This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Cautious Set‐Up Minimal Authorship (of Sorts) Minimal Authorship (of the Comic Sort) Some Work for a Theory of Comic Authorship Illustrating Robust Comic Authorship Comic Authorship of the McCloudian Sort Appropriation Cases Commission Cases Collaborative Cases Non‐Collaborative Cases Final Thoughts Notes References.

The authors, a father and son team from Pacific Lutheran University and Augustana College respectively, speak of their book as "not primarily a study of Kierkegaard, but a guide to the literature." Only one caveat should be applied to this description--it is a guide to the literature in English. When the authors turn to untranslated works they express their gratitude to someone else for translations, and the notes refer only to secondary sources in English. Although it is not a work (...) of genuine scholarship or penetration, it does provide "a relatively simple introduction" to Kierkegaard's authorship.--J. T. (shrink)

The idea that films can be philosophical, or in some sense ‘do’ philosophy, has recently found a number of prominent proponents. What is at stake here is generally more than the tepid claim that some documentaries about philosophy and related topics convey philosophically relevant content. Instead, the contention is that cinematic fictions, including popular movies such as The Matrix, make significant contributions to philosophy. Various more specific claims are linked to this basic idea. One, relatively weak, but pedagogically important observation (...) is that some films can be used to provide philosophy students with vivid and thought-provoking illustrations of philosophical issues. Film screenings stimulate discussion and may motivate renewed engagement with difficult philosophical texts. A stronger contention, however, seeks to link innovative and philosophically valuable thinking to ‘the film itself’ or to the ‘specificity of the cinematic medium’. Such claims raise interesting questions, including questions about the status of the increasingly prevalent philosophically motivated interpretations of particular movies. Who is actually doing the philosophizing in such cases? Is it the audio-visual display, the film-maker, or the philosopher who devises an interpretation of the work? What is the role of specifically cinematic devices in the philosophical points made in such interpretations? Is there any tension between the goal of appreciating a film as a work of art and the goal of arguing that a film has significant implications for a position on a problem in philosophy? A course in the general area of cinema as philosophy can focus on issues related to the locus and status of cinematic philosophizing. It can also delve into specific films and film-makers and philosophically oriented interpretations of specific philosophical topics, such as personal identity. Issues pertaining to interpretation, meaning, and authorship can be usefully investigated in this connection, as can topics in meta-philosophy related to the very nature of philosophical insight or knowledge. (shrink)

This dissertation is an attempt at harmonizing hermeneutics. In particular, what I term the normative and descriptive approaches are explored and brought together. A normative approach is one concerned with providing the correct method for gaining knowledge of the meaning of a text. Beardsley's normative method of relying on the "text itself" is considered and rejected. Hirsch's normative method of relying on authorial intention is considered, criticized, and used as a springboard to my own normative method of urinterpretation. Propaedeutic to (...) the articulation of urinterpretation is an answer to the question: What is an author? After a survey of theories of authorship, I propose my own author construct--the urauthor. In constructing the urauthor we go back as far as possible to the model of the original. In urinterpretation we seek authorial intention on the basis of the urauthor. It is argued that through this method we secure the meaning of a text. ;Descriptive hermeneutics is concerned with describing the phenomenon of interpretive understanding. It eschews questions of epistemological method, which are at the center of a normative approach, in favor of an ontology of interpretive understanding. Gadamer's Truth and Method is the most complete philosophical account of descriptive hermeneutics to date, and accordingly our attention to descriptive hermeneutics is largely a critique of Gadamer's work. It is argued that both normative and descriptive hermeneutics can and should coexist, but to facilitate scholarship each should be explored separately. ;Interpretation and criticism are also harmonized. Interpretation is understood as the project of seeking the meaning of a text. The meaning of a text, it is argued, is discovered by seeking authorial meaning through the urauthor. Criticism is understood as the project of seeking the significance of a text. The significance of a text, it is argued, is its meaning-as-related-to: to me, to you, to our time, etc. The harmonization of interpretation and criticism is briefly explored in typical philosophical, literary, theological, and legal texts. (shrink)

So far I have taken prose and poetry where admittedly they exist, in literature, and attempted to discover the difference between them by taking pieces of prose or poetry which have the same or much the same subjects and comparing them with one another. In all these pairs of passages I thought I could detect this difference: that in the poem the subject as rendered in words acquires a life of its own, is a living thing, as it were, living (...) its own life like an animal or plant, is organic, and, in a word, concrete. While the prose, for all its constructive unity, is not self-subsistent, but is descriptive of a given subject, even though that subject is itself created by the writer, as in a novel, and, in a word, is analytic. It is not the greater passion or vividness of the poem, for prose may be vivid, as in Carlyle, and passionate, as in Burke. It is that the poet places himself and places his hearer within the subject itself, and works from within outwards, while the prosaist describes relatively from without. Both of them describe, the poet as well as the prosaist. But the prosaist builds up his subject so as to bring it before your mind. The poet starts with his subject in its integrity, places the hearer's mind within it, and his exposition is the unfolding life of the subject itself. (shrink)

So far I have taken prose and poetry where admittedly they exist, in literature, and attempted to discover the difference between them by taking pieces of prose or poetry which have the same or much the same subjects and comparing them with one another. In all these pairs of passages I thought I could detect this difference: that in the poem the subject as rendered in words acquires a life of its own, is a living thing, as it were, living (...) its own life like an animal or plant, is organic, and, in a word, concrete. While the prose, for all its constructive unity, is not self-subsistent, but is descriptive of a given subject, even though that subject is itself created by the writer, as in a novel, and, in a word, is analytic. It is not the greater passion or vividness of the poem, for prose may be vivid, as in Carlyle, and passionate, as in Burke. It is that the poet places himself and places his hearer within the subject itself, and works from within outwards, while the prosaist describes relatively from without. Both of them describe, the poet as well as the prosaist. But the prosaist builds up his subject so as to bring it before your mind. The poet starts with his subject in its integrity, places the hearer's mind within it, and his exposition is the unfolding life of the subject itself. (shrink)

This thesis is about the problem of how sensory qualities relate to neural states or processes. I shall try to present an account of why dualism appears to be an attractive and intuitive position, but also point out why dualistic intuitions may be misleading. A relatively common view in philosophy of mind is that accounts of how sensory qualities relate to neural states and processes involve an explanatory anomaly i.e. the so-called explanatory gap. The alleged gap makes it hard to (...) comprehend how a system, which basically involves electro-chemical processes, can create feels of whatever kind. However, the felt profoundness of the problem may be an exaggeration. One of the major points in this essay is to show that we do not yet know whether it is a deep mysterious philosophical puzzle or if it is a technical engineering problem, i.e. how to bring about sensory qualities by means of an underlying neural mechanism. A theme throughout this essay is to demystify the nature of sensory qualities as natural items that only under certain descriptions appear as mysterious or miraculous. For all we know, phenomenal consciousness may be plain sentience – not some fancy or unfathomable kind of consciousness, although complicated to account for due to lack of empirical knowledge about how the brain works. The argument tries to establish that it is the wiring and function of sensory observational systems that make sensory qualities appear spectacular and immaterial. It is argued that the notion of there being an explanatory gap emerges out of a misunderstanding of how sensory observation is wired and how it works. Some basic facts about sensory observation explain why “experiential concepts” and “physical concepts” reflect two logically distinct conceptual vocabularies. Given a proper description of the observational process the gap does not manifest itself as a gap but as an illusion of there being a gap. In sum, the mind-body problem is man-made and is in a profound sense a cognitive artifact. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): Paisley Livingston, ‘Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy’, Philosophy Compass 3/4 (2008): 509–603, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2008.00158.x Author’s Introduction The idea that films can be philosophical, or in some sense ‘do’ philosophy, has recently found a number of prominent proponents. What is at stake here is generally more than the tepid claim that some documentaries about philosophy and related topics convey philosophically relevant content. Instead, the contention is that cinematic fictions, including popular movies such as The (...) Matrix, make significant contributions to philosophy. Various more specific claims are linked to this basic idea. One, relatively weak, but pedagogically important observation is that some films can be used to provide philosophy students with vivid and thought‐provoking illustrations of philosophical issues. Film screenings stimulate discussion and may motivate renewed engagement with difficult philosophical texts. A stronger contention, however, seeks to link innovative and philosophically valuable thinking to ‘the film itself’ or to the ‘specificity of the cinematic medium’. Such claims raise interesting questions, including questions about the status of the increasingly prevalent philosophically motivated interpretations of particular movies. Who is actually doing the philosophizing in such cases? Is it the audio‐visual display, the film‐maker, or the philosopher who devises an interpretation of the work? What is the role of specifically cinematic devices in the philosophical points made in such interpretations? Is there any tension between the goal of appreciating a film as a work of art and the goal of arguing that a film has significant implications for a position on a problem in philosophy? A course in the general area of cinema as philosophy can focus on issues related to the locus and status of cinematic philosophizing. It can also delve into specific films and film‐makers and philosophically oriented interpretations of specific philosophical topics, such as personal identity. Issues pertaining to interpretation, meaning, and authorship can be usefully investigated in this connection, as can topics in meta‐philosophy related to the very nature of philosophical insight or knowledge. Author Recommends Carroll, Noël and Jinhee Choi, eds. 2008. The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, Part VIII: Film and Knowledge. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 381–405. Inclues a brief introduction by Carroll followed by papers by Bruce Russell, Karen Hanson, and Lester H. Hunt. Kania, Andrew, ed. 2009. Memento. London: Routledge. A number of philosophers elucidate philosophical themes in Memento and discuss more general issues pertaining to cinema’s philosophical significance. Livingston, Paisley. 2009. Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Part 1 surveys arguments surrounding the cinema as philosophy theme, providing detailed criticisms of some of the bold theses in this area. Part 2 discusses issues related to cinematic authorship and the status of philosophically motivated interpretations of works of fiction, arguing for a partial intentionalist account of a work’s meanings. Part 3 illustrates the intentionalist principles in a discussion of Ingmar Bergman’s philosophical sources, providing insight into themes of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and self‐knowledge in some of Bergman’s works. Livingston, Paisley and Carl Plantinga, eds. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Part IV: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. 547–659. Offers a succinct survey by Wartenberg as well as entries on Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, and Andrei Tarkovsky, discussions of film and specific philosophical topics (morality, skepticism, personal identity, and practical wisdom), and examples of philosophically motivated interpretations of three specific films: The Five Obstructions, Gattaca, and Memento. Smith, Murray and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds. 2006. Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. A collection of papers that combines essays devoted to general positions on the cinema as philosophy topic as well as specific interpretations of works in different genres. Turvey, Malcolm. 2008. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A probing critical investigation into the assumptions underlying influential philosophical claims about the epistemic value of cinema. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2008. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. Ably surveys and responds to arguments against the idea that films can ‘do philosophy’. It defends a conditionalist form of intentionalism in response to the ‘imposition objection’ according to which it is only the commentator who reads philosophical themes ‘into’ the movie; illustrates the favored account of film as philosophy with interpretations of specific cinematic fictions. Online Materials Film‐Philosophy Founded in 1996, this peer‐reviewed online journal is dedicated to philosophically oriented interpretations of films and cinema studies more generally. The e‐mail salon encourages discussion of related topics. Includes essays, festival reports, calls for papers, conference and job information, and book reviews. The archive includes contributions from 1997 to the present. Wartenberg, Thomas E. ‘Philosophy of Film.’The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; A brief survey of a range of issues in the philosophy of cinema including a few paragraphs on the film as philosophy topic. Philosophical Films A briefly annotated list of philosophical films grouped in rubrics such as ‘The Meaning of Life’ and ‘Environmental Ethics’. Sample Syllabus What follows is a 4‐week ‘start‐up module’ followed by samples of optional units that focus on particular topics and cinematic examples. Introductory Module Week I: Introduction & Overview Livingston, Paisley. ‘Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy.’Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): 1–14, 20 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2008.00158.x). Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2009. ‘Film as Philosophy.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 549–59. Russell, Bruce. 2008. ‘The Philosophical Limits of Film.’The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 387–390. Week II: The Bold Thesis on Film as Philosophy Reading: Livingston, Paisley, ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.’Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, Chapter One. 11–38. Screening: October (dir. Sergei Eisenstein 1928). Week III: Debating the Bold Thesis: The Case of October Carroll, Noël. 1998. ‘For God and Country.’Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 80–91. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. ‘Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67:4: 409–20. Week IV: Cinema as Philosophy: Objections and Replies Livingston, Paisley. 2009. ‘Arguing over Cinema as Philosophy.’Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, Chapter Two. 39–59. Additional Optional Units Depending on the instructor’s areas of interest and expertise, any of the following units could be added (and in some cases, easily expanded into longer segments). The Case of Ingmar Bergman Livingston, Paisley. 2009. ‘Ingmar Bergman.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 560–568. Screening(s): Wild Strawberries (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1957), or The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1957), or Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1966). Skepticism Fumerton, Richard. 2009. ‘Skepticism.’ In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 601–10. Screening: The Matrix (dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski 1999) or Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven 1990). Ethics Kupfer, Joseph. 1999. Visions of Virtue in Popular Film. Boulder, CO: Westview. 35–60. Falzon, Chris. 2009. ‘Why be Moral?’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 591–599. Screening: Groundhog Day (dir. Harold Ramis 1993), or Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen 1989), or Hollow Man (dir. Paul Verhoeven 2000). Personal Identity Knight, Deborah. 2009. ‘Personal Identity.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 611–619. Hanley, Richard. 2009. ‘Memento and Personal Identity: Are We Getting it Backwards?’Memento. Ed. Andrew Kania. London: Routledge. 107–126. Martin, Raymond. 2009. ‘The Value of Memory: Reflections on Memento.’Memento. Ed. Andrew Kania. London: Routledge. 87–106. Screening: Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan 2000). Freedom and (Genetic) Determinism Sesardic, Neven. 2009. ‘Gattaca.’The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 641–649. Screening: Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol 1997). Focus Questions • Is there anything special about the experience of fiction films that is especially well suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflection? • Have any novel and philosophically significant ideas found their first expression in a cinematic work? • Under what circumstances can the film medium be used as an expression of a cinematic author’s views? • What sort of background knowledge has to be in place for a film to be interpreted as articulating reasonably precise philosophical theses and arguments? • Does the goal of spelling out a film’s philosophical meaning sometimes conflict with the goal of appreciating its value as a work of art? (shrink)

Forensic authorship analysis is based on two assumptions: that every individual has a unique idiolect, and that features characteristic of that idiolect will recur with a relatively stable frequency. Yet, a speaker’s language can change with age, affective states, according to audience, or genre. Thus, studies on authorship analysis should adopt the theory that while some linguistic parameters of an idiolect can remain stable, others can change depending on various circumstances. This investigation, which takes a constructional and functional-based (...) approach to discourse-level phenomena in idiolectal stability, analyzes cross-genre data produced by nine Mexican participants throughout a twelve-year time span. This study contributes to a greater understanding of the linguistic elements that survive genre effects and are potentially useful in both investigative and evidential forensic linguistic work. We provide a detailed description of linguistic features, their specific values, and context-dependent interpretation, keeping in mind the context of expert linguistic testimony, with its preference for methods which “employ linguistically motivated analyses in combination with quantitative tools” (Solan & Tiersma, 2004, p.463). Our findings show that idiolectal style tends to remain stable across genres and communication modes in epistemic modality constructions. Epistemic markers —specifically, markers indicating low commitment by the speaker (e.g., _no sé_ ‘I don’t know’) or expressing indirectness when introducing the illocutionary force (e.g., _la verdad [es que]_ ‘the truth [is that]’)— display idiolectal stability, as these markers seem to be the most effective in terms of allowing speakers to strategically manifest the extent of their knowledge regarding what is said. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reclaiming the Works of Early Modern Women Authorship, Gender, and Interpretation in the Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635)1Aurora Wolfgang (bio) and Sharon Diane Nell (bio)Reclaiming the forgotten texts of women writers has been a major feminist undertaking of the last half-century. Indeed, believing in the importance of this sort of work, we have each spent much of our careers studying the women writers (...) absent from our own graduate-school education. What follows, however, is a cautionary tale about discovery and reclamation: first, our discovery of what we thought was a hitherto-neglected text by eminent seventeenth-century writer Madeleine de Scudéry—her Lettres amoureuses de divers auteurs de ce temps (1641); second, our discovery that the text was not (even as indexed in Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History microfilm collection) authored by Scudéry but was written instead by a Franciscan priest, Jacques Du Bosc. Clearly, our second discovery pointed out both our own rush to judgment as well as that of other literary scholars interested in the tenuous project of historical reclamation. In this essay, we seek to explore the implications of attribution and authorship for our cautionary tale. Does the fact that a work is not Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses but instead Du Bosc’s Nouveau recueil de lettres des dames de ce temps (1635) diminish its importance to the history of women’s letters?The First DiscoveryWe became interested in Scudéry’s Lettres amoureuses because of a brief description of the text in Joan DeJean’s Tender Geographies, a pioneering study of women novelists of the seventeenth century. DeJean describes a one-volume work that constituted the first publication of one of the most important writers of the seventeenth century, Madeleine de Scudéry. This work was a reversal of and “forceful response to” the so-called Ovidian model of epistolary fiction in which a “seduced and abandoned” woman complains in letter form about the infidelity of her male lover. In Scudéry’s text, however, men wrote long letters complaining about the women who did not reciprocate their love (DeJean, Tender Geographies 79).We obtained a copy of the Lettres amoureuses from the Women’s History microfilm collection, which was created in the 1970s (published 1983) in order to make available [End Page 1] an extensive array of texts and documents relating to women’s lives. We were surprised to see that all of the letters in the Lettres amoureuses were written by women—not men. Moreover, most of the letters were written by women to other women. No letters by men were included at all. Our copy of Lettres amoureuses contained letters and responses written between women, meant to show the excellence of women’s writing skill. The letters discussed and debated a wide variety of topics of interest to seventeenth-century French women; more strikingly, however, they reflected a close-knit homosocial world of women who openly expressed love, devotion, desire, and longing for each other’s company.Given the differences between our copy of Lettres amoureuses and the text described by DeJean, we wondered if we were looking at the same book. Was our collection the one to which DeJean referred? Yes and no. In another DeJean article about the Lettres amoureuses, we discovered that DeJean had used a particular copy of the text, one found in the holdings of Harvard’s Houghton Library. Upon first obtaining a microfilm copy of the Houghton volume, and later examining the physical book itself in Houghton’s rare books room, we saw that it (unlike our own copy) did indeed contain only letters by men who complain about their female beloveds. At this point, we thought we had discovered a second volume to Scudéry’s work: it seemed clear to us that the Lettres amoureuses had been halved at some point in the last several centuries and that we had a chance to reunite the volumes. After all, the preface in the Houghton volume tells the reader, “Si vous receuez fauorablement ce volume, ie vous en prepare un second” [“If you receive this volume favorably, I will prepare a second one... (shrink)

Background The number of coauthors in the medical literature has increased over the past 50 years as authorship continues to have important academic, social and financial implications.Aim and method The study aim was to determine the prevalence of honorary authorship in biomedical publications and identify the factors that lead to its existence. An email with a survey link was sent anonymously to 9283 corresponding authors of PubMed articles published within 1 year of contact.Results A completed survey was obtained (...) from 1246 corresponding authors, a response rate of 15.75%. One-third admitted that they had added authors who did not deserve authorship credit. Origin of the study from Europe and Asia , study type as case report/case series and increasing number of coauthors were found to be the associated factors on multivariate analysis. Journal impact factor was also found to be associated with honorary authorship for those who self-reported honorary authorship and 5.60 for those who did not report unjust authorship, p=0.05). In retrospect, 75% of the authors indicated that they would remove unjustified names from the authorship list. Reasons for adding honorary authors were complimentary , to avoid conflict at work , to facilitate article acceptance , and other .Conclusions Honorary authorship is relatively common in biomedical publications. Researchers should comply with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ criteria for authorship. (shrink)

Recent work in biology and cognitive science depicts a variety of target phenomena as the products of a tangled web of causal influences. Such influences may include both internal and external factors as well as complex patterns of reciprocal causal interaction. Such twisted tales are sometimes seen as a threat to explanatory strategies that invoke notions such as inner programs, genes for and sometimes even internal representations. But the threat, I shall argue, is more apparent than real. Complex causal influence, (...) in and of itself, provides no good reason to reject these familiar explanatory notions. To believe otherwise, I suggest, is generally to commit (at least) one of two seductive errors. The first error is to think that the general notion of a state x coding for an outcome y involves the state's constituting a full description of y. This is what I call the myth of the self-contained code. The second error is to think that the practice of treating certain factors as special (e.g., seeing genes as coding for outcomes in a way environmental factors do not) depends on the (often mistaken) belief that the singled out factor is somehow doing the most real work. Where the amounts of causal influence are evenly spread, it is assumed there can be no reason to treat one factor in a special way. This is what I term the Myth of Explanatory Equality. Avoiding these errors involves reminding ourselves of (1) the rich context-dependence of even standard, unproblematic uses of the notions of code, program and information content (all three make sense only relative to an assumed ecological backdrop) and (2) the difference between explaining why an event occurred and displaying the full workings of a complex causal system. (shrink)

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal theorists (...) for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IPhRAS), held in 2021. The purpose of the article is to give an overview of IPhRAS's contribution to the study of Aristotle's ethics within the framework of domestic Aristotelian studies, to note the main works of IPhRAS employees in this field. The material of the article is aimed not only at summing up the results to a significant date, but can be (...) used as an auxiliary reference point in the domestic research literature by all those interested in the ethics of Aristotle. The article examines the articles and monographs of IPhRAS employees, makes brief descriptions of the most significant ideas expressed in them, analyzes the general process of development of Aristotle's ethics research in IPhRAS. The result of the conducted research is the identification of two directions in the study of Aristotle's ethics by IPhRAS employees – philosophical-theoretical and historical-philosophical. Within the framework of the first direction, two types are also distinguished: those aimed at the theoretical reconstruction of Aristotle's teaching on morality itself and those that turn to Aristotle's works in search of modern significant concepts. The second direction is represented by translation work, structural and comparative analysis of Aristotle's texts in order to reproduce them as accurately as possible and clarify individual concepts and statements. The main conclusion of the study is the statement that IPhRAS has not yet developed a holistic school in the approach to the study of Aristotle's ethics, and also that the two discovered areas of research are being implemented separately from each other. However, in both directions, researchers proceed largely from the analysis of the philosophical language of the Stagirite, which makes not only historical and philosophical works significant for philosophical and theoretical ones, but also vice versa. Also, despite a relatively short history, the study of Aristotle's ethics at IPhRAS has a systematic nature, all generations of employees are involved in it, which promises its further successful development. (shrink)

Determining appropriate authorship recognition in student-faculty collaborative research is a complex task. In this quantitative study, responses from 1346 students and faculty in education and some social science disciplines at 36 research-intensive institutions in the United States were analyzed to provide a description of current and recommended practices for authorship in student-faculty collaborative research. The responses revealed practices and perceptions that are not aligned with ethical guidelines and a lack of consensus among respondents about appropriate practice. Faculty and (...) student respondents agreed that students deserve more authorship recognition than they get in common practice but they did not agree on the appropriate authorship arrangement for several of the collaborative scenarios described in the study or on the relative value of various contributions to research projects. The misalignment with ethical codes and lack of consensus among the respondents is problematic because student-faculty collaborative research is common and authored publications are powerful indicators of research competency. With these detailed results, students and faculty can better anticipate areas where their perspectives are likely to differ and faculty can work to clarify ambiguous expectations. (shrink)

The question of what ontological insights can be gained from the knowledge of physics (keyword: ontic structural realism) cannot obviously be separated from the view of physics as a science from an epistemological perspective. This is also visible in the debate about 'scientific realism'. This debate makes it evident, in the form of the importance of perception as a criterion for the assertion of existence in relation to the 'theoretical entities' of physics, that epistemology itself is 'ontologically laden'. This is (...) in the form of the assumption that things (or entities) in themselves exist as such and such determined ones (independent of cognition, autonomously). This ontological assumption is not only the basis of our naïve understanding of cognition, but also its indispensable premise, insofar as this understanding is a fundamentally passive, 'receptive' one. Accordingly, just as 'perception' is the foundation, ('objective') description is the aim of cognition, that which cognition is about. In this sense, our idea of cognition and our idea of the things are inseparably linked. Without the ontological premise mentioned we just would not know what cognition is, but it is basically just a kind of image that we have in our minds (an assumption that helps us understand 'cognition'). Epistemology not only shares this basic assumption (which it also shares with metaphysics), but it revolves (unlike metaphysics) entirely around it by making the idea and demand of 'certainty' a condition of 'real' knowledge. As 'certainty' is a subjective criterion this entails the 'remodelling' of the real, holistic cognitive situation (to which metaphysics adheres) into a linear subject-object-relation (which results in the strict 'transcendence' of the objects). And it also establishes, due to its 'expertise' in matters of cognition, the 'primacy of epistemology' over all other sciences. Now, on closer inspection, however, the expertise of epistemology seems not all that dependable, because it basically consists only of paradigms which, from the point of view of the holism of the real cognitive situation itself, are nothing more than relatively simplistic interpretations of this situation. However, we do not yet know what another conception of cognition might look like (which is not surprising given the high rank of the phenomenon of cognition in the hierarchy of phenomena according to their complexity). 'Certainty' as a criterion of cognition is thus excluded from the outset, and thus the linear relational model of cognition appears as what it is, a gross distortion of the real, holistic cognitive situation. The significance of this argumentation with regard to physics is that the linear epistemological model of cognition itself is a major obstacle to an adequate epistemological understanding of physics. This is because it is fixed 'a priori' to an object-related concept of cognition, and to 'description' as the only mode of ('real') cognition. But physics (without questioning our naïve notion of cognition on the level of epistemology) simply works past it and its basic assumptions. Its cognitive concept (alias heuristic) is fundamentally different from that of metaphysics. The acceptance of the real, holistic cognitive situation is, in my opinion, the condition for an adequate understanding of physics' heuristic access to objects, its transcendental, generalizing cognitive concept, as well as its ontological relevance and dimension of its own. (shrink)

In recent work on context­dependency, it has been argued that certain types of sentences give rise to a notion of relative truth. In particular, sentences containing predicates of personal taste and moral or aesthetic evaluation as well as epistemic modals are held to express a proposition (relative to a context of use) which is true or false not only relative to a world of evaluation, but other parameters as well, such as standards of taste or knowledge or (...) an agent. Thus, a sentence like chocolate tastes good would express a proposition p that is true or false not only at a world of evaluation, but relative to the additional parameter as well, such as a parameter of taste or an agent. I will argue that the sentences that apparently give rise to relative truth should be understood by relating them in a certain way to the first person. More precisely, such sentences express what I will call first­person­based genericity, a form of generalization that is based on or directed toward an essential first­person application of the predicate. The account differs from standard relative truth account in crucial respects: it is not the truth of the proposition expressed that is relative to the first person; the proposition expressed by a sentence with a predicate of taste rather has absolute truth conditions. Instead it is the propositional content itself that requires a first­personal cognitive access whenever it is entertained. This account, I will argue, avoids a range of problems that standard relative truth theories of the sentences in question face and explains a number of further peculiarities that such sentences display. (shrink)

How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory (...) and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities. (shrink)

Kierkegaard scholars have made much of Kierkegaard’s posthumously published The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and the work does seem to provide a key to interpreting Kierkegaard’s infamous authorial difficulties – not the least of which is the meaning of pseudonymity in his work. Considerations of the book’s authorship itself are, however, exceptionally rare. In this article, I open an inquiry into issues of authorship that arise within the work, both in terms of what (...) The Point of View has to say about the Kierkegaardian authorship, and also in terms of how (and by whom) the book is itself authored. I propose that The Point of View brings authorship to the fore as a philosophical issue and, contrary to the consensus view, I argue that – despite the fact that the book was clearly written by Søren Kierkegaard – the book’s author cannot be identified. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 331 The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy. By ROBERT PATTISON. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii +231. $29.95. This extremely provocative and elegantly written study of John Henry Newman's struggle with "liberalism" argues that Newman was a genuine rebel whose solitary voice needs to be heard, as much today as then, but whose project was, in the end, eminently unsuccessful. The (...) preface announces that the purpose of the book is to " establish Newman 's impeccable credentials as a failure," and the suggestion that " the totality of his failure is the measure of his grandeur as a critic of our culture" leads to the appraisal that Newman's true "intellectual counterparts " were Marx and Nietzsche and Lenin, rather than Arnold or Carlyle (vi-viii, 53). As "the single unwavering but articulate voice raised against liberalism in all its incarnations," Newman indirectly offers an " invaluable " description of the thought against which he battled, but his importance, the author suggests, lies in his utter failure to make a dent in the century of thought following him: " the victory of everything Newman despised makes his defeated and unfashionable view of Western civilization interesting not merely as a consistent critique of what has come to pass, hut as one of the few intelligible alternatives to the ideological monopoly of liberalism " (53). That alternative, a " consistent view of the world opposed to liberalism root and branch, sharing none of its premises and despising all of its works is an inestimable benefit, for no one more than the liberal himself," for without an "honest and unforgiving voice" like Newman's, the liberal " would smugly assume that the paradoxical tenets of his creed are... self-evident truths" (215). On the one hand, Newman's value lies in challenging liberalism's complacency, and treating "the ugliest manifestations of liberalism with the contempt they deserve but rarely provoke" (215). Moreover, Pattison allows that Newman offers an " acute refutation of its [liberalism's] major premises " (53) (if " refutation " is the ' achievement ' word I think it is, this seems inconsistent on Pattison's part). On the other hand, Newman's value lies precisely in failing to undermine liberalism-while he reminds liberalism that it is a heresy, thus provoking its vitality, it is only insofar as liberalism remains vital that " the possibilities of relative decency and tolerant forbearance remain alive" (216). The author argues, in other words, that Newman's attack on liberalism hits the mark with respect to liberalism's "ugliest manifestations," hut it is, unfortunately, tied to a theory of belief which entails an intolerant dogmatism. Newman is, in the end, a peculiar figure, described as 332 BOOK REVIEWS important and valuable (and even possibly correct-189), yet, none· theless, insignificant, "trivial" (8), and even "absurd" (143); like the Oxford Movement with which he is associated, he said to have made an "impression" without making an "impact" (25), and that, according to Pattison, is a blessing for those care about the liberal cause oftoleration (65, 178). Pattison begins in earnest his exploration of Newman's response to his age by examining his particular response to one critical, yet typical, opponent: "The combat with Renn Dickson Hampden epitomizes the process by which Newman determined the narrow compass of truth and formed his reply to the heresies of liberalism " (60). The " almost pathological detestation " of Hampden which the author attributes to Newman (77, n.40) is the response to principles put forth by Hampden which Newman saw as "the social expression of Socinianism," which was itself only a reincarnation of the Ari.an heresy (76). Hampden's heresy, on this view, grew out of Arianism-to understand that "is to see how Newman formed the standards of truth by which he condemned the modern world" (76). For Newman, "the modern world is a realization of Socinian beliefs," " the complex of contemporary civilization originated in the distorted beliefs of Arius" (198-99), and Arianism (Hampden's heresy, liberalism) raised the pressing question "what kind of truth could words express" (107). Pattison presents Newman's understanding of liberalism from two somewhat different perspectives-HberaHsm is not only anti-dogmatic, it also claims that one... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Boethii Daci Aliorumque Sophismata by Boethius of DaciaJulie Brumberg-ChaumontBoethius of Dacia. Boethii Daci Aliorumque Sophismata. Edited by Sten Ebbesen and Irène Rosier-Catach. Corpus Philosophorum Danicorum Medii Aevi, 9. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2021. Pp. 624. Hardback, 400.00 DKK.This volume offers a reliable and accurate scholarly edition of two collections of thirteenthcentury sophismata (logical and grammatical puzzles) contained in ms. Brugge, Stedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek 509 (=B) and (...) ms. Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana 12 sin. 3 (=F). Taken together, these two collections constitute a set of twenty-three sophismata called "Sophismata Florentino-Brugensia" in the catalogue published by Sten Ebbesen and Frédéric Goubier (A Catalogue of Thirteenth-Century Sophismata [Paris: Vrin, 2010]). These sophismata were previously available only in partial editions. Specifically, the two versions of the sophisma "Omnis homo de necessitate est animal," previously both ascribed to Boethius of Dacia, were partially edited from F by Grabmann in 1940 and from B by Roos in 1962. Other sophismata in this collection have been previously edited by Ebbesen, but their editions should now be considered "obsolete," according to the editor himself (9). Each sophisma is identified by an S followed by a number (S1, S2, etc.). In turn, each sophisma deals with several issues or problems, each one of which is identified by a P followed by a number (P1, P2, etc.). The volume is very usefully completed by an index of explicit and implicit references to other works and an index of parallel passages, both compiled by Kristian Thomsen Purreskov (591–601). Finally, this edition is accompanied by a selective but still rich index of words, where special attention has been dedicated to the sophismata by Boethius of Dacia (603–24). All the material is presented in a clear and accurate way. There are only a few minor material errors (specifically, the running titles for problems in S4 are messy; at 33, "a*" should be read as "b*"; at 49, "S14" should be read as "S18").Sten Ebbesen is the sole editor of all sophismata except for the three that deal with grammatical subjects, for which Irène Rosier-Catach is the main editor, with Ebbesen serving as a coeditor.Concerning the authorship of each sophisma, Ebbesen follows the indications contained in F, but he also provides some independent discussions (24–26). Thus, he ascribes two sophismata to Boethius of Dacia, ten to Peter of Auvergne, one to an otherwise unknown Nicholas of Normandy, and the remaining ten to anonymous masters. They are listed in detail in the "Index sophismatum et problematum" (65–69).After a summary of the contents of the volume, Ebbesen's introduction contains five sections of different lengths: first, a history of the edition (7–9); second, a general description of the structure and functioning of sophismata (9–13); third, a description of the seven manuscripts used for the edition (14–22); fourth, a discussion about authorship (22–58); and fifth, an explanation of the principles of the edition (58–62). In the third section, Ebbesen provides a wealth of information about manuscripts, stemma codicum, and evaluations of variants, especially about the relationship between S and B for the sophismata contained in both manuscripts. In this regard, Ebbesen establishes that B and F are probably not two independent reportationes of the same oral disputation, that they had a common ancestor, and that they do not depend on one another (25–32). The fourth section, about authorship, demonstrates that the collection contained in F is earlier than that contained in B. One major result is that the text copied in B (S1B) ("Omnis homo de necessitate est animal") is not by Boethius of Dacia (35). Because of F priority, that manuscript is chosen as the main witness for those sophismata or parts of sophismata that are common to F and B.The second section makes an extremely significant historical and doctrinal contribution to the history of logic, particularly the history of logical practices and their textual records. [End Page 705] Three constitutive parts of a sophisma are identified: first, the sophismatic sentence itself; second, a brief disputation (called here corpus sophismatis) about the sophismatic sentence... (shrink)

Relative essentialism is the novel metaphysical theory that there can be multiple objects occupying the same space at the same time each with its own de re modal truths. Relative essentialism is motivated by Davidson’s semantics and his denial that nature itself is divided into a privileged domain of objects. Relative essentialism was first presented by Samuel C. Wheeler. I argue that Wheeler’s approach to the Davidsonian program needs to be elaborated in terms of various types of (...) preconceptual intentional relations. This elaboration is already largely implicit in Davidson’s own later work and in Wheeler’s relaunching of Davidsonian metaphysics. More specifically, I argue that relative essentialism is ultimately founded not on predication narrowly construed but on intentionality broadly construed. Following Wheeler’s suggestion, comparisons are made between relative essentialism and work within the phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Authorship of the Abstract Revisited John 0. Nelson More than a dozen years ago, in the pages of The Philosophical Quarterly,1 this writer contested Sraffa and Keynes' claim, advanced in the introduction to their edition ofthe Abstract? that it was Hume and not Adam Smith (as traditionally supposed) who was the author of that work. The traditional view, which might be called the Adam Smith authorship-theory, (...) was largely inspired by and seemed nailed shut by Hume's reference to a "Mr Smith" in a letter to Francis Hutcheson, datedMarch 4, 1740.3There appeared tobe goodreasonsforidentifying this "Mr Smith" with Adam Smith and then the latter with the undivulged author of the Abstract. It was known, for instance, that previous to March 4, 1740, Adam Smith had been a student of Hutcheson's and that Hutcheson was in the habit of setting his students the task of writing abstracts of newly published philosophical works.4 Since Hutcheson had originallylooked with favor on both the Treatise and its author,5 it had to seem more than likely that he had set his students the task ofwriting an abstract ofthe newly published Treatise ofHume. It was known, too, that Adam Smith was in possession of a copy ofthe Treatise soon after the date of H.6 Who, then, might be the "Mr Smith" adverted to in H's "My Bookseller has sent to Mr Smith a Copy of my Book, which I hope he has receive, as well as your Letter," except that same student of Hutcheson's, Adam Smith? What other Smith might have been known to Hutcheson, whom Hume could have wanted to refer to? No other Smith appeared to fit the bill. But why should Hume have wanted to refer in his correspondence with Hutcheson to an obscure, sixteen-year-old student ofHutcheson's, besides going to the trouble of having his bookseller send him a copy of the Treatise, unless that student had in some way made himselfnot only known to Hume but so highly regarded that Hume would want to favor him, presumably at his own expense, with a copy ofthe Treatise? The only tenable answer had to seem to be that this same student had composed such a perceptive and laudatory précis of the Treatise for Hutcheson that the latter had shown it to Hume and Hume, in the honest attempt to excite interest and sales of that languishing work, had seen to its publication as the Abstractl These are the reasonings Volume XVII Number 1 83 JOHN O. NELSON and considerations that inspired and seemed to confirm the Adam Smith authorship-theory.7 As can be perceived, these reasonings and considerations all revolve around the reference to a "Mr Smith"in H andthe identification of that Smith with Adam Smith. When, therefore, Sraffa and Keynes in the introduction to their edition oftheAbstract pointed out that there existed another Smith who might arguably be the Mr Smith referred toin H, namely, the DubUn publisher oftwo ofHutcheson's works, John Smith "at the Philosopher's Head on the Blind Quay," its major prop being seemingly knocked out from under it, the Adam Smith authorship-theory crashed—at least in the eyes of the general world—to the ground. And in thelatter's place, various ofits supporting reasons being given a lease on life, such as Hume's well-known endeavors and desires to excite interest in this first work of his, the Hume authorship-theory, so to speak, seated itself. In my previous venture into this subject, "Has the Authorship of An Abstract ofa Treatise ofHuman Nature Really Been Decided?"8 I tried, I believe with some success, to show that Sraffa and Keynes' arguments were not so unanswerable as they were generally taken to be and that, in fact, they presented various difficulties which the traditional theory avoided. But what then occasions this new excursion into these troubled waters? What more is to be said that I did not say in "Decided"? In "Decided" I presented various arguments and considerations that showed that it was unlikely either that Hume was the author of theAbstract or that the Mr Smith referred to in H... (shrink)

Weinberg's 1972 work, in his description, had two purposes. The first was practical to bring together and assess the wealth of data provided over the previous decade while realizing that newer data would come in even as the book was being printed. He hoped the comprehensive picture would prepare the reader and himself to that new data as it emerged. The second was to produce a textbook about general relativity in which geometric ideas were not given a starring role (...) for (in his words) too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscure the deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics. (shrink)

"Every other is truly other, but no other is wholly other." This is the claim that Aspects of Alterity defends. Taking up the question of otherness that so fascinates contemporary continental philosophy, this book asks what it means for something or someone to be other than the self. Levinas and those influenced by him point out that the philosophical tradition of the West has generally favored the self at the expense of the other. Such a self-centered perspective never encounters the (...) other qua other, however. In response, postmodern thought insists on the absolute otherness of the other, epitomized by the deconstructive claim "every other is wholly other." But absolute otherness generates problems and aporias of its own. This has led some thinkers to reevaluate the notion of relative otherness in light of the postmodern critique, arguing for a chiastic account that does justice to both the alterity and the similitude of the other. These latter two positions--absolute otherness and a rehabilitated account of relative otherness--are the main contenders in the contemporary debate.The philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel provide the point of embarkation for coming to understand the two positions on this question. Levinas and Marcel were contemporaries whose philosophies exhibit remarkably similar concern for the other but nevertheless remain fundamentally incompatible. Thus, these two thinkers provide a striking illustration of both the proximity of and the unbridgeable gap between two accounts of otherness.Aspects of Alterity delves into this debate, first in order understand the issues at stake in these two positions and second to determine which description better accounts for the experience of encountering the other.After a thorough assessment and critique of otherness in Levinas's and Marcel's work, including a discussion of the relationship of ethical alterity to theological assumptions, Aspects of Alterity traces the transmission and development of these two conceptions of otherness. Levinas's version of otherness can be seen in the work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, while Marcel's understanding of otherness influences the work of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney.Ultimately, Aspects of Alterity makes a case for a hermeneutic account of otherness. Otherness itself is not absolute, but is a chiasm of alterity and similitude. Properly articulated, such an account is capable of addressing the legitimate ethical and epistemological concerns that lead thinkers to construe otherness in absolute terms, but without the "absolute aporias" that accompany such a characterization. (shrink)

This article is a limited defense of copyrights for the contents of factual compilations. The form of protection that I propose, under which the collective factual content of such compilations is protected, differs from an approach that protects individual facts and from the currently accepted approach (as articulated in Feist v. Rural Telephone), under which only selections and arrangements of individual facts are protected. Although I accept that there are sound economic justifications for refusing to copyright individual facts, my justifications (...) differ from those that have traditionally been offered. The traditional justifications are: 1) that the monopolization costs of protecting individual facts are too great, because facts are too valuable as components for future works to have access to them limited by property rights, and 2) that facts fail the independent creation requirement for copyright protection, because they are not authored by anyone. Both of these justifications fail. Monopolization costs can at most justify limited terms for copyrights in facts. And, far from failing the independent creation requirement, facts (properly understood as representations of reality rather than reality itself) are as much works of authorship as novels are. I argue that transaction and enforcement costs are the real reasons that individual facts are not copyrightable. Furthermore, some components of factual works - specifically, ground breaking and explanatorily powerful theories like Einstein's theory of relativity - should be copyrightable if our sole concerns were transaction, enforcement and monopolization costs. Instead such theories are not protectable because any work that borrows them is their complement (in the sense that its production makes them more desirable), provided that the work acknowledges the theories' true provenance. This is because it is only through dissemination in other works that such theories can undergo the test of truth. But nothing about the uncopyrightability of the components of factual works stands in the way of copyrights for the collective factual content conveyed by such works. It might appear that protecting collective content is no different from the Feist approach, in which selections and arrangements of facts alone are protected. After all, collective factual content is created by selecting and arranging individual facts. If individual facts are not protected, then the selections and arrangements, it seems, must be. But this is a fallacy. Protecting a fictional story is not the same as protecting the methods of selection and arrangement used to generate the story from unprotected elements of character, plot, and setting. Likewise, protecting the collective factual content of a database is not the same as the Feist method. The collective content of databases, I argue, should be protected in the same manner that fictional stories are. Such an approach, far diverging from traditional copyright principles, follows from them. (shrink)

To those who know little about the Middle Ages, the copying of manuscripts of “the ancients” (whether classical, such as the Roman poet Horace, or Christian, such as Saints Jerome or Augustine) often seems either a laudable act of preserving the past or an unfortunate fixation on repeating the words of others rather than penning new and original compositions. Even scholars of the Middle Ages appear sometimes more interested in new types of works such as fabliaux or courtly romances written (...) in the vernacular; when they study the practice of copying, they often concentrate on identifying prototypes or legacies. Finding old wine in old bottles has been a fairly constant theme in medieval studies; sometimes, we must admit, medievalists have just thrown out the old bottles and moved on to something completely new. In this context, it may seem strange to find a work about medieval Latin manuscript commentaries titled “The Birth of the Author,” responding to Roland Barthes's well-known essay “The Death of the Author,” published in 1984 and cited repeatedly since. What can it mean to see new, self-conscious awareness of the act of personal creation in works that are copies by scribes of other works that themselves comment on yet earlier works, often of a certain age or canonicity? Yet in this intelligent, engaging, and beautifully produced book, art historian Jeffrey Hamburger not only shows how those who wrote commentaries came to suggest that anyone who composes a work (even the scribe who copies it) could be considered a creator of meaning but also that the images in commentaries themselves sometimes make statements—indeed, statements more radical than those in the text—about the author of the work being illustrated. Long known as one of the relatively rare historians of medieval art equipped with a wide knowledge of theology and hence of how images respond to and reflect text, Hamburger here shows himself possessed of a shrewd eye for the image itself. He studies illuminated prefaces to, among other texts, the prose and poetic works of Horace as used in the medieval classroom, copies of the major biblical commentary of the High Middle Ages, the Glossa ordinaria, and Rupert of Deutz's erotically charged commentary on the Song of Songs. Changing the lens through which scholars have usually viewed such texts, Hamburger argues that images of authors of commentaries sometimes go beyond anything in the text to assert the authority not only of the author of the text commented on and of the commentator but occasionally even of the scribe.The Birth of the Author is a work of complicated analysis, and its full power demands close attention. Understanding how images construct claims that go beyond the text involves a good deal of careful looking. Hamburger is a patient and clear guide, but the reader must be prepared to flip back and forth between the magnificent colored images the publisher provides and to follow what are often painstaking arguments from comparison of small visual differences or puzzling identifications of seemingly strange details. The result of doing so is, however, to gain not only the reward of Hamburger's ingenious conclusions but also a lesson in how to look. For example, in a discussion of Gilbert Universalis's commentary on the Lamentations of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, Hamburger shows how Gilbert not only identifies Jeremiah as a “divine rhetorician” but also assimilates his own act of authorship to Jeremiah's prophetic speech. In the only extant copy of Gilbert's text that has a program of illustrations, the artist constructs both Jeremiah's speech and Gilbert's interpretation as similar acts of creation by framing both authors in parallel architectural images that evoke the Old Testament temple and a Christian church. Or to give a final example of Hamburger's interpretive reach: the book concludes not with yet another medieval preface but with an example of the far less usual manuscript epilogue. Here not only commentator, scribe, and illustrator but even the medieval reader construct themselves. Reception becomes interpretation, illustration becomes construction. In a commentary by the Carolingian figure Sedulius Scotus (fl. 840–60) on the Roman grammarian Donatus (mid-fourth century), the illustrator depicts Donatus as author and scribe (thus assimilating author into copier and vice versa). On the same folio, a later medieval reader constructs himself as reader/author in a charming marginal doodle that seems to entrap Donatus in a sort of hangman's noose. Thus, a bit wryly perhaps, Hamburger—himself teacher, commentator, and consummate scholar—seems to suggest that even frustrated students can construct themselves as interpreters and, yes, authors. Behind the seeming repetition and backward glance of the images in medieval commentaries lies radical and forward-looking self-awareness of the acts of authoring, interpreting, reading, and imagining. In Hamburger's analysis, the most seemingly conventional of medieval genres—the preface to commentaries on the texts of others—is a locus of the birth in illustration of the self-conscious and self-expressive author and reader. (shrink)

The general aim of this work is to show the importance of the adressee's mind as planned by the author of a speech act or of a norm; in particular, how important are the expected motivations for goal adoption. We show that speech acts differ from one another for the different motivations the speaker is attempting to obtain from the hearer. The description of the participants' social positions is not sufficient. Important conflicts can arise which are not relative to (...) what to do, but to the different motives requested by the speaker. This view is applied to norms, pointing out that what is required by a norm is not only a behaviour but also a mental attitude, and that the prescribed mind might be even more important than the prescribed behaviour. Norms don't want just behavioural conformity, but also that this conformity implies an acknowledgement and a reinforcement of both the authority and the norm itself. Norms ask for submission. Any form of norm is aimed at influencing the addressee by changing his or her mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Inheriting Identity and Practicing TransformationThe Time of Feminist PoliticsShannon HoffA human life unfolds over time. No moment of it can be considered apart from the others, independently of the fact that the human being was and will be, and so no moment is sufficient on its own to tell us of the nature of that identity. Each moment is insufficient as an expression of who we are, as (...) an answer to the question of what we want to be, or as a point at which a full account of our identity could be given. And we live each moment as if afflicted by a dual blindness with regard to the past and future that lend it significance; while exercising pervasive influence in the present, this past and future are relatively inaccessible to our reflective insight. We are always “growing up,” so to speak, from out of a childhood that can never be the purely transparent object of reflection, to an adulthood or “accomplishment” of identity that is always in the mysterious future, unimaginable in the terms of the adolescence in which we find ourselves.My purpose here is to show how this issue resonates in the context of feminist philosophy, feminist critique, and feminist practice—that is, how a consideration of time and its impact on human experience allows us to highlight the accomplishments of various avenues of feminist thought, to elaborate their shortcomings in relation to each other, to perceive the reasons behind the tensions among them, and to understand the way in which they are (and should [End Page 167] be understood as) connected. I will work through the issue of what it means to live in the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future—what it means to inherit an already meaningful world, to be an individual in the present, and to be propelled into an uncertain future—so as to provide a general framework by which to interpret the history of feminist thought. I will explain these different temporal dimensions in terms of the (respective) ideas of cultivation, universality, and transformation, identifying the positive and negative significance of each and also the demand that the tensions among them be negotiated. Finally, I will show that feminist justice is in fact found here, as answerability to all three—to communities of cultivation, to the demands of universality, and to the inconclusiveness and transformability of human identity. While much feminist thinking has been committed to exploring these elements singly, in abstraction from the others, and while such work is important, it is also valuable to explicitly explore the relationships and tensions among these different aspects, to articulate how to act and think in light of this underlying conceptual context, and to do so in a more explicit and self-conscious way.There is, of course, a disadvantage to not exploring these elements on their own terms: namely, that one handles their subtleties roughly. A further and related danger is that involved in trying to draw a broad picture of a tradition with complex and conflicting elements, one that does not count itself as a tradition at times—as a “we,” a feminism, or a feminist thought.1 While I will talk about “feminism” or “feminist thought,” I do not presume that these differences do not exist; my goal is simply to explore what is involved in an elaboration of a critical interpretation of society, when the society one critically interprets is an agent in one’s formation. The description of the dynamics of human becoming, agency, and critique I develop below has the purpose of showing that it is possible to understand differences between feminist positions as complementary, a process that will lead me to underemphasize stringent divisions and charged oppositions and to focus on drawing connections. Let us turn now to a preliminary description of the conceptual framework I seek to construct.Feminism and TimeTo advance feminist purposes is, one might presume, to hope for and work toward a new and transformed reality in the future. It would seem, however, that this reality cannot be clearly envisioned in the present, since that would require the transformation of the very people envisioning it. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal Mind in its Early Years, 1876–1920:An IntroductionThomas W. StaleyAt its inception, and in the succeeding decades, the journal Mind was a publication of singular significance. Founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain, it was the first of its kind: the pioneering "philosophical journal" in the Anglophone world, to use Bain's own description.1 Close on the heels of Nature, the hugely successful periodical established seven years earlier to address (...) progress in the natural sciences, Mind would devote itself to another important domain of intellectual work in Britain and worldwide. At the time, science and philosophy were as yet poorly demarcated areas, and the primary ground on which this distinction was negotiated was the study of the human mind and its role in social phenomena.2 Especially under its first two editors, George Croom Robertson (serving from the foundation to 1891) and G. F. Stout (from 1892 until 1920), the journal bore witness to a wholesale transformation of scholarly activity regarding these subjects.The purview of Mind was advertised on its opening page by Croom Robertson.3 This introductory offering bears close scrutiny as an indication of how the journal would develop. Foremost, in his mission statement, Robertson elaborated his position in terms of a series of dichotomies that [End Page 259] Mind would bridge. As both an "organ for... original researches" and a "critical record," the journal would be an announcer for and a judge of new work on the phenomena of "subjective consciousness" as well as "objective" physiological operations. On the side of psychology, it would deal with such "natural" mental productions as language as well as the "abnormal mental phases" of insanity. It would treat the mental character of animals in addition to that of humans, employing a relative methodology encompassing "much of... Anthropology and all that is meant by Comparative Psychology." In its philosophical aspect, Mind would range from the theoretical ground of "ultimate questions" to applications in educational practice and "Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics." It would deal with the historical background of philosophy and with "what is being done or left undone in the present day." While an obvious focus was expected on the intellectual community in Britain itself, attention would be granted to work "on the Continent and in America" and the reader was assured that "Mind will not be the organ of any philosophical school."Mind's masthead, formally unchanged until 1972, denominated it as a "Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Psychology" but Robertson's comments indicate that it would encompass far more than this phrase might immediately suggest. Explicitly at issue was a wide range of controversies then current in Britain. Late Victorian culture was characterized by a self-conscious examination of its own status and prospects. Especially vital concerns included the secularization of knowledge-making institutions4; shifts in the role of public social movements5; the reshaping of scholarship to accommodate new modes of inquiry, fostering in the process new relationships between literature and science6; and the morality of scientific practice7—all items of substantive interest for Mind and its founding editor. [End Page 260]As detailed in a pair of articles written for the journal's centennial in 1976, Mind under its first two editors gradually transformed into an exclusive forum for academic philosophy, shedding its aspirations to chronicle scientific psychology as well as its other broader goals for social reform.8 However, for a significant period, it continued to pursue the ambitious program of inquiry indicated on its very first page. In Robertson's introduction, Mind's territory was effectively defined to cover all of what was then known alternately as "moral philosophy" or "moral science." At the moment of the journal's foundation, this was a field undergoing wholesale transformation. An examination of the project of the new periodical provides a window into many important changes underway in intellectual activity at the time. That this project would be centered on problems of "mind" was hardly a surprise. The dominant orientation of British philosophy since the Enlightenment work of Locke and Hume had been directed toward issues of human society by way of an inquiry into individual mental operations. However, with... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 286—310. This mad play of writing —Stéphane Mallarmé Somewhere in between mathematics and theory, light and dark, physicality and projection, oscillates the poetry of Alessandro De Francesco. The texts hold no periods or commas, not even a capital letter for reference. Each piece stands as an individual construction, and yet the poetry flows in and out of the frame. Images resurface from one poem to the next, haunting the reader with reincarnations of an object lost in the (...) grass or a representation of a pear in a Dutch still life, embedded in cycles of cinematic close ups and multiple dimensions. As a whole, De Francesco’s oeuvre suggests, to use the title of one of his works, a redefinition —linguistic, epistemological, personal. The poem The End (un’agenda) (The End (an agenda)) opens with a quote by literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, which may be translated as follows: Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from this optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated out approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.[1] In writing, De Francesco seeks to redefine our approach to things. His poems, like Blanchot’s writings, speak to both illuminate and to obscure. The reader hangs in an absence of reality within language that necessitates an attempt at interpretation, yet renders such a search ultimately futile. De Francesco draws the anonymous images that appear in this poem from the city of Paris, his current home. The fragmented narrative depicts an inner doubt of realness, calling for a confirmation of a physical existence beyond verbalization and cogitation. Cyclical references to film throw into question the reliability of the reality he creates. The light, sometimes red and safe, other times absent and murky, cannot necessarily be trusted as a guaranteed means of illumination. Blanchot’s distinction between language and visualization, and the relationship of each to reality, though linked specifically to The End (un’agenda) , can be a lens through which to read any of the three works that follow. assente obliqua (absent oblique) is composed of descriptions of six still life paintings, ranging from Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century to 1960s minimalism. The actual images of the paintings are absent, and the text is the sole source and object of a virtual reality created around the artwork. “Absent oblique” refers to the light source placed outside of the frame, which both informs and distracts viewing of the scene. Although mere description can be unreliable and unsatisfying in its necessary limitation, the representational act of description is shown as more than just a human want. It is a need, a means by which to grapple with an unsure reality. As the illustrations progress, they descend into abstraction and chaos. The precariously placed plate triggers the movement: the bottle bursts and the objects collapse into the movement of a tracking film camera. corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale (foreign body in ascending motion) is prose poetry in action. Its objective tone of description is skewed by the subjectivity of the narrative as horrific images are relayed in fragmented but matter-of-fact manner. A “foreign body” is both a mass of cancerous cells, and a corporeal description, and the poem takes the reader on a journey back and forth between the two, destination unclear. Beyond a questioning of the real, corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale is an examination of the possible. De Francesco’s poetry becomes a camera obscura through which to observe the constant flux of light and dark that blurs our reality. His work is colored by the idea of apo koinou , a Greek term meaning “from the common” that involves a construction of two clauses with a shared word or phrase. Through such melting of meaning, De Francesco creates a fluid ambiguity that is nonetheless grounded in bodily concepts. In assente obliqua , the reader is confronted with a description of a still life that rapidly transforms into a more chilling scene: the membrane of the mushroom in the basket emerges behind the white cloth a body could hide itself that asks for help In the realm of pure description, there is a mushroom that peeks out from behind a white cloth in a basket. Behind the white cloth, too, there could be a body, hiding, asking for help. Such an elision elicits disorienting mistrust in temporality, but also expands the planar possibilities of syntactical meaning. A white cloth is not merely a construct in still life painting, but veil that both shields and reveals potential mysteries. It is a proposed alternative to a traditional Western binary of subjectivity and objectivity. The apo koinou construction is rare in modern English, having slipped out of use after its resurgence in Old English poetry. De Francesco reintroduces this blur of object and subject relations into a modern light. He draws inspiration from a device used by Gruppo 63 founder and avant-garde poet Antonio Porta tended toward repetition of phrases in third person perspective. In Italian, it is perfectly grammatically correct to omit the subject, including only a verb conjugation. Gender, even humanity unknown, the subject dissolves into the action, thus giving to the poetry the power to change the reader’s perception of who or what is actually acting. To further push the relative boundaries of experience, De Francesco expands his written poetry into what he calls “reading environments.” In these sound experiments, De Francesco’s voice reading his poetry is manipulated by real time digital voice processing. The written is transformed to the spoken, and then injected with currents of electric sound. “At each activation of word in the darkness,” (from The End (un’agenda) ) language is permutated into a nonphysical yet all-encompassing being. In these projects, realized all over Europe, De Francesco continues his examination of the word’s potency beyond the page and into an “n-dimensional space,” where the lines between nature and affect are intertwined. To publish excerpts of De Francesco’s oeuvre is to show screen shots of full-length film, to read pull quotes from a philosophy treatise. In these poems, there are questions, not to be answered, but to be questioned again. The words will oscillate in and out of the square construction found in his poems, out of the borders of the page, out of the rectangle of the laptop screen. NOTES (1) Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation . Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 27. EDITORS' NOTE The .pdf above contains about twenty pages of translation and the original Italian poetry. Below we provide only a brief account. The End (an agenda) Parler, ce n’est pas voir. Parler libère la pensée de cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis des millénaires notre approche des choses et nous invite à penser sous la garantie de la lumière ou sous la menace de l’absence de lumière. —Maurice Blanchot in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through the half-closed shutters becomes an event enunciation we stay without explanation like parallel curves on the back of a solid growing older she enters the garden always repeats certain phrases the elevator to be redone the neighbor’s music the steps the pavement furls like the leaves of a fern when touched she is framed from behind while she moves rocking she covers distances slowly a bag overflows from the wardrobe something stirs inside but then the suitcase comes open not even by my hand it’s the objects that are starting to filter out the little red haired monster watches idling the appointments written on one of your agendas two years old still seem urgent each letter holds itself upright on the page with flourishes and arabesques each angle has its own geography i’m trying to describe the path the fingers trace on the carpet the zipper takes the opposite route we are suspended on the stairs above the water in the center is the summer seen from above the darkness of the city passes from one headlight to the next the surfaces of our arms cohere and are shiny underneath the blinking of a sign each pore is an open expanse the body dreams the hair gives form to the possible some daring swimmers were throwing themselves into the seine they swam upstream up to the first quay look there could exist behind the screen a room where even when the lamp is out and the curtains drawn even when the suitcase wasn’t closed everything seemed red everything calm construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron by R. Courant – H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1941  . (shrink)

This article examines an omission in the study of discretionary time that bears on proposals currently being evaluated in this part of political philosophy. Specifically, this is the tendency in many jobs for work time to bleed into what is meant to be protected or discretionary time. I refer to this phenomenon as the relative proximity of labour and capital, which has become more prevalent in the labour market due to increased use of mobile communications technology. Ignored by (...) the literature is the fact that whether a job exhibits a high degree of proximity of labour and capital will influence workers' access to their discretionary time entitlements, including policies such as workplace flexibility and the four-day week. To account for this, I provide a descriptive and normative account of the proximity of labour and capital, in response to which I propose a remedial policy that provides workers with greater autonomy over how and when they take up their discretionary time entitlements. (shrink)

Despite widespread recognition that psychiatry would be better served by a classificatory system based on etiology rather than mere description, it goes without saying that much of the necessary work is yet to be done. In this chapter I take up the increasingly important question of how mechanistic explanation fits into the larger effort to build a scientifically sound etiological and nosological framework. I sketch a rough picture of what mechanistic explanation should look like in the context of psychiatric research, (...) with a focus on several potential challenges posed by the special features of many psychiatric conditions. These include the role of social and environmental factors, the relatively transient nature of symptoms, the presumably complex organization of underlying systems, and the likelihood that many disorders are the product of nonstandard development. I suggest that these explanatory challenges can be met with a sufficiently broad notion of mechanism, one that allows for something less than the flawless execution of internal operations, appeals to the influence of contextual factors, and attends to organizational relations both within the mechanism itself and across the wider cognitive system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:George Engel’s Legacy for the Philosophy of Medicine and PsychiatryBradley Lewis (bio)KeywordsBiopsychosocial model, George Engel, pragmatism, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of psychiatryEach of the respondents to this paper raises critical and important concerns. I am grateful for the quality of their insights. David Brendel’s response, along with his recent book, Healing Psychiatry: Bridging the Science/Humanism Divide, resembles my efforts in several ways. Like Brendel, I too believe that the (...) American pragmatic philosophy can be helpful in healing the splits and divisions within psychiatry. And, like Brendel, I believe that psychiatry would benefit from what he calls the “four ps” of pragmatism. Where we differ with regard to George Engel and his biopsychosocial model seems to be less about philosophy and more about strategy. Brendel argues that Engel was too scientistic in his manifest reasoning to be considered a pragmatist. I agree with this description of Engel. But, strategically, we can go beyond Engel’s manifest reasoning to draw out the implications of Engel’s writings in a pragmatic fashion. I am not saying that Engel did this himself; I am only saying that it is very possible to reinterpret Engel along these lines.Brendel also argues that the biopsychosocial model itself needs improvement. But, just as it is possible to update Engel’s theoretical scaffold, we can also update Engel’s biopsychosocial model. Along the lines of Brendel’s concerns, we can easily revise the model so that we remember that not all problems need complex analysis and interventions. Some problems are relatively simple and can have a simple solution. We can also revise the model so we include questions of consumer participation and the provisional nature of the clinical encounter. I see nothing in the biopsychosocial model that contradicts either of these concerns. Yes, the biopsychosocial model needs to be updated, refurbished, expanded, and reimagined. That is my point in the paper.The traction of Brendel’s concerns is not can we reinterpret Engel? or can we refresh the biopsychosocial model?—of course we can. The traction of his concern seems to be “should we?” To this strategic question, Brendel’s answer is no and my answer is yes. I argue that it is a good idea to refresh and refurbish Engel and his biopsychosocial model because it helps to create a connection with an important tradition within both medicine and psychiatry: the tradition of balanced, broadminded, nuanced, patient-centered and anti-reductionistic [End Page 327] care. This tradition is important because medicine and psychiatry seem perpetually vulnerable to the temptations of reductionist approaches and to what Engel, and Nassir Ghaemi more recently, call “dogmatism” (Engel 1977, 130; Ghaemi, 2003, 301). Whether reductionism and dogmatism take the form of biopsychiatry, or psychoanalysis, or antipsychiatry, or cognitive-behavioral therapy, the problems of dogmatism are the same.I am sure Brendel would agree with this, which is why he raises pluralism to such a prominent position in his own reasoning. The difference is that Brendel believes we can better get to this kind of balanced clinical care by letting go of the past figures like Engel and moving into the bright light of the twenty-first century. Maybe so. But my thinking when I wrote the paper goes the other way around. For me, if clinical medicine and psychiatry more carefully tended to its history and tradition, it would be less likely to fall sway to the next Johnny-come-lately reductionistic model.Jeffery Spike’s memories of George Engel during the years they worked together at the University of Rochester School of Medicine provide a good sense of why Engel is an important figure to remember and to pay homage. As Spike puts it, Engel was not only a “legendary figure” with an “almost mythical diagnostic ability,” Engel “probably had more influence on the philosophy of medicine in the United States than any other person, physician, or philosopher.” Both of these accomplishments help to explain why Engel is worth remembering.Those of us in medicine and psychiatry all know mythical clinicians and teachers—the ones who seem like Michael Jordan used to seem on the basketball court, able to somehow make even... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Butler on Subjectivity and Authorship: Reflections on Doing Philosophy in the First PersonAsher WaldenWhat drew me to theology a number of years ago was that it was the most personal kind of philosophy, to the extent that it deals with the most important issues of one’s own “personal” life. It used the tools of the philosophical tradition to address questions that the philosophers—especially those in the University of (...) Chicago’s analytically oriented environment—seemed not to want to ask; at least, not when I was an undergraduate there some years ago. My engagement with philosophy has always been about personal questions, and in the past I tended to eschew the political realm as being at best external to the more essential business of philosophy. But the questions I have been asking lately are rather different from the ones that concerned me back when I was still in Chicago. Largely due to the birth of my son two years ago, questions that before were only secondhand—questions about education, democracy, and debt—are now very personal and very, very important to me. I am perhaps a latecomer to the position that, as the saying goes, “The personal is the political.” But being a convert, like the earliest Christian Apologists, may afford me an opportunity and motivation to argue the position all the more earnestly.The way I have sought to incorporate these different questions and perspectives in my theologizing has primarily been through engagement with the Confucian philosophical tradition. The Confucian tradition is, in large measure, a series of reflections on the individual’s utter embeddedness in familial, sociopolitical, environmental, and sacred structures and forces. The tradition has its own resources for expressing and navigating this embeddedness, but what has become interesting to me is that the requisite resources are being developed independently, and perhaps more forcefully, within the realm of postmodern and postcolonial theory. Indeed, these newer articulations may [End Page 55] well be vital for present-day Confucian thinkers to consider in reformulating and re-presenting their own commitments and traditions in the current era.The questions posed to and for the current paper are, first, how does the religiously committed philosopher (or theologian, in a loose sense of the term) consciously incorporate political and economic considerations into her theological research and discursive product; and second, to what extent and in what ways is it necessary for her also to include and address her own personal life/history into the same. Naturally, these are questions which religious thinkers will ask and answer anew for themselves, and repeatedly. My own engagement with Judith Butler in the current paper will merely provide, I hope, one possible model for such an account of how the personal and the political may function in theological discourse. Generally, the model given here suggests that such considerations are not external add-ons to the more essential “hard-core” theologizing of the doctrines of God and Christology. It is not a matter of (first) theory and (then) application. Rather, theological discourse is one place where ethical subjectivity is attained, if provisionally, through conscientious and critical engagement with both one’s religious tradition and the sociopolitical-economic structures in which those traditions are practiced, and where one’s own place within those structures is both questioned and created.In her recent work Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler continues her project of deconstructing the metaphysics of the substantive self, begun in her deservedly noted early work, Gender Trouble. In particular, she argues that the subject comes into being through processes and in contexts that, while not completely determinative of one’s subjectivity, do limit one’s ability to give a complete account of oneself, one’s actions and motivations. She asks the important question of whether this opacity of the conditions of one’s coming into being limits the possibility of taking responsibility, or being held responsible, for one’s actions. She ultimately finds, with Foucault, that selfhood is itself an ethical process, one occasioned and in large part constituted by the call, and subsequent attempt, to give an account.The question which drives Butler’s essay is, generally, if the subject comes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chaos and LiteratureCarl Matheson and Evan KirchhoffIChaos theory was the intellectual darling of pop-science writers of the late 1980s. 1 In their eyes, it would provide a new paradigm by which to describe the world, one that liberated scientists from clockwork determinism—or, alternatively, from incomprehensible randomness. In an introductory textbook of the period, Robert Devaney called chaos theory “the third great scientific revolution of the 20th century, along with (...) relativity and quantum mechanics.” Similar attitudes propagated into philosophy; for example, Stephen Kellert argued that an acceptance of chaos theory would involve a reconfiguration of scientific methodology. 2It was in the domain of literary theory, however, that chaos found its most enthusiastic reception in the humanities, and the enthusiasm lives on. Many literary theorists display no hesitation in touting the supposedly revolutionary implications of chaos science. Katherine Hayles, the chief among them, argues that because the concept of order has undergone a “radical reevaluation” in recent decades, “textuality is conceived in new ways within critical theory and literature, and new kinds of phenomena are coming to the fore within an emerging field known as the science of chaos” (CO, p. 1). She infers that the new “paradigm of orderly disorder” (CB, p. xiii) represented by chaos theory signifies a conceptual revolution in modern culture as a whole. 3 She attempts to establish a parallel between chaos theory and various poststructuralist philosophical positions, including those of Derrida and Foucault, claiming that this new paradigm “may well prove to be as important to the second half of the century as the field concept was to [End Page 28] the first half” (CB, p. xiii), and that chaos may soon be “on a par with evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanics in its impact on the culture” (CO, p. 4). Other theorists make claims for the interpretive power of chaos; according to William Demastes, “chaos theory can help in comprehending several paths that the theatre has followed since the inception of postmodernism” (p. 242). 4 By a conservative estimate, over fifty papers have been published which link chaos theory to literature or literary theory. Clearly, the idea that chaos theory has application outside of science is not restricted to one or two over-eager humanists.In this essay, we wish to address some of the claims which concern the relationship between chaos science and the study of literature. Three such claims are:a. There are significant similarities between the science of chaos, contemporary literary theory, and/or philosophy.b. We can trace a common etiology for chaos theory and poststructuralist criticism. The two are so intimately related that they are really different formulations of a common claim, as filtered through two different fields.c. The science of chaos can help us interpret and understand specific literary works, and perhaps contemporary literature in general.However, before assessing the relationship between chaos and literature, we will briefly introduce chaos theory itself and demonstrate that even a minimal understanding is sufficient to undercut the supposed revolutionary significance of chaos theory. 5IIChaotic systems are deterministic: an exact description of a system at any given time, together with the laws of nature that apply to it, will entail the entire future behavior of the system. In this sense, chaotic systems form a subclass of classical systems (and are to be distinguished from quantum systems, which are indeterministic). However, chaotic systems differ from the systems studied throughout most of the history of science in two major ways. First, the differential equations used to model them are nonlinear, while the history of mathematical physics is largely devoted to a treatment of linear differential equations. Technical issues aside, the ramifications of nonlinearity are: (i) equations which are impossible to solve using the general strategies designed for [End Page 29] linear equations; and consequently (ii) the need for solutions by methods of numerical approximation, generally performed on a computer. Second, chaotic systems exhibit a feature known as “sensitive dependence”—or, more colorfully, as “the butterfly effect,” a figure of speech intended to evoke the worry that our long-term forecasts of the weather can be hopelessly disrupted by the atmospheric fluctuations due to a single butterfly... (shrink)

a decisive move on his part beyond James. Many have pointed out that it was James who turned Dewey from Hegelianism to what becomes his instrumentalist rendition of Jamesian pragmatism.2 In this article, I will concentrate on what Dewey borrows (and changes) from James: a notion of experience meant to bridge the gap between traditional philosophical rationalism and empiricism (and meant to take the place of both), and an emphasis on meliorism. I agree with those who argue that Dewey "naturalizes" (...) James.3 James's moral multiverse and his relatively uncritical approach to religious experience are replaced by a rather transparent religion of pluralism (or democracy) and a notion of moral faith which points from individual experience toward the pluralistic, democratic community. It would be more accurate to say that religion itself, any religious tradition, and religious experience, are replaced by the religious function in experience, through which the beliefs of the many and their aspirations form the working hypotheses of a progressive community. Faith in the existence of some religious Being is replaced by moral faith in the future, a faith which does not point to a divine Being beyond our own existences. James describes religious experience in psychological terms. Dewey wants to move beyond description. And he wants to move beyond the category of religious experience, beyond the idea that there is a special and unique type of experience which reflects a unique reality. For Dewey, the religious aspects of experience only point forward. In Dewey, James's pragmatism becomes instrumentalism. Where James may be satisfied to accept certain beliefs and experiences (including "special" beliefs and experiences) at face-value and to judge them by their consequences, Dewey demands a reconstruction of the meaning of a belief before he is willing to discuss its value; and value, for Dewey, involves the power to exert an influence at the level of community and address and redress social problems.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 239-242 [Access article in PDF] The Uses of Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and Antidepressants Stephen H. Kellert Keywords chaos, metaphor, rhetoric, values Ever since the popularization of chaos the-ory in the 1980s, there has been an explo-sion of interest in work in nonlinear dynamics generally and the study of strange attractors in particular. From law to economics to theology, researchers in the social (...) sciences and the humanities have sought to make use of the concepts, methods, and results of chaos theory. Previous generations have seen similar attempts to explore the consequences of relativity theory or quantum mechanics for their own areas of inquiry. In examining the implications of chaos for the treatment of mental illness, Douglas Heinrichs provides an example of this phenomenon, which I call "borrowed knowledge." Lacking expertise in the areas of psychotherapy or psychopharmacology, I view his suggestions as a case study in the ways that knowledge gets used across disciplinary boundaries. In these remarks, I examine some of the different functions that borrowed knowledge can serve in order to argue that although cross-disciplinary borrowing can be a fruitful source of new insights, it is not without its dangers. I look at the persuasive function that borrowed knowledge can serve in making one's ideas plausible candidates for further exploration, as well as in motivating methodological change. I look at the conceptual work performed by metaphors, paying special attention to the question of how we can judge whether or not a nonliteral use of knowledge from the natural sciences is fruitful. And finally, I look at the ways in which borrowed knowledge can be used to address evaluative questions—in this case, questions about autonomy and appropriate therapeutic practice. I do not mean for these various functions to be thought of as exclusive categories. Instead, they overlap, interact, and combine in various ways. Rhetorical Functions, Disciplinary Prestige, and Methodologic Change In examining the persuasive uses of chaos theory, I should make it clear that by "persuasive" I do not mean illegitimate or deceptive. When Heinrichs points out that what he calls the traditional model of brain function is used to [End Page 239] present and explain the use of antidepressants (ADs) to clinicians and the general public, it becomes clear that he believes an alternative model can be useful for explicating and justifying the use of ADs for clinicians and patients. This descriptive function of the metaphorical appeal to a chaotic "attractor landscape" shows up where Heinrichs discusses the use of the chaotic model for patient education and the "rationale for pharmacotherapy," giving patients "appropriate expectations."But the rhetorical functions of chaos theory also come into play with audiences other than patients; they apply to the audience for the scholarly article itself, perhaps attracting attention because of the novelty or promise of a new field of research, but also harnessing the considerable disciplinary prestige that the natural sciences wield in our culture. All of these functions are useful in directing attention to the author's suggestions for further research, especially where he suggests that it would provide the clinician with guidance in working with an individual patient. Here I take it that Heinrichs has made fruitful use of the work of Thelen and others on the variability of individual developmental trajectories. This proposal for methodological change suggests that focusing on the dynamics of system and its evolution through time may be important in addition to focusing on equilibrium states. The disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences can provide a valuable and legitimate resource for the persuasive task of encouraging one's colleagues to explore a new methodological approach.A further rhetorical use is found in the appeal to the unpredictability of chaotic systems to account for the variability of results in the application of ADs. We see this where Heinrichs says, "a meaningful science of persons is possible even in the face of their ultimate unpredictability" (2005, 221). The disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences, which in studying chaotic systems are able to achieve genuinely "scientific" status without being able... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

The article focuses on two lecture courses - The Idea of time and The History of the Idea of Time - delivered by the French philosopher Henri Bergson at Collge de France in 1901-1903. While these courses cannot replace Bergsons published works for understanding his philosophy, they can shed new light on Bergsons popularity. Due to the requirements of the genre, Bergson presents his views in a most succinct and convincing manner and showcases his most original ideas. In these lectures (...) Bergson reinterprets traditional philosophical categories such as the absolute and the relative, the infinite and the finite, and explores two major modes of cognition - conceptual and intuitive knowledge. Major thrust of Bergsons arguments is targeted at conceptual cognition because it is incapable of grasping the duration. Conceptual cognition relies on signs to operate representations of reality. Bergson demonstrates that signs, including concepts, are general, fixating and they appeal to action. Conceptual cognition, therefore, is based on fragmenting continuous processes in reality. However, when discussing intuitive cognition Bergson provides but an outline by referring to intellectual sympathy, plunging into the thing in itself. Despite this apophatic description of the alternative - intuitive - mode of cognition Bergson insists on fundamental transformation of philosophy. We conclude that already in the early 1900s Bergson has in mind an entire project of reconstituting metaphysics and reorienting it towards the problem of time, what might be described as temporal turn in philosophy of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This dissertation opens, or perhaps re-opens, a dialogue between the work of Emmanuel Levinas and that of Gabriel Marcel. These two thinkers, each in his own way a philosopher of "the other," both provide us with descriptions of the intersubjective relationship. However, the remarkable similarity of these descriptions is matched by a frustrating incompatibility. The remarkable similarity manifests itself in the emphasis both philosophies place on the unique and in some sense inviolable position of the other person with respect to (...) the self and, further, in advocating the service of the other by the self. The incompatibility is the result of two entirely different, seemingly contradictory, accounts of the nature of the other person: Levinas insists the other person is absolutely other, while Marcel maintains this otherness in only relative. ;Following a short introduction, chapters two and three provide a foundation for the later chapters by offering a summary of the work of Levinas and Marcel respectively. Chapters four and five look critically at Marcel and Levinas in turn, identifying problems or ambiguities in their thought, and investigate the extent to which the points of opposition between them are insurmountable obstacles to a reconciliation. These chapters examine both the concrete and pragmatic implications of each thinker's philosophy and the transcendental positions that condition these implications. Chapter six, based on the preceding four chapters, attempts to ascertain why what appear to be responses to similar callings have resulted in dissimilar philosophies. The obstacle that ultimately prevents the harmonization of these two philosophies is a different understanding of "otherness," which is itself in no small part the result of different understandings of how one relates to God. Finally, the concluding chapter offers some brief thoughts on how this dialogue might proceed from here, given the similar inspiration, the parallel exposition and, yet, the fundamental incompatibility of these two thinkers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur by Michael SohnLevi CheckettsThe Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur Michael Sohn WACO, TX: BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014. 172 PP. $69.95Michael Sohn's book The Good of Recognition: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Religion in the Thought of Lévinas and Ricœur explores the philosophical and religious writings of (...) two of twentieth-century France's most significant thinkers, Paul Ricœur and Emmanuel Lévinas, "to gain, by thinking with and through them, an insight into the phenomenon of recognition" (128). Recognition, to these authors, is not merely an act of re-cognition (identifying something one already knows), nor is it simple cognition (consciousness of something). For Lévinas, to whom Ricœur is indebted for his own work, recognition precedes ontological identification and is a "sensation of the infinite" in the Other (29). Recognition entails "a primordial ethical claim by the other" (57), up to and including self-sacrifice. For Ricœur, on the other hand, recognition of the other is situated in the "loving struggle for existence" between people seeking mutual recognition (72) and presents itself as "one among many sources of value and motivation" [End Page 207] for moral decision (81). In other words, while recognition of the other is a central concept in both authors' ethical writings, Sohn notes that "Lévinas' phenomenological description of recognition emerges out of a fundamental project to uncover the principle of all principles," while "Ricœur's attention to the locus of will integrates passivity and activity as it is taken up within the dialectic of the voluntary and the involuntary," making recognition one value among others (127).In highlighting the different positions of each of these authors, Sohn structures his writing in a highly systematized and clear way. He first divides the book broadly by author, then for each author devotes a chapter each to philosophical and religious approaches to recognition. Within each chapter, he outlines the intellectual influences for the given author, then articulates in turn the phenomenon, the ethics, and the politics of recognition. This tactic serves as a helpful reference for readers interested in Sohn's comparative project, though it sometimes leads to repetition insofar as there are overlaps in how different thinkers, philosophical schools, or principles function for each area. The overall project is framed by an introductory chapter that briefly outlines the main points of discussion throughout the book and a conclusion that summarizes, compares, and contextualizes the significance of the project. Sohn offers this text as a clarifying study of the phenomenon of recognition, a term the application of which "touches upon a broad spectrum of issues ranging from battles over multiculturalism to questions of national sovereignty and from matters of international human rights to social movements within feminism and human rights" (135). With such a broad range of applications, this relatively short examination of two pivotal thinkers' works on recognition is highly valuable.This work will be of interest to ethicists hoping to use the works of Ricœur or Lévinas, or to philosophers and historians interested in the development of recognitionbased ethics. Sohn provides thorough citations from the broad corpuses of both authors, giving students of either philosopher a helpful resource both for summarizing ideas and for carrying out research. Sohn also provides deep intellectual genealogies for each author, noting how thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Karl Barth, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and their interpreters influenced Lévinas and Ricœur; he downplays the influence of thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, and Gabriel Marcel. This book does offer useful and clear summaries of the main ideas discussed, but it may be difficult for newer students unfamiliar with French language or philosophical concepts. Overall, this book is a valuable reference tool for Lévinas and Ricœur studies, especially those that focus on the phenomenology, religious thought, ethics, or politics of these two men. [End Page 208]Levi CheckettsGraduate Theological UnionCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:46 HUME IN THE GOTTINGISCHE ANZEIGEN: 1739-1800 Surprisingly little historical and systematic work has been done on the early reception of Hume's philosophy in Germany. Although there are quite a number of papers and books devoted to discussing Kant's relation to Hume, these are, for the most part, thoroughly uninformed by the historical background of Kant's reception of Hume. The question of what Kant actually knew of Hume is (...) raised over and over again, but, in the absence of new evidence, does not seem to admit of any satisfactory answer. These two circumstances, namely, the lack of historical work on Hume's reception in eighteenthcentury Germany, and the seeming futility of discussions concerning Kant's knowledge of Hume, are closely related. For, given the relative sparsity of Kant's remarks on Hume, new light on the Kant-Hume relation will have to come from the general background of Kant's thinking and writing. Once we know that works of Hume were known in Germany, how they were seen, and how they figured, if they did, in the thought of Kant's contemporaries, we will perhaps be able to make more sense of Kant's sometimes 2 cryptic remarks about Hume. But I believe it would be a serious mistake to look at Hume's reception in Germany from an exclusively Kantian point of view. Quite independent of the Kant-Hume relation philosophically important as it obviously is — it should prove interesting to see how Hume was received by his contemporaries in Germany, and whether their view of him reveals interesting aspects of his thought that were seen neither in Britain nor in France. It is clear, however, that the discussion of the reception of Hume in eighteenth-century Germany 47 is far too large an undertaking to be attempted in one article. Therefore I shall attempt to trace, by means of a descriptive bibliography, the rough outline of the history of his reception in just one German publication: the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (GGA). This journal seems to me a particularly good place to start an account of Hume's German Rezept ionsgeschichte because, first, it covers the entire period during which Hume could have influenced German thought. For the GGA began appearing in 1739, the very year in which Hume's Treatise was first published, and it is still being published today. Thus it can supply us with a continuous series of documents from 1739 to the present. Second, since the GGA was begun when Hannover, and thus Gottingen, were closely linked to Britain because of the Personalunion, it had a greater interest in British thought than most other German journals. Thus it reported British developments more quickly than did other German 4 journals. Third, and partially as a result of the British connection, the GGA very soon became one of the most prestigious German journals. What was being said in its reviews carried greater weight, or, at the very least, must be assumed to have been more widely read, than what was put forward in many other German publications. It is useful to divide Hume's early German influence into roughly four different periods. The first period lasted from 1739 to the early 5 seventies. This period saw the translation of most of Hume's works into French and German, and it may be characterized as the time of Hume's first reception. The second period began in the early seventies and lasted to the early eighties. During this time, Hume's Scottish critics Reid, Oswald and Beattie, as 48 well as their and Hume's critic, Joseph Priestley, became better known in Germany, and thus changed the German view of Hume. But this change appears also to have been connected with the more thorough discussion of Hume in Germany itself, and with the reception of Hume's posthumously published writings. The third period I see beginning with the appearance of Kant's first Critique (1781) and the Prolegomena (1783), which, at first, were seen by him as well as by his contemporaries as a continuation of the Humean enterprise. This clearly had significant effects on the way in which Hume was... (shrink)

Freedom of scientific enquiry must be distinguished from freedom to communicate scientific results. The former demands freedom for scientists to communicate among one another, without which progress is hampered, but not, in itself, freedom to communicate conclusions to the public. The latter freedom may be taken as resting on a general principle of free speech, or, more specifically, on the right of all members of society to knowledge gained by that society, especially by means of public expenditure: it is not (...) to be viewed as resting on the superior rationality of scientists as individuals. More important than knowledge are the social and practical consequences of scientific research, of which the most striking example is that of nuclear weapons; we may assume that the net practical effects of research will be, perhaps increasingly, disastrous. The social consequence, and the liability of scientists to prejudice, may both be illustrated by work on IQ and its genetic determination. Adequate safeguards are impossible; but some discouragement of what seems likely to be socially or practically malign Hnes of research may be exercised by relatively autonomous bodies in control of State funding. (shrink)

People's treatment of others (humans, nonhuman animals, or other entities) often depends on whether they think the entity is worthy of moral concern. Recent work has begun to investigate which entities are included in a person's moral circle, examining how certain target characteristics (e.g., species category, perceived intelligence) and judge characteristics (e.g., empathy, political orientation) shape moral inclusion. However, the relative importance of target and judge characteristics in predicting moral inclusion remains unclear. When predicting whether a person will deem (...) an entity worthy of moral consideration, how important is it to know who is making the judgment (i.e., characteristics of the judge), who is being judged (i.e., characteristics of the target), and potential interactions between the two factors? Here, we address this foundational question by conducting a variance component analysis of the moral circle. In two studies with participants from the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia (N = 836), we test how much variance in judgments of moral concern is explained by between‐target differences, between‐judge differences, and by the interaction between the two factors. We consistently find that all three components explain substantial amounts of variance in judgments of moral concern. Our findings provide two important insights. First, an increased focus on interactions between target and judge characteristics is needed, as these interactions explain as much variance as target and judge characteristics separately. Second, any theoretical account that aims to provide an accurate description of moral inclusion needs to consider target characteristics, judge characteristics, and their interaction. (shrink)

The article considers arguments presented by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Julien Garnier and their modern followers against the authenticity of the Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah, which has been preserved in mansucsripts as a work of Basil the Great. A survey of the correspondence of Erasmus and of the circumstances of his attempted translation of the book shows that his critical judgement on the authorship was motivated by the need to justify his abandoning of the project of translation rather than (...) by the evidence of the text itself. The first systematic examination of Garnier’s critical dossier demonstrates that his statements about the incompatibility of many linguistic features of the Commentary with undisputed writings of Basil are not supported by the text of his own edition of the book. Moreover, his rigid criteria for stylistic analysis are based on misleading notions about textual aspects of the creation and transmission of Patristic works. Isolated observations of the modern followers of the Maurist need to be assessed on the basis of a new and critical edition of the text; however, without the support of his numerous unfounded arguments, they are not sufficient by themselves to refute the attribution of the book in the manuscript tradition. (shrink)

The historic or traditional Christian view of pain (suffering) and death, especially as preserved by the Christian East (i.e., the Orthodox), is radically opposed to the modern secular obsession with avoidance of pain. Everything about this life has its goal or aim in a mystical reality, the Kingdom of Heaven, for which earthly life is a preparation. While neither illness nor health are seen as ends in themselves, both are viewed as proceeding from the will of God for our benefit (...) and have no ultimate meaning or purpose outside of eternal life. Death may be a relief or an ending of suffering, but in itself it is not “good” but evil.Because they are the embodiment of lived theology, saints' lives can be a sure guide to understanding how to die as a traditional Christian. To illustrate this, I have chosen some examples from the lives of relatively recent saints. I myself am from the Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition, so all but one of my examples come from pre-Revolutionary Russia.The question is not so much whether or not a traditional Christian can countenance physician-assisted suicide, but rather, what is the meaning or purpose of pain and suffering in general. Is it part of the “work of perfection” required of those who wish to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and therefore not to be completely denied? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of ConscienceEric SpencerDaemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience, by Ned Lukacher; x & 228 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $37.50 cloth, $15.95 paper.Daemonic Figures is a specialist’s book twice over. Profiting from it requires not only considerable familiarity with Heidegger, but also unquestioning acceptance of the rhetorical conventions and critical methods of contemporary theory. Lukacher uses these conventions and (...) methods to argue that conscience, properly understood, poses uncomfortable questions about the origins of self-knowledge, and leads to a mysterious but presumably enriching encounter with the limits of our certainty. Shakespeare enters the argument as the supreme example of a poet who discovers, through sensitivity to the ambiguities of language, how to peer without flinching into the Heideggerian abyss. Although the book relies too heavily on Heidegger’s unforgiving idiom, and pauses too seldom to justify suggestive but tenuous claims, at its heart lie hard, interesting questions about what having a conscience means.Lukacher wishes to restore to the idea of conscience all its paradoxical force. As a silent inner voice carrying a moral imperative from elsewhere, conscience immediately suggests an internally divided self. And although, according to Lukacher, Christian tradition locates the source of the imperative in God, and classical tradition in natural law, conscience remains irreducibly “uncanny,” because “the most intimate site of human habitation [i.e., the self] is also the strangest of places, for it is there that the (unfamiliar) god comes to presence through the language of moral judgment that tells us that we are and that because we are what we are we should act thus” (p. 7). For Lukacher, then, the question of conscience is the question of being, a question without an answer because it involves the unthinkable idea of something prior to and beyond being. The book argues that whatever speaks to us under the name of conscience must be both within and without any categories we have to explain it.Hence “daemonic figures”: drawing on the Greek notion of a realm of daimones dwelling between the human and divine worlds, Lukacher claims that the “daemon is the cipher, the name, and the figure for the incontrovertible [End Page 240] ghostliness, the familiar strangeness, that dwells between the perceptions and reflections of consciousness and the enigmatic ground of Being itself” (p. 2), or “the medium in which we come to ourselves as precisely that which is divided from itself... from the outset” (p. 6). And because, in Lukacher’s scheme, language articulates this daemonic mediation, we must seek in literary works which explore conscience—like Hamlet and Macbeth—traces of uncanniness welling up through ostensibly coherent words. Literary value accordingly involves “giving us the words with which to bring that enigmatic lack to presence” (p. 92). Simultaneously ubiquitous and inscrutable, conscience both calls to and evades us, and literature makes its home in such paradoxical territory.It follows that Lukacher seeks in texts brief flashes of something else in the midst of what’s apparently going on, a procedure which constantly risks arbitrary idiosyncrasy. For instance, in his chapter on Hamlet, Lukacher notes that the Player’s description of Priam’s death includes a line—“and with a hideous crash / Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear”—whose sequence of sounds produces a ghostly authorial signature: sh... akes... Pyr... ear. And because this “countersignature” appears fragmented, in a context of hesitation, destruction and decline, Lukacher claims it creates an allegory of the “nonrelation at the heart of self-revelation” (p. 135). That is, it (and the larger drama of Hamlet’s revenge to which it obliquely gestures) reveals that at the heart of authorship, of authorized speech, of the moral law of conscience, lies “the silent play of the letter” (p. 135), the “daemonic figure” of dissolution in the midst of self-assertion, which unsettles all authorization. Hence Hamlet’s famous difficulties—he hears the whisper of Otherness in what ought to be a straightforward moral imperative to vengeance.Lukacher justifies this procedure by noting that “Derrida’s writing, no less than that of Heidegger [and presumably Shakespeare], relies on the invention of figures and metaphors through which... (shrink)

Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence of new physics at the LHC and the theoretical evidence for a multiverse of alternative physical realities, predicted by our best fundamental theories, have casted doubts about the validity of these concepts. In this essay we argue that the discussion about Finetuning should not predominantly concentrate on the desired features a fundamental (...) theory is expected to have, but rather on the question what a theory needs to qualify as fundamental in the first place. By arguing that a fundamental description of the Universe should possess zero entropy, we develop a ‘holistic’ concept for the most fundamental layer of reality: The fundamental description of the Universe is the Universe itself, understood as an entangled quantum state. Adopting a universal applicability of quantum mechanics, in this framework the behavior of subsystems can be understood as the perspectival experience of an entangled quantum Universe perceived through the “lens of decoherence”. In this picture the fundamental reality is non-local, and finetuned coincidences in effective theories may be understood in a way similar to EPR-correlations. This notion provides a fresh view on the topic of Naturalness and Finetuning since it suggests that Finetuning problems and hints for anthropic explanations are an artifact of theories building up on subsystems rather than on the fundamental description. Recent work in quantum gravity aiming at an understanding of spacetime geometry from entanglement entropy could be interpreted as a first sign of such a paradigm shift. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:149. RELATIVE IDEAS REJECTED Hume's claim that ideas copy impressions seems to provide prima facie evidence for the interpretation that he also believed that all thought is restricted to images. Clearly such a view would be fatal to Hume's epistemological framework for at least two reasons. The first reason is quite simply that images are not a necessary element for thought, since we rarely think in images or (...) pictures. The second reason is that the imagistic interpretation prevents the possibility of universal a priori knowledge; since images only represent particulars they can never permit the inference from knowledge of particular instances to knowledge of universal cases. Yolton's paper, "Hume's Ideas", is a valiant effort to save Hume from the crippling imagistic interpretation. Although Yolton presents a reading of the Treatise that might avoid this interpretation, he fails to provide a sufficiently detailed account of any one counter-example to the imagistic view of Hume. However, such a counter-example has been worked out in Flage's 2 recent paper "Hume's Relative Ideas". Although the search for non-picturable ideas in Hume's system, and subsequent destruction of the imagistic interpretation is an admirable path for investigation, I intend to show that Flage's attempt to produce a Humean theory of non3 picturable "relative" ideas is entirely misguided. I shall argue that Flage has produced a theory without application in Hume's framework, a theory actually based on a distinction between relative ideas and relations of ideas, that Hume never intends. Flage argues that Hume has a theory of relative ideas, and that the application of this theory can produce intelligible concepts of essentially imperceptible 150. objects. A relative idea is obtained by an inference, of sorts, from the relations of ideas obtained from impressions; or in Flage' s words, a relative idea "singles out an unperceived entity on the basis of its relations to a perceived entity, i.e. a positive [picturable] idea" (HS 56). Flage admits that "Hume often regarded epistemic claims based upon relative ideas with at least a modicum of scepticism" (HS 55). He also realizes that no such theory of relative ideas can be used to justify ontological claims of the unperceivable objects (HS 63), but that "the doctrine of relative ideas at least accounts for the intelligibility of various concepts" (HS 59). Flage applies the theory of relative ideas to three concepts that Hume discusses in an effort to demonstrate how this theory can make these concepts intelligible. The three concepts are substratum, the missing shade of blue, and the idea of a thousandth part of a grain of sand; however, Flage fails to realize that Hume successfully argues against the intelligibility of these concepts. I shall present the arguments that Hume gives to show that Flage' s theory of relative ideas does not apply in the cases he argues for. Hopefully this will show that Flage has created a theory that lacks application; however, this is not Flage' s only failing. "Relative" ideas are obtained from relations of ideas (HS 56), and by this description Flage has implicitly distinguished between Hume's use of "relative" and the philosophical "relations of ideas!', a distinction that Hume never intends. In the latter part of this paper I shall show that Hume uses "relative" to refer to the relations of ideas, and that Flage has simply located and produced a theory on the basis of a distinction that has no real difference. In the discussion of substance, Flage correctly points out that Hume distinguishes three definitions of substance in the fourth part of book I of the Treatise (HS 63-4). 151. Flage also correctly points out that at least two of these definitions are unintelligible (HS 64). The definition of substance, as an autonomous object that is distinct from dependent qualities, fails to properly 4 distinguish substance from qualities (T 233), and substance defined as the "subject of inhesion" fails because there is no empirical evidence to justify the claim that qualities inhere in a substance J(T 234). However, Flage incorrectly argues that Hume asserts that the idea of substance as "the entity that is simple and identical through time... (shrink)