Many people do not really believe fortune-telling, but they do not dismiss it as a complete nonsense, either. Their attitude toward it is ambivalent, and this ambivalence requires explanation. In this paper, I propose a thesis which can explain their ambivalent attitude toward fortune-telling by appealing to the concept of prop-oriented make-believe. I argue that if we understand fortune-telling as practiced and enjoyed by these people as prop oriented-make-believe, we can best explain and understand (...) the ambivalent attitude toward it. (shrink)

The Khmer Rouge period had a hugely negative impact on the knowledge and practices of Khmer divination. At present, Khmer divination and astrology has been revitalized with many forms of it being embedded in people’s everyday lives in both rural and urban settings, such as in the capital Phnom Penh. With the re-emergence of numerological fortune-telling, Khmer practitioners are now turning to Thai numerological books, such as ‘Patithin Neung Roi Pee (100-year calendar)’, ‘Tamra Phromachati’, and ‘Tamra Plu Luang’ (...) to supplement the diminished body of traditional Khmer knowledge that survived the war. This paper aims to explore how Cambodia divinatory and astrologicalauthority have been revitalized and reinvented through that of their Thai counterparts within the flows of globalization and modernity. (shrink)

While comparative literature is often called a discipline in crisis, it is just as often charged with the responsibility to see into the future. But why has comparative literature been give...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body by Xing WangWenbin Wang (bio)Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body. By Xing Wang. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. x+ 325. Hardcover €114.00, ISBN 978-90-04-42954-3.Physiognomy (xiangshu 相術) as a technique of fortune-telling via the observation of the body has a long history in China and is still a living tradition. As a part of the traditional (...) Chinese technological repertoire of "Techniques and Methods" (fangshu 方術), records of performing physiognomy date back to the Spring and Autumn period (8th-5th centuries B.C.) (p. 31). According to Lisa Raphals, physiognomy was a crucial part of early Chinese philosophical discussion of the body, cosmology and human existence.1 Yet Wang Xing argues that despite its long history, our knowledge of Chinese physiognomy before the Ming dynasty is rather limited due to the small amount of pre-Ming physiognomy manuscripts still in existence. Chinese physiognomy as we know it today is largely based on its predecessors in late imperial China, and it was during the late Ming that most of the well-known extant physiognomy manuals were produced (p. 34). In contrast, the paucity of academic surveys of Ming physiognomy means that when it comes to scholarly examination of Chinese physiognomic texts and academic representation of physiognomic theories, misinterpretation often occurs. Wang is particularly critical of an early academic work on Chinese physiognomy by American anthropologist William Lessa, who made many dubious and broad assertions about the origin and characteristics of Chinese physiognomy (p. 15).2 In this context, Wang's Physiognomy in Ming China: Fortune and the Body is the first monograph in the English-speaking world primarily dedicated to the study of Chinese physiognomy in the Ming dynasty, including its social, textual, intellectual and technological history. It is also the first work in English that comprehensively introduces the history of Chinese physiognomy in early to late imperial China.Wang's investigation of this topic is two-fold. On the one hand he tackles physiognomy manuals and records of physiognomy practice from a historical perspective. Wang uses a very famous Ming physiognomic "encyclopedia," The Compendium of Divine Physiognomy (Shenxiang quanbian 神相全編), as the main text in his discussion of physiognomic knowledge, as well as a large amount of anecdotal writings from the Song to Ming periods. On the other hand, Wang consciously draws links between Chinese physiognomic theories and modern Western philosophical and anthropological debates on the body, symbolism and phenomenology. To push forward this conversation, Wang establishes a unique [End Page 1] framework for interpreting the conceptualization of the body, fortune and the cosmos in Ming physiognomic texts: the "homological" body on which time is "spatialized," discussed further below. It is this second facet of the argument that could most intrigue and inspire scholars of Chinese philosophy like myself. As Marta Hanson comments, Wang's work is an excellent example of how Chinese technical as well as cosmological works could problematize and challenge modern Euro-American academic theorizations of Asian culture and how professional sinological study could contribute to salient modern intellectual debates.3 When reading Wang's book, readers should always bear in mind his intention to bring together Ming physiognomic theories with broader contemporary philosophical discourse.Apart from the introduction, there are seven chapters in the book. The first two chapters serve as the historical section of the discussion (although historical analysis is also an indispensable part of later chapters). Chapter 1 provides readers with an overall background to physiognomy in China, especially its categorization as a form of elite knowledge in traditional catalogues, the development of core physiognomic theories and concepts in relation to traditional Chinese cosmology and medical theories, and the textual history of Ming physiognomy manuals. Beyond providing general information, in my view the author here makes three outstanding points: the first is that what we know as Chinese physiognomy is actually not merely a technique of human body divination, but also a method of predicting human future via observing the whole material world. Wang mentions a very important branch of physiognomy in historical catalogues called "physiognomy of things" (xiangwu 相物) (p. 27), in which anything from a horse... (shrink)

Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck—novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics—and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of (...) probability and exploring how luck relates to theology, sports, ethics, gambling, knowledge, and present-day psychology. As we travel across traditions, times and cultures, we come to realize that it’s not that as soon as we solve one philosophical problem with luck that two more appear, like heads on a hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is nothing to defeat: luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. By introducing us to compelling arguments and convincing reasons that explain why there is no such thing as luck, we finally see why in a very real sense we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way. (shrink)

Used in China as a book of divination and source of wisdom for more than three thousand years, the _I Ching_ has been taken up by millions of English-language speakers in the nineteenth century. The first translation ever to appear in English that includes one of the major Chinese philosophical commentaries, the Columbia _I Ching_ presents the classic book of changes for the world today. Richard Lynn's introduction to this new translation explains the organization of _The Classic of Changes_ through (...) the history of its various parts, and describes how the text was and still is used as a manual of divination with both the stalk and coin methods. For the fortune-telling novice, he provides a chart of trigrams and hexagrams; an index of terms, names, and concepts; and a glossary and bibliography. Lynn presents for the first time in English the fascinating commentary on the _I Ching_ written by Wang Bi, who was the main interpreter of the work for some seven hundred years. Wang Bi interpreted the _I Ching_ as a book of moral and political wisdom, arguing that the text should not be read literally, but rather as an expression of abstract ideas. Lynn places Wang Bi's commentary in historical context. For beginners and devotees alike, Columbia's _I Ching_ is the clearest and most authoritative translation of this ancient classic. (shrink)

The final volume of Feinberg's four-volume work, The Moral Limits of Criminal Law examines the philosophical basis for the criminalization of so-called "victimless crimes" such as ticket scalping, blackmail, consented-to exploitation of others, commercial fortune telling, and consensual sexual relations.

In modern times, the ways of acquiring and transferring religious knowledge are mostly shaped around the possibilities brought by technology. Social media platforms have become the channels where religious information is shared as well as current news, and this has led to the uncontrolled mass interaction of religious information. Based on the assumption that special importance is attached to religious days and nights in our country, many individuals, institutions and platforms produce religious content about the times that are sacred to (...) the masses they address in these time periods. For a news site to produce content that covers all areas of religion from taharah to testament, issuing fatwas and recommending some guiding practices requires significant preparation and infrastructural work, apart from sharing religious information. The fact that those who produce religious content act with the copy-paste way, that is often done in modern times, can pave the way for religious disinformation on platforms with millions of followers. In addition to this, carelessness in the selection of the visuals included in the shared information may cause the masses' perceptions of religion to be negatively shaped. In fact, the issues of accuracy and reliability rather than sharing information in the internet environment, which is an open-ended platform, are gaining more and more importance day by day, as well as the fact that the contents carry mediatic forms/magazine creates another problem. On the website called haber7.com, which states in its publication principles that “believing in the universality of knowledge, he presents informative and educational publications with an obsessive approach free from prejudices for the development of society”, religious content is shared under the subtitle of Yasemin section Masiva. In this section, there is information on many subjects such as signs of doomsday, fortune-telling, torment in the grave, prayer on the eve, the virtue of the three months, the prayers of repentance, marriage, acts to ensure domestic peace, and wearing an evil eye bead. Masiva platform uses some visuals while sharing religious information. In this paper, the subject of mediatization of religion will be emphasized and the role of popular religion perception in sharing religious content will be touched upon. The religious content produced on the website haber7.com, which is considered to have a conservative broadcasting style, will be examined in terms of accuracy and reliability principles, especially about the three months among the occasions considered religious/blessed. In addition, the analysis of the data will be carried out in terms of the science of fiqh, especially hadith; in particular, the sources and authenticity values of the texts mentioned as hadith will be determined. The ultimate goal of the study is to identify some problematics such as the purpose, nature, source, accuracy and reliability of the information assumed to be religious, and to point out the points to be considered when using religious information as a means of information. (shrink)

Heidegger characterises the relationship between language and being as "language is the house of being", negating the idea that language is merely a tool ready to be used at hand. Drawing on this idea, as well as ideas from anthropology, pragmatics, and folklore studies, the author argues that "language is man's last homestead", meaning that man lives within language, has to live within language, and is governed by formulaic speech events. The author takes western classic works on the philosophy of (...) language and his own insights of language use rooted in traditional Chinese culture, in order to develop his own localized theory. In this title, the author explores the philosophical aspect of man's survival by presenting day-to-day exchange routines such as weddings and fortune telling dialogues in the Chinese context. Awarded the first prize for Academic Excellence in Philosophy and Social Sciences in Guangdong Province, and second prize in the second Xu Guozhang Award for Foreign Language Studies, this is a must-read for researchers interested in language philosophy and pragmatics. (shrink)

17 November 1979 You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably. What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from (...) its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you. On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path. The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a "fortune-telling book" watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean _to happen, to arrive, to have to happen_ or _arrive, to let _or _to make happen _or _arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit_, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, _da und fort_, the one or the other. You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself. J. D. "With _The Post Card_, as with _Glas_, Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel, he stages his writing more overtly than in the scholarly works.... _The Post Card_ also contains a series of self-reflective essays, largely focused on Freud, in which Derrida is beautifully lucid and direct."—Alexander Gelley, _Library Journal_. (shrink)

Researchers summoned a Baltimore County woman to an office at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health last spring to tell her the bad news. They had found a genetic threat lurking in her 7-year-old son's DNA—a mutant gene that almost always triggers a rare form of colon cancer. It was the same illness that led surgeons to remove her colon in 1979. While the boy, Michael, now 8, is still perfectly healthy, without surgery he is almost certain to develop (...) cancer by age 40.This genetic fortune-telling was no parlor trick. It was the product of astonishing advances in recent decades in understanding how genes build and regulate our bodies. And as scientists pinpoint new genes and learn to forecast the onset of more inherited disorders, millions of people are likely to demand their medical prognosis. (shrink)

Researchers summoned a Baltimore County woman to an office at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health last spring to tell her the bad news. They had found a genetic threat lurking in her 7-year-old son's DNA—a mutant gene that almost always triggers a rare form of colon cancer. It was the same illness that led surgeons to remove her colon in 1979. While the boy, Michael, now 8, is still perfectly healthy, without surgery he is almost certain to develop (...) cancer by age 40.This genetic fortune-telling was no parlor trick. It was the product of astonishing advances in recent decades in understanding how genes build and regulate our bodies. And as scientists pinpoint new genes and learn to forecast the onset of more inherited disorders, millions of people are likely to demand their medical prognosis. (shrink)

Librarians often object to Internet filters on the grounds that filters are prone to overblocking and underblocking. This argument implies that a significant problem with contemporary filters is that they are insufficiently fine-grained. In this article, we posit that present-day filters will always be conceptually capable of failure, regardless of how granular their content analysis becomes. This is because, we argue, objections to content are best understood as objections to problematic interactions between content and particular knowers. We import the concept (...) of the situated knower from feminist epistemology to capture the heterogeneous, socially embedded nature of patrons, about whom we cannot make blunt generalizations for filtering purposes. A successful filter would need information about these differently situated patrons, the content they seek, and the interactions between the two. We conclude that a genuinely successful Internet filter would therefore need to be both mind reading and fortune-telling. (shrink)

The final volume of Feinberg's four-volume work, The Moral Limits of Criminal Law examines the philosophical basis for the criminalization of so-called "victimless crimes" such as ticket scalping, blackmail, consented-to exploitation of others, commercial fortune telling, and consensual sexual relations.

이 논문은 『주역』 에 나타난 미래 예측의 특성에 대해서 논한 것이다. 아울러 오늘날 대중적으로 알려진 명리사주 이론에 대해서도 어떠한 특성이 있는지 살펴보았다. 이 과정에서 이 논문은 미래 예측에 대한 것을 거대 미래 예측과 단순히 개인의 운명을 점치는 소규모 미래 예측으로 구분하였다. 거대 미래 예측이란 국가나 사회, 나아가서는 세계의 운명을 예측하고 만약 거기에 부정적이거나 좋지 않은 일이 있다면 이를 피하는 방안까지 제시해야 한다는 것이다. 이와 반대로 소규모 미래 예측은 예측의 정확성에 있어서도 확률이 떨어질 뿐만 아니라 예측함이 거의 불가능하다고 하였다. 논자는 이를 (...) 결론 마지막에서 거대한 강물을 그 물줄기도 바꿀 수 있고 나아가서는 그 흐름을 예측할 수 있지만, 그 강에서 발생하는 작은 소용돌이는 예측하기 힘들다고 비유하였다.BR이러한 경향은 원래 선진 시기의 『주역』 경문에서도 나타난다. 이 논문에서는 예시를 많이 들지는 않았지만 경문에 나타나는 특성이 사회 전반의 정치 및 경제와 긴밀히 관련되어 있으며, 선진 시기 사람들도 이것으로부터 역리易理를 찾아내려고 하였던 점을 지적하였다. 이는 곧 『주역』이 한 사람만을 위한 것이 아닌 공동체의 이익을 위하여 공헌한 것임을 말하였다. 이러한 것을 또한 점친 용례에서 찾으려 하였다. 선진 시기 점을 친 용례는 『좌전』과 『국어』에 밖에는 나타나지 않는다. 점을 친 용례를 분석해 보았을 때도 순수하게 점사만을 보고 판단을 한 것이 아니라, 사람과 상황 등 여러 가지 요소를 종합적으로 보아 결정함을 논증하였다.BR그렇다면 이것이 과연 『주역』의 미래 예측에 한정된 것인지를 파악하기 위해 사주명리의 이론을 살펴보았다. 구체적인 사주 이론은 다른 논문이나 책에서 잘 설명하였으므로 여기에서는 그 기본 원리만 설명하고 다시 사주 이론의 공부론에 주목하였다. 즉 사주 이론 역시 처음에는 정명론적 요소에서 출발하지만, 공부론으로 들어가면 불리한 사주를 없애야 한다고 주장하였다. 이것이 명리사주의 공부론인데, 이를 볼 때 사주 역시 『주역』의 미래예측의 방향과 동일한 방향으로 흐름을 알 수 있다. 이에 본 논문에서는 거대 미래 예측에 주목하여 인간 공동체의 이익을 위한 예측을 해야 한다고 주장하였다. (shrink)

Telling stories is a basic human activity. It enables us to organise, evaluate and transform what we see going on around us. It allows us to make sense of what is happening, to defy what is ephemeral in our experience. In short, it helps us to read the signs and between the lines. In the story that follows, we shall watch how Little Monster struggles with the apparently random and inexplicable and strives to make order out of chaos. He (...) is fortunate to have a mother who regards story-telling as a significant determinant of his psycho-social well-being. Indeed, there are those who would argue that engaging in the construction of narrative is a precondition for literacy development, academic success and enhanced life chances. Our second story begins here, as we exploit the potential of narrative to function as a developmental turning-point in our understanding of contemporary debates on early literacy acquisition in the context of the National Evaluation of the Early Intervention Programme in Scotland. (shrink)

I conduct an empirical analysis of the temporally asymmetric character of our epistemic access to the world by providing an experimental scheme whose results represent the core empirical content of the epistemic asymmetry. I augment this empirical content by formulating a gedanken experiment inspired by a proposal from David Albert. This second experiment cannot be conducted using any technology that is likely to be developed in the foreseeable future, but the expected results help us to state an important constraint on (...) our ability to know the future. Finally, I show that a third experiment concerning precognition, described by Michael Scriven and John Mackie, does not characterize any additional empirical content but does help to illustrate why it is unlikely that any precognition exists. (shrink)

Telling stories is a basic human activity. It enables us to organise, evaluate and transform what we see going on around us. It allows us to make sense of what is happening, to defy what is ephemeral in our experience. In short, it helps us to read the signs and between the lines. In the story that follows, we shall watch how Little Monster struggles with the apparently random and inexplicable and strives to make order out of chaos. He (...) is fortunate to have a mother who regards story-telling as a significant determinant of his psycho-social well-being. Indeed, there are those who would argue that engaging in the construction of narrative is a precondition for literacy development, academic success and enhanced life chances. Our second story begins here, as we exploit the potential of narrative to function as a developmental turning-point in our understanding of contemporary debates on early literacy acquisition in the context of the National Evaluation of the Early Intervention Programme in Scotland. (shrink)

The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one's own good. Though it may (...) be difficult to tell whether a person is motivated by self-interest in a particular instance, and difficult also to determine whether a given act or decision really is in one's self-interest, the meaning of the claims in question seems unproblematic. My main concern in this essay is to make a point about the content of self-interest. Specifically I shall put forward the view that meaningfulness, in a sense I shall elaborate, is an important element of a good life. It follows, then, that it is part of an enlightened self-interest that one wants to secure meaning in one's life, or, at any rate, to allow and promote meaningful activity within it. Accepting this substantial conception of self-interest, however, carries with it a curious consequence: the concept of self-interest which formerly seemed so clear begins to grow fuzzy. Fortunately, it comes to seem less important as well. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit distinguishes three sorts of theories about self-interest–hedonistic theories, preference theories, and what he calls “objective-list theories." Hedonistic theories hold that one's good is a matter of the felt quality of one's experiences. (shrink)

The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one's own good. Though it may (...) be difficult to tell whether a person is motivated by self-interest in a particular instance, and difficult also to determine whether a given act or decision really is in one's self-interest, the meaning of the claims in question seems unproblematic. My main concern in this essay is to make a point about the content of self-interest. Specifically I shall put forward the view that meaningfulness, in a sense I shall elaborate, is an important element of a good life. It follows, then, that it is part of an enlightened self-interest that one wants to secure meaning in one's life, or, at any rate, to allow and promote meaningful activity within it. Accepting this substantial conception of self-interest, however, carries with it a curious consequence: the concept of self-interest which formerly seemed so clear begins to grow fuzzy. Fortunately, it comes to seem less important as well. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit distinguishes three sorts of theories about self-interest–hedonistic theories, preference theories, and what he calls “objective-list theories." Hedonistic theories hold that one's good is a matter of the felt quality of one's experiences. (shrink)

Is conceptual engineering feasible? Answering that question requires a theory of semantic change, which is sometimes thought elusive. Fortunately, much is known about semantic change as it occurs in the wild. While usage is chaotic and complex, changes in a word’s use can produce changes in its meaning. There are several under-appreciated empirical constraints on how meanings change that stem from the following observation: word use finely reflects equilibrium between various communicative pressures. Much of the relevant work in linguistics has (...) employed the methods of empirical pragmatics and diachronic semantics. In this way, the study of meaning change can be brought to bear on the conceptual engineer’s normative project. The picture that emerges tells against the sorts of engineering projects most likely to appeal to philosophers. Some may stand to succeed, but they have significantly different contours than the typical ones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under FireIrina Deyneka and Eva RegelIrina DeynekaWhen the Russian army attacked my country, I became a volunteer for a hotline offering psychological support to those in crisis; refugees, those who were under the shelling, those who were hiding in bomb shelters, and who were directly in the zone of fighting. People were (...) lost and disoriented by constant bombing, by the fact that their country was under attack. Once, I had a woman who lived in Mariupol on one of these calls. I was living then in another city, Odessa, but was experiencing the same horrors of war that my client was—the shelling, uncertainty, and despair. We were processing my client’s feelings of grief and anxiety when I heard the sirens on her end. I offered to stop our session so she could seek shelter. She told me she would not have time to find shelter and wanted to continue our meeting. And so, we continued... But soon, Odessa’s sirens broke the silence, and it was my turn to decide what to do; should I continue our session or try to find a bomb shelter for myself? I decided to stay because I thought that was the right thing to do morally, professionally, and personally.I eventually left Odessa, but only after a bomb destroyed a house next to mine, and I saw a family, my neighbors, perish in the destruction. I am now a member of one of Slovakia’s Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and work in a mobile brigade providing medical and psychological support to refugees. I can remember every one of my clients. Children, adults... I can remember their stories, their traumas, their memories of the horrors of war and devastation. Sometimes I meet with them only once, and they move on to another refugee center or are on their way to a Western part of Ukraine, trying to escape the war. And frequently, I do not know how many sessions I will be able to have with clients. Sometimes it is only one time, and sometimes we can meet for many months. Initially, I thought, What can I do in one therapy session? Now, I know that I can do a lot. I can provide people who survived the most inhuman conditions and witnessed death and destruction around them with a space and time to talk through and process their experiences. I am their support, and they lean on me as they try to make sense of what has happened to them and their country. I always tell my clients that my goal as a psychotherapist is to help them withstand, survive, and hold on while still being able to continue to function in a country at war. All I can do is treat each of the therapy sessions as our last one and try to provide as many strategies and skills as possible to cope with anxiety and depression, to be able to function, and to live in the present.Every session is about installing hope, moving slowly forward, and away from traumatic events. One of my clients, a 14-year-old boy, was diagnosed with a neurological condition, involuntary facial muscle spasm, or tics. He was barely talking when I first saw him, and I decided to use art therapy as a trauma-processing tool during one of the therapy sessions. He was drawing an explosion, fire, and destruction of his neighbor’s house. He blacked out the horrors of his experience to preserve his strength. Yet, he began slowly remembering his experiences, re-creating the story of his trauma, and making memories. I was fortunate to work with [End Page E4] him for many months, carefully and thoughtfully helping him re-create the sorry of his trauma, helping to become its witness. Ultimately, it was great to see that he could control his memories and his emotional stress; he felt empowered and in control.Eva RegelThis is the story of Irina Deyneka, one of many Ukrainian psychotherapists working in Ukraine, providing mental health support to a nation ravaged by... (shrink)

NGC 1300 (shown in figure 1) is a spiral galaxy 65 million light years from Earth.1 We have never been there, and (although I would love to be wrong about this) we will never go there; all we will ever know about NGC 1300 is what we can see of it from sixty-five million light years away, and what we can infer from our best physics. Fortunately, “what we can infer from our best physics” is actually quite a lot. To (...) take a particular example: our best theory of galaxies tells us that that hazy glow is actually made up of the light of hundreds of billions of stars; our best theories of planetary formation tell us that a sizable fraction of those stars.. (shrink)

The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a jobbing critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance to teach schoolchildren in a provincial Austrian village, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and align his fortunes with the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture at the back of a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold over (...) the next decade. The lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine as each gains world historical significance, between them remaking philosophy. Time of the Magicians tells the story of this revolution in Western thought through the remarkable and turbulent lives of its four protagonists, showing philosophy not gifted from on high but worked out in the mess of everyday life, and illuminating with rare clarity their ideas. (shrink)

A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is still fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin, whose life is characterized by false starts and unfinished projects, is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living (...) hand to mouth as a jobbing critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, as a scion of one of the biggest industrial families in Europe, in order to commit himself unswervingly to a life of the mind. Meanwhile, Heidegger, having managed to avoid combat in war by serving instead as a meteorologist, is carefully cultivating his career, aligning himself with the great Edmund Husserl, and renouncing his prior Catholic associations. Finally, Cassirer is working furiously on the margins of academia, applying himself intensely to his writing and the possibility of a career at Hamburg University. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold across the next decade. The lives and ideas of this great philosophical quartet will converge as they become world historical figures. But as the Second World War looms on the horizon, their fates will be very different. Wolfram Eilenberger, internationally-bestselling author, stylishly traces the paths of these remarkable and turbulent lives, which feature not only philosophy but some of the most important economists, politicians, journalists, and artists of the century, including John Maynard Keynes, Hannah Arendt, and Bertrand Russell. In doing so, he tells a gripping story about some of history's most ambitious and passionate thinkers, as well as illuminating with rare clarity and economy their brilliant ideas, which all too often have been regarded as enigmatic or opaque. (shrink)

The Higgs particle has been detected a few years ago, that is what newspapers tell us. For many physicists, the Standard Model of particle physics has accomplished all the jobs. Or to put it simply: The game is over. Is it true? Then some physicists began to ask: can go beyond the Standard Model? Because the supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model has failed. If you feel that theoretical physics is becoming boring, you are not alone. Fortunately, there is good (...) news: a new generation of physicists are doing table-top experiments in their basements. Can we expect new results later? If so, what will the future of physics look like? This article discusses this question, starting with a blunt look at the relationship between mathematics and physical reality, written from the perspectives of a mathematician and a cosmologist. (shrink)

According to Part VI of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, some things matter.1 Indeed, there are normative truths to the effect that some things matter, and it matters that there are such truths. Moreover, according to Parfit, these normative truths are cognitive and irreducible. And in addition to mattering that there are normative truths about what matters, Parfit holds that it also matters that these truths are cognitive and irreducible. Indeed this matters so much that Parfit tells us that if (...) there were normative truths, but that these truths were non-cognitive or reducible, then he, Sidgwick, and Ross “would have wasted much of our lives” [OWM2 367]. That it would be a consequence of the thesis either of noncognitivism or of reductive realism that Parfit would have wasted his life is, of course, no evidence against either thesis; it is perfectly possible even for the most brilliant thinkers to waste their lives. Indeed, as any of the students from my introductory ethics course would be quick to point out, it is very difficult to think clearly and objectively about a question in which you take yourself have a large personal stake. My undergraduates readily agree that the steak they have is enough to complicate their thinking about moral vegetarianism; so certainly explosive expressions like ‘wasted my life’ give Parfit the kind of loaded stake in metaethical questions that should make us cautious of trusting his intuitive verdicts in metaethics. Fortunately, as I will argue in this paper, Parfit has not wasted his life, and he would not have wasted his life, even if it turned out that either noncognitivism or reductive realism turned out to be true. In arguing that Parfit has not wasted his life, independently of the answer to any metaethical question, I am, of course, arguing against Parfit’s own conception of what makes his life worthwhile. Parfit clearly believes that the worthwhileness of [much of]2 his life turns on the answer to questions in metaethics.. (shrink)

Philosophers of all times and peoples tried to describe the mystery of magic, each time giving humanity their own images of magical practices, on the one hand, and the attitude to magic from the side of public consciousness, on the other. Turning to the problem of magic even today, in the era of worldview pluralism and the crisis of traditional ideas about the world, turns out to be quite relevant. Magic, which actually originated with humanity itself and passed through centuries (...) and millennia, continues to exist in the consciousness of modern human.Some researchers talk about the onset of a «new magical era» and the formation of a whole subculture of magic followers. Yes, today in the individual and mass consciousness there is a sharp increase in interest in everything mysterious and supernatural: on the pages of newspapers, magazines, and social networks there are many ads from magicians and fortune tellers who promise to fulfill almost any wishes of people for a fee, television channels actively broadcast projects that talk about some magical events and phenomena, and even celebrities in their interviews tell how certain mysterious events happened to them, or how they personally turned to the mystery of magical practices. That is, we can say with confidence that the thinking and behavior of modern man is rightfully considered magical. Therefore, magic is not a relic of the past, but an integral part of the consciousness of a modern people. The aim of the publication is to analyze the influence of magic and magical practices on the consciousness and behavior of modern human. Research methodology. Research methods are comprehensive and based on a philosophical-anthropological and philosophical-cultural analysis of magic as an integral part of human consciousness. Discussion. Magic in the mind of a modern people exists in the form of: something prohibited, anti-social, anti-religious, dangerous and harmful; one’s native achievement of a certain goal or fulfillment of desires; everyday rituals and superstitions, which, although some do not associate the direction with magic, somehow have a strong connection with it.Conclusion. Magic is an integral part of the consciousness of modern human. For some, it is something dangerous, frightening, anti-religious and anti-social, and for some, magic appears to be an excellent means of learning about the surrounding world, a tool for subduing supernatural forces and obtaining certain benefits or fulfilling wishes. One way or another, each of us consciously or subconsciously performs certain magical rituals every day. Magic is so firmly entrenched in human consciousness that some philosophers speak of the onset of a «new magical era», which is associated with the open promotion of magical practices, supernatural forces and phenomena in modern society and the formation of such a phenomenon as a «magical worldview», which will perspective of our further research. (shrink)

Tranquillity’s Secret Presents A New Understanding Of The World And Ourselves, And A Forgotten Meditation Technique That Protects You From Traumatic Harm. There Is A Way Of Seeing The World Different. -/- My goal in this book is two-fold: to introduce a revolutionary paradigm for understanding ourselves and the world; and to explain an ancient meditation technique that brought me to the insights upon which it is founded. This technique appears in different forms in the extant spiritual and religious traditions (...) over millennia which have used it — and in which it has been acknowledged as the most efficacious way to reach a direct experience of mind, or the most direct path to a union with God. Unfortunately, the proper way to use it has been largely lost over the last few centuries along with a clear understanding of why it was claimed to be so highly efficient. The primary reason for this loss is the mechanical materialism that frames all our scientific knowledge today. Lady Anne Conway, an English philosopher and a contemporary of René Déscartes, the French Metaphysician of the Seventeenth Century, was the first to characterize his philosophy as the “Mechanical philosophy.” It was Déscartes’ fascination with garden automata (moving statues) that he saw throughout Paris during his time, that led to his idea that the bodies of animals are nothing more than machines of varying complexity – which could be replaced by metal cogs, axles, and wheels. This very contemporary idea is in fact his legacy to humanity — along with the mind-body split that it entails — as mechanism became the standard to which Nature and all life was compared, and still is. This was the genesis of the modern reductive scientific understanding of life as discovered mechanisms made up of dead matter. -/- Although Déscartes’ philosophy was not materialism proper, as he held mind to not be material in nature, his was the most significant move to a cognitive framing of all phenomena as the result of mechanical interactions, and he went so far as placing all non-human animals into the machine-only category, because, he argued, they didn’t have minds. While a full account of Déscartes’ thought is not useful in this work, I want to use Lady Conway’s term to make a distinction between a mechanical materialism, which materialism has evolved into, and a less severe understanding that is not so destructive of the primacy of two aspects of being alive — mind and cognizance — which today are asserted to be by-products or epiphenomena of material processes in the brain by strict adherents to the mechanical philosophy. -/- This frame allows nothing but dead matter, and all that is comprised of dead matter, to be entertained as real. Anything beyond that is either ignored, or considered to be nothing more than figments of someone’s imagination — and this both limits and structures our thoughts about everything. Even those who believe they have moved on from this limiting understanding continue to be fenced in by language, which is structured by it — so that there is no escaping its limitations via a simple substitution or redefinition of concepts. Rather, it will take a truly revolutionary new paradigm and a concomitant reframing of our understanding of ourselves, this world, and reality, and how they come together in the new paradigm. I characterize the difficulty of this change as being like that of meeting an alien race and trying to work out how they see reality before communication can begin — which is very difficult to do when one’s own view is so limited. -/- I call this revolutionary paradigm Responsive Naturing. -/- Responsive Naturing replaces the current paradigm and its concomitant idea of deterministic causality which is foundational in scientific practice today. It can do this because, as you will see, it better accounts for all categories of phenomena, and thus includes all the most important human experiences, such as that of being alive, of beauty, of love, and the ultimate unity of all things. Responsive Naturing provides a sound foundation for the sciences, without the imposed limitation of mechanical materialist explanations, so that both science and spirituality can be founded upon this single common understanding of how things work. -/- This novel paradigmatic understanding of reality intrinsically applies to all dimensions of mental phenomena — be it of perceptions, sensations, or thoughts — and from the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics to the stochastic nature of most physical phenomena, to the often accidental, sometimes fortunate, but never sure, character of all human activities. This makes this new paradigm immediately productive in a practical way — it simply works, as I will show. It empowers us in ways that our disjointed and parochial schools of thought lock us out of completely, opening up new possible methods of looking at problems and finding solutions across disciplines. However, understanding the repercussions of the new paradigm upon one’s cognitive frame and the concomitant structure of language is difficult to comprehend simply because it is alien to the existing frame and paradigm. The impetus to make the effort is becoming quite clear: -/- Today, the sciences are ruled by the limiting cognitive framing of mechanical materialism, and over the last century, the limitations of that frame and its associated scientific paradigm of physical causality have become obvious: science has become schizophrenic. On one hand, some scientists say everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature, and neither free will nor conscious intent have any involvement in what happens; but others say that the state of the underlying quanta that make-up everything is indeterminate until consciously observed with the intent to measure it. Mechanical materialism is why scientists say you have no free will, while you obviously experience that you do — and you are held responsible for your actions by society because you do. It is also why scientists cannot find a non-speculative explanation of consciousness on an evolutionary or biological level, even though being conscious is the most obvious aspect of being alive. And these contradictions have infected every aspect of our lives, and our world, by limiting our ability to see the world any other way. Even the formulation of spiritual doctrines is constrained today by this cognitive frame’s presence in our language. This is not an academic matter, as we see clearly in our failure, so-far, to change the path that has brought us to a global environmental collapse and the ecocide of life on Earth. -/- What is unique about the book’s approach is that it does not speculate about what might be the case, like so much of philosophy does. Instead, it relies upon meditative and contemplative insights that were gleaned directly from a dedicated advanced meditation practice over 60+ years of the author’s life. These insights were then confirmed by subsequent research into similar forms of this advanced meditation technique found across the world and throughout human history. In conjunction with my meditation practice, I have doctoral-level education in Philosophy and a 30-year career in Software Engineering. The latter was in part focused on automated software development, during which I was confronted with the unsolvable enigma — within the mechanical materialist understanding that I was enculturated into, and inculcated with — of Human Creativity. An enigma that set me on my path of discovery. -/- I have discovered, and continue to discover, just how productive this novel paradigm is in understanding ourselves and our world, by its ability to explain — in detail — so many of our experiences that are today either inexplicable, paradoxical, or ignored “for the present” by scientists until some hoped for mechanical description can be found. For the most part, scientists constrain themselves to describing mechanisms, but describing how is not explaining why — and that is why so much of our modern knowledge has a best-used-by-date. On the other side, seemingly all spiritual traditions accept this modern characterization of the world, ourselves, and reality that is manifest in our language, so that even spiritual phenomena and ideas are necessarily structured by it. We accept the ideas of separate beings, intentional entities, levels of consciousness, and attainment of enlightenment or unification with God, all of which are necessary because dead matter, and unconsciousness, are considered to be the starting point. It isn’t. Rather than just present this novel paradigm as a fait accompli, the book’s five sections bring the reader through stages of reconfiguration of our understanding: -/- Volume 1. The Way of Unsaying — The need for the articles in the first volume is not to tell the reader how things are, but to unsay the things that they have heard throughout their lives and have taken to heart. This is accomplished by exposing the logical and explanatory limitations of those ideas that usually go unnoticed. This is necessary to do in order to open the reader’s mind to other ways of accounting for phenomena, and navigating life, so that the reader will understand: first, why the meditation technique I will present is so effective; and second, why the novel paradigm that I propose will truly advance human knowledge and enable us to change our way of being in the world. In order to liberate oneself from seeing the world in a particular way I use skillful means to unseat all the understandings that we have all been inculcated with. This can be destabilizing, and you might find yourself getting annoyed, or even frightened. To paraphrase a Buddhist proverb: Better not to start; but if started, better to finish: -/- Volume 2. The Way of Contemplation — In this volume, the paradigm of Responsive Naturing is developed, building upon the dialogs in volume 1. This volume challenges the reader, since breaking free of one’s existing cognitive frame and paradigmatic understanding is not a trivial exercise, and neither is restructuring one’s thoughts to fit into a new paradigm. This section explains what Responsive Naturing means, how it works in both spiritual and scientific senses, my specific arguments for why it is the answer to our need for a better way to account for phenomena and experience, and how our way of being in the world can change because of it. I attempt to show, via a myriad of independent fields of study, just how powerful this paradigm is in explaining the various phenomena that until now, either had no scientific explanation, or had an incoherent and never proven one. -/- Volume 3. The Way of Tradition — This volume provides the reader with traditional descriptions of similar types of meditation to that which I am presenting. These techniques are related by the unusual support for meditation that they use: that of Inner Spontaneous Sound. This information is provided for two reasons: 1) to validate the technique I present in volume 4, The Way of Meditation, by showing the high esteem that these techniques have been held in by all spiritual traditions, and 2) to present a rational explanation for the technique’s effectiveness, based upon responsive naturing. Volume 4. The Way of Meditation — This volume describes the practice that I call “Great Responsiveness Meditation” which will allow the reader to: 1) engage in a long-term meditative and contemplative practice in order to attain the insights that are the foundation for the novel paradigm that I am presenting; and 2) to benefit from two unique side-effects of using inner spontaneous sound: one which protects the meditator during traumatic and extreme emotional experiences, especially of the kind now expected because of the current global environmental and societal crises; and the other — which is widely attested to — is an alchemical-like change in the meditator, who quickly displays compassion without self-centered concern. In Buddhism, this is known by the Sanskrit word “Mahākaruṇā,” which is the type of responsive compassion displayed by all enlightened beings. It is a permanent change in how we live our life, and it enables each of us to overcome our worst inculcated selfish behaviors. 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There is nothing quite like parrot pie for breakfast. First one must catch one's parrot, of course, and build the hearth to bake it, but that is all in a days work for the woman pioneer. This riveting anthology tells the story of over 100 such women spanning four centuries, from the lowliest kitchen skivvy to ambassadors' wives: emigrants who settled the wildernesses of the world in search of new and better lives. Many were lured abroad by the promise of (...) work or fortune; some went because imperial duty called, while for others it was a most unfeminine lust for adventure that drew them away. But all faced challenges in their homes from home that were to test to the limit their spirits, their resourcefulness, even their survival. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Right HeartIngrid GouldI remarked to a friend, “We haven’t spoken since my arrest!” Alarm and confusion clouded his face, given my half-century of squeaky-clean living. “Cardiac arrest,” I clarified. “The fire department rebooted me.”An electrophysiologist diagnosed Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia, prescribed medication, and implanted a defibrillator. For the next three-and-a-half years, he helped me live with a disease I didn’t know existed until he told me I had (...) it.The disease progressed—an ironic, disease-centric term since its advancement was to my detriment— prompting my cardiologist to recommend seeing someone who specialized in heart failure. I resisted the very idea of heart failure, a terrible term for a struggling organ, but took her advice and scheduled an appointment.The new cardiologist urged transplant testing, a lengthy process. I agreed, figuring that by the time I needed a new heart in 15–20 years, they’d be rolling off 3D printers.To record occasional transplant musings and inchoate fears and perhaps, over time, untangle them, I began journaling. I chronicled my passage through the echocardiogram, heart catheterization, 31 tubes of bloodwork, interviews with different clinical specialties, a pulmonary function test in a machine reminiscent of Star Trek’s Transporter, and more. Testing had barely begun when my medication stopped working—a Halloween shock.I began a harsher medication, underwent an ablation, and spent six weeks in a wearable defibrillator, a vest with abundant wires, and a purse-sized battery pack that made me resemble a character in [End Page 123] the Jetsons. This attire did not bring holiday comfort or joy to the TSA1 when I flew to visit my sister. As my R-waves faded to a whisper, I swapped the vest for a second implanted defibrillator, substantially more sensitive than the first.In early 2018, we learned I had qualified for transplant listing, though I wished to get as much mileage as possible from the original engine. My cardiologist warned, “There is no Plan B—no machine, device, or medication for the long-term. You will need a transplant.” He explained that since most cardiac patients have left-heart problems, companies develop products for the left side of the heart. My problem was on the right—a tiny market. He also cautioned that a patient needs to be sick enough to warrant transplant and well enough to remain a candidate, survive the surgery, and recover.Although clinically I was ready, I was not personally ready. I felt too good to trade an excellent quality of life for the promised miserable post-transplant year. The cardiologist wisely asked if I wanted to speak with another patient. When I requested someone beyond the dreaded first year, he put me in touch with two women who had received new hearts a few years earlier and befriended each other. They soon became my invaluable mentors and cherished friends. I will never forget seeing them stride into our first meeting and thinking, “They are beautiful! They look totally normal!”By May, climbing four flights of stairs took as much effort as five used to take. Tests confirmed further deterioration and suggested I had 7–13 months of declining health before my heart would give out completely. We chose a date for hospital admission, and I started telling people outside my immediate family. Most were flabbergasted, believing heart transplants were the last hope of the desperately ill. I did not look moribund, though, apparently, I was.The eight months after my first transplant appointment let me prepare psychologically to bid farewell to my heart—the metaphor for kindness, love, and bravery in our culture—and to welcome a new organ from a generous person less medically fortunate than I.In the hospital, I met others awaiting their hearts. A sudden intimacy arises when mortal choices catapult people into a medical realm suggestive of science fiction. Add the emotional intensity that accompanies knowing your extended life comes courtesy of a person who breathes no more on this earth and you wonder how an organ recipient integrates sorrow and gratitude.Two weeks after I was hospitalized, my cardiologist informed me the wait was over... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Abaelards Logik by Wolfgang LenzenSten EbbesenWolfgang Lenzen. Abaelards Logik. Paderborn: Brill | mentis, 2021. Pp. 206. Hardback, €59.00.According to its author, this book aims at reconstructing key parts of Abelard's logic while denying him a role as a hero of connexive logic or more generally as one of history's greatest logicians. At the end of the preface, we are told that "Abaelard hat die Logik seiner Zeit nicht (...) revolutioniert; er hat keine Kalküle konstruiert; und er hat auch nicht die Logik seiner Zeit auf ein höheres Niveau gehoben" (xiv).The book is divided into twenty-three chapters with titles such as "'Destruierende' versus 'separierende' Negation," "Vollkommene und unvollkommne Folgerungen," and "'Leere' Begriffe." As the titles show, it ranges over a large field. The results of Lenzen's analyses of Abelard's argumentation are presented in modern logical notation. There are many fine analyses, and despite Lenzen's refusal to see Abelard as a genius, he, too, seems to have been quite impressed by the old logician. However, at the end of the day, I am not sure that I have become any wiser about Abelard's contribution to the history of logic.Lenzen is a newcomer to the study of twelfth-century logic, and the book is marked by this in several ways. Thus, he informs the reader that "Spätestens seit Prantls Publikation der 'Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande' steht fest, dass Abaelards Traktat 'De Sillogismis Ypoteticis' sich stark an das Werk 'De syllogismo hypothetico' von Boethius (470–524) anlehnt" (165). This is quite true, but anything else would have been very remarkable, so the reference to Prantl serves no purpose.Unsurprisingly, the main source texts used are Abelard's Dialectica and his Glosae super Peri hermeneias, a part of the series of commentaries on the Ars vetus that go under the common name of Logica ingredientibus. Lenzen displays a cavalier attitude to philology. He quotes the Dialectica from De Rijk's second edition (1970), but in the bibliography he mentions that there are two editions without stating explicitly which one he quotes. In the case of the Glosae, he uses the obsolete editio princeps by Bernhard Geyer from 1927, and he does not even mention its replacement, Klaus Jacobi and Christian Strub's much superior 2010 edition in the series Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis. This is inexplicable, for in his preface Lenzen describes his book as the child of a research project he began several years after the publication of the new edition. Now, fortunately, the use of Geyer does not have disastrous consequences for Lenzen's interpretation of Abelard, but had he used Jacobi and Strub's edition, he would not have had to propose a textual emendation in one place (88n17), nor would he have needed to quote, in another place, a Latin text (which he does not translate) with a nonsensical significantem instead of figurative (94n1o).Lenzen sometimes proposes textual emendations, but not always in a perspicuous way, and they are not all felicitous. For example, a quotation of L. M. de Rijk's edition of Introductiones Montane Minores in Logica Modernorum (LM) II.2 (1967) contains the phrase aliquod opposit[or]um (127n2). An unsuspecting reader would think this means De Rijk had conjecturally emended oppositorum into oppositum, for this is what opposit[or]um would mean in LM II.2. In fact, De Rijk just prints oppositum, so Lenzen's opposit[or]um must mean that he wants to correct De Rijk's text by inserting 'or,' but he forgets to tell us that he does not [End Page 520] faithfully reproduce the text quoted and that his square brackets mean something different from what they do in De Rijk's edition. This issue aside, his conjecture is superfluous, as proven by a parallel passage in LM II.2: 118. Similarly, he quotes Abelard as saying "alterum istorum [est]: vel nox vel dies" (152). The "[est]" is Lenzen's own, again superfluous, contribution to the text. By contrast, elsewhere he proposes to insert a non at LM II.2: 64.2. This time, he explains what he is doing, and I think his conjecture... (shrink)

Quand vous essayez de comprendre quelque chose qui au départ vous est étranger, vous ne pouvez l'aborder, il n'est pas humainement possible de faire autrement, qu'à l'aide des moyens dont vous disposez. Le péril, dans une telle situation, est toutefois de croire que ces moyens de fortune sont fiables et solides, quelle que soit la découverte à faire. Il suffit donc d'apprendre qu'ils ne le sont pas forcément. Ainsi devient-il possible d'avancer jusqu'au point où vous pourrez discerner qu'ils sont (...) en réalité l'obstacle même vous empêchant de reconnaître comme inconnu ce que vous avez pourtant sous les yeux, sans le voir. Le présent livre n'a d'autre ambition que de nous rendre capables de lire ce que Martin Heidegger cherche à dire au sujet de l'humaine condition, dont il reste à s'acquitter. (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and emo­tional challenges. `Wise (...) Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

Marnell studies the fortunes of the belief that society's moral foundations are man-made. In England and America this belief has "crested four times in the past three hundred years, and receded three." Deism, utilitarianism, social Darwinism, and pragmatism are the crests. About half the book's length consists of sketches of nearly fifty adherents of these philosophies--their birth and training, their views and influence on the movements, and excerpts from their work. The philosophical expositions are reliable. Moreover, the book is thick (...) with detail and very lively, both because its subject is the philosophy of essentially active people, and because of its style. Thus the reader is propelled along by colorful, epigrammatic prose. It should be a popular assignment as background reading in American civilization or philosophy, or the history of ideas. There are notes, bibliographical notes, and an index. In the final chapter Marnell examines the relationship between "progress," "liberalism," and the belief in a man-made order. Each man-centered philosophy has started as a reform movement, but has degenerated into cynicism and an excuse for self-aggrandizement, he tells us. Then, "believers in the divinely created order have found the way around to the fertile plain where progress once more is possible." Pursuing the current good cause, liberals have shifted philosophical positions three times in the past one hundred years. Currently, civil rights arguments rely on a natural law position ultimately based on divine rather than man-made order. The author makes a case for at least alternating emphasis on human and divine order, as the condition for social betterment.--M. B. M. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Invisible HarmKimberly ZieselmanI’m a 48–year–old intersex woman born with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) writing to share my personal experience as a patient affected by a Difference of Sex Development (DSD). Although I appear to be a DSD patient “success story”, in fact, I have suffered and am unsatisfied with the way I was treated as a young patient in the 1980’s, and the continued lack of appropriate care for (...) intersex people even today.As the Executive Director of the advocacy organization Advocates for Informed Choice and a board member of the AIS–DSD Support Group since 2012, I have heard doctors reference the “silent happy majority” of DSD patients all too often. They speak [End Page 122] of patients who were treated in childhood and went on to live (seemingly) contented lives. It appears however that doctors have drawn this conclusion from the fact that most of their patients have not returned to complain about their treatment. While there is little evidence to support the success doctors claim, there is quite a bit of evidence that suggests my suffering is the norm rather than the exception.Medical professionals would likely include me in that “silent majority,” only seeing a woman who identifies and appears typically female, graduated law school, married for over twenty years, with adopted children and a successful career. And while I have been fortunate in many ways, I no longer want my voice to be presumed buried within that silent majority. Instead, I am speaking out today to tell my story.My StoryAt age 15 I was diagnosed with amenorrhea and referred to a reproductive oncologist who told my parents I had a partially developed uterus and ovaries that would likely soon become cancerous. We were told my vagina was abnormally short and might require surgery in order to have heterosexual intercourse.Neither my parents nor I was ever told I had AIS and XY chromosomes, or that the gonads being removed were testes, not ovaries. I was told I needed a “full hysterectomy” to prevent cancer and hormone replacement therapy. That summer I spent my 16th birthday recuperating from surgery. I spent the next 25 years living a lie.A lie that has had a profound and harmful impact on me.At some level, I knew I was not being told the whole truth. My parents’ and the doctors’ actions signaled to me something more might be going on. But I was afraid to ask questions; my parents were distressed and I didn’t want to cause them any more pain. Over the years I have wondered just how much my parents knew but withheld from me (albeit with good intentions). I sensed something awful was being hidden from me, and I didn’t know whom I could trust.When I asked my doctor if I could meet someone else with my condition, I was told I was different, that there was “nobody” with my medical condition in the world, that my situation was “very rare.” I was told to get on with my life and not talk about my surgery because it wasn’t important; I was healthy and could adopt if I wanted to become a parent. I was told I must take a hormone pill each day for the rest of my life to stay healthy.But what I heard was, “you are not a real woman: you are a damaged freak, so go out and fake the rest of your life and be sure nobody knows your secret.” So that’s what I did. I was a “good girl” and took my pills, didn’t ask questions and did what the men in white coats asked me to do. There was no support provided for either my parents or me. No social workers, no therapists. Perhaps most shockingly, there was no true informed consent.A few years ago I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by anxiety I had been harboring for over two decades about my past surgery and fear of getting cancer. I decided to obtain my medical records from the hospital and discover the truth.Covering several pages of... (shrink)

Marnell studies the fortunes of the belief that society's moral foundations are man-made. In England and America this belief has "crested four times in the past three hundred years, and receded three." Deism, utilitarianism, social Darwinism, and pragmatism are the crests. About half the book's length consists of sketches of nearly fifty adherents of these philosophies--their birth and training, their views and influence on the movements, and excerpts from their work. The philosophical expositions are reliable. Moreover, the book is thick (...) with detail and very lively, both because its subject is the philosophy of essentially active people, and because of its style. Thus the reader is propelled along by colorful, epigrammatic prose. It should be a popular assignment as background reading in American civilization or philosophy, or the history of ideas. There are notes, bibliographical notes, and an index. In the final chapter Marnell examines the relationship between "progress," "liberalism," and the belief in a man-made order. Each man-centered philosophy has started as a reform movement, but has degenerated into cynicism and an excuse for self-aggrandizement, he tells us. Then, "believers in the divinely created order have found the way around to the fertile plain where progress once more is possible." Pursuing the current good cause, liberals have shifted philosophical positions three times in the past one hundred years. Currently, civil rights arguments rely on a natural law position ultimately based on divine rather than man-made order. The author makes a case for at least alternating emphasis on human and divine order, as the condition for social betterment.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Résumé — II s’agit ici de montrer que la mimèsis tragique chez Aristote a un sens éthique, dans la mesure où elle donne à réfléchir sur les conditions du bonheur humain. En effet, en montrant des personnages soumis aux vicissitudes de la fortune, elle donne à réfléchir sur la contingence du bonheur, que la vertu ne suffit pas à assurer. En ce sens, la mimèsis tragique est le pendant de l’Éthique à Nicomaque qui définit les conditions morales du bonheur. (...) Ce sens éthique de la tragédie peut déboucher sur une portée éthique, dans la mesure où la connaissance qu’elle procure de la condition humaine et du hasard qui règne sur la vie des hommes s’oppose à toute hubris en faisant prendre conscience au spectateur de la fragilité du bonheur. Dès lors, on peut dire que le sens éthique de la tragédie selon Aristote est d’abord intellectuel, mais qu’il peut avoir du coup une portée pratique. La différence entre Platon et Aristote sur ce point vient de la différence de leurs conceptions éthiques : pour Platon en effet, et contrairement à son disciple, la condition nécessaire et suffisante du bonheur est la vertu, de telle sorte que la mimèsis tragique, en tant qu’elle présente des hommes soumis à des malheurs sans pour autant avoir nécessairement commis une faute, donne une fausse idée du bonheur. C’est pourquoi chez Platon la tragédie ne peut donner un enseignement éthique, contrairement à ce qui se passe chez Aristote. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

La logique cartésienne est introuvable parce qu’on a cherché une logique qui n’existe pas, c’est-à-dire une logique classique sur le modèle des manuels de la tradition réformée. La puissance transgressive de Descartes, même dans ce domaine, a été radicale : il a bafoué l’Arbre de Porphyre, vidé de sens la théorie des catégories, montré l’inutilité du syllogisme pour la recherche scientifique. Sans efficacité, à son avis, fut le renouveau d’une logique fondée sur des normes préconstituées. Il se « limite » (...) pourtant à suggérer, sur le modèle des procédés mathématiques, une attitude de pensée centrée sur l’intuitus et dont les relations sont garanties par les notions de « série » et de respectus. La transgression cartésienne a été si bouleversante que « Descartes logicien » devient un auteur maudit et l’attitude qu’il aurait voulu inspirer n’a connu aucune fortune, à telle enseigne que même la Logique de Port-Royal qu’on voudrait cartésienne consacre un grand espace à la syllogistique.Undiscoverable is the Cartesian logic, because scholars looked for a logic that does not exist, i.e. a classical logic after the model of traditional, more or less reformed, manuals. Descartes’ transgressive power was radical even in this domain : he scorned Phorphyrius Tree, voided the theory of categories of all meaning, showed the uselessness of syllogism for scientific research. Just as totally ineffective was, in his view, the renewal of a logic founded on preconstituted norms. He therefore « limits » himself to suggest, after the model of mathematical procedures, an attitude of thought centered on intuitus and whose relationships are guaranteed by the notions of « series » and respectus. The Cartesian transgression turned out to be so upsetting that « Descartes the logician » became a wicked author and the attitude he had meant to inspire had no fortune whatsoever, to such a point that even the Logic of Port-Royal – purportedly Cartesian – leaves much room to syllogistics. (shrink)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders? And even if one were to suddenly take me to its heart, I would vanish into its stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us...."So what are you telling me, there's no God, but there's you?"Peter Weir's film Fearless appeared in 1993 to critical acclaim and (...) middling box office fortune. The film draws on all of Weir's considerable art, a stunning sound track, and powerful performances by Jeff Bridges, Rosie Perez, and Isabella Rossellini. Based on the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 191-211 [Access article in PDF] Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine Nancy G. Siraisi Hunter College In Renaissance medical practice rhetoric had an ambiguous reputation. Many authors warned physicians against use of persuasion or repeated some version of the truism that patients are cured not by eloquence but by medicines. On the other hand, physicians were also reminded that by speaking (...) well they helped patients to have confidence in their advice and to understand directions, which in turn facilitated cure.1 Yet some aspects of medical culture of the period between 1450 and 1600 seem profoundly attentive to rhetoric, at least as regards the use of language, performative elements, and the influence of these features in ancient models (most notably Galen himself).2 One area in which rhetoric had an unambiguous, acknowledged, and essential place was in the medical orations pronounced at university ceremonies. A sample follows: Pursuit of all these different things by study, investigation of obscurities with ingenuity, conquest of difficulties with industry, and—after penetrating into the very fibers of the earth and searching everywhere into the arcana of the whole of nature and from all herbs, fruits, trees, animals, gems, and even poisons—inquiry after remedies and the proper way to use them for all the ills of human life from so many authors, so many disciplines, and even from the very stars: these things, I say, [End Page 191] have uncovered so many hidden cures, been attained with such arduous powers of the mind, completed with so much effort of memory, offer so many things necessary for the health of the entire human race in common, that does not indeed [the entire enterprise of medicine] seem to have been superhuman and really in a certain way divine?3This nicely exuberant example of Renaissance medical rhetoric exemplifies the genre in several respects. The oration to which it belongs was originally delivered to an academic faculty of medicine by a physician; it shows the impact in medical settings of the revival of epideictic rhetoric, and its author drew on learned sources and commonplaces about medicine that belonged to a store of broadly humanistic erudition, shared both in and outside the medical profession. In fact the only truly distinctive feature of this passage is its author. It comes from Erasmus's Encomium medicinae, which he wrote in 1499 for a friend—a physician named Gysbertus—to deliver to the medical faculty of the University of Paris.4If Gysbertus was exceptionally fortunate in his ghost, many other surviving medical orations are internal products of medical faculties, the work of university masters or students of medicine. But whoever their authors, orations delivered in or written for an academic medical setting offer some telling illustrations both of the way in which certain kinds of humanistic interests and requirements came to penetrate medical learning and of the reaction of humanistic rhetoric to medicine. "Medical humanism" is usually understood to encompass both the core enterprise of intensive philological study, editing, and translation of Greek medical texts—never the occupation of more than a handful of hellenist scholars—and also the reception and scientific influence of the fruits of their labors among a wider medical audience. But Renaissance medicine was also a humanistic discipline in a much broader and more inclusive sense; that is, it both fostered and provided ample scope for the development among learned physicians of interests characteristic of humanistic culture in general: rhetoric, history, biography, fascination with remote peoples and places, and antiquarianism. At the same time, as the passage from Erasmus quoted [End Page 192] above demonstrates, humanists outside the medical profession interested themselves in medicine and controlled a stock of rhetorical commonplaces on the subject. To be sure, the penetration of terminology and concepts from medicine into the general culture long antedated the Renaissance.5 But the revival of rhetoric together with attention to ancient sources and commonplaces provided humanist observers with new tools for commenting, sometimes in quite specific and detailed terms, on the contemporary medical scene, a phenomenon... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Rhetoric of Philosophical Politics in Plato's Seventh LetterV. Bradley LewisThe name Syracuse has come to stand as an emblem of the problematic relationship between philosophy and politics. While the sources1 differ on specifics, we can be confident that Plato visited there at least three times between 387 and 362 B.C. On his first trip, during the reign of Dionysius I, he became acquainted with Dion, the tyrant's brother-in-law. (...) When the elder Dionysius died, Dion, a devotee of philosophy, apparently contrived for the old man's son, namesake, and successor to invite Plato back, believing that the young tyrant could be philosophically educated and convinced to lay down tyranny in favor of a new regime based on the rule of law. The plan was defeated, however, by a combination of Dionysius's dissolute life and opposition by Dion's enemies at court. Dion was exiled, and Plato returned to the Academy. Dion implored Plato to return to Syracuse on the basis of reports of Dionysius II's renewed resolution to take up philosophy and by the tyrant himself (who seems to have made some thinly veiled threats against the still-exiled Dion). Plato's second visit to Dionysius was no more successful than the first, however, and he considered himself fortunate to have escaped with his life. After a meeting at which Plato recounted the events of his final trip, Dion marshaled an expeditionary force, which included volunteers from the Academy, and set out to expel Dionysius II by violence. The effort succeeded, but the new regime was itself riven by faction, and Dion was assassinated in 353.2The principal legacy of this ill-starred episode is contained in the letters that have come down to us under the name of Plato, particularly those numbered seven and eight. Scholarly discussion of Plato's Seventh Letter has usually focused on three questions: the doctrinal content of the letter and its relationship to the doctrinal content of the dialogues; the character of the letter as an apologia for Plato's Syracusan activities; and the general authenticity of the letter. While the second of these questions focuses correctly [End Page 23] on the rhetorical character of the letter, it ignores the most obvious aspect, namely, the letter's explicit addressees: the friends and comrades of Dion, and their request for political advice. If we take this rhetorical element with sufficient seriousness, we will see that the content of the letter is fully consistent with the teachings of the political dialogues, a point that tells in favor of the authenticity of the letter. Specifically, a focus on the rhetorical character of the letter reveals that its content is determined mostly by what emerges as an effort by Plato to influence his correspondents by moderating their understandable desire for vengeance and thus to forestall further bloodshed and disorder in Syracuse. What is most important about the letter, then, is not so much its account of Plato's actions in Syracuse, but its unveiling of his intentions with respect to Dion's followers. It is not the philosophical-political blueprint, sketched vaguely in the Seventh Letter, that is most important,3 but the concrete effort to mitigate the passions of his correspondents. Read in this light, the letter becomes even more important, since it contradicts the popular image of Plato as a proponent of dangerous political utopianism and portrays a more subtle relationship between philosophy and politics.1. Dion's intentions, Plato's apologyTo the extent that the rhetoric of the letter has been treated, commentators have usually focused on Plato's (or whoever the author) defense of his own actions in Sicily.4 While there is certainly warrant for this approach, the most important fact about the letter concerns its intended audience, the "relatives and comrades of Dion."5 As Plato explains in the opening of the letter, these are the men who have sought not only his advice, but his cooperation in completing the political project halted by Dion's death at the hands of several of his other purported "allies."The most striking feature of the rhetorical structure is that, while the letter... (shrink)