core concepts and thinkers of Continental Philosophy, from Leibniz to Whitehead and Marx, through this encounter. Most importantly, the book puts Luhmann and Deleuze to work to offer urgently needed insight into the rise of post-truth populism. In our complex democratic societies, Richter argues, orientation against complexity has become the ground of political power, privileging the simplistic narratives of the populist right. (shrink)

В данной работе рассматриваются важнейшие вопросы о коллективном воображаемом и его отношениях с реальностью и истиной. Сначала мы рассмотрим эту тему в концептуальных рамках, а затем проведем соответствующий фактологический анализ наглядных поведенческих реалий. Мы будем опираться не только на методологию, но и, главным образом, на постулаты и положения аналитической философии, которые, безусловно, будут проявляться на протяжении всего исследования и могут быть идентифицированы по признакам, описанным Пересом : Рабосси (1975) отстаивает идею, что аналитическая философия может быть идентифицирована путем рассмотрения некоторых семейных (...) сходств. Он предлагает следующие семейные черты: позитивное отношение к научному знанию; осторожное отношение к метафизике; представление о философии как о концептуальной задаче, в которой в качестве метода используется концептуальный анализ; тесная связь между языком и философией; стремление к аргументированным ответам на философские проблемы; поиск концептуальной ясности. Эти базовые понятия включают в себя культурное, социальное, религиозное, научное, философское, моральное и политическое содержание, принадлежащее каждому и коллективному существованию. В данной статье мы не будем дискутировать и доказывать. Наша цель — не систематическая методология, не критика и не доказательство. Настоящая работа основана на аналитической рефлексии. Мы будем рассуждать как можно более полно и глубоко и излагать результаты своих размышлений. Несмотря на междисциплинарный характер темы и методологическую открытость к принятию вклада из любой области науки, данная работа относится к психологии и онтологии, или, другими словами, к социальной и онтологической психологии. Свободная методология, направляющая такие размышления, охватывает и рассматривает все, что приближается к согласованности с философской и психологической эпистемологией. Эта методология не гонится за доказательствами, а ищет взаимосвязь между существующими доказательствами любой природы и величины, выводя когерентный смысл реальных вещей. (shrink)

A blindfolded clairvoyant walks into a room and immediately knows how it is arranged. You walk in and immediately see how it is arranged. Though both of you represent the room as being arranged in the same way, you have different experiences. Your experience doesn’t just represent that the room is arranged a certain way; it also visually presents the very items in the room that make that representation true. Call the felt aspect of your experience made salient by this (...) contrast its presentational phenomenology. Many philosophers have observed that perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology. In this paper I explore its nature, scope, and significance. I argue that in addition to perceptual experiences, presentational phenomenology can be found in intuitive, introspective, imaginative, and recollective experiences. I also argue that presentational phenomenology is epistemologically significant: it plays a central role in explaining why the experiences that have it justify beliefs and give us knowledge. (shrink)

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze this chapter investigates the virtual as what problematizes the possible by inserting contingency in the process of emergence of the new. The tension between the virtual as what is uniquely placed to engender true innovation, and its aleatory and unforeseeable nature mirrors the tension existing in design between form-making and the need to acknowledge contingency. In embracing the un-designability of the virtual, design is called to take contingency and material variability as forces impinging on the process (...) of emergence of the new. The chapter puts forward a new model for design research that shifts from problem-solving to problem-finding and is predicated on the undesigned at the core of design itself. This points to a further shift: the role of designer from creator to facilitator, teasing form out of the formless, engaged with the manifold forces expressed through material variation. (shrink)

As people age their actions often become entrenched—we might say they are not open to the new; they are less able to adapt; they are stuck in a rut. Indeed, in The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) Simone de Beauvoir writes that to be old is to be condemned neither to freedom nor to meaning, but rather to boredom (Beauvoir 1996, 461; 486). While in many ways a very pessimistic account of ageing, the text does provide promising moments where her (...) descriptions do capture other possibilities for aged existence. In particular, I turn to Beauvoir’s suggestion that habit can take on a “kind of poetry” since it merges past, present and future in a sense of eternity that the present moment now lacks with its limited futural horizon (468; 492). In this paper, I draw out, delineate, and further explore this phenomenological reconfiguration of the present that she gestures towards through a consideration of the intensification and modification of the present through habit. Drawing as well upon Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the phenomenal body, I argue that poetical habit is an active passivity that allows for the spontaneity of the new out of the sedimentation of corporeal memory, and for the attentive perception of what appears in the present. To disrupt someone’s habitual life is to unanchor that life from the world, from an identity shaped by repetition, by the constancy of a shared reality of things, that is, from the spatial-temporal process of inhabitation, and thus from her ability to engage with others and to disclose the world. (shrink)

One particularly vibrant area of debate, in recent times, concerning potential cognitive differences between humans and other animals (and also one wth a veritable history) is centred on the claim that non-human animals are, in some sense, 'stuck in time', whereas humans are able to cognitively transcend the present moment in time by turning their minds back to particular past events. This chapter seeks to clarify what is at issue in these debates.

Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and commits him to a conceptually ideal interpretation of process. Process becomes a transcendental idea of reflection that can always be predicated of our knowledge of the world and of the world qua known, but not necessarily of reality an sich. Rescher’s own taxonomy of process thinking implies that it has other variants. While Rescher’s approach to process philosophy makes it intelligible and appealing to mainstream (...) analytic philosophy, it leaves behind the more daring ideas of Bergson, James, and Whitehead, all of whom envisioned the primordial reality of process in a radical ontology of becoming. This variant of process thought can be construed as coherent and self-consistent, but not without relinquishing the correspondence theory of truth and embracing challenging ideas that bring us in close proximity to existentialism, apophatic theology, and Buddhism. (shrink)

In the recent literature on episodic memory, there has been increasing recognition of the need to provide an account of its adaptive function. In this context, it is sometimes argued that episodic memory is critical for certain forms of decision making about the future. We criticize existing accounts that try to give episodic memory a role in decision making, before giving a novel such account of our own. This turns on the thought of a link between episodic memory and the (...) emotion of regret. We discuss how both experienced and anticipated regret can have a distinctive influence on decision making, and argue that the ability to recollect past events in episodic memory underpins the capacity to engage in the sophisticated types of mental time travel recruited in experiencing and anticipating regret. (shrink)

If complexity is a necessary but not sufficient premise for the existence and expression of the living, anticipation is the distinguishing characteristic of what is alive. Anticipation is at work even at levels of existence where we cannot refer to intelligence. The prospect of artificially generating aesthetic artifacts and ethical constructs of relevance to a world in which the natural and the artificial are coexistent cannot be subsumed as yet another product of scientific and technological advancement. Beyond the artificial, the (...) synthetic conjures the understanding of aesthetics and ethics no longer from the perspective of the How? type of question, but rather the Why? Given the current infatuation with synthetic biology (i.e., making life from non-life), there is a practical consequence to such considerations. Synthetic life, as any other form of life, implies the possibility of evolution. Anticipation, which is the underlying factor of evolution, is thus expected. At the level of human existence, anticipation is expressed, for instance (but not exclusively), in aesthetic forms and ethical values. This translates, in turn, into an argument for the role aesthetics and ethics play in the process. Consequently, to qualify as life, the synthesis of the physical and the living will have to efficiently handle ambiguity. Current computational facilities, regardless of their nature or performance, operate exclusively in the semiotic domain of the well defined non-ambiguous. (shrink)

Proposes a new way of understanding the nature of metaphysics, focusing on nonreductionist emergence theory, both in ancient and modern philosophy, as well as in contemporary philosophy of science.

The development of immersive media-communication environments, and their theorization in terms of the `haptic', calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between sensuality and the ethics of contact. For the most part, the cultural theorization of the virtual which remains preoccupied with the visual has tended to limit its scope to the paradoxes, politics and ethics of representation. Much of media and cultural studies work, for instance, has adopted, directly or indirectly, the traditional visual and ocularcentric paradigm in its analyses (...) of cultural forms and technologies as these have become integrated into contemporary life. Whilst it has been argued, for instance by Mark Hansen in his recent books, that this paradigm is inadequate to digital media and the developments of human-machine interactions the digital introduces, few comentators have addressed how new developments in immersive sensory media environments bear on the ethics of communication. By way of a reflection on the themes of the tactility of contact and the ethics of touch in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this article critically evaluates the ethical significance of the `sensory extension' haptic media represent. It identifies and argues against the neo-positivist tendency of Hansen's reliance on the empiricism of the neurosciences whilst locating the resources for an ethics of touch in Levinas' concept of time as `diachrony'. (shrink)

No presente trabalho, vamos abordar algumas das questões essenciais sobre o imaginário coletivo e suas relações com a realidade e a verdade. Devemos encarar esse assunto em uma estrutura conceptual, seguida pela análise factual correspondente às realidades comportamentais demonstráveis. Adotaremos não apenas a metodologia, mas principalmente os princípios e proposições da filosofia analítica, que com certeza serão evidentes ao longo do estudo e podem ser identificados pelos recursos descritos por Perez[1] : Rabossi (1975) defende a ideia de que a filosofia (...) analítica pode ser identificada considerando-se certas semelhanças familiares. Ele sugere os seguintes traços familiares: uma atitude positiva em relação ao conhecimento científico; uma atitude cautelosa em relação à metafísica; uma concepção da filosofia como uma tarefa conceptual, que toma a análise conteudo como um método; uma estreita relação entre linguagem e filosofia; uma preocupação em buscar respostas argumentativas para problemas filosóficos, e procura de clareza conceptual. Esses conceitos centrais envolvem conteúdos culturais, sociais, religiosos, científicos, filosóficos, morais e políticos, pertencentes à existência individual e coletiva de cada um de nós. Neste artigo, não discutiremos nem demonstraremos. Nosso objetivo não é o de sistematicamente criticar ou evidenciar qualquer coisa, de qualquer maneira. O presente trabalho se baseia na reflexão analítica. Apenas especularemos da maneira mais abrangente e profunda que pudermos e expressaremos os resultados de nossos pensamentos. Não obstante a natureza multidisciplinar do assunto e a abertura metodológica para aceitar contribuições de qualquer campo da ciência, este trabalho pertence ao objetivo da psicologia e ontologia ou, em outros termos, da psicologia social e ontológica. A metodologia livre que norteia tais reflexões abrange e leva em consideração tudo o que se aproxima da coerência com a epistemologia filosófica e psicológica. Essa metodologia não busca alcançar evidências, mas apenas procura a inter-relação entre evidências já existentes, de qualquer natureza e magnitude, inferindo um significado coerente para as coisas reais. Muitos dos grandes pensadores, a qualquer momento, nunca procuraram demonstrações, teorizações ou sistematizações. Esses pensadores apenas pensavam, meditavam e com a iluminação de sua humildade podiam se aproximar da verdade. Eles serão nossa referência e o exemplo a ser seguido. Com certeza, não encontraremos a verdade, mas podemos ter certeza de alguma coisa: em muitos momentos, chegaremos perto da verdade e, em todos os momentos, estaremos nos afastando da inverdade e da mentira. O escopo principal deste estudo é observar como alguns dos atributos evolutivos essenciais da humanidade, como criatividade, imaginação e associação, podem se tornar uma doença perigosa, abrigada nas sombras enevoadas da inteligência. (shrink)

This article approaches Gilles Deleuze's notion of problems through a series of thinkers Deleuze draws on in developing this notion: Heidegger, Plato, Kant, Bergson and Nietzsche. Taking these thinkers as its guide, it sketches six broad characteristics that accompany an investment in problems, ultimately arguing that problems are attained through the activity of critique. It echoes Deleuze's essay ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’ by asking: for whom do problems exist? What does Deleuze recognise in those who recognise problems? And what (...) do those who recognise problems make visible for us? (shrink)

What is?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference (...) from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual and the virtual. (shrink)

Iconic photographs are visual arguments depicting an, often dramatic, particular situation showing victims of disasters. Spectators watching the photo of the particular situation, empathise with it, and project the feelings evoked onto the events that form the context for the scene in the picture. This mobilises them into political action. In the process, however, the depicted personal misery is perused to exemplify the larger events. The tragedy of iconic photographs is analysed not as the misery experienced by the depicted persons, (...) but as the breach of their right to shame which is required for the photo to acquire iconicity. Examples are addressed, as well as the contrast classes of the self-portrait and Byzantine icons. (shrink)

This article engages with the philosophical reflections of the French historian of science Hélène Metzger (1886–1944) in order to develop a vocabulary for understanding the rise of non-reductive Continental naturalism in the contemporary humanities. The bibliography of current naturalist approaches in the arts and the human sciences is still in the making, but it is altogether clear that the trend is not scientist or historicist or relativist. This epistemological diagnosis refers us to Metzger, who found herself surrounded with the logical (...) positivism of the Wiener Kreis, on the one hand, and the historicism of her French colleagues, on the other, as well as with the infiltration of the history of science by a chronological empiricism. In this article I will take the most recent book of Vicki Kirby – Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large from 2011 – as an exemplary case of non-reductive Continental naturalist scholarship in the humanities today and by reading it through the concepts of Metzger, I will demonstrate how this type of research leads to refreshing insights in what constitutes positive humanities knowledge and what is the role of the a priori in the field. (shrink)

The writings of Philip Rieff present a challenge to the social sciences along three fronts: the nature of theorizing, the meaning of 'culture', and the sources of social order. Here I outline the main themes of his life's work, including the 'sacred sociology' that he announced in his later writings. I suggest that the broad cultural diagnosis that he had developed by the 1960s remains pertinent today, but that his more detailed substantive statements - particularly about art, science, politics and (...) sexuality - are of mixed quality; the reason for this is that, while Rieff developed a very clear view of the meaning and purpose of theorizing, his methods of cultural analysis were less well thought through, and his work haunted by a series of ambivalences that he never resolved, notably between the demands of the critical and the affirmative intellect, and between credal and psychological Jewishness. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on "diffraction." This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or "new materialist.". (shrink)

This article revisits Krzysztof Kieślowski's films in light of Gilles Deleuze's writings on cinema. Its central argument is that, while Kieślowski's films register what Deleuze calls exhausted life, or la vie épuisée, they also offer an affirmative response to exhaustion. Deleuze's articulation of exhaustion in the context of film emerges first in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, where the term is posited as the denial of life's capacity to transform itself. In the context of Kieślowski's films and the communist milieux from (...) which they emerge, exhaustion as a film-philosophical concept acquires a socio-political specificity otherwise lacking in Deleuze. Kieślowski's films thus provide the basis for reading exhaustion as an affective correlate of what Deleuze famously calls the “crisis of the action-image”. Stressing Kieślowski's resistance to the hegemony of exhaustion – and what the director calls a “world without representation” – this article emphasizes films such as From the City of Łódź, The Scar, Camera Buff, Three Colors: Red. Reading Kieślowski and communist Poland's repressive socio-political context in light of the Deleuzian sense of exhaustion vivifies the affective dimension of the director's oeuvre. Surveying the director's earlier documentary work, his decision to transition to fiction, and his reflections on ethics and politics, this article concludes by arguing for the generative, life-affirming character of Kieślowski's cinema of exhaustion. (shrink)

Richard Koch1 became known in the 1920s with works on basic medical theory. Among these publications, the character of medical action and its status within the theory of science was presented as the most important theme. While science is inherently driven by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, medicine pursues the practical purpose of helping the sick. Therefore, medicine must be seen as an active relationship between a helping and a suffering person. While elucidating this relationship, Koch discusses (...) the fundamental elements of medicine found in natural philosophy and the relationship of medicine to its own history. One of his aims is to unite natural history and the history of ideas without reducing intellectual processes to biological ones. Koch considers free will as something intuitively certain. It must serve as an axiom which will capture human as well as non-human reality. Based on the fact that human free will, considered a psychic quality, evolved out of inanimate matter, Koch grants matter (proto-) psychic qualities. They are evoked through specific constellations of matter. – With regard to history, Koch rejects the notion of constant progress. The history of medicine has provided insights that cannot be surpassed but can be obscured. Historical self-contemplation serves as a means for avoiding any deviations which may prevent medicine from fulfiling its ultimate purpose. Koch connects nature and history through the concept of a unity between natural history and the historical development of medicine. Medicine is considered an especially complex development of a purposive reaction to harmful stimuli, a reaction which can already be encountered in unicellular organisms. Without intending to reduce historical and mental processes to biological ones, Koch sets for himself the aim of gathering different phenomena and presenting them in one encapsulating unity. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to trace some lines of thinking towards a conceptualization of the uniqueness of the creative work of museums, the mode of creativeness that belongs exclusively to museums, or at least that museums are capable of by virtue of the types of materials and forms as well as activities unique to what will be referred to as museography. This is linked to the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum work as (...) a professional field. The article characterizes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge primarily in terms of a mode of creativeness, or bricolage in Levi-Strauss’s sense, mediated through the museographic form, and applied to the chance assemblies of materials to generate museum-specific modes of engaging questions—across science, culture, and society—particularly through creating unique temporal arrangements, or durations, that provoke thought, learning, and engagement on museographic terms. Museography’s originality, it is argued, consists in a bricolage that works through the museum’s unique material and form to create learning resources and encounters, museographic assemblages that depart from a conception of linear time as the space of evolutionary narrative to facilitate the experience of Bergsonian durations. (shrink)

The Nanoessence project aims to examine life at a sub-cellular level, re-examining space and scale within the human context. A single HaCat skin cell is analysed with an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) to explore comparisons between, life and death at a nano level. The humanistic discourse concerning life is now being challenged by nanotechnological research that brings into question the concepts of what constitutes living. The Nanoessence project research is based on data gathered as part of a residency at SymbioticA, (...) Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia and the Nanochemistry Research Institute, (NRI) Curtin University of Technology. The space of the body can be seen at an atomic level as having no defining boundaries. More generally, molecular self-assembly seeks to use concepts of supramolecular chemistry, and molecular recognition in particular, to cause single-molecule components to automatically arrange themselves into some useful conformation (reference Wikipedia). Nano assembly, or bottom-up approach, is the construction of a supramolecular chemistry by the assembly of nanoscopic particles, or even atoms and molecules. The proposal for nanotechnology to reshape nature atom by atom develops an interesting debate as to the constitution of life. The Nanoessence project aims to construct a physical experience to examine this scientific and metaphysical world. Nanoessence is an interactive audio-visual installation. In the Nanoessence installation the viewer will interface with the visual and sonic presentation through his or her own breath. In the context of the project breath has a strong conceptual and metaphorical link to a Biblical inception of life. The project attempts to maintain a high quality of authentic data to engage the viewer in a sensorial qualitative experience of quantitative data. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, Hilda Diana Oakeley set out a new kind of British idealism. Oakeley is an idealist in the sense that she holds mind to actively contribute to the features of experience, but she also accepts that there is a world independent of mind. One of her central contributions to the idealist tradition is her thesis that minds construct our experiences using memory. This paper explores the theses underlying her idealism, and shows how they are intricately connected (...) to the wider debates of her period. I go on to explain how the parts of Oakeley's idealism are connected to further areas of her thought – specifically, her views on history and her growing block theory of time – to provide a sense of Oakeley's philosophy as a system. As there is no existing literature on Oakeley, this paper aims to open a path for further scholarship. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of historical facticity in the phenomenological tradition. I argue that taking historicity into consideration in its factical constitution means transgressing the realm of the primordial or existential temporality. Following Ricoeur’s discussion of the idea of the “referential status of the past,” the question of the material foundation of historical meaning-formation, i.e., relation between temporality and materiality will be brought into the forefront of phenomenological investigations. It is with this context in mind that I argue (...) that exploring the conditions of historicity with regard to its factical and material determinations should assume a realist position in phenomenology. (shrink)

This article examines the experiences of pilgrims walking to the shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. It argues that walking is a social practice operating at the nexus between body and self. Pilgrims do not generally regard walking as a spiritual practice at the journey's outset. They do, however, develop a deep awareness of the multiple effects of walking as they progress along the route. Pilgrims report a variety of techniques in relation to their walking including using (...) rhythm, `being' in the moment and narrating. Various social borders also establish a space for self-reflection that is both individualistic as well as marked by wider social meanings. Walking is thus simultaneously a bodily, social and spiritual practice. (shrink)

This paper shows how reflection on habit leads in nineteenth-century French philosophy to Henri Bergson’s idea of duration in 1888 as a non-quantifiable dimension irreducible to time as measured by clocks. Historically, I show how Albert Lemoine’s 1875 L’habitude et l’instinct was crucial, since he holds – in a way that is both Ravaissonian and Bergsonian avant la lettre – that for the being capable of habit, the three elements of time are fused together. For that habituated being, Lemoine claims, (...) it is not true to say that the past is no longer, nor even that the future is not yet. This historical link between Ravaisson and Bergson, however, only sharpens the philosophical question of how a dynamic conception of habit involves and requires a conception of real duration, of a temporality more original than clock-time, and, conversely, of how reflection on duration prior to clock-time involves a notion of habit. With reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by showing that there is an internal connection between these two grand philosophical themes of nineteenth- and then twentieth-century French thought: habit and time. (shrink)

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I (...) analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind. (shrink)

A process philosophical interpretation of Deleuze's theories of time encounters problems when formulating an account of Deleuze's portrayal of temporality in The Time-Image, where time is understood as having the structure of instantaneity and simultaneity. I remedy this shortcoming of process philosophical readings by formulating a phenomenological interpretation of Deleuze's second synthesis of time. By employing Deleuze's logic of affirmative synthetic disjunction in combination with his differential calculus interpretation of Spinoza's and Bergson's duration, this phenomenological interpretation portrays time as given (...) to our awareness in immediacy rather than through a continuous process of unfolding. The viability of this alternate approach calls into question the claims that Deleuze is strictly a process philosopher and anti-phenomenologist. (shrink)

This paper takes five different perspectives on kinesthesia, beginning with its evolution across animate life and its biological distinction from, and relationship to proprioception. It proceeds to document the historical derivation of “the muscle sense,” showing in the process how analytic philosophers bypass the import of kinesthesia by way of “enaction,” for example, and by redefinitions of “tactical deception.” The article then gives prominence to a further occlusion of kinesthesia and its subduction by proprioception, these practices being those of well-known (...) phenomenologists, practices that exemplify an adultist perspective supported in large part by the writings of Merleau-Ponty. Following this extended critical review, the article shows how Husserl’s phenomenology enlightens us about kinesthesia and in doing so offers us substantive clues to the phenomenology of learning as it takes place in the development and acquisition of skillful movement. It shows further how phenomenological methodology contrasts markedly with existential analysis, most significantly in its recognition of, and its ability to set forth a developmental history, a veritable genetic phenomenology that is basically a phenomenology of learning anchored in kinesthesia. After showing how that phenomenology of learning finds mutual validation in a classic empirical study of infant movement, the article ends by highlighting how human “I cans” are grounded in “I move,” specifically, in the pan-human ability to learn one’s body and learn to move oneself. (shrink)

This article begins with a summary phenomenological analysis of movement in conjunction with the question of “quality” in movement. It then specifies the particular kind of memory involved in a dancer’s memorization of a dance. On the basis of the phenomenological analysis and specification of memory, it proceeds to a clarification of meaning in dance. Taking its clue from the preceding sections, the concluding section of the article sets forth reasons why present-day cognitive science is unable to provide insights into (...) dance, notably because being largely tethered to happenings in the brain, it lacks foundational grounding in experience, specifically, the actual experience of movement, which is to say in kinesthesia. (shrink)

The subject of my paper is to examine nostalgia as “involuntary memory” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie Nostalghia. Tarkovsky understands filming as “sculpting in time.” In his book with the same title he writes that “time and memory merge into each other.” In order to understand this we have to distinguish between a voluntary memory, which refers to the intentional effort to remember, and the involuntary memory, which is like a force that comes over us, that affects us. The latter is (...) especially the case with nostalgia. In nostalgia we can find a revision of the past but the revised version of the past is not primarily about the production of a new representation of memory but more a case of re-experiencing the same past through returning to it, particularly in an embodied manner. Nostalgia is a particular mode of “memory of place.” Places we inhabit or pass through leave an impact on us, for we are bodily subjects and as such we have a relationship with the places that surround us. What Tarkovsky’s movie Nostalghia shows is how the spatio-temporality of the present is “haunted” by the superimposed appearance of the past. Nostalgia is a movement of seeping returns. The past transpires in the present, and Tarkovsky makes this structure visible in using the visual medium of film. He shows how the texture of the everyday world fuses with the imagined memory of the past. In my paper, I construe this nostalgic experience provided by Tarkovsky. (shrink)

The question of Ruyer’s relationship to Bergson remains under-theorized. This article attempts to address that problem by introducing a little-known essay written by Ruyer on the topic of B...

Within Piaget there is an implicit theory of the development of explicit memory. It rests in the dynamical trajectory underlying the development of causality, object, space and time – a complex (COST) supporting a symbolic relationship integral to the explicit. Cassirer noted the same dependency in the phenomena of aphasias, insisting that a symbolic function is being undermined in these deficits. This is particularly critical given the reassessment of Piaget’s stages as the natural bifurcations of a self-organizing dynamic system. The (...) elements of a theoretical framework required to support explicit memory are developed, to include, (1) the complex developmental trajectory supporting the emergence of the explicit in Piaget, (2) the concrete dynamical system and the concept of a non-differentiable time contained in Bergson’s theory required to support a conscious, as opposed to an implicit remembrance, (3) the relation to current theories of amnesia, difficulties posed by certain retrograde amnesic phenomena, the role of the hippocampus and limitations of connectionist models, (4) the fact that nowhere in this overall framework does the loss of explicit memory imply or require the destruction of experience “stored in the brain.”. (shrink)

Bergson’s model of time (1889) is perhaps the proto-phenomenological theory. It is part of a larger model of mind (1896) which can be seen in modern light as describing the brain as supporting a modulated wave within a holographic field, specifying the external image of the world, and wherein subject and object are differentiated not in terms of space, but of time. Bergson’s very concrete model is developed and deepened with Gibson’s ecological model of perception. It is applied to the (...) problems of consciousness, direct realism, qualia and illusions. The model implies an entirely different basis for memory and cognition, and a brief overview is given for the basis of direct memory, compositionality and systematicity. (shrink)

What are the political implications of a complex image of time, where time does not unfold progressively in a neat linear structure, but where the past is always present and the future impinges on the now? If the past is inescapably present, how do societies that live with grievously injured pasts come to terms with them in the present for the sake of the future? How do they try to address the collective memories of their people, when such memories are (...) marked by violence and conflict, without resorting to vengeance? Drawing from the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, this article examines the way in which two countries have recently attempted to negotiate the politics of memory – Algeria and Rwanda. It poses such questions as how much should be forgotten and how much should be remembered? It also asks the difficult question of how such pasts can be overcome and transfigured in the present for the sake of the politics of an affirmative politics of the future. (shrink)

What are the political implications of a complex image of time, where time does not unfold progressively in a neat linear structure, but where the past is always present and the future impinges on the now? If the past is inescapably present, how do societies that live with grievously injured pasts come to terms with them in the present for the sake of the future? How do they try to address the collective memories of their people, when such memories are (...) marked by violence and conflict, without resorting to vengeance? Drawing from the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, this article examines the way in which two countries have recently attempted to negotiate the politics of memory – Algeria and Rwanda. It poses such questions as how much should be forgotten and how much should be remembered? It also asks the difficult question of how such pasts can be overcome and transfigured in the present for the sake of the politics of an affirmative politics of the future. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper arrives at a normative position regarding the relevance of Henri Bergson's philosophy to historical enquiry. It does so via experimental historical analysis of the adaptation of cinematographic devices to physiological investigation. Bergson's philosophy accorded well with a mode of physiological psychology in which claims relating to mental and physiological existence interacted. Notably however, cinematograph-centered experimentation by British physiologists including Charles Scott Sherrington, as well as German-trained psychologists such as Hugo Münsterberg and Max Wertheimer, contributed to a cordoning-off of (...) psychological from physiological questioning during the early twentieth century. Bergson invested in a mode of intellectual practice in which psychological claims had direct relevance to the interpretation of physiological nature. The in-part cinematograph-inspired breakdown of this mode had significance for subsequent interpretations of his philosophy. It is suggested that this experimental particularization of Bergson's contentions indicates that any adaptation of his thought for historical enquiry must be disciplinarily specific. (shrink)

According to the B-theory, the passage of time is an illusion. The B-theory therefore requires an explanation of this illusion before it can be regarded as fullysatisfactory; yet very few B-theorists have taken up the challenge of trying to provide one. In this paper I take some first steps toward such an explanation by first making a methodological proposal, then a hypothesis about a key element in the phenomenology of temporal passage. The methodological proposal focuses onthe representational content of the (...) element of experience by virtue of which time seems to pass. The hypothesis involves the claim that the experience of changeinvolves the representation of something enduring, rather than perduring, through any change. (shrink)

In this article I will suggest ways in which adding the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the mix can complement and extend the 4EA approach to cognitive science. In the first part of the paper, I will show how the Deleuzean tripartite ontological difference (virtual/intensive/actual) can provide an explicit ontology for dynamical systems theory. The second part will take these ontological notions and apply them to three areas of concern to the 4EA approaches: (a) the Deleuzean concept of the virtual (...) will clarify the ontological status of perceptual capacity as sensorimotor skill; (b) the Deleuzean concept of “intensive individuation” will clarify the ontological status of the genesis of perceptually guided behavior; (c) the Deleuzean critique of confusing the actual and the virtual will enable us to intervene in the realism/idealism debate. These aspects will not be addressed sequentially but will be interwoven into an unfolding argument. (shrink)

Compared to earlier waves of political cinema, such as the Russian revolution films of the 1920s and the militant Third Cinema movement in the 1960s, in today's globalized and digital media world filmmakers have adopted different strategies to express a commitment to politics. Rather than directly calling for a revolution, ‘post-cinema’ filmmakers with a political mission point to the radical contingencies of history; they return to the archives and dig up never seen or forgotten materials. They reassemble stories, thoughts, and (...) affects, bending our memories and historical consciousness. Following Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophical ideas in A Thousand Plateaus filmmakers can be considered metallurgists. Discussing the work of Tariq Teguia, John Akomfrah and others, this article investigates several metallurgic strategies that have a performative effect in reshaping our collective memory and co-constructing the possibility of ‘a people to come.’. (shrink)

In this essay, Perraudin sets out to contrast the competing philosophies of time and imagination of two major French thinkers of the twentieth century: Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962). Despite Bachelard’s polemical approach vis-à-vis philosophical tradition in his works on epistemology and poetics, his accounts of time and imagination have been shown by several critics to be significantly influenced and inspired by his predecessor. Perraudin nonetheless argues that Bachelard’s critique of Bergson’s theory of continuous temporality opens the way—through (...) the subtle dialectics of his “philosophy of no”—to more prolific, and as yet untapped, therapeutic possibilities in our understanding of time and imagination than Bergson’s accounts of continuum of the élan vital had managed to reveal. (shrink)

This paper presents the influence that Bergson’s theory of subjectivity had on Lévinas. We start by examining Bergson’s “centripetal theory of mind.” Considering the relationship between perception and action, Bergson develops an understanding of subjectivity as a process that unifies disparate perceptions. Guided by the body, this unifying principle is deemed affective. This being done, we then present a contradiction in Bergson’s thinking: While humans are described as different in kind from other animals, the framework used to determine the nature (...) of their world remains unchanged. Bergson never fully embraced the centripetal theory. We then turn to Lévinas and compare his critiques of Bergson and Heidegger. Lévinas believes that both instrumentalize desire, and that a philosophy of subjectivity can only escape this problem by radically embracing the affective nature of Bergson’s centripetal theory. The latter accounts for the place of Lévinas’ phenomenology of enjoyment. (shrink)

It is often maintained that practical freedom is a capacity to act on our view of what we ought to do and in particular on our view of what it would be best to do. Here, I discuss an important exception to that claim, namely habitual agency. Acting out of habit is widely regarded as a form of reflex or even as compulsive behaviour but much habitual agency is both intentional and free. Still it is true that, in so far (...) as we act out of habit, we have no capacity to determine what we do by making a judgement about whether we ought to be doing it. Habitual agency is nonetheless free because we have the capacity to determine whether we act out of habit by making a judgement about whether or not the habit is a virtue. I develop this view of habit by contrasting habitual agency with action on policy and I argue that much virtuous agency is best understood as a form of habitual agency rather than as a form of action on policy. (shrink)

This article attends to Deleuze and Guattari's idea of a ‘minor literature’ as well as to Deleuze's concepts of the figural, probe-heads and the diagram in relation to Bacon's paintings. The paper asks specifically what might be usefully taken from this Deleuze–Bacon encounter for the expanded field of contemporary art practice.