This chapter contains sections titled: Plantinga's First Objection: Naturalism and the Concept of Function Plantinga's Third Objection: Materialism and Belief Plantinga's Second Argument: Naturalism as Self‐Defeating Summing Up.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 175-194 [Access article in PDF] Measure for Measure The Reliance of Human Knowledge on the Things of the World Tim Adamson When all things were in disorder, God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive. —Plato, Timaeus (69b) Is my body a (...) thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 152) The search for truths differs from the search for truth criteria in more ways than those that are immediately obvious. —M. C. Dillon (1997, 9) The notion that all knowledge is a form of measurement can be traced back to the Socratic insight that knowledge requires the presence of some standard against which things are measured. We cannot account for our knowledge of things, Socrates argued, without appealing to some prior capacity we have for recognizing, comparing, or measuring things in terms of something else, for example, a concept or definition. In the modern era, Kant extended this insight to include perception as such, [End Page 175] arguing that even though our perceptual experience seems to be direct and immediate, upon reflection we know that some process of mediation must be at work which enables us to have a stable experience of objects. Faced with such insights, we are compelled to ask how such measuring is possible. If experience and knowledge rely on some capacity for measurement, what is measurement and what does it entail?The most common contemporary answer to this question can be found in notion that our experience and knowledge are "constructed" by distinctly human, that is, cultural factors. Having abandoned Kant's notion of a priori knowledge and its various Idealist offshoots, contemporary constructivism nonetheless maintains that cultural structures (although not fixed or permanent ones) serve as the basic principles upon which experience and knowledge are built. Such a view has some merit, insofar as it enables us to acknowledge the mediated character of our experience, while also avoiding the problematic claims of traditional idealism. But as appealing as this view is, it raises the question of the place and role of nature in our experience. From a constructivist point of view, although we may acknowledge that our experience and knowledge depend in crucial ways upon natural elements and events, it can often seem naive to discuss the role of such natural factors within experience—except, that is, as we admit that nature itself is "constructed" by culture, for example, language, conceptual systems, theoretical constructs, ideology, political power, institutional practices, and so forth. That is, although we no longer accord cultural factors an a priori or absolute status, we remain convinced that in fact cultural norms play the final, determining role in shaping our experience. In the end, we have come to believe, it is culture that measures and defines nature, not vice versa.My aim in this essay is to articulate an alternative view of the measurement involved in human experience and knowledge, one which helps us to overcome the privileging of culture over nature that still plagues contemporary thought. My account is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body, particularly his notion that the human body serves as a "measurant of things." There are two key components of this claim. First, it describes the body's general capacity for measurement, and does not appeal to any specific measure or standard of measurement. As a measurant, the body is not any particular measure; rather, it is a thing that measures, an element of the natural world that brings measurement to the [End Page 176] things it encounters, thus bringing meaning into our experience. Second, the body's capacity to measure shows how our natural being as bodies is inherently meaningful, because measurement is, as we shall see... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 175-194 [Access article in PDF] Measure for Measure The Reliance of Human Knowledge on the Things of the World Tim Adamson When all things were in disorder, God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive. —Plato, Timaeus (69b) Is my body a (...) thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 152) The search for truths differs from the search for truth criteria in more ways than those that are immediately obvious. —M. C. Dillon (1997, 9) The notion that all knowledge is a form of measurement can be traced back to the Socratic insight that knowledge requires the presence of some standard against which things are measured. We cannot account for our knowledge of things, Socrates argued, without appealing to some prior capacity we have for recognizing, comparing, or measuring things in terms of something else, for example, a concept or definition. In the modern era, Kant extended this insight to include perception as such, [End Page 175] arguing that even though our perceptual experience seems to be direct and immediate, upon reflection we know that some process of mediation must be at work which enables us to have a stable experience of objects. Faced with such insights, we are compelled to ask how such measuring is possible. If experience and knowledge rely on some capacity for measurement, what is measurement and what does it entail?The most common contemporary answer to this question can be found in notion that our experience and knowledge are "constructed" by distinctly human, that is, cultural factors. Having abandoned Kant's notion of a priori knowledge and its various Idealist offshoots, contemporary constructivism nonetheless maintains that cultural structures (although not fixed or permanent ones) serve as the basic principles upon which experience and knowledge are built. Such a view has some merit, insofar as it enables us to acknowledge the mediated character of our experience, while also avoiding the problematic claims of traditional idealism. But as appealing as this view is, it raises the question of the place and role of nature in our experience. From a constructivist point of view, although we may acknowledge that our experience and knowledge depend in crucial ways upon natural elements and events, it can often seem naive to discuss the role of such natural factors within experience—except, that is, as we admit that nature itself is "constructed" by culture, for example, language, conceptual systems, theoretical constructs, ideology, political power, institutional practices, and so forth. That is, although we no longer accord cultural factors an a priori or absolute status, we remain convinced that in fact cultural norms play the final, determining role in shaping our experience. In the end, we have come to believe, it is culture that measures and defines nature, not vice versa.My aim in this essay is to articulate an alternative view of the measurement involved in human experience and knowledge, one which helps us to overcome the privileging of culture over nature that still plagues contemporary thought. My account is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body, particularly his notion that the human body serves as a "measurant of things." There are two key components of this claim. First, it describes the body's general capacity for measurement, and does not appeal to any specific measure or standard of measurement. As a measurant, the body is not any particular measure; rather, it is a thing that measures, an element of the natural world that brings measurement to the [End Page 176] things it encounters, thus bringing meaning into our experience. Second, the body's capacity to measure shows how our natural being as bodies is inherently meaningful, because measurement is, as we shall see... (shrink)

Since the beginning of human history, there has been no society that did not have any religion. Man meets his need to believe, encoded in his nature by turning to God. God has not left humans alone in their journey on earth, and from time to time, He has intervened in the world through his prophets. The prophethood, which constitutes one of the main subjects of theology, is an important institution in God-human communication. The messengers chosen by God (...) convey to people the information that they received through revelation and offer teachings that will bring them to salvation. The idea of salvation by God when suffering or feeling helpless has driven people to the expectation of a savior. Nearly all religions except Shintoism have the awaited savior belief in the world. Accordingly, the savior will emerge in an environment of chaos where disasters are experienced, and a moral collapse is observed. The expected savior will drive people away from this turmoil, bring them happiness, well-being, and lead them to salvation. Although there is a savior belief in Judaism and Christianity, Muslims claim that the awaited savior in these religions is Muhammad. Muslim thinkers who believe that Muhammad was heralded in previous scripts, tried to find evidence on the subject from the Bible. One of the Islamic scholars who did researches for this purpose is Shamsuddin al-Samarqandi. Shamsuddin Mohammed b. Ashraf al-Husayni al-Samarqandi is an important Turkish-Islamic scholar who lived in Turkestan at the end of the 7th century and the first quarter of the 8th century. Samarqandi is a versatile scholar who produced important works in various fields such as philosophy, logic, mathematics, discussion, debate and astronomy. Shamsuddin al-Samarqandi is one of the eminent scholars who have written his name in the history of science and philosophy with his works. He adopted a critical and analytical style in almost every field, putting the science of logic at the center of his system. His constructive criticisms had an important function in understanding and interpreting the ideas of numerous thinkers, from Greek philosophers to Islamic philosophers and representatives of philosophical theology. In addition to all these, Samarqandi did not hesitate to criticize the Christian and Jewish belief systems, religions such as Sanawiyyah and Zoroastrianism, and the teachings of the naturalist philosophers regarding the relationship between God and the world in the light of rational and scriptural evidence. Samarqandi, who distinguished himself in rational sciences, also showed himself with his background in theology. Due to his exceptional intellectual interest, he analyzes some key concepts and divine codes related to the Bible, making original inferences about the loyalty of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Samarqandi interprets some passages of the Torah and the New Testament, which he considers as signs of Muhammad's prophethood, in the axis of language, logic and the rules of shariah, and concludes that Muhammad is the last prophet to be announced. The conceptual framework that he mostly focuses on in this regard contains Mount Paran, Paraklite, comparison with Moses, and the good news given to the Ishmaelites. Samarqandi makes inferences about the environment in which Muhammad appeared, his qualities, and his lineage, based on the aforementioned concepts. Samarqandi also responds to the criticisms raised by the Ahl al-Kitab about the principles, such as the abolition of other religious rules constituting the basis of Muhammad's legitimacy and establishment of Islam instead, and him being a universal prophet. An important privilege of Samarqandi is that he not only grounds his claims on a theoretical scale but also engages in debates with the leaders of the Ahl al-Kitab. Although Samarqandi exhibits a satisfactory analytical attitude in most of his claims, he displays a sophisticated approach based on the method of coercion (ilzām) in some of his claims. Although he adheres to the tradition of beshair al-nubuwwah in general, he gives a different perspective and strong reasoning to the same evidence within the tradition with the effect of his identity as a verifier (muhaqqik). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Carnap’s Construction of the World. The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism by Alan W. RichardsonRolf GeorgeAlan W. Richardson. Carnap’s Construction of the World. The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. x + 242. Cloth, $49.95.According to the author, the “received view” of Carnap’s Kantian treatise of 1928, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, promulgated mostly by Quine (10), (...) takes it to be a continuation of Russell’s “external world program,” an attempt at “providing a systematic reduction of empirical discourse generally to discourse involving only sense data” (21). One of Richardson’s aims is to show that this is wrong: while Carnap holds that our knowledge begins in sensation, our “elementary experiences” are not conscious and thus do not obey Russell’s “principle of acquaintance.” While we have no conscious access to the first elements of cognition, logical constructions based on them lead to sense qualities, phenomenal items, and eventually to physical and even cultural objects.These constructions are also meant to solve the problem of objectivity. According to Carnap, individual streams of experience are not comparable at all, but “certain structural properties agree for all streams of experience” (Aufbau §66, 32), a point that Kant had also made: “In the relation between sensations lies something that is generally valid, even though each sensation has only private validity” (Reflection 653).Richardson describes Carnap’s constructions in a couple of well written and accessible chapters (31–91), one of them an overview, the other a discussion of the problem of objectivity. Then comes the “Kantian Problematic,” (92–116), centered on the synthetic a priori. He repeats Michael Friedman’s now familiar but mistaken point that, due to the limitations of Aristotelian logic, Kant could not have formulated simple statements about order structures: “between any two points there lies another” could not be formulated in any logic he knew, and he therefore had to call in pure intuition to handle mathematical constructions. But he could, and in fact did, make just such claims in the vernacular, which was the sole vehicle for the pellucid formulations of the classical theory of the continuum, from Bolzano to Weyerstrass.The next chapter brings us the heart of Richardson’s concerns, which is to establish neo-Kantian antecedents of the Aufbau. There are some biographical details of doubtful merit. The neo-Kantian Bauch is identified as Carnap’s “dissertation director,” and, in a perhaps unconscious slight to Carnap’s intelligence, as “the philosopher from whom Carnap learned what he knew about Kant” (116). Ten years before Carnap had indeed taken a seminar in the Critique of Pure Reason from Bauch, but perusal of the latter’s work does not encourage the thought that he had much to do with the thesis “Der Raum” (1922). In the event, a German ordinarius did not usually have a hand in the construction of a thesis, and often did not even read it. His job was to accept it on behalf of the university. We now know, for example, that Bauch’s teacher Rickert had an assistant evaluate Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift never reading it himself. (It passed.)Richardson’s reflection on the neo-Kantian project relies mostly on Cassirer. This points to another problem with the Bauch connection. Bauch was a zealous anti-Semite, and did not think much of Cassirer and the Marburg school in general. He gave up the editorship of Kantstudien in 1916 because of the Jewish presence in the Kant Society, and [End Page 179] founded his own group and journal. Carnap nonetheless chose Kantstudien to publish his dissertation, perhaps to put more distance between himself and Bauch. Space does not permit me to cite Bauch’s vicious remarks about Einstein; he could not have guided Carnap through the discussion of physical space in “Der Raum.”I return to Richardson’s reconstruction. According to the neo-Kantian, objective knowledge is found in mathematical physics, not in uninformed experience. He acknowledges that theoretical physics relies on conventions, and that these conventions go beyond mere experience to provide the mathematical structure necessary for objectivity (131). The responses to the problem this poses... (shrink)

The COVID-19 emergency has hit the whole world, finding all countries unprepared to face it. The first studies focused on the medical aspects, neglecting the psychological dimension of the populations that were forced to face changes in everyday life and in some cases to stay forcedly at home in order to reduce contagion. The present research was carried out in Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic. The aim was to analyze the perception of happiness, (...) mental health, and the sense of loneliness experienced by adults during the lockdown due to the COVID pandemic. Specifically, the variables will be examined in relation to gender difference, living alone, with partner, or with partner and children. The research followed a quantitative approach using an online questionnaire. The project involved 1100 subjects from whom 721 participants were extrapolated. Of them, 17.3% claimed to live alone, 39.5% with their partner, and 43.1% with their partner and children. The results show that people in general experienced a lower level of happiness and mental health and higher levels of loneliness compared to normative sample. The lockdown and pandemic condition due to COVID-19 seems to have canceled the gender differences in the perception of happiness and mental health, while it seems to have increased the perception of loneliness experienced by males compared to the pre-pandemic condition. In addition, those who lived alone perceived a greater level of loneliness than those who lived with their partner or partner and children. Unexpectedly, no significant differences emerged regarding the level of happiness and mental health between those who had direct contact with the virus and those who did not. These data should make political decision-makers reflect on the need to pay more attention to the implications that such drastic measures as a lockdown can have on people’s psychological well-being. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on some new normativist positions and compare them with traditional ones. In so doing, we claim that if normative judgments are involved in determining whether a condition is a disease only in the sense identified by new normativisms, then disease is normative only in a weak sense, which must be distinguished from the strong sense advocated by traditional normativisms. Specifically, we argue that weak and strong normativity are different to the point (...) class='Hi'>that one ‘normativist’ label ceases to be appropriate for the whole range of positions. If values and norms are not explicit components of the concept of disease, but only intervene in other explanatory roles, then the concept of disease is no more value-laden than many other scientific concepts, or even any other scientific concept. We call the newly identified position “value-conscious naturalism” about disease, and point to some of its theoretical and practical advantages. (shrink)

Russell once said that “Vagueness and precision alike are characteristics which can only belong to a representation, of which language is an example. They have to do with the relation between a representation and that which it represents. Apart from representation, whether cognitive or mechanical, there can be no such thing as vagueness or precision; things are what they are, and there is an end of it” (1923). In other words, expressions like ontological vagueness (and even ontological precision) (...) are category mistakes and therefore make no sense. Half a century later, as the view began to emerge that some vagueness could be intelligibly ascribed to the world, Dummett opined that “It is not apparently absurd to suppose ... that the physical world is in itself such that the most precise description of it that even omniscience would yield might yet involve the use of expressions having some degree of vagueness” (1981). Evans had already questioned the idea of worldly vagueness, arguing that it was inconsistent (1978). A quarter of a century later, however, many papers had been written in defense of the intelligibility and possibility of this once nonsense and then contradictory claim. This chapter is one of them, albeit from a different viewpoint. The aim of this chapter is twofold: firstly, to consider the intelligibility of vague ontology, and secondly, to discuss the most famous argument against vague ontology, i.e., Evans’ argument. To this end, in Sect. 11.2 we present some commonsensical considerations on vague ontology. In Sect. 11.3, we look at some supervaluationist theories and the kind of vague ontology they accommodate before arguing that this kind of ontology is inconsistent with commonsense. Section 11.4 outlines a version of supervaluationism that can accommodate the commonsensical considerations discussed in Sect. 11.2. The outlined view is an ontological variation of Kit Fine’s characterization of vagueness as incompleteness (1975). It will be argued that the view is more effective than other versions of supervaluationism at accommodating commonsensical and metaphysical considerations. In the following section, we consider vague identity. Based on the view outlined in Sect. 11.4, there may be vague identity in some special cases. In Sect. 11.6 we focus on Evans’ argument and argue that it can be blocked in the first step. (shrink)

In this article, I present some worries about the possible impact of global efforts to aid the needy in some of the world’s most desperate regions. Among the worries I address are possible unintended negative consequences that may occur elsewhere in a society when aid agencies hire highly qualified local people to promote their agendas; the possibility that foreign interests and priorities may have undue influence on a country’s direction and priorities, negatively impacting local authority and autonomy; (...) and the related problem of outside interventions undermining the responsiveness of local and national governments to their citizens. -/- Another issue I discuss is the possibility that efforts to aid the needy may involve an Each-We Dilemma, in which case conflicts may arise between what is individually rational or moral, and what is collectively rational or moral. Unfortunately, it is possible that if each of us does what we have most reason to do, morally, in aiding the needy, we together will bring about an outcome which is worse, morally, in terms of its overall impact on the global needy. -/- The article ends by briefly noting a number of claims and arguments that I made in my 2017 Uehiro Lectures regarding how good people should respond in a world of need. As I have long argued, I have no doubt that those who are well off are open to serious moral criticism if they ignore the plight of the needy. Unfortunately, however, for a host of both empirical and philosophical reasons, what one should do in light of that truth is much more complex, and murky, than most people have realized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toleration and Justice in the Laozi:Engaging with Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early ChinaAi Yuan (bio)IntroductionThis review article engages with Tao Jiang's ground-breaking monograph on the Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China with particular focus on the articulation of toleration and justice in the Laozi (otherwise called the Daodejing).1 Jiang discusses a naturalistic turn and the re-alignment of values in the Laozi, resulting in a naturalization (...) of justice (impartiality) by rejecting artificial humaneness and rigid hierarchical moral-political structures. In this Laozian just world, there is no room for human intervention and rigid top-down enforcement of values, thus leaving justice to naturalized Heaven or Dao as the ultimate source of the cosmos.Based on Jiang's interpretative context, I show that there is a twofold justification for the "paradoxical" and "elusive"2 value of political toleration.3 A negative expression of toleration focuses on non-interference with choices, and non-enforcement of values toward those whom one reasonably disagrees with and regards as morally wrong. Such an attitude of toleration results in practical advantages such as avoiding entrenchment in bloodshed, abandonment, and deprivation.A positive expression of toleration operating in the Laozian ideal world requires equal protection of people as capable knowers, including those to whom we object. Such protection includes their ways of expression and an unbiased recognition of them as equally capable knowers so that they are heard without bias and prejudice. Such a kind of toleration is revealed as a constituent component of justice since it enables equal contribution toward the shaping of society without discrimination. In other words, toleration is seen as naturalized justice in a Laozian world within which no one is "being wronged with the capacity as a knower"—a kind of epistemic justice articulated by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007).4 [End Page 466]This article discusses how Jiang's political reconstruction of Laozian philosophy contains the seeds for a discussion of toleration, a value associated with distributive justice and against epistemic injustice. First, it introduces Jiang's arguments on a naturalization of justice and impartiality as Heavenly attributes in the Laozi. Second, it articulates the value of tolerance in the Laozi. Finally, I compare Laozian toleration with Confucian toleration using youwei- wuwei metaethical criticism.Moral-Political Philosophy in the LaoziJiang's interpretative framework about the origins of distributive justice in the Laozi starts with a discussion of the cosmogonic-mystical worldviews that signal "a new understanding of the nature of the cosmos, as well as a broad reorientation in the Heaven-human relationship in the mid-Warring States period" (p. 192). Differing from the interests in the origins of human culture or civilization in the Ru and Mo traditions, Jiang agrees with Franklin Perkins and identifies a "cosmogonic turn" in the late fourth century b.c. that reveals a demotion of anthropomorphic Heaven. By paring Heaven with earth and accordingly decentering human beings in the intellectual discourse, the Laozi directs equal values to the ten thousand things, with humans as just one among them (Perkins 2016, quoted in Jiang 2021, p. 196).5 Laozi's philosophy thus stands out by rejecting Heaven as caring for human affairs while taking Dao as the ultimate origin of the cosmos, as claimed in chapter 5 of the received text: "Heaven and earth are not humane; they treat ten-thousand things in the world as straw dogs; the sage is not humane; he treats people as straw dogs" (p. 199).With Jiang's reading of a naturalistic heaven, we see a re-alignment between cosmos and the human since sage-rulers follow the Heaven-Dao. The Laozian Dao is "self-so-ing" (ziran 自然), "accommodating" (rong 容), and "impartial" (gong 公), and thus marks a sharp contrast to Confucian familial bias resulting in "actively intervening in human affairs on behalf of the (certain) humans by appointing them to carry out its mission" (p. 200). With the sage emulating the ultimate Dao, the Laozi replaces the Confucian anthropocentric Heaven, which focuses on partiality (qin 親) and humaneness (ren 仁).This Laozian understanding of the cosmos also grounds its philosophical departure from Mohism despite both having a political... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CAUSALITY AND GENERALITY IN THE TREATISE AND THE TRACTATUS In the Tractatus Wittgenstein cryptically rejects the existence of a causal connection (or relation or nexus) : 5.135There is no possible way of making an inference from the existence of one situation to the existence of another, entirely different situation. 5.136There is no causal nexus to justify such an inference. 5.1361 We cannot infer the events of the (...) future from those of the present. Belief stition. Belief in the causal nexus is super1 And he later proceeds to add: 6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity. What he is claiming can be understood in terms of the "Logical Atomism* of the Tractatus. Atomic sentences, composed of a monadic predicate or a relational predicate and a suitable number of subject terms, represent situations or possible facts. The existence of a represented situation is the ground of truth for (or condition for the truth of or explanation of the truth of) the representing atomic sentence. We can consider 2 such atomic situations or atomic facts to be composed of a monadic property or relational property and an appropriate number of particulars. (This is a matter of some debate among interpreters of the Tractatus, but that issue does not really affect the question at issue in this paper. So, I will simply treat the view in the Tractatus along the lines of Russell's more explicit version of logical atomism in his lectures of 1918.) The world, according to Wittgenstein, is made up of such facts. This is the point of: 1.11The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.12The facts in logical space are the world. 1.13The world divides into facts. Consider, then, the claim that a's being F is the cause of its being G. This suggests that we construe causality in terms of a relation between the situations represented by 'Fa' and 'Ga'. With 1C representing a relation or nexus of causality, we could express that situation by: (1)C(Fa, Ga). The existence of the situation represented by (1) would then ground or explain the truth of (1). But that would mean that we recognize a relation of causality and causal relations between facts or situations. I cannot here argue, but will simply assert, that Wittgenstein's logical atomism in the Tractatus is incompatible with the recognition of relations between facts. However, one point that will be relevant to the concerns of this paper is easy to see. Logical atomism involves the claim — 1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same. This is not compatible with the recognition of the relation C and a fact grounding the truth of (1), for then Fo and Ga would not be items that were "independent" in the sense of 1.21. Hence, one who holds Wittgenstein's views about the independence of atomic facts cannot recognize causal relations between such facts. Thus, no fact is represented by (1) and C cannot relate atomic facts. The same results would hold if one suggested, in place of (1), that there was a fact corresponding to (2)(X)(Fx * Gx), where we read the arrow as the "causal" arrow — anything's being F causes it to be G. For, if there were a fact corresponding to (2), it would guarantee the link between the purported atomic facts Fa and Ga, since (3)Fa + Ga would be a logical consequence of (2), and we are back to a case like (1), with the arrow replacing 'C. (2) would also be problematic in that it would be some sort of "general" fact, which Wittgenstein also rejects. Thus, as Wittgenstein sees it there is no basis in the world for the explanation of causal statements. If the sentence (4)' (x) (Fx O Gx) ' is a statement of causal law is true, it is so simply because the list of atomic facts will contain the atomic sentence 'Ga' if it contains 'Fa'. That is, (4) is true, not because of any special fact corresponding to (5)(X... (shrink)

The notion of the supernaturality of an event may be understood in various ways. Most frequently ‘supernatural’ means ‘separated from nature’, i.e. different from nature. Thus, what is meant here is the difference in ontological character. The definitions of miracle, present in literature, emphasize the fact that we may talk about a miracle only when the phenomenon takes place beyond the natural order or stands in opposition to it. The description of a miracle as a ‘supernatural (...) event’ contains in itself the reference to that which is natural. The supernaturality of an event means that it surpasses (transcends) naturality. Additionally, this transcendence contains a kind of opposition to that which is natural. However, the miracle as a supernatural event takes place within the scope of that which is natural, although it takes place in a different way from natural events. It seems that this supernaturality may involve two things: (1) the course of the miraculous event; (2) the cause of the miraculous event. We should consider each of them separately and specify what we understand by the supernatural course of the event and by the supernatural cause of the event. If we could prove that we can talk about supernatural events at least in one of the two signaled aspects of supernaturality, then we would be able to define the miraculous event as a supernatural one. The analyses proposed in the paper allow us to formulate the following statement concerning the miraculous event, which is, to a great extent, a critical correction of the traditional way of understanding it: the miracle may be correctly understood as a supernatural event, only when this supernaturality concerns the personal cause of the event and not its course. (shrink)

Writing, the exigency of writing: no longer the writing that has always (through a necessity in no way avoidable) been in the service of the speech or thought that is called idealist (that is to say, moralizing), but rather the writing that through its own slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence) seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity, and little by little brings forth possibilities that are (...) entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, deferred, and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question – and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work so that this writing (understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language. – Maurice Blanchot ( The Infinite Conversation , xi) The Compendium * Beginning with the idea and practice of writing, and moving to the subject or self, then to truth and the One, and arriving at the Book and the Work, Blanchot’s words reflect the trajectory of the following work of writing. True to the embeddedness of the subject in the work of writing, the term “Compendium” has been a metonym for me over the past few years as I have thought about the concept of totality alongside its expression in figures such as the One, the Whole, or the All. In the following I aim to share some of the content of this metonym, and to enrich it by making some distinctions. 1 Here the term “Compendium” will refer to a concept of totality that is ontological (pertaining to being, and the copula) and also textual (pertaining to the symbolic, and the signifier-signified relationship). The Compendium is a figure for thinking the world as a Book, in the broadest sense—an approach to reality that is by no means new, but one that is due for renewal. 2 In partial answer to the question of the Compendium we will say that the word ‘Compendium’ stands in for expressions which seek to totalize, or concepts which seek to approach the concept of ‘everything,’ particularly when these expressions are bound up in the question of the Book (both the book as a physical object and the Book as a metaphysical figure: a way of thinking about the work in and of writing). The question of the Compendium is strongly associated with the physical and metaphysical form of the Book, like the mysterious and symbolic books which are opened in the Biblical book of Revelation, the book of life and the book of death, which together constitute an important couplet. 3 Parataxis & Hypotaxis There are two helpful distinctions that will bring us closer to an answer to the question “What is a Compendium?” The first distinction is between two figures in and for writing: parataxis and hypotaxis . Typically paired in contrast to one another as literary techniques, with parataxis indicating a side-by-side placement of textual elements and hypotaxis referring to subordinate arrangements of textual elements, the two figures can be understood as having a philosophical significance in addition to their practical function as devices for writers. For us these two terms will remain between philosophical theory and writing practice, and serve as a perspective for our writing and creation of texts. Here I take texts to refer to anything from the concrete written words in a book, to the ontological text of the world that we experience. Parataxis , as a figural way of thinking about the ontological structure of texts, refers to texts which are tightly woven and interdependent – texts within which each sentence bears the weight of the entire work. Parataxis often involves repetition, great density, and fragility. One of the best examples of this sort of text is Theodor Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus , Aesthetic Theory . In addition to the text itself, the translation history of the book may also help us to better understand parataxis and its relation to hypotaxis . The final published version of Aesthetic Theory , in German, was a text that Adorno intended to revise and rewrite, but this intention was never realized because of his untimely death. Where the German text of Aesthetic Theory certainly exemplifies the concept of parataxis , the first English edition took this densely woven text and carved Adorno’s lengthy paragraphs and lengthy sentences into manageable ‘bite-sized’ pieces of English text. The first translator took further liberty and inserted headings and new paragraph breaks where there were none in the original. Aesthetic Theory was eventually retranslated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and is now available in a form that is much more faithful to the original work. 4 The pertinent idea that this translation history points to is the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis . Where parataxis describes texts which are repetitive, densely woven, and often fragile, hypotaxis describes texts which are hierarchical and in which the primary relation is linear – the latter of which is very similar to the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory . On the other hand, the original German text that Adorno wrote was very dense, often repetitive, and contained long sections of text unbroken by paragraphs or headings. This example of parataxis was then turned towards hypotaxis through the initial translation which took a text that was, in many ways, nonhierarchical and nonlinear, and artificially subjected it to a hierarchy that was not its own (and here I take the word of Fredric Jameson who comments on the two translations in a note at the beginning of his book Late Marxism ). 5 The point here is not about translation, but rather the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis precisely as they are figures for discourse, written or otherwise. The concept of parataxis looks far more postmodern and rhizomic than the concept of hypotaxis which remains very modern and arborescent. This is a more figural way of talking about the distinction. However, if we wanted to take a more precise and analytical approach we could say that on the level of form parataxis involves a relationship between sentences and paragraphs in which each part bears an equally crushing responsibility to present the whole content of the text. As well, on the level of content, parataxis requires that each concept in a work take on the full conceptual weight of the total work. Continuing the analysis, we could say that parataxis describes texts in which there is no (or very little) linear or causal move from antecedent to consequent, whether in content or form. Instead, parataxis describes texts which weave together concepts via conjugations or associations. The concept of hypotaxis , on the other hand, requires that texts submit themselves to hierarchy, one example of which is logical argumentation. The contingency of the conclusion upon premises in hypotaxis is certainly distinct from the repetition, re-presentation, and conjugation of concepts in parataxis , and I think that this is evident in the difference between the writing styles prevalent in contemporary Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. It is not the case that the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis absolutely corresponds with the writing styles of Continental and Analytic philosophy (respectively). There are thinkers who take exception to this pattern, such as Badiou’s more formal approach in the discourse of Continental philosophy to give one example. However, when Analytic philosophy takes its writing lessons from the sciences, and seeks to do philosophy via the clean linear move from antecedent to consequent, then I think that Analytic philosophy writes with hypotaxis in mind. On the other hand, when Continental (particularly German and French) philosophy takes its writing lessons from narrative or poetry then Continental philosophy writes with parataxis in mind. It is not fair to say that all those writing Continental philosophy are looking to narrative and poetry for stylistic direction, just as it is not the case that all those writing Analytic philosophy have mathematics and science as their writing format, however there are some striking ways in which the differing epistemologies of Continental and Analytic philosophy encourage writing with parataxis and hypotaxis in mind (respectively). For some, writing with parataxis or hypotaxis in mind is a conscious decision and a product of stylistic self-consciousness, and for others it is an unconscious discursive and epistemic requirement that must be met in order to be involved in a particular discourse. Before moving on to our second distinction, and then an examination of the question of the Book, it is important to point out that both totality and figurations like the One, the Whole, and the All, come out of very human desires to totalize or to actualize our being-towards-totality. The relationship between identity and totality then can be construed, with Heidegger in mind, as striving toward wholeness, completion, or fulfillment, each of which is a quality of compendia. 6 Compilation & Selection The first distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis pertains to both form and content, and to both the mechanics of writing and the ideas to which writing refers. The second distinction pertains to both as well. In the process of writing and in the process of perception as well, there is a tension between compilation and selection . To begin with, in the work of theory-writing there is compilation, and this is because writing theory requires a broad perspective and certain measure of totalization. On the other hand, writing theory requires that the writer select an idea or a combination of ideas to individuate out of a radical and infinite multiplicity of identities and combinations. The concern here is not primarily for the writing of a theory about a specific idea, like a secondary work or a reference text. But rather the concern is with the writing of grand theories: Marx and Marxism, Derrida and Deconstruction, Husserl and Phenomenology, Sartre and Existentialism, Saussure and Structuralism —each of which strives along a trajectory towards being all-encompassing, whether it intends to or not. Today, we could even say that Speculative Realism has embarked on this journey, and perhaps now we could say that the discourse of Speculative Realism has reached the inevitable point after which a grand theory leaves the hands of its writer or writers and becomes a possession of the collective consciousness of the academy, or (perhaps now) the mass consciousness of the blogosphere—and this is a true pharmakon , a poison and a cure, a blessing and a curse. 7 When we write theory, whether the scope is that of a grand theory or a particular theory, we write in the tension between compilation (making good on the desire to be all encompassing) and selection (being required to decide and discern and to judge what is included in the work and what is deleted or appended or abridged or given over to ellipses). Generally speaking, the work of theory-writing often comes out of a desire to totalize, that is, to develop a theory of everything that is able to apprehend new experiences and ideas while still remaining whole. I grant that this is not a universal desire, and that not everyone who sits down to write a work (or book) of theory does so because of their will-to-totality, but it remains that this drive to totalize does condition a great many writers of theory (especially those who seek to develop grand theories like those mentioned previously). At the beginning of his book of interviews, Between Existentialism and Marxism , Sartre is quoted as saying, after completing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason : “I no longer feel the need to make long digressions in my books, as if I were forever chasing after my own philosophy. It will now be deposited in little coffins, and I will feel completely emptied and at peace—as I felt after Being and Nothingness . A feeling of emptiness: a writer is fortunate if he can attain such a state. For when one has nothing to say, one can say everything .” 8 This is where our two initial distinctions come to bear on the being-towards-totality as it is expressed in the concrete practice of writing: the first being between parataxis and hypotaxis , and the second being between compilation and selection. Where this second distinction is concerned there is a certain paradox at play given that selection is inescapable, and compilation is unachievable. Selection is inescapable (with the figure of the Compendium in mind) because, even when the imperative to compile is followed to excruciating lengths, selection still has the last word. This is why the Compendium is a figure rather than some material thing that can actually be accomplished or actualized. No matter how far one goes along with the will-to-archive and the will-to-compile, it is only ever a question of minimizing selection and never eliminating it. This leads to the second point, which is that total compilation is unachievable. The closest thing to total compilation that we have before us is the ontological and textual fabric of the world. Even in the case of the world, compilation cannot be enacted in a total fashion because of the need to include both the sphere of the actual and the sphere of the possible or potential. This as another way in which compilation is always-already selection, and further evidence that total compilation is practically impossible. Discursive Figuration and Total Writing Rather than figuration referring to a figure of speech or an image, here the term points to a way in which to think about the work of writing, both the work put into writing, and the work that is the result of writing: the finished yet incomplete final piece. As figures or figurations, the Book and the Compendium are ways of thinking about the work of writing and the human desire for the wholeness, completion, and fulfillment that are made manifest in the completed form of the book (whether a published or printed or saved document put to rest by the author). These two figures bear more strongly upon works that seek to be all-encompassing, and works that strive towards expressions of totality such as the One, the Whole, or the All. Moving on to the topic of the subtitle, and on a more prescriptive note, I would say that there is more hope for theory-writing to be found in parataxis than hypotaxis . Part of the reason for this claim is the poststructuralist critique of hierarchies, and yet another part is the compelling line of thinking called “weak thought” (in theology by John D. Caputo, and in philosophy by Gianni Vattimo, among others). 9 The consequences of these two convictions are such that if one is to strongly assert the truth of a grand theory without leaving the realm of hierarchy-critique and weak thought, then one must write paradoxically with parataxis in mind, and in so doing write weakly and non-hierarchically. This does not mean avoiding a sort of topography or topology when writing theory, rather it means avoiding both subjugation and oppression in thought by pursuing a nonviolent sort of ontology. In order to do this, theory writing does not present itself as an exercise in logical analysis where one mechanically moves from a set of premises (via contingency) to the inevitable conclusion (via necessity). Instead, theory approaches the idea of a Compendium. Given that the figural Compendium places parataxis and compilation above hypotaxis and selection, then the question becomes: is placing one part of a binary term before another not just another way of selecting, or another expression of hypotaxis ? Counter to the urge to resign oneself to the reign of selection, with some qualification one can nonetheless write without deciding whether selection and hypotaxis should be subservient to compilation and parataxis (which is to say that writing-without-decision is somewhere between and beyond possibility and impossibility). This dilemma can be disarmed by stating that theory writing is not about primacy, and not about having-decided-beforehand, both stylistically and also where content is concerned. This is the paradox of writing: always striving along a trajectory ( telos ) towards totality via parataxis and compilation, but always being drawn back to finitude and making selections, and placing one idea before another with hypotaxis in mind. In light of this paradox, the question of the Compendium as a figure for discourse and a figural Book has resonance with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Edmund Jabès’ Book of Questions , found in his Writing and Difference . The Question of the Book “Little by little the book will finish me.” 10 Derrida quotes Jabès, and proceeds to outline the reflexive relationship between the author of the book and the book itself, each of which are subjected to the other through a sort of chiasmus, both ontological and textual (not that the two are entirely separable). The Book, for Derrida like Blanchot in the introductory quotation, “infinitely reflects itself” and “develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility”, and in light of this we can draw an association with the painful tension between the practical reality of selection and the ideal trajectory of compilation. 11 This tension in writing, between the will to total compilation and the necessity of abridgment, is an ontological tension between part and whole just as it is a textual tension between signifier and signified. The ontological tension in writing that Derrida expresses in his essay on Jabès is between everything and nothing – a contradiction which Derrida finds in Jabès’ Book of Questions and also in the divine, in God. When one writes between compilation and selection one writes towards totality, and here we can follow Derrida who states that the lapse in signification, presumably in the signifier-signified discrepancy, is a “ rupture with totality itself” and furthermore that this lapse cannot be rectified through deductive reason or even philosophical discourse. 12 This rupture with totality, found in the troubled relation between signifier and signified, can also tell us a lot about the Book and about writing. Given an understanding of writing as an ontological act that strives towards (but never accomplishes) totality, we can see the written book as the manifested and given body of that striving. Perhaps in other disciplines or even other schools of philosophy there is a cultural climate within which the article is prized above the book, but I am fairly confident, especially when referring to the grand theories of Continental thought, that there is a respect for the book as a uniquely meaningful object capable of apprehending totality. Derrida writes, Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. 13 Here the vitality of the literal event is compromised by the deadening weight of the concept, and the figure of the Book assists in this lapse of meaning. The Book is a totalizing object, much like the figure of the Compendium, and yet this totalization lacks its final object of completed totality both because the figural Book is necessarily incomplete, and because the physical book is always-already a product of selection. Instead of achieving its end of being a place where everything takes place, it suffers from the lapse of writing, the discrepancy between event and concept. Derrida continues his exposition on Jabès by bringing to light yet another reflexive relation, a reversal of the relationship between the Book and the world. Derrida writes that, for Jabès, “the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.” 14 In addition to what was stated before, I take figuration to mean that the concepts employed, such as the Book or the Compendium, are not subject to the supposed rigor of analysis that is so prized by Enlightenment or Capitalist realisms. The figure of the Book and the figure of the Compendium cannot be held accountable to standards imported from scientific method, given an understanding that these standards require a concept to be replicable, consistent, falsifiable, measurable, and so on… This is an important point to make, especially in the present atmosphere within which theory must justify itself under conditions that are not its own. Instead of being held to these standards, figuration serves as a way in which to think about writing that leaves thought open to idealistic speculation, imperfect analogies, and most importantly the ever-present gain and loss that occur in the relationship between thought and being. By extension the figural way of addressing writing indulges in enough generalization to accommodate the excess/lack relationship between the ideal form of the Book or the Compendium, and the manifested and given body of a text (as it is practically completed and closed). Here we speak against the hostile atmosphere which would have theory submit itself to hierarchical rigor, rather than Blanchot’s “enigmatic rigor”, by being explicit about the discursive conditions and epistemic conditions under which theory operates. To write with parataxis in mind is, to a certain degree, to write with weakness as one’s methodology (with weak thought being in opposition to hypotaxis and hierarchy as much as weak thought can be in opposition to anything). Rather than asserting the strength of hierarchical theory, and rather than employing antagonistic argumentation with the goal of refutation different discursive and epistemic conditions for theory writing must be cultivated (and these are by no means new). First the critical and theoretical spirit reveals itself as being concerned with the task of complication—especially the complication and critique of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, polarities, paradoxes, parallaxes, hybridities, and especially antinomies. Second, theory positions itself as a sort of showing or revealing, rather than being ultimately focused on coming to full agreement or disagreement. This is where figuration can help theory-writing, both by placing emphasis on teleologies and trajectories (like parataxis and compilation), and by shifting focus away from pure primacy, power, or absolute origin. Figuration then, assists theory writing by placing the concern of theory outside of the concerns of the hard or soft sciences, and into the realm of thought or the idea. To speak of ‘the’ Compendium or ‘the’ Book, here, is to generalize not regarding the perfect form of the Compendium or Book, but to engage speculatively with an abstract idea which remains singular and yet complicated by multiplicity. The question of the Book that Derrida asks through Jabès is a question of everything and nothing, totality and nonbeing, and this question is a concern for writing and a concern for the figure of the Compendium so defined by the tension between compilation and selection, and parataxis and hypotaxis . On the note of nonbeing, we can look to the final page of Derrida’s first essay on Jabès in Writing and Difference and notice the introduction of his neologism, différance (with an ‘a’). Derrida writes: Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance . Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians). 15 This introduction of différance into the equation of the Book, alongside ontological affirmation and negation, hearkens back to the discussion of the symbolic lapse earlier in his essay. Differing and deferring, the Book is always a Book of Life and a figure for the intersection of the vital (life) and the total in writing. In a way, the writer of the Book may be someone who lives life, and in another way the writer of the book-as-object may be someone who engages in the act of writing, both practically (by inscribing words on paper, or typing script on a computer) and ontologically or symbolically (by investing their existence and inexistence into a work worthy of the figural Book). In addition to the writer as writer, the writer also serves as an editor, and the editorial role alongside the idea of the Compendium shows the editor to be one who collects and compiles, while being restrained by eventual selection and decision. Beyond this the editor of works and texts, in both the Book and the world, is engaged in a process of inscribing notation—of annotating (on) the Compendium. Eternal commentary is a feature of the textual Compendium, just as open-ended totality describes the ontological Compendium. The writer as writer does not simply write texts, but rather engages in a profoundly ontological act of inscribing their existence into the world, and the writer as editor does not merely annotate or alter texts as they are, but rather comments upon the text of the world. In/Conclusion So as we create texts, and as we write and create theory, let us be and remain attentive to the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book. These two concurrent metonymies are essential for total writing (grand theories, etc.), and may be forgettable for those concerned with fragmentary or hierarchical writing (which are valid in their own right). From the ontological and symbolic text of the world and phenomenological experience, to concrete texts such as books or mixed media, the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book are important for the actualization of the human will to be all-encompassing. The figure of the Compendium teaches writers of theory that the repetition, density, and fragility of parataxis offers a strong sort of weakness which does not become yet another variety of oppressive and hegemonic thought. Rather than write with hypotaxis in mind, subjugating one thought to another via cause and effect or antecedent and consequent, I would hope that theory-writing could guiltlessly indulge in the dialectical and contradictory conjugation of ideas, and take this as a legitimate methodology. Rather than being ashamed of showing resonances or giving way to abridgment or ellipses, it is my own authorial (but not authoritative) conviction that one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the fact that complete totalization is impossible, and one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the worry of violence, for the Book and the Compendium lack their completed object and are ever incomplete trajectories. NOTES * UPDATED 7/19/13: we've updated the HTML version to reflect the (correct) PDF version. Our apologies to the author—eds. 1. I would like extend thanks to Dr. Peter Schwenger of the University of Western Ontario for his comments on this paper and his hospitality as it was presented as a Theory Session at the Centre for Theory and Criticism on October 26th 2012. I would also like to thank Andrew Weiss for conversation and critique. 2. I should clarify my use of the term ‘figure’ at the outset. Given the use of the term by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Discourse, Figure (and also Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon ), I should state clearly that my use of the term will not correspond to the term ‘figure’ understood as the representation of an object. Instead, my use of the term ‘figure’ and its variations (‘figural’, ‘figurative’, ‘figuration’) will refer to the illustrative or metaphorical use of the Compendium or the Book as models or ways of thinking about writing and discourse. 3. Cf. Revelations 20:12-15. 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London & New York: Continuum Press, 1997). 5. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 1990), ix-x. 6. I have written about this concept of being-towards-totality elsewhere in two pieces of writing: the first is called Notes on the Compendium (an unfinished draft) which addresses some very wide theoretical concerns, being structured as a sort of itinerary or archive, and the second is Dialectics Unbound (Punctum Books, 2013) which outlines a concept of totality without the violence of totalization. While these works are more concerned with ontological totality, here I would like to focus on the idea of the Compendium as a textual totality. 7. Cf. Louis Morelle, “Speculative Realism: After Finitude and Beyond, A vade mecum” in Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism . Issue 3 (Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 241-272. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism . Trans. John Matthews (London & New York: Verso, 1974), 9. 9. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65. 11. Ibid, 65. 12. Ibid, 71. 13. Ibid, 75. 14. Ibid, 76. 15. Ibid, 78. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:109 HUME'S MISSING SHADE OF BLUE, INTERPRETED AS INVOLVING HABITUAL SPECTRA David Hume claimed that his hypothetical case of the unseen shade of blue posed no fundamental problem to his general empiricist principle. But I believe it well may show exactly what he denied it showed — viz., that his empiricism rests on a mistake. Hume says: Suppose... a person to have enjoyed his sight for (...) thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac'd before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; 'tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other. Now I ask, whether 'tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho' it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there are few but will be of opinion that he can.... Sometimes one is surprised by the colour which emerges when one mixes paints, powders or lights of different hues, in the sense that one is unable to imagine this resulting colour until one actually sees it. I often have analogous experiences when sightreading music on the trombone. If there is a large, unfamiliar interval between the note I am playing and the one to be played next, so I cannot 'hear' the next note inwardly, I bring the slide to the correct position, set my lips at approximately the right tension, and presto! the correct note appears, despite 110 my inability to predict what it was going to sound like. Only after I have heard it can I also 'hear' it, i.e, predict its occurrence in this melodic line. Cases like these are not puzzling philosophically, because in them, the note, colour, etc. arises primarily from the equipment used — e.g., paints, powders or lights, the trombone and tension of the lips, and so on — rather than from the mind of the person who uses these things. But in Hume's example, no extra-mental objects or events play a direct role in creating the imagined colour. In fact, this colour never appears at all outside the subject's mind, and he never sees it. Therefore here the imagined colour is produced entirely by the subject himself, without his having copied it from anything in the external world. Yet this contradicts the maxim Hume laid down at the beginning of the Treatise that all simple ideas arise from correspondingly simple (sense) impressions. Two points perhaps mitigate the seriousness of the problem set by the missing shade of blue. First, Hume saw clearly, as Locke did not, that "innate" does 2 not mean the same as "justified." He was not so much concerned with the question of where ideas come from, as with how these ideas can be shown to be legitimate. His answer to the latter question is that experience alone is competent to show this. Second, strictly speaking, no idea is itself a piece of knowledge, but only something with the help of which one constructs knowledge-claims; and it is necessary for a person to justify knowledge-claims which are composed of innate ideas, by checking them against experience, just as much as knowledge-claims composed of non-innate materials. For example, suppose I possess innately the idea (visual image) of blue and the idea (tactile image) of cool. To say that these ideas are innate means that they are merely triggered or activated in my Ill mind by experiences I happen to have, but are not created by these experiences, and are not necessarily copies of them. Nevertheless, in order for me to know something which involves these ideas, I first must put them together in a judgment, and then confirm that judgment by appeal to experience. For instance, I might use these ideas to make the judgment... (shrink)

Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world (...) and life. The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan’s teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience—for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan’s account, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl’s account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls “meaning rationalism,” I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality that Husserl does not share. Husserl’s position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit—contra Millikan—of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it—of life. (shrink)

Within the cognitive science of religion, some scholars hypothesize (1) that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts enjoy a transmission advantage over both intuitive and highly counterintuitive concepts, (2) that religions concern counterintuitive agents, objects, or events, and (3) that the transmission advantage of MCI concepts makes them more likely to be found in the world’s religions than other kinds of concepts. We hypothesized that the memorability of many MCI supernatural concepts was due in large (...) part to other characteristics they possess, such as their frequent and salient association with moral concerns and the alleviation of existential anxieties, and that without such characteristics they would fail to be memorable. We report the results of three experiments designed to test the relative contributions of minimal counterintuitiveness, moral valence, and existential anxiety to the memorability of supernatural ideas. We observed no main effects for minimal counterintuitiveness but did observe main effects for both moral valence and existential anxiety. We also found that these effects did not seem to stem from the greater visualizability of morally valenced concepts or concepts that concerned existential anxieties. These findings challenge important claims made by leading researchers regarding MCI concepts within the cognitive science of religion. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, (...) reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In a circulated but heretofore unpublished 2001 paper, I argued that Leiter's analogy to Quine's 'naturalization of epistemology' does not do the philosophical work Leiter suggests. I revisit the issues in this new essay. I first show that Leiter's replies to my arguments fail. Most significantly, if — contrary to the genuinely naturalistic reading of Quine that I advanced — Quine is understood as claiming that we have no vantage point from which to address whether belief (...) in scientific theories is ever justified, it would not help Leiter's parallel. Given Leiter's way of drawing the parallel, the analogous position in the legal case would be not the Legal Realists' indeterminacy thesis, but the very different position that we have no vantage point from which to address whether legal decisions can ever be justified. I then go on to address the more important question of whether the indeterminacy thesis, if true, would support any replacement of important legal philosophical questions with empirical ones. Although Ronald Dworkin has argued against the indeterminacy thesis, if he were wrong on this issue, it would not in any way suggest that the questions with which Dworkin is centrally concerned cannot fruitfully be addressed. The indeterminacy thesis is a bone of contention in an ordinary philosophical debate between its proponents and Dworkin. Of course, if the determinacy thesis were true, no one should try to show that it is false, but this triviality lends no support to the kind of replacement proposal that Leiter proposes. I conclude with some general reflections on naturalism and philosophical methodology. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which familiar views about the world and our place in it must change in the face of the reality of psi phenomena. It is argued that most commentators are confused on this topic. Contrary to the received opinion, the existence of psi should make almost no difference to our currently accepted body of scientific theories. Nor, as some argue, can it be of much help to a defense of dualism. But the existence (...) of psi has profound implications regarding the pervasiveness of intentions in the world, even in connection with everyday sorts of events. The view is defended that we have no grounds for imposing antecedent restrictions on the range, magnitude, or refinement of psi. Finally, the paper discusses how the evidence for precognition forces serious consideration of a world?view generally associated only with so?called ?primitive? cultures. (shrink)

I defend a pragmatist reinterpretation of Sellars’s famous manifest-scientific distinction. I claim that in order to do justice to this important distinction we must first recognize, despite what philosophers—including, arguably, Sellars—often make of it, that the distinction does not draw an epistemological or metaphysical boundary between different kinds of objects and events, but a pragmatic boundary between different ways in which we interact with objects and events. Put differently, I argue that the manifest-scientific (...) distinction, in my view, can be best understood, not as a metaphysical distinction between apparent and real objects and events, or an epistemological distinction between perceptible and imperceptible objects and events, but rather as a distinction, which is not necessarily rigid over time, between distinct ways in which we collectively deal, in practice, with objects and events. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacredness of Nature: Response to Six Objections to Religious NaturalismDonald A. Crosby (bio)The poet Mary Oliver speaks as a kind of religious naturalist when she writes in her book of prose and poetry Winter Hours, “I would not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, (...) along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendent relationship to rapture, and with words, I celebrate the rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.”1 She speaks as a poet and not as a philosopher or religious scholar, but she does so as one who is ardently in touch with the sacredness of nature. Her vocation as a poet is testimony to this constant attunement. Her daily walks in the woods and by the sea are her portals of access to the temple of the natural world. Her every step makes contact with holy ground.Oliver’s poetic vocation shows itself to be in deep sympathy with all of the living and nonliving aspects of nature, and thus with the imminent ecological crisis of our time, when she reflects later in this same book, “The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense of honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”2Poet, philosopher, religious scholar, ecologist, and perceptive human being are bound together in Mary Oliver’s alert responses to the sacredness of nature. She captures in both her poetic and prose writing the essential spirit and outlook of religious naturalism. I do not claim that she is a religious naturalist; that would be going beyond what I am capable of knowing. But she certainly sounds like one in many respects throughout the poetry and prose of this book.I want us to keep constantly in mind her spirit and outlook as we ponder the cogency, adequacy, and appeal of religious naturalism as a way of thinking and living religiously, for they are the ultimate tests of that adequacy. I want us to do so by considering objections of various sorts arguing that religious [End Page 24] naturalism fails to be sufficiently religious in the way of satisfying the deepest discernments, needs, hopes, and foundations of authentic religious faith. My plan for this essay is to present what I surmise to be some of the most substantive objections, and to reply to each of them in turn.I do so in defense of the thesis that religious naturalism—at least as I have come to interpret and understand it over many years—is a strong contender for having an honored place among the religions of the world. My personal conception of religious naturalism is of course only one of many, and other religious naturalists might have different kinds of response to at least some of these objections. But my responses indicate the capability of religious naturalism to take such objections seriously into account and to provide plausible answers to them.The objections I want to respond to in this essay are six in number. All of them, as will be seen, assume a kind of panpsychism or the primordiality of some kind of mind or spirit, a view I find unnecessary and tending strongly toward an untenable mind-matter dualism in my defense of religious naturalism. 3 The first one is that nature by itself has no overarching purpose or reason for being. The second is that if mind and spirit are emergent rather than primordial, then they are reducible to blind physical processes, meaning that religion is implausibly reduced to physics. The third objection is that nature is just a mass of meaningless facts, with no objective, dependable values of any kind, including religious values. The fourth objection is that with impersonal nature rather than a personal, loving, God as its focus, religious naturalism lacks essential divine... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of EnlightenmentJohn E. SmithAvihu Zakai. Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii + 348. Cloth, $49.95.Edwards's History of Redemption is the focus of this study by Avihu Zakai—Professor of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The History (...) is a series of thirty sermons Edwards preached on Isaiah 51:8 "... my righteousness shall be forever... my salvation from generation to generation." For him, it was a "new method in divinity... thrown into the form of a history"—a narrative showing God's sovereignty in redemption "from the fall of man to the end of the world."Zakai gives a comprehensive account of Edwards's view of history meant to highlight his struggle against modern beliefs threatening Christian faith (308; passim). The discussion is not limited to history, but includes most of Edwards's writing from 1720-1750 with emphasis on his opposition to the Enlightenment. Zakai cannot interpret so many works with the accuracy needed; he repeats old errors such as opposing the "head" and "heart" in the Affections and minimizing Edwards's respect for "common morality" in the ethical writings. Zakai is right in saying that Edwards insisted on God's authority over the world and history, but he puts it in such absolutistic terms that he often seems to abandon historical analysis in favor of exhortation.Zakai's best contribution is in his search for the general framework of God's redemption of the "engine" driving history (120ff.; 213ff.). He finds the answer in "seasons" of revival such as the Great Awakening. This is true, but Edwards notes other special events like the Reformation that "promoted the work of redemption" (Works, 9. 272), but are not revivals in the usual sense. For Edwards, special events are of many kinds and are identified by interpretation based on God's Providence. As Miller claimed, interpretation is essential; without it we may have a chronicle of events, but no history. Zakai seems to underestimate this point and the many problems it poses.The book strikes me as one more attempt—George Marsden's recent book, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, 2003), is another—to rescue Edwards from "profane" interpreters like Miller who saw that Edwards learned from the Enlightenment even though he challenged many of its ideas. In my view, Edwards can well take care of himself.John E. SmithYale UniversityCopyright © 2004 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of EnlightenmentJohn E. SmithAvihu Zakai. Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii + 348. Cloth, $49.95.Edwards's History of Redemption is the focus of this study by Avihu Zakai—Professor of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The History (...) is a series of thirty sermons Edwards preached on Isaiah 51:8 "... my righteousness shall be forever... my salvation from generation to generation." For him, it was a "new method in divinity... thrown into the form of a history"—a narrative showing God's sovereignty in redemption "from the fall of man to the end of the world."Zakai gives a comprehensive account of Edwards's view of history meant to highlight his struggle against modern beliefs threatening Christian faith (308; passim). The discussion is not limited to history, but includes most of Edwards's writing from 1720-1750 with emphasis on his opposition to the Enlightenment. Zakai cannot interpret so many works with the accuracy needed; he repeats old errors such as opposing the "head" and "heart" in the Affections and minimizing Edwards's respect for "common morality" in the ethical writings. Zakai is right in saying that Edwards insisted on God's authority over the world and history, but he puts it in such absolutistic terms that he often seems to abandon historical analysis in favor of exhortation.Zakai's best contribution is in his search for the general framework of God's redemption of the "engine" driving history (120ff.; 213ff.). He finds the answer in "seasons" of revival such as the Great Awakening. This is true, but Edwards notes other special events like the Reformation that "promoted the work of redemption" (Works, 9. 272), but are not revivals in the usual sense. For Edwards, special events are of many kinds and are identified by interpretation based on God's Providence. As Miller claimed, interpretation is essential; without it we may have a chronicle of events, but no history. Zakai seems to underestimate this point and the many problems it poses.The book strikes me as one more attempt—George Marsden's recent book, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, 2003), is another—to rescue Edwards from "profane" interpreters like Miller who saw that Edwards learned from the Enlightenment even though he challenged many of its ideas. In my view, Edwards can well take care of himself.John E. SmithYale UniversityCopyright © 2004 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

The chapter studies the speculative realist critique of the notion of finitude and its implications for the theme of the "end of the world" as a teleological and eschatological idea. It is first explained how Quentin Meillassoux proposes to overcome both Kantian and Heideggerian "correlationist" approaches with his speculative thesis of absolute contingency. It is then shown that Meillassoux's speculative materialism also dismantles the close link forged by Kant between the teleological ends of human existence and a teleological (...) notion of the "end of the world." Speculative materialism no longer sees the end of thought, or the end of the thinking human being, as an insurmountable limit of conceivability, but rather as one contingent and possible event among others. This allows us to conceive an "end of all things" in a positive sense with regard to which the old eschatological hope for the end of the present world of injustice and for the emergence of a new world of perfect, "divine" justice becomes meaningful and legitimate in an entirely new sense. (shrink)

The Threshold of the Visible World advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic--Kaja Silverman explores the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies. Accounting for these phenomena on both a conscious and an unconcious level, Silverman analyzes the psychic and textual (...) conditions under which our "field of vision" can be expanded. The title of this book is taken from Lacan's essay on the mirror stage. In that text, Lacan writes that "the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world." He thereby suggests that the visible world has no existence as such until the infant subject has access to an image of self. Lacan intimates that the mirror provides the frame through which one relates to others within the domain of vision, stressing the priority of narcissism and the ego over all other libidinal transactions. The Threshold of the Visible World provides a psychic, social and political specification of Lacan's claim, and most particularly of its implications for the subject's relations to the social other. This is accomplished through examination of the ego, as well as two other categories at the center of Lacan's account of the mirror stage: ideality and identification. This book is an ethical-political project which leads to the re-elaboration of a number of crucial theoretical categories--Silverman offers an account of the bodily ego, of identification, of idealization, of the gaze, of the look, and of the "photographic." The Threshold of the Visible World leads as well to the formulation of a fresh model for conceptualizing sexual, racial and class "difference," and the terms under which it might be dismantled. This book thus seeks to apprehend the field of vision through the frame of a different kind of bodily ego, and discover the pleasures to be derived from corporeal transport. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Disenchantment of the WorldAndrew KeittIn 1688 Anglican divine William Wharton published a short tract entitled The Enthusiasm of the Church of Rome demonstrated in some observations upon the life of Ignatius Loyola. Typical of the confessional propaganda of the day, Wharton's work contrasted the "rationality" of Protestantism with what he considered to be the superstition and obscurantism of the Catholic faith:It has (...) been the peculiar happiness of the Church of England to create a right sense of Religion and Piety in all her Communicants, and secure to them the practice of a rational Devotion. She makes no pretensions to private Inspirations, and extraordinary Illuminations of the Holy Ghost; and all her Children are more apt to deride, than admire the follies of the Enthusiasts.... Not so the Church of Rome, which in all her Offices and publick Ceremonies promotes and foments it, hath on many occasions given publick applause and approbation to it, and oweth the greatest part of her peculiar Doctrines, and present prosperity to the Enthusiasm of her Followers.1The "enthusiasm" to which Wharton refers had become the object of intense controversy in late seventeenth-century England. The term enthusiasm in this context meant highly emotional, deeply embodied religious experience in [End Page 231] the form of inspired raptures, miraculous revelations, and prophetic power. It was an epithet used with increasing frequency during this period to condemn not only Catholics but also members of radical Protestant sects such as the Diggers, Levellers, and Fifth Monarchy Men.The efforts of mainstream Protestant denominations to distance themselves from the "ultrasupernaturalism" of religious enthusiasts would seem to fit within a Weberian paradigm in which the Protestant Reformation functions as a catalyst for the "disenchantment of the world," the process by which the boundaries of the supernatural were supposedly rolled back in the modern West.2 Indeed, many historians of early modern Europe have adopted, either implicitly or explicitly, such a model. Lawrence Stone, for example, reflects this school of thought with his assertion that by the end of the seventeenth century, Protestantism's "more rational and coherent view of nature and its relationship to God's providence" created a worldview in which magical or miraculous explanations of events became increasingly untenable.3Catholicism, on the other hand, has often been portrayed as maintaining a more porous boundary between nature and supernature. Summarizing what he calls the "Weberian consensus," sociologist Peter Berger offers the following analysis, which reads remarkably like a translation of Wharton's characterization of Catholicism into the language of the social sciences:The Catholic lives in a world in which the sacred is mediated to him through a variety of channels—the sacraments of the church, the intercession of the saints, the recurring eruption of the "supernatural" in miracles—a vast continuity of being between the seen and the unseen.4In recent years, however, as historians have emphasized the structural parallels between the various confessions in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such stark contrasts have become increasingly suspect.5 Consequently, scholars have underscored the need for comparative work on the topic. Michael Heyd, for example, has suggested such a strategy in his work on the reaction to religious enthusiasm in seventeenth-century Europe.6 [End Page 232] Although Heyd focuses primarily on the English case, he recommends an integrative, comparative approach. He describes how religious enthusiasm became "the subject of detailed analysis—theological, social, psychological and even medical" in the closing decades of the seventeenth century in England, and he details the efforts of both religious and secular authorities "to distinguish carefully between true inspiration and a false one, between the natural realm and the truly supernatural."7 Heyd links this reaction against religious enthusiasm to the disenchantment of the world and asks to what extent these trends were unique to the Anglican tradition in England.8Lorraine Daston has emphasized the need for comparative study as well. Religious enthusiasm plays an important role in Daston's "historical epistemology," which traces the development of modern notions of "fact" and "evidence," and their relationship to changing attitudes toward the miraculous in early modern Europe. The... (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two (...) countries, speaking eighteen different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

We should now be able to come to some general conclusions about the main lines of Cuvier's development as a naturalist after his departure from Normandy. We have seen that Cuvier arrived in Paris aware of the importance of physiology in classification, yet without a fully worked out idea of how such an approach could organize a whole natural order. He was freshly receptive to the ideas of the new physiology developed by Xavier Bichat.Cuvier arrived in a Paris also (...) torn by many overlapping debates on the nature of classification, and in particular that between the natural and artificial systems. The very validity of the enterprise of classification was questioned in many quarters. Cuvier's achievement on his entry into the Parisian world of science was not simply to establish himself as a highly competent anatomist: far more important, he also began to use ideas from many different specialties to change completely the notion of what was involved in natural history.124 At the same time that he himself swung away from the guiding image of the field naturalist as the ideal of the specialty, he took ideas from the new physiology to answer questions about the order of the animal world, and from comparative anatomy to resurrect extinct creation — and to come to conclusions from that creation about the history of the forms of life and the manner of their succession. He showed himself able to alter the relationships between natural history and many other fields of study in a way that implied, rightly or wrongly, his own complete mastery over such a movement. Partly he was able to do this because the ideas he borrowed were not themselves logically articulated and thus could be easily adapted and refocused for many different specific purposes. The value of the heuristic possibilities inherent in the idea of life, for example, far outweighed its inability to generate full systems of classification. Cuvier also consistently refused to consider in science matters relating to the first causes of events. Freed from the consideration of first-order phenomena, he was able to use second-order explanations across a far wider field of applicability. Personal doubts about the validity of a theology that had used science in order to bolster its own claims were combined here with the strong influence of the Kantian critique of the limits of human reason.125Cuvier's characteristic mode of procedure was that of intellectual appropriation and a bold capacity for altering the relationships between different fields of knowledge, rather than, with the exception of taxonomy, the technique of expanding their subject matter. His claims to originality came, first, from this reappropriation and reorientation and, second, from the sheer scope of his work, which aimed at nothing less than the cataloging and classification of all animate objects.126 They rested also on his acute use of his assertion of a certain relationship with the past of his subject. Very often he would present this history in such a way as to obscure his own intellectual genealogy, and often too he would give differing accounts of the priority of use of an idea in order to distract attention from the questionable exactitude of his own claims to originality. Cuvier came to Paris at precisely the time when society and institutions were most profitably malleable for a newcomer; it was also a time when many scientific disciplines had reached a stage advanced in terms of their factual content, yet relatively inadequate in conceptual organization. They were ripe for takeover by large-scale organizing ideas such as the animal economy and the subordination of characteristics. Paleontology is a particularly good example of a specialty in this particular form of underdevelopment in 1795.Cuvier paid a high price for his initial success. His electic applications of large-scale organizing ideas tended to mean that little of his own work had complete coherence at all levels. Ideas, as we have seen, that proved capable of providing a complete reform of the larger groups of the animal kingdom were incapable of producing its detailed working-out in the taxonomy of smaller groups, which had to be supplied from observed analogical correlations. Further, his physiological approach to classification involved the breakdown of strict correspondence between organs and functions, which left the way open for workers such as Geoffroy St. Hilaire gradually to tilt the balance away from the study of the correlations of hierarchies of functions, and toward morphology as the basis of the order of nature. Cuvier's brilliant appropriations from physiology from the beginning, therefore, contained the seeds of conflict with Geoffroy.Cuvier's eclectic approach made it very nearly impossible for him to present a clear idea of the ways in which the life sciences could be said to be lawful. In spite of his efforts to assimilate them to the position of the physical sciences in this respect, he was forced in the end to accord only an ambiguous status as “laws” to observational correlations. From this area of failure came much of the attempt to give his own two laws — the correlation of parts and the subordination of characteristics — predictive qualities, particularly in relation to paleontological research.It is not surprising that Cuvier's title as the “legislator” of natural history should represent more a claim than a reality. How, then, was he able to emerge as the leading French naturalist of his day? First of all must be adduced the sheer scale of his undertakings. Then comes his expertise as a practical anatomist, and the range of different topics toward which he turned his interest. His collaborators cannot be given credit for his output nor, as we have seen, for slavish adherence to his ideas. Cuvier was able to successfully claim to have dominated the underdeveloped specialties, such as paleontology, and turned them into a major heuristic input into both geology and comparative anatomy; but in other fields, such as physiology, he appropriated concepts and encouraged research but made little impact on the field himself. His attempts in 1812 to head off, or neutralize and absorb the growth of morphological studies landed him in a dangerously rigid position, which despite his encouragement of the new physiological research under the Restoration made further elaboration of his own conceptual underpinnings almost impossible.Cuvier's authority in the scientific world would in any case have been great because of his substantive achievement in taxonomy, but the rest of his work had enough ambiguities and dislocations for it to need the support of his political and social power. Cuvier's detractors seized on a vital fragment of the truth when they accused him of finding the political dimension all-important: it obscured the disjunctions in his theories and at the same time gave him the authority to make new claims for the status of the observational sciences - and for their relations of power with their surrounding specialties. Cuvier's science both thrived on and was halted by the power games of intellectual appropriation, manipulation of the past to confirm the present, and continual claims for hegemony. (shrink)

Some philosophers of physics recently expressed their skepticism about causation (Norton 2003b, 2007). However, this is not new. The view that causation does not refer to any ontological category perhaps can be attributed to Hume, Kant and Russell. On the other hand, some philosophers (Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe) view causation as a physical process and some others (Cartwright) view causation as making claims about capacities possessed by objects. The issue about the ontological status of causal claims (...) involves issues concerning the ontological status of capacity, modality and dispositional claims. In this paper, my goal is to show that without engaging metaphysical debates about the ontological status of causal claims, it can be shown that we can objectively assign truth values to these statements. I argue that for causal claims to be objective we don't need to postulate the existence of special facts (specific to causal claims) in addition to ordinary physical facts described by physical theories. This, I think, is enough to justify the usefulness of this concept in certain branches (may be all) of science. Once this is achieved, there is no need to engage in unnecessary metaphysical debates. So, even if advanced physical theories don't mention this notion, causal reasoning can still be important in understanding the world not in the sense that science discovers special ontological category called causation but in the sense that we come to know certain facts about the world. (shrink)

This study focuses on the acquisition of the two basic relational functions of the French address pronouns: tu for solidarity with friends and vous for deference with an unknown person or a known person with higher social status. Previous research has found that L2 learners of French become more target-like in their choice between tu and vous when they spend time in a French community. This is due to the fact that study-abroad offers L2 learners exposure to naturalistic (...) interaction involving native speakers of the target language. Our study reports findings from a cross-sectional study of language practices outside the classroom and the productive use of the pronouns in a role-play task by 24 Ghanaian L2 French learners. Half of them had learnt L2 French in Ghana while the other half had spent 9 additional months in France. The findings show that the distribution of address pronouns in L2 French is significantly different from the distribution of address pronouns in L1 French. But there are no significant differences between the two groups of learners. The analysis of reported language practices, interaction with native and non-native speakers and exposure to radio and films in both contexts show that appropriate use of address pronouns is not related to the amount of interaction outside the classroom or exposure to media, be they in the ‘at home’ context or during study abroad context. This study suggests that factors other than exposure are at play in the acquisition of the relational function of address pronouns. (shrink)

The dispute over the viability of various theories of relativistic, dissipative fluids is analyzed. The focus of the dispute is identified as the question of determining what it means for a theory to be applicable to a given type of physical system under given conditions. The idea of a physical theory's regime of propriety is introduced, in an attempt to clarify the issue, along with the construction of a formal model trying to make the idea precise. This construction involves a (...) novel generalization of the idea of a field on spacetime, as well as a novel method of approximating the solutions to partial-differential equations on relativistic spacetimes in a way that tries to account for the peculiar needs of the interface between the exact structures of mathematical physics and the inexact data of experimental physics in a relativistically invariant way. It is argued, on the basis of these constructions, that the idea of a regime of propriety plays a central role in attempts to understand the semantical relations between theoretical and experimental knowledge of the physical world in general, and in particular in attempts to explain what it may mean to claim that a physical theory models or represents a kind of physical system. This discussion necessitates an examination of the initial-value formulation of the partial-differential equations of mathematical physics, which suggests a natural set of conditions---by no means meant to be canonical or exhaustive---one may require a mathematical structure, in conjunction with a set of physical postulates, satisfy in order to count as a physical theory. Based on the novel approximating methods developed for solving partial-differential equations on a relativistic spacetime by finite-difference methods, a technical result concerning a peculiar form of theoretical under-determination is proved, along with a technical result purporting to demonstrate a necessary condition for the self-consistency of a physical theory. (shrink)

From a cognitive point of view, the adhesion to religious beliefs, especially those involving adult subjects, are quite mysterious. Religious representations entail paradoxical claims that should imply skepticism or cautious doubts in any rational mind. Nevertheless, it is not rare that they prompt an act of total commitment from the converts. The aim of this paper is to propose a naturalist explanation of the conversion phenomenon. The argument relies on the postulated existence of an emotional signal (...) selected by evolution to motivate the child to look for the underlying structure of the world by providing a strong positive feeling when a solution is found. By the use of different examples of historical conversions, the author shows how this emotional mechanism can be triggered in the presence of religious representations, causing in the subjects the feeling that they have discovered a good solution to problems they were confronted with. (shrink)

Jen-Luc Nancy’s thinking of the event stems from his understanding of being as based on no principle, ground or essence. Nothing preexists the event of being, no principle, arche or prior substance. With such a statement, a thinking of the event emerges: not preceded by any principle or ground, being is nothing but the event of itself. In turn, the event is no longer anchored in a principle that itself would not be happening. Thus, preceded by (...) nothing and grounded in no essence, the event of being can only come as a surprise. The event is always the bringing forth of the unprecedented: the event always comes as a surprise. I first show how Nancy thinks the event from the very motif of the surprise, indeed claiming that an event is surprising or it is not an event. In a second part, I explore Nancy’s thinking of the event of the world, understood as creation ex nihilo. Ultimately, I show that Nancy understands the eventfulness of the event in terms of the essencelessness of existence. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests (...) both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:66 IN DEFENCE OF KEMP SMITH D. C. Stove argues against Kemp Smith's contention that Hume's philosophy "was intended not to subvert but to endorse our natural beliefs" in general, and our belief in the Causal Principle in particular. His arguments are insufficient. Kemp Smith does not need to deny that the falsity of the Causal Principle is believed by Hume to be possible in the strongest (...) of Stove's three suggested 2 senses: it is not merely self-consistent, but the Principle is unverifiable and unconfirmable in the sense that no empirical proposition is relevant to its truth. However, to say flatly that its falsity is possible is to say that it is not impossible in any way at all; and that is what is at stake both in Hume's letter to Stewart and in the use Kemp Smith makes of it. If Hume had written a letter to Stewart or to any scientific enquirer urging him to desist from his labours on the ground that "something may begin to exist, or start into being without a cause," he would have been a fool, and in representing Hume's position in this way Stewart is in fact calling Hume a fool. It is not surprising that Hume is indignant. The problem is whether, and how, one can hold both that the Causal Principle is undeniably true and that it can be supported neither by deductive nor by inductive argument, and whether Hume on the most reasonable interpretation of his published works held both these views. Clues to the answer lie in the in tradition of sceptical philosophy, and in the difference between a cause and a reason. Hume's philosophy is indeed, as he says, 'very sceptical'. But scepticism is a kind of philosophy with a long history, from Sextus Empiricus to Bayle, and it is reasonable to suppose that Hume was aligning himself with this position, especially since so much of the argument in 67 the Treatise is derived from Bayle. But sceptics do not behave otherwise than ordinary men. Scepticism is not directed against everyday beliefs but again.st arguments: this is a point on which Sextus insists." It would not be the part of a sceptic to doubt that every event has a cause, but to refute all arguments purporting to show that such is the case. To assert "that any thing might arise without a Cause" would not be scepticism, but an inverse dogmatism: to infer from a philosophical argument a belief about the real world that is at variance with everyday belief. The crucial step in Stove's argument occurs in his gloss of Hume's claim that he had maintained "that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source" phrase "sic., experience, of course". This could be misleading. It could mean that Hume here claims that experience gives us reason to believe that the Causal Principle is true; and this Hume has denied, as Stove urges ad loc. But nothing in what Hume says in his letter requires us to interpret him thus. And his sceptical principles tell against it: an argument from experience, whether inductive or by analogy or whatever, is still an argument and thus liable to sceptical attack. What Hume could mean, and what Kemp Smith took him to mean, is that our experience causes us to regard the principle as necessary: experience is not a premise in any sort of argument at all, but a causal explanation for a universal propensity to believe in the Causal Principle. It is true that Hume's citation as analogues of such empirical affirmations as "That Caesar existed" is misleading. But it is not in fact the case that Hume represents these as in any way 'parallel' with the Causal Principle: he says only that, like it, They are believed without recourse to Reason and Intuition. In 68 point of fact, Stove is going a bit far when he says that this is (like "There is such an Island as Sicily") an observation-statement; but that point is hardly relevant here. It is worth noting that in the offending passage... (shrink)

In the 7th century, when Islam emerged, the Arabian peninsula was under the influence of the Sassanid empire, one of the two great world powers, culturally as well as economically/politically. Like the Sasanian/Zoroastrian belief system, the Arabs of the Ignorance period had a dualist cosmology in essence. In the world of the Arabs of Ignorance, who think of man as a being between "good" and "evil" forces, it is believed that evil forces such as "jinn and (...) devils" can have an effect on people, as well as Allah. In the period of ignorance, which is generally accepted to be understood through "idol worship", idols actually function as a form for the embodiment of these metaphysical powers. Therefore, idols themselves are not gods; Just like the manifestation of the human spirit in the body, they are worshiped because they enable metaphysical entities to "take on flesh and bones", that is, to occupy a place in the visible realm. However, in accordance with the dualist belief, the polytheists place idols around the Kaaba in the center of the city so that the angels can be incarnated, they also place idols in the wild and desolate places and build temples and altars for demonic forces. According to Ibn al-Kalbī, for example, the idol of al-ʻUzzā is a female devil and its altar is located in the Batn al-Nahle valley, 45 km northeast of Mecca. As a result, the main characteristic feature of the cosmology of the Age of Ignorance is the belief that evil metaphysical beings can affect human life as well as benevolent forces. What happens to human beings caught between these two metaphysical powers is also explained by the concept of "Dahr", which means time, which occurs as a result of the synthesis of the conflict between the two. Islam flatly denies the ability of a power other than Allah to have such an effect on existence in the universe. Polytheism, which Islam qualifies and condemns as "shirk", is essentially this dualism. In the Qurʾān, this is emphasized as " Take not (for worship) two gods: for He is just One Allah." (an-Naḥl, 16/51.). By making only the will of Allah valid in the universe, Islam also unifies the order in the physical world and the mind. Thus, an important step has been taken towards rational thinking in the universe where the rule of a single mind is valid. Even in the Qurʾān, it is emphasized that the Prophet was a "human" like other people, did not have any supernatural abilities, and did not know the "unseen", that is, events beyond what time or material means allowed. As a matter of fact, since the Prophet did not have any superhuman claims, the polytheists accuse him of "ordinariness" and claim that what he tells is only the "word of man". However, Islam does not stay here either, it declares the end of prophethood with Muhammad. According to this, it will not be possible for Allah to address another person after Muhammad as the carrier of a divine message that must be socially obeyed. From now on, human beings will walk the rest of the way on their own in a world where a single rational, consistent mind is valid. Of course, in this journey, the light of the Qur'an, the last revelation, and all the acquis of humanity up to that time will be benefited, but the guidance of a living prophet will no longer be in question. This situation, which is described as the "sealing of the prophethood" in the classical literature, represents a new stage for human beings in terms of the history of thought. However, all this rationalization fails when the parties to the conflict in the history of Islam after the death of the Prophet tend to justify their political positions with occultist arguments. Especially in the Umayyad period, political legitimacy is based on metaphysical claims rather than being taken from the society itself. According to classical sources, the expression "the shadow of God on earth" is used for the first time for Muʿāwiya. With the same method, it is possible to provide theological explanations for tragic events such as the events in Karbala. This situation leads to the reproduction of the dialectical relationship between good and evil forces, which were known in the Ignorance period and revealed the concept of Dahr, this time by attributing "evil" (shar) to Allah. Objections to all these interpretations also form the basis of the first debates about the essence of God in Islamic thought. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solidarity Ethics: Transformation in a Globalized World by Rebecca Todd PetersDavid LilleySolidarity Ethics: Transformation in a Globalized World Rebecca Todd Peters minneapolis: fortress, 2014. 160 pp. $39.00.“But what do I do?” Addressing this frequent response to her well-received In Search of the Good Life (2004), Peters proposes an ethic of solidarity as a new strategy for privileged readers negotiating the “morally precarious waters of neoliberal globalization” (...) (xiv). She takes the novel step of using the methods and sources of liberationist, feminist thought while crafting a contextual ethic “that starts from the reality of life in the first world” (30).Economic redress done only for the benefit of the marginalized is critiqued. Peters insightfully details the problem of coupling unsustainable economic disparity with marked isolation and disinterest in the common good. The solution proposed thus begins with acknowledging human commonality and forging relationships across lines of privilege. This emphasis on mutuality enables Peters to address first-world readers without neglecting two-thirds world [End Page 211] agency, even when advocating top-down structural change. To “love your neighbour as yourself,” not as your children, is the foundation for an ethic of solidarity (40). Readers are called to pursue justice by transforming, not escaping, the global economy.The book finishes well, inspiring the creativity of readers by suggesting transformative strategies involving everyday matters such as food, investment portfolios, and relational networks. Eschewing technical jargon, this would benefit classroom or small-group discussion. Not all materials equally further this practical end, however. Chapter 1 deftly builds a bridge from liberation theology to contextual theology in situations of privilege and calls for understanding privilege as the starting point of first-world solidarity ethics. Not until chapter 4 (of five), though, does understanding privilege become central, leaving the impression that intervening materials, while interesting, do little to advance the argument. A theologically focused section feels particularly foreign. The life of Jesus is identified as this theology’s exemplary starting point, but principles—justice and sustainability—carry greater argumentative weight; without further explanation, Jesus’s instruction, “Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” is rejected as naïve and ineffective (88).The proposed ethic is called “new” no less than ten times, but an unconvincing portrayal of differing approaches leaves this claim difficult to evaluate. Patronizing feelings of sympathy or responsibility for “others” are clearly rejected but perplexingly illustrated. Prayers of thanksgiving are connected with sympathy while boycotts and low-energy bulbs are said to instantiate benevolent responsibility for those less fortunate; the leap from light bulbs to paternalism is made in half a paragraph. Without substantive footnotes for support, the links between particular practices and ideas seem speculative and unconvincing, making it difficult to judge the relative merits of solidarity as an alternative.What is made eminently clear is the formative impact of solidarity on those who pursue it. Readers are guided to face oft-avoided questions about their place in a global economy and to pursue interconnection across lines of difference. A crucial recurring theme is the importance of metanoia, which requires first-world Christians to recognize and change that which is harmful. To move toward solidarity is to be continually confronted with personal privilege by listening to those without it—brilliantly illustrated by the scriptural example of Nehemiah listening to Israel. This calls forth greater depth of metanoia and guides one into solidarity afresh. The frequent failure involved in forging such relationships across lines of difference is insufficiently acknowledged, but the book’s hopefulness encourages readers to persevere when difficulties arise. Solidarity Ethics does not quite lead us to where we need to be, but it points toward the path, for which it is most welcome. [End Page 212]David LilleyUniversity of AberdeenCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Slife and Reber ask of psychologists that they recognize their prejudice against theism and the incompatibility between theistic and naturalistic worldviews. Yet, the subtext of their article is that theism and naturalism are equally valid and that psychology’s secularism is a mistake. Given that theism is not beyond reason, the only sufficient ground for charging psychologists with prejudice is if theism has survived serious attempts at conceptual and empirical test, and psychology ignores or disguises this (...) fact. So, the grounds for believing in the reality of a supernatural existent are highly relevant to the authors’ allegation. However, their concept of God affords no such grounds. They disavow the logic involved in the ordinary meaning of the term “incompatible” and they ignore a crucial distinction between conditions of existence and qualities of things or processes. The consequence is that either God is this-worldly, and there is no ontological basis to Slife and Reber’s incompatibility thesis, or God’s mode of existence is quite different from the mode of existence of ordinary things and all the problems of dualism follow. Either way, their charge of prejudice is without foundation. The burden of proof rests with the defender of theism and, for now, psychology’s secularism can be considered a mark of the discipline’s rationality. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 34.2 (2006) 14-36 [Access article in PDF] "The Possibility of the Poetic Said" in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lévinas) Gabriel Riera Language would exceed the limits of what is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making understandable [en laissant sous-entendre, sans jamais faire entendre] an implication of meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or (...) the logical definition of concepts. This possibility [vertu] is laid bare in the poetic said. [...] It is shown in the prophetic said. —Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being [my emphasis] Writing, without placing itself above art, supposes that one not prefer art, but efface art as writing effaces itself. —Maurice Blanchot, Writing of the DisasterIn an effort to elucidate a more originary difference than Heidegger's ontological difference between Being and entities, as well as an ethicity of thinking able to respond to the trace of transcendence of the other's face, Lévinas's philosophy redefines language radically and does so in uneasy proximity to poetic language. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), Lévinas deploys a constellation of terms—discourse, expression, communication, face, sincerity, witnessing, prophecy—in order to elucidate the ethical dimension of language, the ethicity of philosophical discourse. This constellation revolves around the crucial notion of signification and the two operative concepts of the said (le dit) and saying (le dire). By the former Lévinas understands the semantic content of an utterance or the giving of signs by a sender to an addressee, but also the different modalities by which a subject masters the world by assimilating it to the measure of consciousness (discourse, narration, history, manifestation, representation). Saying (le dire) refers to the way of signifying primarily that I am for the other, the expression of being-for-the-other that subjectivity "is" before positioned as the source of signs or comprehension: subjectivity as exposition. While the said expresses a content, the saying is expression without content.Language for Lévinas is the "structure" of both the retraction and the inscription of infinity (l'infini), and this "structure" is what Lévinas calls ethics. It is thus possible to affirm that in Lévinas there is no ethical turn without a certain linguistic turn, one in which the a priori of language is interrupted by an anteriority whose a priori character is enigmatic. But Lévinas's linguistic turn is turned inside out: for him language contains the other's call and thus harbors a form of exteriority within itself. This is because language is elevated to a metaphysical category (in the sense of Totality and Infinity [1961], where it means the breaching or interruption of totality) that exceeds the simple [End Page 14] "giving out of signs" [délivrance de signes] [AE 81/OB 48] or communication. Lévinas claims that "saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communication, as exposure [exposition]" [AE 82/OB 48]. Signification precedes and defines language as proximity and contact with the other and not as the "vicissitude [peripetia] of the thematizing intentionality" [AE 216/OB 137] of a subject whose main attribute is its ability to synchronize questions and answers, being and its manifestations, and by so doing leaves no margin for being exposed to the other. Further, signification also names an enigmatic pre-diction that challenges the primacy that language, understood as a system of signs, enjoys in other philosophies (structuralism and analytic philosophy, for example).Most critics agree that Lévinas's philosophy is inhospitable to aesthetic phenomena and ambivalent toward poetic language. His severe condemnation of the work of art in "Reality and Its Shadow" (1948) is still present in Totality and Infinity, Lévinas's first major work, where he establishes a relation with the other as face-to-face in discourse. And although in Otherwise than Being Lévinas finally acknowledges "poetic" language's ability to suggest significations that exceed the order of discourse and even endows it with a (quasi)-ethical force... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to identify early and recent Pentecostal studies in the West and to highlight the main difference between them. Today there are more than 250 million Pentecostals in the world, and together with the charismatic movement there are more than 500 million. Having begun to spread in the 20th century, the movement claims to be the fastest growing religious phenomenon in human history. In attempts to interpret the phenomenon of the movement's growth, there (...) have been several gradually emerging approaches: explaining the origin of the movement as supernaturally "coming from heaven"; searching for the origins of Pentecostalism in other Christian movements; presenting the emergence of the movement as the result of social and psychological factors such as poverty, marginalization, and the desire to escape from modern society; and the multicultural approach. The paper analyzes the works of Western historians and theologians of Pentecostalism since the second half of the 20th century. The result shows a turning point between early and late studies, namely that late studies aim to revise the history and include participants in the movement around the world, not just in North America, explore the contribution to the development of the movement of local ministers who have long remained in the shadow of Western missionaries, emphasize the diversity of ideologies and social influences that have shaped the movement. It also highlights three major contemporary areas of research: historical, characterized by studies of Pentecostalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; theological, focusing on the development and shaping of theoretical theology as a result of the movement's institutionalization; and religious studies, practiced primarily from the perspective of the sociology of religion. (shrink)

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche demands that “psychology shall be<br>recognized again as the queen of the sciences.” While one might cast a dubious glance at the “again,” many of Nietzsche’s insights were indeed psychological, and many of his arguments invoke psychological premises. In Genealogy, he criticizes the “English psychologists” for the “inherent psychological absurdity” of their theory of the origin of good and bad, pointing out the implausibility of the claim that the utility of unegoistic<br>actions would be (...) forgotten. Tabling whether this criticism is valid, we see Nietzsche’s methodological naturalism here: moral claims should be grounded in empirical psychological claims. Later in Genealogy, Nietzsche advances his own naturalistic account of the origins of good, bad, and evil.<br>Three cheers for methodological naturalism, but it was not Nietzsche’s innovation, and he did not pioneer its application to morality. The list of moral naturalists who appealed to psychology arguably includes Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Bentham, and Mill, among many others. If Nietzsche’s naturalism is to be worth the candle of contemporary scholarship, it must involve more than the methodological naturalism that predated him by centuries and to which he made no serious contribution. Nietzsche’s key contribution to naturalism is not his adherence to its methodology, but his discovery of certain psychological facts. In particular, he realized that mental states are not ordinary dyadic relations between a subject and an intentional content. Nietzsche discovered the tenacity of intentional states: when an intentional state loses its object (because the subject realizes the object does not exist, because the object is forbidden, or because of something else), a new object replaces the original; the state does not disappear entirely. As Nietzsche puts it Genealogy, “Man would rather will the void than be void of will.” Nietzsche relies on the tenacity thesis in his explanation of the origin of bad conscience: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward […. They turn] against [their] possessors.” When hostility towards others becomes impossible, hostility does not disappear; instead, its object is replaced. (shrink)

When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Remi Brague in (...) this wide-ranging cultural history. Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality. Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own. (shrink)

In the verse of Sūrah al-An'ām 6/38, "Nothing has we omitted from the Book" as it is stated in the 59th verse of the same sūrah, “Anything fresh or dry (green or withered) but is (inscribed) in a record clear (to those who can read)." has been commanded. In the verses of the an-Naḥl 16/44 and 89, it is stated that it was revealed to the Prophet to explain to people everything that was revealed to them. In this (...) meaning, there are other verses in the Qur'ān. Based on these and similar verses, according to some, the Qur'ān; it is a general source of information that anyone who has lost his camel's bridle as an allusion to all knowledge, all knowledge of those before him and those who will come until the Day of Judgment, can find it in the Qur'ān. On the contrary, according to some, it is useless to look for everything in the Qur'ān, which was sent for the guidance of man, happiness in this world and the hereafter, and it is necessary to look for things in line with his goals. From this point of view, the article focuses on the content of the thesis that there is knowledge of everything in the Qur'ān, in Turkish and Arabic websites, and it is tried to understand how the Qur'ān is portrayed as a source of information on these platforms. While doing this, a search was made on Google, one of today's popular and easy access to information platforms, by typing ‘Is there everything in the Qur'ān’. And the content in the first five rows, written and visual, was transferred to the study without falling into repetition. Among these, an evaluation was made based on the most read internet sites and it was seen that the general opinion was that there is everything in the Qur'ān. Content creators have often answered the question of how such a thing is possible, by analogy, in which all the information of a tree is stored in a kernel, a large bale of cotton takes up very little space when compressed, or -in an easy-to-understand analogy for today's people- huge amounts of memory cards are stored in tiny memory cards explained by compressing information. As proof of this, History in the Qur'ān, Technology in the Qur'ān, Astronomy in the Qur'ān and Mathematics in the Qur'ān, are just a few of the titles in this content. Again, according to those who think this way, it is another way of explaining the subject that the Qur'ān is secret and only those who have deepened in science and have certain competence can discover that secret when the time comes. On the other hand, there are also some who say that there is no knowledge of everything in the Qur'ān, even if it is a little. Despite the verses stating that nothing is missing in the book and that everything wet and dry is in the book, it is important how those who hold this view explain the subject. For example, the concept of kitāb is one of the words that have a wujūhāt (different meanings) when the whole of the Qur'ān is taken into account. Because, in various places in the Qur'ān, this word is used in the meaning of the Qur'ān, the lawh-i mahfūẓ, the written/obligatory and the book of deeds. In addition, even if the Qur'ān is meant, it has been stated that the wording here is common, not in the meaning that the knowledge of everything is in the Qur'ān, but in the sense that the things about guidance or in line with the goals of the Qur'ān can be found in it. As a matter of fact, there are other examples of this in the Qur'ān. Considering the context, there is no explicit or implicit presumption in the relevant verses that the Qur'ān is meant by the kitāb-ı mubīn (a revealed book). Therefore, the first period commentators and later commentators understood this expression not as the Qur'ān, but as the lawh-i mahfūẓ. Interestingly, some of the content producers of the website were able to claim that although the commentators expressed their views in writing or orally, the Qur'ān was meant by the kitāb-ı mubīn, and the preference for the lawh-i mahfūẓ needed explanation. As a result, it is understood that those who claim to have all the information in the Qur'ān actually understand the verses in question literally. If the Qur'ān has everything, it is the necessary consequence of this proposition that the Qur'ān will suffice for us without the need for anything else. In our opinion, it is an important contradiction that among those whose views are given, that they leave the method aside on this issue, even though they emphasize reason and method. This makes it very difficult to obtain healthy information about the epistemic value of the Qur'ān from the internet, which is a popular source of information, and to clarify the mind of ordinary people on this subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Maurice Blondel on the Practice of Supernatural ReligionAnne M. CarpenterIntroductionMaurice Blondel attended daily Mass to the very end of his life.1 This essay is, in a way, a meditation on this fact. But it is more nearly a confrontation with Blondel's philosophical argument in defense of human action's capacity for affirming the infinite, for "containing" the infinite in its affirmation of the infinite, an affirmation achieved in action's (...) finitude. That is, this is an essay on Blondel's argument for a supernatural religion that can be literally practiced. Much like Blondel's larger philosophical works, this essay spends its time exploring the coordinating ground of supernatural religion, which is the natural world split open in two directions: in its very existence, which is a supposition of what absolutely outstrips its power; in its very action, which in ecstasy takes the shape of a desire for a reversal that it cannot offer itself. So the natural world presupposes the supernatural and desires the supernatural while remaining, of its own power, natural. Blondel makes a theoretical distinction in the universe that, concretely, is a natural–supernatural one committed to a single destiny. This theory and this concreteness cohere in order to make the literal practice of religion both possible and necessary, terms that this essay explains. [End Page 1305]Action: The Problem of Theory and PracticeBlondel's later writing in the 1930s expands on an important paradox that appears in the very early L'Action (1893). That paradox has to do with a distinction between theory—that is, the world of ideas and reflection—and practice, by which Blondel means the concrete world of human action, a world that for Blondel is an expansive range or "body" of action. It is true, after all, that an idea is not a deed. And yet no deed is without its idea, without the mediatory power of the act of consciousness, nor without the mediation of this consciousness's rationality—a further synthesizing act within consciousness—even when the deed contradicts reason. "Hence," says Blondel, "it is because we find in our acts a kind of creative sovereignty that we have a consciousness of ourselves and reason; it is because we are reasonable and conscious of ourselves that we judge ourselves capable of voluntary initiative."2 The paradox, at one angle, is this leap or gap, this difference nevertheless sustained by a mediation, where ideas and deeds are non-identical yet inseparable. At another angle, it is a paradox that a "science of practice" has to straddle, since it studies (as science) what it is not: concrete action (practice). Blondel, whether young or of his latter days, is after the possibility of such a science. He is also after the bond between reasoning and acting. In this section, I also seek that bond, and I make use of Blondel's early and later works together to give a sense not of Blondel's development, but of the Gestalt of his life's work with respect to the bond between thought and action.3The bond first requires the rejection of monism. Though Blondel's stance toward theologies of his day tends to be more well-known among theologians, and therefore filtered through questions of nature and grace and carried through to a rejection of a two-tiered conception of the universe, still, his nearer interlocutors are often monists: modern philosophers and the modern sciences, and their strange compatriots in history, the spiritual movements of the fin de siècle, involving spiritualisms of various kinds, recollected in our popular imagination today in visions of crystal balls and séance tables. The positivism of the modern sciences and of modern (French) philosophy poses a totally self-contained "nature" that can be explained [End Page 1306] without religion, in a form of what English speakers might call "secularism," but which is more accurately filtered through French Republican desires for laïcité.4 While Blondel was writing, there were not only these political and scientific and philosophical trends, but also the semi-pantheistic, variously agnostic religious movements that dominated privileged circles in Europe at the time. These are a kind of... (shrink)

Tschumi believes that the quality of architecture depends on the theoretical factor it contains. Such a view led to the creation of architecture that would achieve visibility and comprehensibility only after its interpretation. On his way to creating such an architecture he took on a purely philosophical reflection on the basic building block of architecture, which is space. In 1975, he wrote an essay entitled Questions of Space, in which he included several dozen questions about the nature of (...) space. The questions he formulated could be regarded as analogous to the situation in the philosophy of the time, in which the interest in questioning the most obvious forms of understanding the world and intellectual categories increased. The research on space is an area common to many fields of natural sciences, humanities and artistic creation, but it also deals with other problems, such as issues of experience. The concept of space-time continuum proposed by Hermann Minkowski drew attention to the identity of time and space with the events taking place. Probably regardless of the postulates of physicists commenting on Einstein’s discoveries, also in philosophy it increased the importance of the concept of the event which became dominant in Heidegger’s latest work Contributions of Philosophy. Of the event. Furthermore, Tschumi’s reflections on space entered into relation with the problem of experience, which aroused the interest of a group of French philosophers trying to assimilate Georges Bataille’s concept of “inner experience”. Both Tschumi and Derrida referred to Bataille because his views could be used not only to modify the concept of the subject, but also to change the understanding of what constitutes the area of architecture. The discussion on experience has led to the recognition that the subject is not sovereign, but actually a form of what is on their outside. Such insights make it possible to treat the area of the Parc de La Villette as existing mainly when it is organised by its users. The decisive features of the Park are its assumptions, according to which it is a variety of active void that leads to agreeing new social relations with it. The park does not force to participate in already existing moral or political communities, but tries to move into an unknown future in which the scope of free functioning of individuals will be increased. Doubts about the principles of functioning of the individual self and its discovery as a whole composed of non-coherent parts, as well as its dependence on its own depth full of disordered forces, influenced the understanding of architecture as a set of contradictions whose source is a fundamental void anticipating the empty phenomenal space. The use of this phenomenal void in architecture, as well as the rejection of the whole and unity, had a specific political purpose and drew its inspiration from political analyses. In the Parc de La Villette, metaphysics and politics were brought closer together because the philosophy of void was used to create new conditions for community action. It can be argued that the source of this philosophy was the perception of errors in existing societies dependent on the shortcomings of traditional metaphysics. Spacing (espacement) was one of the key terms in Derrida’s philosophy, which was also combined with the concepts of différance and chôra. The study of the nature of space, especially its transition from the level of pure possibility to the level of sensual phenomenon, also contributes to understanding how well designed space can have an impact on its audience. This explanation is based on Tschumi’s assumption that the space of the Parc de La Villette contradicts the integrating approaches and instead exposes contradictions, but it does so in a way that combines incompatible properties into a single piece of architecture. The specificity of such integration is similar to the invention of a musical phrase, which is an ideological message: moral and political. Such a thesis may raise doubts, however, if both the clearly adopted assumptions and those deduced from the work allow for their ↪Quart Nr 2(52)/2019 logically ordered presentation then to a limited extent it may be assumed that the work has achieved a connection between a specific philosophy of space and its practical application. Derrida combined the problem of spatiality with the problem of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, who in the first version of Critique of Pure Reason assumed that pure imagination precedes the appearance of time and space, even in their transcendental forms. The imagination in such a situation can be described as a factor activating time and space, which indicates what function is played by movement in this activity. This leads us to recognize that the ultra originary source of pure forms of sensual intuition is movement, which in early Greek philosophy was identified with void and its lack of resistance to phenomena occurring in it. Derrida’s philosophy in search of a certain super-transcendental source of time and space pointed to différance which, like void or the chôra, does not have material features or even any other form of being. Différance is the primary cause of the disruption of motionlessness and the introduction of activity into motionless time and space, thus its activity can be described as spacing (espacement). Derrida’s discoveries in this respect are not entirely original, because Hegel already pointed out when examining the present that it is primarily a differential relation (differente Beziehung), which, being seemingly neutral, influences the present with supernatural force and makes it unidentifiable with itself. Differente Beziehung must similarly influence the originary space, negating its initial character by multiplying its divisions and expanding its boundaries. Différance acts by revealing contradictions wherever there is apparent undifferentiation. Tschumi, composing the Parc de La Villette as a variety of void and a set of incompatible layers, followed the rules of différance or the chôra: he made void visible together with its saturation with contradictions. If space can be considered to be the result of the activity of difference, such activity has a certain regularity, which influences the behaviour of its observers. Differences or contradictions fall into a certain rhythm, which can be considered a manifestation of transcendent order. The problem is that what can be considered the source of such order, namely the logos or God, is partly disorder and error. According to descriptions contained in Timaeus, the world is a combination of forces that drive to order with forces of erroneous necessity that resounds in every order and forces it to return to disorder. Derrida denied the possibility of understanding différance as a theological value, even if it were a negative or apophatic theology, but no categorical denial could be perfect. The assumption that différance or the chôra are not endowed with any substance properties cannot deny their activity, and thus a certain force. Already since Democritus, philosophy has multiplied the names of such a force and the contradictory variety of its manifestations, never forgetting also the necessity for reason to withdraw from the possibility of giving its correct characteristics. Such a withdrawal may be interpreted as an expression of respect and, in certain situations, as a cult of the force that precedes reasonableness. The Parc de La Villette, which is an artistic divagation about the contradictions and forces behind them, can be considered as a place of their sublimation, and therefore as a variation of the temple of what differs from order and disorder. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Possible Worlds in the Tahâfut al-tahâfut:Averroes on Plenitude and PossibilityTaneli Kukkonen1.It has become customary to credit John Duns Scotus with having first systematically laid out the basis for treating the modal terms as referring to synchronic alternative states of affairs. This has been viewed as constituting a genuine shift in modal paradigms, as no former model had included the idea of genuine synchronic alternative possibilities. Historians of modal logic (...) and contemporary logicians alike have found it interesting that certain key features of Duns Scotus's theory and subsequent late medieval work markedly resemble the so-called possible worlds semantics approach of modern modal theory.1Duns Scotus' innovations were not completely without precedent. Several key elements in Scotus' theory were foreshadowed by twelfth-century developments. Perhaps somewhat amusingly, one of the most important forerunners to the Latin discussion was one in whose context the expression "possible worlds" would have made sense in a very special way.2 This is the medieval Arabic debate on the eternity of the world and its modal status. In this paper I propose to take stock of the positions the Arabs reached, and to do so by way of [End Page 329] consulting one of the documents central to the debate, the Tahâfut al-tahâfut or the "Incoherence of the Incoherence," by Abû al-Walîd Ibn Rushd (the Latin "Averroes," 1126-1198). In the first part I examine Averroes' exposition of the received Aristotelian tradition; in the second I assess the revisions to modal theory suggested by al-Ghazâlî (1058-1111), in the latter's comprehensive critique of philosophical doctrine. Though the two inquiries are obviously complementary, they can be accomplished independently of each other.It will be seen that Averroes' and his formidable adversary's views on the interpretation of the modal concepts differ quite fundamentally. What makes the ensuing debate, often fraught with misunderstandings and misrepresentation, so engaging is that both parties, in spite of their differences, refer to a common Aristotelian backdrop in questions of terminology and mode of argumentation. Both Averroes and al-Ghazâlî are well-placed to present a considered and balanced account of what they take to be crucial in the issues involved. It is on account of this that the complex interplay between the old and the new comes to the fore with exceptional force and clarity in the Tahâfut debates.2.The Tahâfut al-tahâfut, first published in 1180, is a philosophical rejoinder to an attack on philosophy, Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî's Tahâfut al-falâsifa or "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" (1095). In that celebrated work al-Ghazâlî had claimed to expose certain philosophical doctrines as not only contrary to orthodox Muslim belief, but also internally incoherent.3 Averroes' reply in turn was written in order "to show the different degrees of assent and conviction attained by the assertions in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and to prove that the greater part has not reached the degree of evidence and of truth."4 The work is thus of a doubly dialectical nature. Whereas al-Ghazâlî tries to show the philosophers' reasoning to be defective, Averroes has to show both that al-Ghazâlî is likewise lacking in intellectual rigor and that philosophy, properly understood, is innocent of the charges leveled at it. If the Islamic philosophers (al-Fârâbî and, above all, Avicenna) have in fact erred, this is only to the extent that they have misrepresented correct Aristotelian doctrine. [End Page 330]Averroes' presentation is appropriately delicate considering the complexity of the task at hand. Averroes quotes al-Ghazâlî exclusively in full, lengthy passages, with the result of incorporating almost all of the Tahâfut al-falâsifa in his own work. In so doing he gives us an adequate and comparably fair representation of al-Ghazâlî's views. Averroes then goes on to discuss what al-Ghazâlî says both in the philosophers' name and in his own, and points out their respective deviations from Aristotelian doctrine. The text thus comes laid out in three successive layers, with Averroes' own... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by John RussonRobert BermanJohn Russon. The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 199. Cloth, $60.00To intoduce his account of the human body, Russon places two epigraphs at the front of his book, one from Diogenes Laertius, the other from Artaud. The first tells of Zeno, seeking (...) the oracle’s counsel about how best to live and advised to “mix his flesh with corpses.” What sounds like a recommendation to practice necrophilia, Zeno cleverly interprets to mean that he ought to spend his life reading old books. The second likens culture to a new bodily organ, radicalizing Merleau-Ponty’s view that the blind man’s cane is an extension of his body. Diogenes’ anecdote and the surrealist’s aphorism extend the conception of the human body beyond its ordinary boundary. Literally, Artaud’s culture is no bodily organ, nor is Zeno’s hermeneutically active mind a body which, flouting the law, mixes with the corpus of ancient authors, and experiences, at one Phaedrus-like remove, forbidden pleasures of dialectics.If Russon is a Zenonic reader and Hegel an ancient, then his book enacts the oracle’s advice correctly spun. However, it is clear, despite its title, that this is not Russon’s only aim. At the outset Russon distinguishes his project from that of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (PS); whereas Hegel presents the experience of consciousness, Russon’s project is to develop a “phenomenology of the body” or “science of the embodiment of consciousness” (3), whose central concepts are the “three logical determinations of … phusis, hexis, and logos” (8). Despite this contrast, Russon claims to follow the method he takes Hegel to have adopted in PS, intending “by rigorous argument to comprehend … the human body” (3), to “display the self-development of the internal dynamism of the concept of the body” (4). Yet, while initially insisting on the difference between his and Hegel’s projects, he actually holds that PS is “implicitly” such a phenomenology of the body; hence, he wants to extract from it “the philosophy of the body that is there implied” (3) and to show how it rationally comprehends human embodiment. If making the implicit explicit describes the work of interpretation, then his book is as much an essay in Hegel interpretation as it is a self-standing phenomenology of the body. Russon mixes his interpretive with his Hegelian systematic aim, but these are distinct, and he grants the latter priority. If one rejects his interpretive claim about Hegel’s project, Russon’s systematic claims about the body should remain unaffected, and assessable in their own right, even if not implicit in PS. What are these claims?Russon’s central gambit is to understand the human body in terms of embodiment, and embodiment in turn via the activities of the self-conscious self. Since he argues that these activities essentially involve recognition, thus are inherently social, the “whole [End Page 636] functioning world of social, cultural life will have to be recognized as the body of the properly human self,” while the natural body “of mere human life” is “not yet the body of the human proper” (9). Accordingly, Russon organizes his systematic claims about the human body into three parts: A. treats propaedeutically the “Hegelian concept of self-conscious selfhood” (8), B. handles the body as social institution; and C. deals with the culminating “absolution of the body” in which the self knows itself in its embodiment as self-conscious self.Russon’s project prompts questions about his Hegel interpretation and his conception of the human body. PS is skeptical, but preparatory: its immanent critique of interrelated knowledge claims serves to expose and undermine the principle of the opposition of consciousness which they assume; acceptance of that principle, Hegel argues, is the chief obstacle blocking the way to systematic philosophical knowledge, precisely because it leaves philosophy defenseless against skeptical challenges to the very possibility of such knowledge. This construal of PS conflicts with Russon’s interpretive claim that it is implicitly a science of the... (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests (...) both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

This article considers a series of ideas disturbing the conventional wisdom that decrees education an essential force in saving the world. Taking Morton's descriptions of hyperobjects seriously, we consider his radical idea that the world has ended amidst the eco-political depredations of the Anthropocene. Accordingly, we claim that education in modernity most properly belongs - materially and ideologically - with technological enframing and the rise of biopower. In other words, what is taken almost universally as (...) the sacred realm of education is, in fact, a contributory factor in the global eco-ontological crisis. Morton describes global warming, plastics and nuclear arsenals as hyperobjects: viscous, nonlocal entities that exist in temporal and spatial planes vastly different from our own immediate worlds. They are the threatening, difficult to access entities that express the Anthropocene. While most will propose that education will be vital in combating looming ecological apocalypse, we consider that education is a hyperobject itself. Education, we opine, is aligned with the forces and conditions that have generated the present crisis. This is because education embodies the same qualities as the hyperobjects of modernity; according to any rigorous historical ontology, education as we know it must be seen as the most extensive expression of a dangerous biopower that is beyond control. If this position is to be taken seriously, education is not merely impotent in combatting ecological catastrophe, but is a key apparatus supporting the Anthropocene. Education is thus another element of the end of the world. (shrink)