These considerations illuminate an ontology of the witch by first disclosing how “witch,” as a linguistic gesture, carries a world of meaning, ethics, and a culture of being originating in the body. Witches and witchcraft speak to a communal situatedness of being by acknowledging the power we have over ourselves, others, and that singular lack of control we often experience in everyday life. In dialogue with Ada Agada, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I offer an interpretation of the body (...) schema through what I call the “witching-body,” drawing on historical and anthropological examples of witchcraft as related to personhood, thus demonstrating how embodiment philosophy and ontology are already alive in everyday ritual and magical acts. I explain the other’s contradiction of everydayness and transcendence through the reflexivity of self-sensing-self and how aspects of our own body, such as organs and emotions, may be occult or other to us. The everydayness of witchcraft and the ungraspable ambiguity of the witch speak to this necessary transcendence we experience with everyday others; there is both a banality and an infinite plurality. We yearn to know the witch because through the embodied existential expressions of “witch” we find what constitutes being a person. (shrink)

Its oft I had been asked by students and many of others of the given topic. What I personally felt be its answer, referring obviously standard books, I answered my seekers including also analyzing myself many times just twelve lines of the opening scene, which is in fact, later I thought, is containing a very ‘partial fulfillment’ of the conversation among the witches- perhaps that figures out the destiny of a mortal being, destiny of our tragic hero, full of (...) “profound- mature -complexity of human materialistic nature’’. ( http://philpapers.org/profile/112741 ). (shrink)

The concept of a witch hunt is frequently invoked, in recent times, to describe a kind of procedure for deciding the guilt of a person against whom an accusation has been made. But what exactly is a witch hunt? In this paper, ten conditions are formulated as a cluster of properties characterizing the witch hunt as a framework in which arguments are used: (1) pressure of social forces, (2) stigmatization, (3) climate of fear, (4) resemblance to a fair trial, (5) (...) use of simulated evidence, (6) simulated expert testimony, (7) nonfalsifiability characteristic of evidence, (8) reversal of polarity, (9) non-openness, and (10) use of the loaded question technique. The witch hunt, as characterized by these criteria, is shown to function as a negative normative structure for evaluating argumentation used in particular cases. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper is about the context of Albert Einstein's concerns at the time of a most intense intellectual effort — his own and that of a small group of scientists concerned with classical quantum theory. I describe contemporaneous interactions and differing views about the prospects for and the significance of the First Solvay Congress of 1911 as voiced by major participants. There are two axes around which the paper evolves: the Einstein-Nernst-Lorentz dialogue and the public institutional creation of the (...) “Solvay” stage. In certain ways, this paper is about personal and institutional patronage: the working out of a difficult theoretical impasse requires individual and collective moral support. It is about the forging of the identity of a scientific problem and the personal and institutional setting, the public space, in which this problem was collectively addressed. But I also uncover heuristic playfulness and flexibility which accompanies theoretical change. (shrink)

This paper will examine how the prominent image of the witch in Christian thought during the early modern period emerged from earlier images of the non-Christian Other, Jews and heretics for example. To do so the beliefs surrounding the ―rituals‖ and ―practices‖ of witches seen during the witch-craze of the fifteenth century are compared and contrasted with the images of Others within medieval Christian society. To do so a variety of both primary and secondary scholarship on the persecution of (...) witches, heretics, and Jews during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. (shrink)

Linda Moulton Howe. An Alien Harvest. Littleton, Colorado: LMH Productions. 1989. Pp. xviii. 455. $55.00. Cloth. ISBN 0‐9620570‐1‐0. Available from Linda Howe Productions, 904 Summit North Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30324.

In the course of history, many individuals have the dubious honor of being remembered primarily for an eponym of which they would disapprove. How many are aware that Joseph-Ignace Guillotin actually opposed the death penalty? Another notable case is that of Maria Agnesi, an Italian woman of privileged, but not noble, birth who excelled at mathematics and philosophy during the eighteenth century. In her treatise of 1748, Instituzioni Analitiche, she provided a comprehensive summary of the current state of knowledge concerning (...) both integral calculus and differential equations. Later in life she was elected to the Bologna Academy of Sciences and, in 1762, was consulted by the University of Turin for an opinion on the work of an up-and-coming mathematician named Joseph-Louis Lagrange. (shrink)

This article analyses the radical feminist formulations of the ‘witch’, focusing on the second-wave feminist sense of urgency to construct a political ‘we’ and to create a common identification with the historical oppression of women. The figure of the ‘witch’ represents here a dimension of (feminist) fantasy that, retrospectively, needs to be seen as a therapeutic attempt both to break through the silence and invisibility of female history and to elevate the notion of female alterity over the complementarity of the (...) phallogocentric system. Conveying the tension between past and present, the ‘witch’ becomes a crucial metaphor for herstory, that is, a form of feminist mythology constituting an alternative to the established male-centered master-story. (shrink)

Alex Sanders, one of the founders of modern pagan witchcraft in the UK, worked briefly at the John Rylands Library in 1962 as a book duster before being dismissed for ‘neglect of his duties’. The full circumstances were more complex, and although Sanders is now the subject of an article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography the episode has never been fully investigated. This article makes use of all relevant sources, including unpublished records at the John Rylands Library, books (...) damaged by Sanders, and interviews with former staff, to establish what happened and what bearing the events had on Sanders’s future career as an occultist and propagator of pagan witchcraft. (shrink)

At the end of 2015‘s The Witch, isolated and beaten protagonist, Thomasin, ultimately rejects her puritanical upbringing to become a witch, accepting the invitation of the Devil (in the guise of the family’s goat Black Philip). This essay will discuss Thomasin’s sexual deliverance in terms of her turning away from the authoritarian ‘Law of the Father’ towards female liberation that comes in the form of the Witch. Thomasin transitions from girl to woman, but does not want to do so in (...) the restrictive Puritan fashion where patriarchy and oppression rules. She becomes a woman by embracing her sexuality in the figure of the witch and Black Philip as the figure of lust helping her become free. Western folklore posits the goat as a symbol of fertility, independence, and lust; Black Philip is a figure who represents a connection to wild desires. Therefore, Black Philip becomes not only a physical representation of the devil, but also a symbolic representation of Thomasin’s sexual desire. Drawing on theories of the monstrous-feminine (Creed, Kristeva, Arnold), the symbolism of folklore and Freud’s Electra complex, this work argues that, despite its message of feminine empowerment, The Witch cannot fully reject or escape patriarchal discourse. (shrink)

The director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life presents a series of essays on the philosophical implications of the Narnia series, exploring Lewis's ...

Through a survey of the discussions of the decline of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-craze of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Keith Thomas and Brian Easlea, the role and impact of Balthasar Bekker, a seventeenth-century Dutch Cartesian, is shown to have been under-estimated, and not inconsiderable.

The subject of this paper is Georg Ernst Stahl's reflections on epilepsy. In the German physician's work, the concept of disease is stratified: it is the morbid idea which causes dysfunctions in the animal economy, as well as irregular motion, overabundance and ultimately an alteration of the corporeal humours. In particular, epilepsy is an affection deriving from an altered functioning of the bodily motions, caused by abnormal blood flow, intestinal worms, anatomical defects, foreign bodies, and the passions of the soul. (...) While a certain medical tradition attributed a nervous origin to epilepsy, Stahl, giving it a humoural genesis, openly shows the theoretical premises on which his physiology rests. So, Stahlian physiology appears to be a non-mechanistic, teleological-inspired, hydraulicism. (shrink)

. The subject of this paper is Georg Ernst Stahl's reflections on epilepsy. In the German physician's work, the concept of disease is stratified: it is the morbid idea which causes dysfunctions in the animal economy, as well as irregular motion, overabundance and ultimately an alteration of the corporeal humours. In particular, epilepsy is an affection deriving from an altered functioning of the bodily motions, caused by abnormal blood flow, intestinal worms, anatomical defects, foreign bodies, and the passions of the (...) soul. While a certain medical tradition attributed a nervous origin to epilepsy, Stahl, giving it a humoural genesis, openly shows the theoretical premises on which his physiology rests. So, Stahlian physiology appears to be a non-mechanistic, teleological-inspired, hydraulicism. (shrink)

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the (...) world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper attempts to be a contribution to the epistemological project of explaining complex conceptual structures departing from more basic ones. The central thesis of the paper is that there are what I call “functionally structured concepts”, these are non-harmonic concepts in Dummett’s sense that might be legitimized if there is a function that justifies the tie between the inferential connection the concept allows us to trace. Proving this requires enhancing the russellian existential analysis of definite descriptions to apply to (...) functions and using this in proving the legitimacy of such concepts. The utility of the proposal is shown for the case of thick ethical terms and an attempt is made to use it in explaining the development of natural numbers. This last move could allow us to go one step lower in explaining the genesis of natural numbers while maintaining the notion of abstract numbers as higher order entities. (shrink)