This article takes off from Freud's literary use of the term ‘fixation’ to explore how female sexuality both establishes the universal foundations of Freud's metapsychology and is excluded from it via a reading of one Freud's strangest and most provocative case presentations. Like a primal word, fixation operates in contradictory fashion: it is associated both with regression and futurity, petrified immobility and contingency. Fixation is Freud's name both for the primal origin of sexuality and the very word for what shuts (...) sexuality down. In ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Disease’, the first case history devoted to a woman after Dora, Freud recounts his brief encounter with a woman who is brought to Freud because she is suffering from a paranoid delusion that her would-be lover has arranged to have her photographed during their sexual engagements. On the basis of his fictionalized account of this fictive case, Freud establishes a curiously suggestive link between fixation, femininity and photography, and introduces, for the first time, the notion of ‘primal phantasies’. By looking how femininity, fixation and photography come together, this article explores how and why Freud attributes quasi-photographic powers to female sexuality as a means of trying to produce a figure for unseen and un-seeable images that come from a primal and unrecoverable past. (shrink)

PurposeIn Western society, the measurement of weight is prioritized over a person’s bodily experience. Hermeneutic philosopher Gadamer warned against the emphasis on measurement, rather than experience, in the medical sciences. An examination of the complexity of the experience of weight provides the opportunity to shift focus from quantifying the connection between health and weight to the experience of the person being weighed.MethodsThis qualitative hermeneutic study aims to understand people’s experiences of weight from the interviews of professionals and lay experts. Interviews (...) were analyzed using an interpretive hermeneutic method.ResultsThe interviews revealed that weight was experienced as a number imbued with meaning and bias, as a number that could be manipulated, and as a constant and anticipated bodily change. Weight change was expected and often unwelcomed, despite weight being a quality of the body that is always in flux. External measures of weight meant to monitor wellness and health inadvertently became an unhealthy fixation that prevented some participants from fully participating in life events and appreciating the stages their bodies were in.ConclusionWeight change is a necessary condition of being human, and bodies are and will be constantly changing. To achieve health and harmony, one must fit together the acceptance of change and their bodily experience of weight. It is often the preoccupation with weight, not weight itself, that gets in the way of living. (shrink)

Bistable figures provide a fascinating window through which to explore human visual awareness. Here we demonstrate for the first time that the semantic context provided by a background auditory soundtrack can modulate an observer’s predominant percept while watching the bistable “my wife or my mother-in-law” figure . The possibility of a response-bias account—that participants simply reported the percept that happened to be congruent with the soundtrack that they were listening to—was excluded in Experiment 2. We further demonstrate that this (...) crossmodal semantic effect was additive with the manipulation of participants’ visual fixation , while it interacted with participants’ voluntary attention . These results indicate that audiovisual semantic congruency constrains the visual processing that gives rise to the conscious perception of bistable visual figures. Crossmodal semantic context therefore provides an important mechanism contributing to the emergence of visual awareness. (shrink)

Looking at a pair of objects is easy when automatic grouping mechanisms bind these objects together, but visual exploration can also be more flexible. It is possible to mentally “re-group” two objects that are not only separate but belong to different pairs of objects. “Re-grouping” is in conflict with automatic grouping, since it entails a separation of each item from the set it belongs to. This ability appears to be impaired in patients with schizophrenia. Here we check if this impairment (...) is selective, which would suggest a dissociation between grouping and “re-grouping,” or if it impacts on usual, automatic grouping, which would call for a better understanding of the interactions between automatic grouping and “re-grouping.” Sixteen outpatients with schizophrenia and healthy controls had to identify two identical and contiguous target figures within a display of circles and squares alternating around a fixation point. Eye-tracking was used to check central fixation. The target pair could be located in the same or separate hemifields. Identical figures were grouped by a connector (grouped automatically) or not (to be re-grouped). Attention modulation of automatic grouping was tested by manipulating the proportion of connected and unconnected targets, thus prompting subjects to focalize on either connected or unconnected pairs. Both groups were sensitive to automatic grouping in most conditions, but patients were unusually slowed down for connected targets while focalizing on unconnected pairs. In addition, this unusual effect occurred only when targets were presented within the same hemifield. Patients and controls differed on this asymmetry between within- and acrosshemifield presentation, suggesting that patients with schizophrenia do not re-group figures in the same way as controls do.We discuss possible implications on how “re-grouping” ties in with ongoing, automatic perception in healthy volunteers. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to determine how salient and non-salient figurative discourse nouns affect readers’ default response processing and oculo-graphic (eye-movement) reactions. Whereas the theories of the Graded Salience and the Defaultness Hypotheses, developed by R. Giora (Giora, 1999, 2003; Giora, Givoni, & Fein, 2015), have stimulated further research in the area of interpretive salience (Giora et al., 2015; Giora, Jaffe, Becker & Fein, 2018), the resonating influence of syntactic salience on default interpretations has been largely neglected. In (...) this study we provide corpus-based evidence followed by eye-tracking experiment verification, supportive of the synchronized influence of syntactic and lexical salience. The results show that default figurative responses in lexically salient positions may require more cognitive effort (longer fixations) if they are syntactically less salient. Literal responses to figurative nouns may also result from either weak lexical or syntactic salience of nouns. Therefore, apart from exemplifying resonance with lexical salience (in terms of lexical frequency, familiarity, conventionality, and prototypicality), the default figurative interpretations are also syntactically dependent. (shrink)

Contents \t\t\t\t\t \tTRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION \t\t1 \t \tNOTE ON THE TRANSLATION \t\t39 \t OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME \t\t\t\t\t \tSECTION ONE: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Distinct Objects of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime \t\t45 \tSECTION TWO: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime.

Cet article propose la première publication complète d’un monument consacré par les Thespiens aux Muses dans leur sanctuaire au pied de l’Hélicon, dont les éléments constitutifs sont connus depuis le xixe s., et notamment depuis les fouilles de P. Jamot au Val des Muses. Les statues en bronze de petite taille des neuf Muses se dressaient sur une base en arc de cercle d’une ampleur de ca 10 m, placée dans un écrin architectural largement ouvert sur l’extérieur. Un nouveau lustre (...) est donné à ce groupe statuaire hellénistique exceptionnel à l’époque d’Auguste par la gravure, sous chacune des figures, d’une épigramme descriptive et érudite signée par le poète corinthien Honestos. Est ainsi conservé l’un des rares exemples archéologiques de recueil de poèmes décrivant des œuvres d’art figuré. L’analyse des épigrammes et l’observation détaillée des mortaises de fixation visibles à la face supérieure des blocs de la base permettent d’émettre des hypothèses sur les types utilisés pour la représentation des Muses, mais aussi d’assurer, au‑delà de tout doute, que les statues prenaient place au milieu d’ornements végétaux en bronze qui évoquaient le paysage du Val des Muses. La représentation de la nature comme élément non plus secondaire, mais essentiel d’un groupe sculpté correspond aux recherches nouvelles de la basse époque hellénistique. Faute de fouilles exhaustives du sanctuaire des Muses, l’emplacement du monument ne peut être déterminé avec certitude. Des lettres de remontage nous apprennent en revanche qu’il a été déplacé, peut‑être à l’époque où furent gravés les poèmes d’Honestos. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal (...) which makes progress in the treatment of this family of problems. I describe a procedure to derive a (unique) homeostatic property cluster [HPC] from facts having to do with the properties that a certain indicator relied on, in the events leading to its fixation in a certain population. This HPC is the one that should figure in the content attribution to the indicator in question. (shrink)

The condition into which humans entered since the dawn of modernity altered and led to the disenchantment of traditional (pre-modern) ways of thinking and theorizing in the different spheres of being and discourse mainly due to an emphasis on reason, freedom and the autonomy of the subject. Ethics in particular has continued to experience since modernity a shift from preoccupation with fixated, absolutist systems of ethics such as those built on notions of God and nature to a preoccupation with (...) the formal, individualistic, fallible or subjective ethical systems that ensue from free and autonomous subjects. The Ethics of Subjectivity presents an examination and analysis of the theorization of this subject-based ethics particularly as presented in the works of key ethicists and philosopher since modernity. These key figures include Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Popper, Feyerabend, Habermas, Lacan and Levinas. The volume also examines the implications of the shift to the subject as the focal point of modern ethics for the ever-evolving field of ethics. (shrink)

Academic philosophy has a novelty problem. Novelty has become a litmus test for a contribution’s value. This results in a common undertaking for academic researchers. Read a bunch. Look for holes and gaps. Figure out what hasn’t been said. Try to insert yourself in a conversation by saying something new. On first glance, this approach might appear to make sense. If it’s not new, why do we need it? Yet a fixation on novelty sculpts a landscape of philosophical inquiry (...) that is inhospitable and self-undermining. (shrink)

Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important innovators of the century, Tariq Ramadan is a leading Muslim scholar, with a large following especially among young European and American Muslims. Now, in his first book written for a wide audience, he offers a marvelous biography of the Prophet Muhammad, one that highlights the spiritual and ethical teachings of one of the most influential figures in human history. Here is a fresh and perceptive look at Muhammad, capturing a (...) life that was often eventful, gripping, and highly charged. Ramadan provides both an intimate portrait of a man who was shy, kind, but determined, as well as a dramatic chronicle of a leader who launched a great religion and inspired a vast empire. More important, Ramadan presents the main events of the Prophet's life in a way that highlights his spiritual and ethical teachings. The book underscores the significance of the Prophet's example for some of today's most controversial issues, such as the treatment of the poor, the role of women, Islamic criminal punishments, war, racism, and relations with other religions. Selecting those facts and stories from which we can draw a profound and vivid spiritual picture, the author asks how can the Prophet's life remain--or become again--an example, a model, and an inspiration? And how can Muslims move from formalism--a fixation on ritual--toward a committed spiritual and social presence? In this thoughtful and engaging biography, Ramadan offers Muslims a new understanding of Muhammad's life and he introduces non-Muslims not just to the story of the Prophet, but to the spiritual and ethical riches of Islam. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 297-327 [Access article in PDF] Liberal Irony A Program for Rhetoric James P. McDaniel [Figures] Seeing like a state Perhaps these famous yet simple pictures display not so much the virtuosity of photography or photographers as they statically represent fragments of Mahatma Gandhi's theosophical and political dynamism, his uncanny blend of calm and charisma, thought and play. The compositions are technically simple yet thematically (...) rich. The great leader being led by a boy, the public figure reflecting quietly in private over news reports: these modest representations key awareness of the place of overturning in Gandhi's thought, words, and deeds. A man who encouraged non-violent resistance (ahimsa) to British Imperialists, Gandhi submitted his body to great harshness (himsa). A witness to incredible atrocities committed against his people, Gandhi exhorted his followers to present their bodies before armed imperialist soldiers with full knowledge that they would be brutalized, many killed. Legally prohibited from doing so, Gandhi made salt. Exhausted and hungry, Gandhi walked hundreds of kilometers without rest and fasted for long stretches of time. Hated and feared, Gandhi loved. Perpetually reversing the "logic" of the world he knew, overturning its values to find and clarify truer values, insisting that choices be made between the received and the [End Page 297] promised, the "is" and the "ought," the actual and the possible, Gandhi was an ironist.Each picture can also be seen as an allegory, or taken together as an allegorical complex of mutually illuminating signs, and Gandhi as a political allegorist of human relations for early twentieth-century India and the globe. Allegory's signature inscriptions are everywhere about these simple photos. Personification of virtue, a stock technique of allegorical composition, abounds: Humility becomes Gandhi. Each photograph personifies humility uniquely: sparseness of setting, simplicity of garb, and other visual cues for self-abasement adorn the one; richness of natural setting, playfulness, childlikeness, and such ornament the other. Both images suggest the presence of the eternal in the temporal, but in different ways, another key fixture of allegorical design: Gandhi's stillness sitting near his spinning wheel, itself an image of eternal circuitousness, in the one, and his vigorous exertion against a vast, seemingly static, natural landscape, both "frozen" in time thanks to the technology of photography, in the other. Likewise, time's flow seems in a sense reversed in a manner that mirrors symmetrical ontological reversals: the older follows the younger, the man the boy, and the wise follow the inexperienced. Further allegorical decoding could be endeavored, for instance rearticulating the two texts on four tiers of signification: literal, figural, historical, and anagogical—the "four-level" allegorical hermeneutic initially developed for application to sacred texts and later ascendant as a critical method from the Middle Ages to some versions of poststructuralism in recent years (e.g., Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious, Frederick Dolan's Allegories of America,Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading). Each tier reveals a unique dimension of discourse: its textual surface (literal), its embedded significations (figural), its reflexive display of placement in time and society (historical), and its alignment with archetypal or ultimate patterns of existence (anagogical).As two approaches to the same texts, irony and allegory are more complementary than exclusive. Neither renders the other invalid or uninteresting, nor do they deplete their common rhetorical resources, yet each features distinctive fixations. The first perspective fixates on a single strategy reflected in the texts and explores the ramifications of that strategy: dialectical reversal. The second fastens on and traverses across myriad textures and patterns of discursive technique displayed in the texts: allegorical personification (e.g., Gandhi as humility), temporality (e.g., fusing of public, private, and eternal time), paratactic association of images (i.e., interplay between visual signs not necessarily regulated by a single code [End Page 298] of meaning), and cosmic ornamentation (e.g., the spinning wheel that, by the way, is not spinning; like Gandhi, it is sitting still in a world of tumult, as if mirroring a moment of individual and universal arrest). Ironic strategizing and inventorying, in this light... (shrink)

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

This article addresses whether Nietzsche’s naturalism is best understood as exemplifying the principles of scientific method and the spirit of Enlightenment. It does so from a standpoint inspired by Eugen Fink’s contention that Nietzsche’s endorsements of “naturalism” are best read as hyperbole. The discussion engages with Enlightenment-orientated readings (by Walter Kaufmann, Maudemarie Clark, and Brian Leiter), which hold Nietzsche’s naturalism to endorse of the spirit of empirical science, and an alternative view (provided by Richard Schacht and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter), which holds (...) Nietzsche’s “extended naturalism” to be an informing ethos of historically aware thought rather than a mere “method.” The ensuing discussion endorses the latter approach in terms that seek to take more seriously the implications of Fink’s point about the hyperbolic and figural aspects of Nietzsche’s naturalism. I argue that Nietzsche’s naturalism is indeed often hyperbolic and figural but that this exaggerated form of naturalizing thought allows insights that invite explicit theorization. Turning to an approach suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer, I argue that Nietzsche’s exaggeratedly “naturalistic” take on morality is best appreciated as a form of disturbing and disruptive political intervention in the dominant discourse of modernity in which it overtly situates itself, namely, the instrumentalizing, methodologically fixated liberal discourse of scientific Enlightenment. If we approach his thinking in this way, Nietzsche’s naturalism serves as a valuable resource for critical reflection on the hegemony of contemporary scientific culture. The context for such critical reflection is provided by Giorgio Agamben’s work on sovereign power and modernity. Nietzsche’s naturalism, I argue, is foremost biopolitical in its implications. These implications invite critical reflection on aspects of Agamben’s work; they also, following Agamben’s lead, suggest that we must step beyond the fundamental concepts of liberalism. (shrink)

Digital cameras and motion capture technologies that document and share creative practices have transformed the way we think about dance as an embodied knowledge as well as the way we experience it bodily. Computational media, which not only records and archives but also calculates, analyses and models dance, further complicates its ontological status. This move to document and inscribe dance in a tangible medium marks a shift from understanding dance as an ungraspable event towards conceiving of dance as a tangible (...) process that can be collected, transmitted, repeated and packaged or archived as an object. I look at two dance works – Matthias Sperling’s Loop Atlas and Siobhan Davies and Anri Sala’s Solo in the Doldrums – that trouble conventional notions of embodiment and its relationship to both presence and absence, at the same time they challenge how computational media fixates on figures and gestures that can be traced, mapped and calibrated. (shrink)

Husserls Analyse der Wahrnehmung und Heideggers Zeittheorie sind beide in ihrem Theorieaufbau auf die Gegenständlichkeit der Gegenstände – oder auf den Gegenstandsbezug der Erfahrung und seine wesensmäßige Konstitution – fixiert. Hierin spiegelt sich, bei Heidegger explizit, Kantisches Erbe. Diese phänomenologische, transzendentalphilosophische Relevanz des Gegenstands verweist im Kern auf Intentionalität – und damit auf eine objektbezogene Selbstüberschreitungsfigur der Subjektivität. Ganz anders bestimmt Latour den Stellenwert der Dinge im Kollektiv, wenn er ihnen eine Handlungsmacht zuschreibt, die den traditionellen Gegensatz zwischen Handlungssubjekten und (...) Objektbehandlung einklammert. Der folgende Beitrag kreist den kritischen Punkt ein, der in der Theoriebildung zur Verzweigung phänomenologischer und ANTistischer Ansätze führt. Während sich die Phänomenologie im Zuge einer begrifflichen Rekonstruktion der Erfahrung von Gegenständen konsolidiert, ist die ANT auf die Beschreibung von Handlungsstrukturen ausgerichtet, die sich aus Aktanten aller Art zusammensetzen. Abschließend stellt sich die Frage, ob nicht die kollektivistische Soziologie Latours von dem methodischen Solipsismus der Phänomenologie lernen kann, dass es eine konstruktive Dimension und Machtfülle der deskriptiven Arbeit gibt, die nicht einfach den Akteuren überhaupt, sondern vor allem der Analytikerin überlassen ist? Husserl's analysis of perception and Heidegger's theory of time are both fixated on the objectivity of objects - or the objectrelation of experience and its essential constitution. This reflects - and in the case of Heidegger quite explicitly - Kantian heritage. This phenomenological, transcendental relevance of the object essentially refers to intentionality - and thus an object-related figure of self-transcending subjectivity. Quite differently, Latour determines the status of things in the collective, ascribing to them an agency that brackets the traditional opposition between acting subjects and passive objects. The contribution encircles precisely that critical point which leads to the separation of phenomenological and ANTistical approaches. While phenomenology grounds itself by reconstructing the experience of objects, ANT focuses on the description of the structures of action, which are composed of actants of all kinds. Finally, the question arises whether Latour's collectivist sociology can learn from phenomenology's methodological solipsism that there is a constructive dimension and plenitude of power in the work of description that is not just left to actors in general, but above all to the analyst herself? (shrink)

Visual phenomenology is highly elusive. One attempt to operationalize or to measure it is to use ‘cognitive accessibility’ to track its degrees. However, if Ned Block is right about the overflow phenomenon, then this way of operationalizing visual phenomenology is bound to fail. This thesis does not directly challenge Block’s view; rather it motivates a notion of cognitive accessibility different from Block’s one, and argues that given this notion, degrees of visual phenomenology can be tracked by degrees of cognitive accessibility. (...) Block points out that in the psychology literature, ‘cognitive accessibility’ is often regarded as either all or nothing. However, the notion motivated in the thesis captures the important fact that accessibility comes in degrees (consider the visual field from fovea the periphery). Different legitimate notions of accessibility might be adopted for different purposes. The notion of accessibility motivated here is weaker than Block’s ‘identification’ (2007) but is stronger than Tye’s ‘demonstration’ (2007). The moral drawn from the discussion of Block can be applied to the debate between Dretske and Tye on the speckled-hen style examples. Dretske’s view is even stronger than Block’s, but his arguments from various figures he provides do not support his conclusion since he does not have right ideas about fixation and attention. Tye’s picture is more plausible but his notion of accessibility is so weak that he reaches the excessive conclusion that accessibility overflows phenomenology. Three ramifications might be considered in the final part of the thesis. The first is the relation between this debate and the one concerning higher-order/same-order theories of consciousness. The second is about John McDowell’s early proposal about demonstrative concepts in visual experiences. The third is the relation between the interpretation of the Sperling case proposed here and McDowell new view of experiential contents, i.e., his story about how we carve out conceptual contents out of intuitional contents without falling pray to the Myth of the Given. (shrink)

This study explores multimodal metaphors and metonymies in Faust, a German Expressionist silent fiction movie by Murnau. The article combines principles of psychocinematics, an interdisciplinary scientific field of enquiry, with the multimodal metaphor and expressive movement model, which looks into the temporal dynamics of metaphoric meaning-making by movie watchers. It is shown that interrelating both film-analytic approaches provides a deeper and more comprehensive insight into how figurative thought influences psycho-cognitive processes in the moviegoer’s mind as they dynamically unfold in their (...) cinematic contexts. Evidence is provided that Kappelhoff and co-workers’ proposal can be complemented and enriched by psychocinematics findings on the allocation of visual attention and eye fixation, motion and image frame sensing, and mental activity underlying emotional and diagetic experiences. (shrink)

Husserl's analysis of perception and Heidegger's theory of time are both fixated on the objectivity of objects - or the objectrelation of experience and its essential constitution. This reflects - and in the case of Heidegger quite explicitly - Kantian heritage. This phenomenological, transcendental relevance of the object essentially refers to intentionality - and thus an object-related figure of self-transcending subjectivity. Quite differently, Latour determines the status of things in the collective, ascribing to them an agency that brackets (...) the traditional opposition between acting subjects and passive objects. The contribution encircles precisely that critical point which leads to the separation of phenomenological and ANTistical approaches. While phenomenology grounds itself by reconstructing the experience of objects, ANT focuses on the description of the structures of action, which are composed of actants of all kinds. Finally, the question arises whether Latour's collectivist sociology can learn from phenomenology's methodological solipsism that there is a constructive dimension and plenitude of power in the work of description that is not just left to actors in general, but above all to the analyst herself? German Husserls Analyse der Wahrnehmung und Heideggers Zeittheorie sind beide in ihrem Theorieaufbau auf die Gegenständlichkeit der Gegenstände - oder auf den Gegenstandsbezug der Erfahrung und seine wesensmäßige Konstitution - fixiert. Hierin spiegelt sich, bei Heidegger explizit, Kantisches Erbe. Diese phänomenologische, transzendentalphilosophische Relevanz des Gegenstands verweist im Kern auf Intentionalität - und damit auf eine objektbezogene Selbstüberschreitungsfigur der Subjektivität. Ganz anders bestimmt Latour den Stellenwert der Dinge im Kollektiv, wenn er ihnen eine Handlungsmacht zuschreibt, die den traditionellen Gegensatz zwischen Handlungssubjekten und Objektbehandlung einklammert. Der folgende Beitrag kreist den kritischen Punkt ein, der in der Theoriebildung zur Verzweigung phänomenologischer und ANTistischer Ansätze führt. Während sich die Phänomenologie im Zuge einer begrifflichen Rekonstruktion der Erfahrung von Gegenständen konsolidiert, ist die ANT auf die Beschreibung von Handlungsstrukturen ausgerichtet, die sich aus Aktanten aller Art zusammensetzen. Abschließend stellt sich die Frage, ob nicht die kollektivistische Soziologie Latours von dem methodischen Solipsismus der Phänomenologie lernen kann, dass es eine konstruktive Dimension und Machtfülle der deskriptiven Arbeit gibt, die nicht einfach den Akteuren überhaupt, sondern vor allem der Analytikerin überlassen ist? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Search of FaithKate RowlandSometimes I’m jealous of my patients’ faith. As a former happily religious person I miss the benefits I used to get from an active faith. I know that some of my patients must struggle with their faith, and I know the struggle probably affects their well–being. For those who simply believe or those who simply don’t believe, it’s easy. And for those who do believe, (...) there can be so much serenity and so much reward.As a doctor, I spend a lot of time reading science, weighing evidence, and making recommendations. Religion has been a respite from this. Faith, for me, has never been a series of decisions based on the best available evidence. I could analyze it as much as I wanted, peel its layers apart, question it, but in the end, it was just faith, not a hypothesis. It has always been something that I believe (or don’t), and practicing my faith had always been a relatively pleasant decision of figuring out what kind of community I want to share in.My faith life has been in shambles for the past several years. I feel distant from and unwelcome in the church where I was raised, and I haven’t found anywhere else to land. I cannot decide how to raise my own small children. I want them to have grounding in God, but I can’t decide how much I believe in God anymore, and I am fixated on the idea that I don’t want to be hypocritical or lie to [End Page 210] them. I don’t want them to see me worshipping in a way that is not really authentic to me.My husband is agnostic—literally—on the issue. He is open to introducing a loving, kind, forgiving God, but unsure about a God incarnate. We both worry about the identity with a particular religion usurping the actual relationship with God: I am [religion], therefore I believe [this], therefore my God does [this] or is [this].And so all of these fears and doubts have led us to live with no religion, and no outward faith. Our children attend a parochial nursery school run by a religion other than one where we were raised, and they have an apparently happy but neutral opinion of religion and God. They understand ceremonies. At age four, they have a more active faith life than I do, since they attend weekly services at school. But then, they have fewer choices than I do. They do what the teachers tell them. They would do what I told them to do, if I could ever decide what I believed in.I spend so many hours a week with my patients that they have become my main source of demonstration of active, living faith. I know that they share mostly good parts with me. I see so much of the good because I mostly see patients who get to choose how to practice their own religions; they don’t feel oppressed by religious or culturo–religious demands or expectations. It’s interesting that I see the positive sides of their faith, not the struggle, because I otherwise see a lot of the struggling parts of their lives. I see the flinty, edgy woman, the patient who has spent more time in the hospital in the past month than I have, the woman who is sick of her low platelet count that keeps her from living a normal life. And every day she has some message of faith: she tells our medical team what Bible passage is keeping her strong, she tells us how God watches over her when we tell her that her counts are better, she tells us to have a blessed day. Sometimes she curses at the hospital or her condition or at her medications, sometimes at us. So far her faith is unshaken.I take care of a woman who has burning mouth syndrome, a chronic condition that causes her lips, her tongue, and her palate to feel as though they are on fire. Eating makes it worse, drinking makes it worse, breathing makes it worse... (shrink)

In his classic work The Mind and its Place in Nature published in 1925 at the height of the development of quantum mechanics but several years after the chemists Lewis and Langmuir had already laid the foundations of the modern theory of valence with the introduction of the covalent bond, the analytic philosopher C. D. Broad argued for the emancipation of chemistry from the crass physicalism that led physicists then and later—with support from a rabblement of philosophers who knew as (...) much about chemistry as etymologists—to believe that chemistry reduced to physics. Here Broad’s thesis is recast in terms more familiar to chemists. In the hard sell of particle physics, several prominent figures in chemistry—Hoffmann, Primas, and Pauling—have had their views interpreted to imply that they were sympathetic to greedy reductionism when in fact they were not. Indeed, being chemists without physicists as alter egos, they could not but side with Broad’s contention that chemistry, as a science that deals primarily in emergent phenomena which are beyond the purview of physicalism, owes no acquiescence to particle physics and its ethereal wares. Historically, among the most widely used expediencies in chemistry and materials science are additivity or mixture rules and their cohort transferability, all of which are devised and used under the mantle of naive reductionism. Here it is argued that while the transfer of functional groups between molecules works empirically to an extent, it is strictly outlawed by the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. Several illustrative examples related to chemistry’s irreducibility to physics are presented and discussed. The failure of naive reductionism exhibited by the deep-inelastic scattering of leptons by A > 2 nuclei is traced to the same flawed reasoning that was the original basis of Moffitt’s ‘atoms in molecules’ hypothesis, the neglect of context, nuclei in the case of high-energy physics and molecules in the case of chemistry. A non-exhaustive list of other contexts from physics, chemistry, and molecular biology evidencing similar departures from the ideal of additivity or reductionism is provided for the perusal of philosophers. Had the call by the mathematician J. T. Schwartz for developments in mathematical linguistics possessed of a less single, less literal, and less simple-minded nature been met, perhaps it might have persuaded scientists to abandon their regressive fixation with unphysical reductionism and to adapt to new methodologies that engender a more nuanced handling of ubiquitous emergent phenomena as they arise in Nature than is the case today. (shrink)

Dans son dernier livre Pour en finir avec la généalogie, François Noudelmann interroge l’imaginaire dans lequel est pensée la figure de la relation, de la fraternité, de l’origine, du frère. L’imaginaire est le processus au sein duquel se constituent l’identité et ses représentations, c’est-à-dire les formes et les symboles à travers lesquels un sujet envisage le même, l’identique, la similitude, toutes ces notions qui conditionnent le désir d’appartenance, le jeu de la distinction. Par l’imaginaire de la transmission se construit (...) une image de soi propice aux liens et aux affiliations. C’est pourquoi une critique politique de la filiation doit passer par l’étude de ce processus opératoire et de ses effets identitaires, afin de faire entendre, dans leur singularité et dans leur étrangeté, les constellations du nouveau. Il s’agit de réagencer, à rebours de la fixation identitaire, ces rapports inédits qui échappent à l’emprise unitaire prévalant dans les images véhiculées et les pensées déterminées de l’imaginaire de la filiation. Le projet de François Noudelmann n’est pas de proclamer l’utopie d’une société qui aurait définitivement évacué la référence généalogique, mais déterminer une autre pensée du sens, de l’image, de l’analogie. La construction des identités sociales, sexuelles et ethniques se trouve suspendue à une telle réévaluation. Finir la généalogie peut s’entendre ainsi : traquer au plus près les paradigmes, les schèmes et les figures qui structurent notre représentation, en défaire les pouvoirs de légitimation et de prescription, et mettre au jour les scènes sur lesquelles se jouent aussi bien sa déchéance que sa dispersion, pour en déterminer les enjeux épistémologiques, politiques et esthétiques. Il s’agit d’achever, au double sens de mettre fin et de mener à son terme, la généalogie et la représentation qui à la fois l’expose et la fonde. (shrink)

Apocalyptic thinking has a long religious and political tradition, but what place does it occupy within the temporal universe of contemporary capitalism? In this essay, we use the figure of the eschaton to draw out the loaded and ambiguous character of the future as it emerges through the condition of indebtedness. This entails a departure from political economy accounts of capitalist futurity, which stress the structural logic of financial speculation, in favour of an existential account that begins instead with (...) the cosmology of money and debt. We argue that finance capital’s fixation on the future has produced a very specific form of apocalyptic imagination, characteristic of financial society and built on a libidinal economy of leverage. Rather than offering an ecstatic end to the global process of financialization, financial eschatologies bind the contemporary subject to debt and indebtedness to the very end: an endless apocalypse, premised on the ends of finance itself. (shrink)

Lewis S. Feuer shows that the gestation of the hypotheses of original-minded scientists, such as Darwin, Einstein, or Bohr, is in large part a subconscious process. Scientists try to project upon the world structural laws that, beside fitting the given physical realities, will also realize their own emotional longings among alternative worldviews. Repeatedly, too, in examining the standpoints of philosophical figures ranging from Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, and Mill to contemporary figures such as Einstein, Lovejoy, and Hook, Feuer illumines how sociological (...) antipathies project themselves into scientific divergences. Feuer delves into the bearing of emotive beliefs such as pacifism, socialism, anti-Semitism, upon the formation of concurrent worldviews, often fixations of scientific belief, held with the same passion in science as in religion. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 109-110 [Access article in PDF] Paul Stanistreet. Hume's Scepticism and the Science of Human Nature. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp.xi + 226. Cloth, $69.95. Any new book on David Hume enters an already overcrowded field. There is no shortage of commentary on Hume's philosophy to be found in a broad range of journals such as Hume Studies, and in recent years (...) a steady stream of monographs and collections have appeared. In addition to this rapidly expanding body of literature, rigorous textual scholarship is being brought to bear on Hume's philosophical writings in the Clarendon edition of Hume's works; significant eighteenth-century editions of Hume are more widely available thanks to facsimile reprints; and a new edition of Hume's correspondence is in preparation. Moreover, this activity has not taken place in a vacuum, insofar as the study of the Scottish Enlightenment and of key figures like Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid has itself been something of an academic growth industry. Consequently, the interpretation of Hume now requires considerable intellectual expertise, a familiarity with an increasingly technical secondary literature, and a firm grasp on the divergent approaches to Hume that have emerged over the past quarter century.In Hume's Scepticism and the Science of Human Nature, Paul Stanistreet aims both to "provide the reader with an accessible guide to the most significant recent developments in Hume scholarship" and "[defend] a general interpretation of Hume's philosophy" (viii) that is largely based on a close reading of Book I of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature. Although Stanistreet's introductory statement of his intentions may seem innocuous to the student readership his book is least partly intended for, the apparent innocence of his opening remarks masks a serious issue, namely the validity of grounding a reading of Hume primarily on the first book of the Treatise. A number of leading Hume scholars would argue, pace Stanistreet, that one cannot offer such an interpretation without reference to the two Enquiries and other texts by Hume. Furthermore, Hume himself can be read as opposing Stanistreet's approach. In the face of hostile critics like James Beattie and Thomas Reid, who focussed their attacks on the Treatise, Hume chose to exclude his first publication from the Humean canon and thereby deflect some of the ill-tempered criticism he had been forced to endure in his later years. Thus, in the "Advertisement" prefacing the 1777 edition of the Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, he explicitly disavowed the Treatise and announced that his philosophical principles were to be found exclusively in the works included in the Essays and Treatises. For the long line of commentators fixated on the Treatise, the "Advertisement" poses questions of interpretation that cannot be ignored, and, for the benefit of his readers, Stanistreet therefore should have not only acknowledged that such questions exist, but also provided some justification for the approach to Hume he adopts.According to Stanistreet, the key to understanding Hume's philosophy is to see how he reconciles his positive programme of constructing a "science of man" with the apparently sceptical thrust of the major arguments advanced in Book I of the Treatise. To show how this reconciliation is achieved, Stanistreet first elucidates Hume's conception of the science of human nature and then proceeds to a detailed consideration of Hume's version of the theory of ideas, his treatment of causation and probable reasoning, and his analysis of our belief in objects external to and independent of ourselves. What emerges from Stanistreet's patient exposition of Hume's position is that Hume was no Pyrrhonian, but rather an advocate for a form of mitigated scepticism that was of a piece with his science of man. For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Hume literature, this will hardly be a startling conclusion. Nor is it news that Hume was supposedly engaged in establishing a genuinely Newtonian science of the mind, as Stanistreet argues at length in Chapter 1... (shrink)

This essay attempts to answer the question of how one commemorates the event of thinking by raising it in relation to some commemorative texts. Derrida’s Demeure, Athènes provides an exemplary point of departure, but the seminars concerned with the death penalty raise the stakes in readings that deeply trouble an inheritance fixated on the determination of death, with Socrates and Oedipus as ancient figures of an enduring culture. The essay touches on Freud and Heidegger as dissenting figures and concludes (...) by commemorating three distinctive thinkers: Lauren Berlant, Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Echoes of Romanticism and Expatriate Englishness in Charlotte Brontë's The ProfessorDavid SiglerCharlotte Brontë's many debts to Romanticism, and especially Lord Byron, are a well-known feature of her fiction. Yet only recently has this become an important part of the discussion surrounding The Professor, her first-written and last-published novel. The novel, written between 1844 and 1846 and published posthumously in 1857, is increasingly seen to be in dialogue with William (...) Wordsworth and Walter Scott, in addition to Byron. Anna Barton, seeing Brontë as "the pupil of Wordsworthian Romanticism" and "a daughter of Romanticism," shows how The Professor develops "intertextual exchanges that perform the failure of the Romantic lyric within the Victorian novel."1 Tanya Llewellyn has argued that the protagonist William Crimsworth, seemingly influenced by Byron's Turkish tales, Orientalizes the women in his life as a way to manage sexual threats.2 Mandy Swann, meanwhile, sees in Brontë's early work an ambivalent response to the Romantic figure of the poet-prophet, as part of the author's general struggle, early in her career, to theorize female creativity.3Yet in other recent accounts, William Crimsworth seems to be as un-Byronic and un-Wordsworthian as possible. Crimsworth has been said to be a "particularly off-putting" narrator, "defensive and humourless," whose "dubious masculinity," passionlessness, and, in one reading, stiflingly repressed homosexuality render him a comically overliteral thinker.4 I will suggest that this incapacity in him for meaningful human engagement is what leads him to fixate on British Romantic poetry as a solution, however backhanded, to his erotic and professional difficulties. [End Page 30] Yet as the echoes of Romanticism that haunt his erotic and professional relations quickly take on lives of their own, they enable the story, and its ethical vision, to exceed William's control. Once the novel directs its protagonist's obsessive personality in the direction of Romantic poetry, it can become an intriguing meditation on ethics, expatriate Englishness, and time.William Crimsworth is a hardworking Englishman living and working in Brussels. The city, which William finds too "cosmopolitan," becomes the site of his zealous self-exploration as he mingles, ever defensively, with the locals.5 Approaching the city like "a morning traveller," as he puts it, William must analyze his foreignness if he is to survive his own residual and aspirational Englishness.6 The phrase "morning traveller" is drawn from Robert Southey's 1798 poem "The Traveller's Return," which describes love as an echo-effect. It is a very auditory poem: Southey's "morning traveller" spends the day listening to unfamiliar sounds, until, in the evening, he hears a "distant sheep-bell," which teaches him that "sweetest is the voice of Love / That welcomes his return."7 A sheep bell is, of course, a tracking mechanism, facilitating the free movement and eventual return of sheep to a shepherd. Southey's speaker learns to grasp the hidden similarity between love and the sheep bell. Just as the sound of the bell goes away and comes back, signifying the wandering and return of livestock, the human "morning traveller" must begin to identify with it. He himself, hearing the sound, gets interpellated by it, once it becomes his objective correlative. Brontë's The Professor, in matters of love, uses Romantic poetry, including Southey's, as a similar tracking device for William. The echo it produces constantly and ambivalently connects the protagonist to England and secures his place within the ideological apparatuses of the state.Judith Butler has observed that "my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others."8 She explains that because there are aspects of oneself that remain forever baffling and inexplicable, we should suppose that other people—who can also seem foreign and inexplicable—contain similar aporias. If their accounts of themselves are difficult for us to understand, we should recognize, through our inability to sympathize, that we too are surely baffling and that they, like us, are likely also baffling to themselves. Thus, [End Page 31] through the sheer dubiousness of understanding other people, we can achieve a kind of negative shared humanity. We all probably confront an inassimilable kernel... (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

Isaac Levi's new book is concerned with how one can justify changing one's beliefs. The discussion is deeply informed by the belief-doubt model advocated by C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, of which the book provides a substantial analysis. Professor Levi then addresses the conceptual framework of potential changes available to an inquirer. A structural approach to propositional attitudes is proposed, which rejects the conventional view that a propositional attitude involves a relation between an agent and either a linguistic entity (...) or some other intentional object such as a proposition or set of possible worlds. The last two chapters offer an account of change in states of full belief understood as changes in commitments rather than changes in performance; one chapter deals with adding new information to a belief state, the other with giving up information. The book builds upon topics discussed in some of Levi's earlier work. It will be of particular interest to discussion theorists, epistemologists, philosophers of science, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the complex interaction between attention, fixation, and one species of change blindness. The two main interpretations of the target phenomenon are the ‘blindness’ interpretation and the ‘inaccessibility’ interpretation. These correspond to the sparse view (Dennett 1991; Tye, 2007) and the rich view (Dretske 2007; Block, 2007a, 2007b) of visual consciousness respectively. Here I focus on the debate between Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. Section 1 describes the target phenomenon and the dialectics it entails. Section (...) 2 explains how attention and fixation weigh in these debates, and argues that Dretske’s hyper-rich view fails precisely because he overlooks certain effects of attention and fixation. Section 3 explains why Tye’s view is also unsatisfying, mainly because he misconceives the degree of access. Section 4 then puts forward the positive model covariance, which has it that the degree of cognitive access tracks the degree of phenomenology, and contrasts it with Block’s view on the Sperling iconic memory paradigm. The paper ends with a discussion of levels of seeing, which involve crowding, indexing, and other visual phenomena. Change ‘blindness’ is a set of phenomena that was discovered about two decades ago, yet an entirely satisfying understanding is still lacking. To move forward, a more detailed understanding of attention and fixation is called for. (shrink)

A growing number of philosophers are bringing interventionism into the field of supervenient causation. Many argue that interventionist supervenient causation is exempted from the fixability condition. However, this approach looks ad hoc, inconsistent with the general interventionist requirement on fixation. Moreover, it leads to false judgments about the causal efficacy of supervenient/subvenient properties. This article aims to develop a novel interventionist account of supervenient causation that respects the fixability requirement. The treatment of intervention and fixation that I propose can accommodate (...) some theoretical constraints on causation and deliver correct causal verdicts in classic examples. It is also worth noting that this interventionist account offers a promising defense of mental causation without postulating mental-physical overdetermination. (shrink)

This book was undertaken before the terms 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' were coined and the further escalation of America's ideological civil war. It was prompted by deep wonderment at the way people tend to be wholly enclosed within their ideological frames and deaf to claims about reality that come from the opposite camp, no matter how valid they might be. Ideology consists of normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped, together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this normative (...) vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological fixation is the result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The book does not focus on the normative aspect of ideology, which is largely subjective, but on its factual claims about the world, typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, the normative commitment. After theorists around 1960 proclaimed the 'death of ideology', ideological divides and clashes have reemerged with renewed intensity throughout the world, including in the liberal democracies. In the United States they have become particularly venomous. The other side is widely viewed as malicious, irrational or downright stupid, and, often, as barely legitimate. The zeal of the opposing sides is often scarcely less than that which characterized the religious ideologies of old. Indeed, historical religious ideologies have largely been replaced by 'secular religions' or 'religion substitutes'. The book is not another survey of past and present ideologies. It is an attempt to understand the cognitive, emotional and social roots of ideology and ideological fixation. It combines insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities with a broad sweep through history. It proceeds from the Stone Age to the rise of civilization, the great religions and modernity, to a critique of fundamental factual premises that underlie some of the major debates dominating today's liberal democracies. (shrink)

Background: The broad autism phenotype includes subclinical autistic characteristics found to have a higher prevalence in unaffected family members of individuals with autism. These characteristics primarily affect the social aspects of language, communication, and human interaction. The current research focuses on possible neurobehavioral characteristics associated with the broad autism phenotype. Methods: We used a face-processing task associated with atypical patterns of gaze fixation and brain function in autism while collecting brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye tracking in unaffected (...) siblings of individuals with autism. Results: We found robust differences in gaze fixation and brain function in response to images of human faces in unaffected siblings compared with typically developing control individuals. The siblings’ gaze fixations and brain activation patterns during the face processing task were similar to that of the autism group and showed decreased gaze fixation along with diminished fusiform activation compared with the control group. Furthermore, amygdala volume in the siblings was similar to the autism group and was significantly reduced compared with the control group. Conclusions: Together, these findings provide compelling evidence for differences in social/emotional processing and underlying neural circuitry in siblings of individuals with autism, supporting the notion of unique endophenotypes associated with the broad autism phenotype. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present some important insights of C. Hookway's pragmatist analysis of knowledge viewed less in the standard way, as justified true belief, than as a dynamic natural and normative question-answer process of inquiry, a reliable and successful agent-based enterprise, consisting in virtuous dispositions explaining how we can be held responsible for our beliefs and investigations. Despite the merits of such an approach, the paper shows that it may be inefficient in accounting for some challenges (...) posed by scepticism or by the nature of epistemic normativity. In which case it might be premature to propose it as a new conception of knowledge against the standard one and worth considering a different, though still pragmatist, strategy, in which inquiry would aim at the fixation of knowledge, still viewed as justified true beliefs, i.e critical commonsensical, warrantedly assertible, intellectual and sentimental dispositions for which the epistemic agent, viewed less as an individual person than as a scientific community of inquirers, should be taken as a knowing and reliable agent, both answerable and responsible for her assertions. (shrink)