This book offers a scientific whistleblower’s perspective on current implementation of federal research misconduct regulations. It provides a narrative of general interest that relates current cases of research ethics to philosophical, historical and sociological accounts of fraud in scientific research. The evidence presented suggests that the problems of falsification and fabrication remain as great as ever, but hidden because the current system puts universities in charge of investigations and permits them to use confidentiality regulations to hide the outcomes of investigations. (...) The book documents the significant conflict of interest that arises because federal regulation gives universities the responsibility to conduct investigations of their own faculty with severely limited oversight. The book is intended for young research scientists or anyone who wishes to understand the challenges faced by scientists in the workplace today. The central thread in the book is an exclusive account of an experienced research scientist who was the first to expose the facts that led to the longest running research misconduct investigation in the history of the National Science Foundation. (shrink)

This article deals with a modern disease of academic science that consists of an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge. Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers. If we consider academic papers as a kind of scientific ‘currency’ that is backed by gold bullion in the central bank of ‘true’ science, then we are witnessing an article-inflation phenomenon, a scientometric bubble that is (...) most harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers. The main problem behind the scenes is that the impact factor is used as a proxy for quality. Therefore, not only for convenience, but also based on ethical principles of scientific research, we adhere to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment when it emphasizes “the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in funding, appointment and promotion considerations; and the need to assess research on its own merits rather on the journal in which the research is published”. Our message is mainly addressed to the funding agencies and universities that award tenures or grants and manage research programmes, especially in developing countries. The message is also addressed to well-established scientists who have the power to change things when they participate in committees for grants and jobs. (shrink)

Universities and funders in many countries have been using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as an indicator for research and grant assessment despite its controversial nature as a statistical representation of scientific quality. This study investigates how the changes of JIF over the years can affect its role in research evaluation and science management by using JIF data from annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to illustrate the changes. The descriptive statistics find out an increase in the median JIF for the top (...) 50 journals in the JCR, from 29.300 in 2017 to 33.162 in 2019. Moreover, on average, elite journal families have up to 27 journals in the top 50. In the group of journals with a JIF of lower than 1, the proportion has shrunk by 14.53% in the 2015–2019 period. The findings suggest a potential ‘JIF bubble period’ that science policymaker, university, public fund managers, and other stakeholders should pay more attention to JIF as a criterion for quality assessment to ensure more efficient science management. (shrink)

Alternate View Column AV-02 Keywords: cosmology, bubble, universe, inflation Published in the September-1984 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine; This column was written and submitted 2/10/84 and is copyrighted ©1984, John G. Cramer. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.

My previous Alternate View column (ANALOG 9/84) described the widely accepted "inflationary scenario" of modern cosmology in which our Universe is just one among very many "bubble universes", all popping out of the general medium of the Big Bang like bubbles forming in a glass of beer. Somewhere perhaps there are many universes more or less like ours, some very similar to and others radically different from the universe we call "home".

Inflationary cosmology has been widely accepted due to its successful predictions: for a “generic” initial state, inflation produces a homogeneous, flat, bubble with an appropriate spectrum of density perturbations. However, the discovery that inflation is “generically eternal,” leading to a vast multiverse of inflationary bubbles with different low-energy physics, threatens to undermine this account. There is a “predictability crisis” in eternal inflation, because extracting predictions apparently requires a well-defined measure over the multiverse. This has led to discussions of anthropic (...) predictions based on a measure over the multiverse, and an assumption that we are typical observers. I will give a pessimistic assessment of attempts to make predictions in this sense, emphasizing in particular problems that arise even if a unique measure can be found. (shrink)

Cosmology is usually understood as an observational science, where experimentation plays no role. It is interesting, nevertheless, to change this perspective addressing the following question: what should we do to create a universe, in a laboratory? It appears, in fact, that this is, in principle, possible according to at least two different paradigms; both allow to circumvent singularity theorems, i.e. the necessity of singularities in the past of inflating domains which have the required properties to generate a universe (...) similar to ours. The first of them is substantially classical, and is built up considering solitons which collide with surrounding topological defects, generating an inflationary domain of space–time. The second is, instead, partly quantum and considers the possibility of tunnelling of past-non-singular regions of spacetime into an inflating universe, following a well-known instanton proposal. We are, here, going to review some of these models, as well as highlight possible extensions, generalizations and the open issues (as for instance the detectability of child universes and the properties of quantum tunnelling processes) that still affect the description of their dynamics. In doing so we will remark how the works on this subject can represent virtual laboratories to test the role that fundamental principles of physics (particularly, the interplay of quantum and general relativistic realms) played in the formation of our universe. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the dramatic collapse of the Icelandic bubble economy in 2008, the Centre for Ethics of the University of Iceland felt all the more compelled to find ways to promote ethical ref...

Creativity: Theory, History, Practice offers important new perspectives on creativity in the light of contemporary critical theory and cultural history. Innovative in approach as well as argument, the book crosses disciplinary boundaries and builds new bridges between the critical and the creative. It is organized in four parts: · Why creativity now? offers much-needed alternatives to both the Romantic stereotype of the creator as individual genius and the tendency of the modern creative industries to treat everything as a commodity. · (...) Defining creativity, creating definitions traces the changing meaning of "create" from religious ideas of divine creation from nothing to advertising notions of concept creation. It also examines the complex history and extraordinary versatility of terms such as imagination, invention, inspiration and originality. · Creation as myth, story, metaphor begins with modern re-telling of early African, American and Australian creation myths and -picking up Biblical and evolutionary accounts along the way - works round to scientific visions of the Big Bang, bubble universes and cosmic soup. · Creative practices, cultural processes is a critical anthology of materials, chosen to promote fresh thinking about everything from changing constructions of "literature" and "design" to artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Rob Pope takes significant steps forward in the process of rethinking a vexed yet vital concept, all the while encouraging and equipping readers to continue the process in their own creative or "re-creative" ways. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice is invaluable for anyone with a live interest in exploring what creativity has been, is currently, and yet may be. (shrink)

Abstract: Science and practical life strive to identify the generating or constraining conditions for the existence and character of whatever states of affairs concern them. Yet some conditions for phenomena within nature or for nature itself may be unidentifiable because there are no empirical data testing hypotheses about them or because relevant data are inaccessible. Three conditions external to nature are considered: God, eternal possibilities, and events priori to or consequent on the Big Bang. Empirical data confirming the existence and (...) character of the first two are lacking; evidence relevant to the inception and effects of the third is inaccessible. Nature has conditions that will likely remain unknowable; the world is likely to be more complicated than we can know. Speculations about the existence and character of its silent conditions won't be deterred, though the absence of justifying empirical data entails that speculation doesn't justify belief. (shrink)

This paper presents a new Symmetrical Interpretation (SI) of relativistic quantum mechanics which postulates: quantum mechanics is a theory about complete experiments, not particles; a complete experiment is maximally described by a complex transition amplitude density; and this transition amplitude density never collapses. This SI is compared to the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) for the analysis of Einstein’s bubble experiment. This SI makes several experimentally testable predictions that differ from the CI, solves one part of the measurement problem, resolves some (...) inconsistencies of the CI, and gives intuitive explanations of some previously mysterious quantum effects. (shrink)

In the science fiction novel Quarantine, Greg Egan imagines a universe where interactions with human observers collapse quantum wavefunctions. Aliens, unable to collapse wavefunctions, tire of being slaughtered by these collapses. In response they erect an impenetrable shield around the solar system, protecting the rest of the universe from human interference and locking humanity into a starless Bubble. When confronting scientific realism and the quantum, many philosophers try to do the theoretical counterpart of this fictional practical strategy. (...) Quantum mechanics is beset with many hard-to-resolve interpretational challenges. Philosophers — appealing to decoherence and coarse-graining — try to put these in a bubble and hope that they can go about their philosophizing as before. My chapter aims to burst this Bubble. (shrink)

In an (indirectly or involuntarily) iconoclastic subject, Claude Fintz proposes to put in perspective the conceptual universe of the humanities by confronting it with the thought of a master of contemporary Indian advaita, Nisargadatta Maharaj—as reflected by his disciple Ramesh S. Balsekar. In this “between” of the scientific and spiritual quest, the great notions of the philosophy of the subject will resonate. The author hypothesizes that this paradoxical encounter is likely to bring out the mystery of a first-person search (...) where, in the context of a certain philosophy of consciousness (resonating with the quest of Henri Michaux), the looking subject turns out to be the mirror of the looked object. This apocalypse projects vitriol on the conceptual bubbles that are the so-called subject (and his free will), knowledge and imagination—all constituents of the human “sciences”, bordered in fact by nothingness, according to a “vacant” anthropology. (shrink)

Preface Phillip R. Sloan, Gerald McKenny, Kathleen Eggleson pp. xiii-xviii In November of 2009, the University of Notre Dame hosted the conference “Darwin in the Twenty-First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God.‘ Sponsored primarily by the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at Notre Dame, and the Science, Theology, and the Ontological Quest project within the Vatican Pontifical... 1. Introduction: Restructuring an Interdisciplinary Dialogue Phillip R. Sloan pp. 1-32 Almost exactly fifty years before the Notre Dame conference, the (...) world’s largest centenary commemoration of Darwin’s legacy was held at nearby University of Chicago. This event, organized by a committee spearheaded by University of Chicago anthropologist Sol Tax, drew nearly 2,500 registrants. In attendance were the primary leaders... Part 1. Nature 2. Evolution through Developmental Change: How Alterations in Development Cause Evolutionary Changes in Anatomy Scott F. Gilbert pp. 35-60 For the past half-century, the mechanisms of evolution have been explained by the fusion of genetics and evolutionary biology called “the Modern Synthesis.‘ The tenets of the Modern Synthesis have been generally formulated as such: 1. There is genetic variation within the population. 2. There is competition... 3. The Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms: A New Perspective Stuart A. Newman pp. 61-89 The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, based on Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection in conjunction with a genetic theory of inheritance in a population-based framework, has been, for more than six decades, the dominant scientific perspective for explaining the diversity of living organisms. In recent years, however, with the growth... 4. The Evolvability of Organic Forms: Possible, Likely, and Unlikely Change from the Perspective of Evolutionary Developmental Biology Alessandro Minelli pp. 90-115 Confronted with the extraordinary diversity of animal form, we can ask questions about function and adaptation. How does this animal move? How does it feed? How does it defend itself from its enemies? But we can also ask questions about development, reproduction, and heredity. What mechanisms produce these forms? How are these... 5. Accident, Adaptation, and Teleology in Aristotle and Darwinism David J. Depew pp. 116-143 Charles Darwin framed the Origin of Species to meet criteria for inductive science set out by John Herschel in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. Accordingly, he was distraught when he learned that Herschel, to whom he had sent a copy of his newly published book, was not... 6. The Game of Life Implies Both Teleonomy and Teleology Gennaro Auletta, Ivan Colagè, Paolo D’Ambrosio pp. 144-164 The present contribution is mainly aimed at suggesting the importance of teleonomy and teleology as explanatory mechanisms in biology in the light of recent achievements in the field, and at showing that they play an actual and relevant role in the realm of life. The issue of finality in biology still provokes lively debates in the... Part 2. Humanity 7. Humanity’s Origins Bernard Wood pp. 167-181 One of Charles Darwin’s many achievements is that he began the process of converting the Tree of Life from a religious metaphor into a biological reality. All types of living organisms, be they animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, or viruses, are at the end of twigs that reach the surface of the Tree of Life, and all the types of organisms... 8. Darwin’s Evolutionary Ethics: The Empirical and Normative Justifications Robert J. Richards pp. 182-200 In the increasingly secular atmosphere of the nineteenth century, intellectuals grew wary of the idea that nature had any moral authority. In an earlier age, one might have looked upon the dispositions of nature as divinely sanctioned, and thus one could call upon natural law to ground moral judgment. Certain behaviors, for instance, might have... 9. Crossing the Milvian Bridge: When Do Evolutionary Explanations of Belief Debunk Belief? Paul E. Griffiths, John S. Wilkins pp. 201-231 Two traditional targets for evolutionary skepticism are religion and morality. Evolutionary skeptical arguments against religious belief are continuous with earlier genetic arguments against religion, such as that implicit in David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Evolutionary arguments are also... 10. Questioning the Zoological Gaze: Darwinian Epistemology and Anthropology Phillip R. Sloan pp. 232-266 This quotation from Darwin’s Descent of Man illuminates an under-explored issue in Darwin’s work---not the issue of evolutionary ethics itself, but the epistemology of experience assumed in his work, and the consequences of his application of this “zoological gaze‘ to human beings. I will term this epistemological stance in this chapter “natural historical... Part 3. God 11. Evolution and Catholic Faith John O’Callaghan pp. 269-298 To begin to examine the relation of orthodox Catholic Christian faith to evolutionary theory and the question of human origins, consider words of the fourth pope, St. Clement: Let us fix our gaze on the Father and Creator of the whole world, and let us hold on to his peace and blessings, his splendid and surpassing... 12. After Darwin, Aquinas: A Universe Created and Evolving William E. Carroll pp. 299-337 At the 2000 Jubilee Session for scientists, held at the Vatican in May of that year, Archbishop Józef Życiński offered an eloquent assessment of contemporary discourse on the relationship between the natural sciences and theology. He ended his address with the comment that what is needed today is a new Thomas Aquinas. I remember... 13. Evolutionary Theism and the Emergent Universe Józef Życiński pp. 338-354 The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species has been celebrated in the context of an animated debate concerning both scientific and philosophical issues implied by the theory of evolution.1 One finds a deep diversity of attitudes, both methodological and semantic, in the current debates on evolutionary... 14. Beyond Separation or Synthesis: Christ and Evolution as Theodrama Celia Deane-Drummond pp. 355-380 The fervor with which popular discourse on science and religion has continued to bubble up in the anniversary year celebrating Darwin’s achievements shows that the publically perceived conflict between science and religion will not go away. Academic discussion on such matters is therefore not just peripheral to cultural concerns but takes... Part 4. Past and Future Prospects 15. Imagining a World without Darwin Peter J. Bowler pp. 383-403 What would have happened if Charles Darwin had not lived to write On the Origin of Species? Perhaps his bad health caused the early death he feared, or maybe he fell overboard while on the voyage of the Beagle. Would the world have still experienced the Darwinian Revolution under another name, or would the history of science, and... 16. What Future for Darwinism? Jean Gayon pp. 404-423 What future for Darwinism? I will propose some criteria for exploring this question in the domains of both evolutionary biology and the human sciences. Do not expect me to tell you where we will stand thirty years from now. It will be enough to identify a few general tendencies. For the sake of brevity, I will not devote a preamble to explain... Contributors pp. 424-430. (shrink)

In recent decades, there has been astonishing growth in scientific theorizing about multiverses. Once considered outré or absurd, multiple universe theories appear to be gaining considerable scientific respectability. There are, of course, many such theories, including (i) Everett’s (1957) many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, defended by Deutsch (1997) and others; (ii) Linde’s (1986) eternal inflation view, which suggests that universes form like bubbles in a chaotically inflating sea; (iii) Smolin’s (1997) fecund universe theory, which proposes that universes (...) are generated through black holes; (iv) the cyclic model, recently defended using string/M theory by Steinhardt and Turok (2007), which holds that distinct universes are formed in a never-ending sequence of Big Bangs and Big Crunches; and (v) Tegmark’s (2007) “Level IV” multiverse, which contains many universes governed by distinct mathematical and scientific laws. While not all of these preclude each other, the details and implications of each one are hotly contested. In one area within the philosophy of religion (the debate concerning the “fine-tuning” argument), scientific multiverse theories are widely held to be hostile to theism. This is because such theories appear to account for the relevant data – the biophilic parameters of the universe we inhabit – without appeal to an intelligent designer. Yet, in recent years, several philosophers and one physicist have offered reasons for thinking that if theism is true, the actual world comprises (or probably comprises) many universes. I first set out some requirements – both scientific and otherwise – for such a theory. I then survey some problems such theories are held to face, and some prospects they are thought to have. Finally, I examine arguments both for and against the claim that multiverse theories can help theists respond to the problem of evil. I conclude that such theories advantage neither the theist or the atheist in the debate about evil: they merely require reframing arguments from evil. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is about three bodies of visual work that raise questions of cultural belonging, hybridity, and memory. I use languages of printmaking, drawing, photography, and poetry to creatively trace processes of memory of place and meanings we make with it. In Migrant Universe, drawings function as rearrangeable continua of maps, landscapes, and portraits of memory and identity. Catalogue of Silence, an installation of photographs, an essay, and poems about the state of cultural institutions in my native city (...) of Sarajevo, is an elegy for what has been irretrievably lost as well as a testament of hope that the city will rebound and be, as it was in the past, a fertile ground for new ways of cultural thriving. In Beginnings and Endings, a series of etchings, images culled from science, explosion traces, and comic book speech bubbles are placed on liquid and unsteady ground, invaded by fungi, functioning as icons of precarity: the loss and the promise of it. In this precipitous moment in human history, in American history, what can we learn about our survival as a species, and a global civilization, from the stories of migrants, seeds, and mushrooms? (shrink)

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

Recent research has emphasized the negative effects of finance on macroeconomic performance and even cautioned of a “finance curse.” As one of the main drivers of financial sector growth, mortgages have traditionally been hailed as increasing the number of homeowners in a country. This article uses long-run panel data for seventeen countries between 1920 and 2013 to show that the effect of the “great mortgaging” on homeownership rates is not universally positive. Increasing mortgage debt appears to be neither necessary nor (...) sufficient for higher homeownership levels. There were periods of rising homeownership levels without much increase in mortgages before 1980, thanks to government programs, purchasing power increases, and less inflated house prices. There have also been mortgage increases without homeownership growth, but with house price bubbles thereafter. The liberalization of financial markets might after all be a poor substitute for more traditional housing policies. (shrink)

Histories of communication are still relatively rare birds, but this one is distinctive on several grounds. The two authors are/were undisputed giants in the field. Ken Cmiel, the originator of the book, still unfinished when he suddenly died in 2006, was a cultural historian of communication; his best friend, John Peters, is one of the world leaders in the intellectual history of communication. In completing that unfinished manuscript, Peters has performed astonishing prestidigitation here in creating an effective hybrid: he retains (...) the core of Cmiel's account, while creating a unique book that, courtesy of Peters, brilliantly spins out the solid Cmielian core and its material traces into gorgeous reflections on aspects of how we make our way through a world of images and information. Promiscuous Knowledge constructs a cultural and intellectual history of information, images, and conceptions of knowledge since the 17th century, with an emphasis on the American context since the 19th century. Cmiel/Peters sketch the way in which various containers for information-knowledge, expertise, abridgment, books, digests, encyclopedias, museums, etc.-have variably organized gluts of information, and how these containers have eroded since the 1970s. A parallel throughline traces social attitudes and practices around images and key media for circulating and experiencing them. Cmiel envisioned the largest contour of the book as a contribution to the history of truth and truth-making. His protagonists are pictures and facts, images and information. They enact a process of gradual dismantling, erosion, or collapse of the mass culture system from last century into the present. Promiscuous knowledge has a new face, courtesy of the online universe full of filter bubbles, echo chambers, and fake news. Google offers a single portal to a churning mass of confusion; it lacks a principle of inclusion/inclusivity, it has no way of framing the whole. Peters has shaped what Cmiel started out with into a better Trump-era book than an Obama-era book. And he has retained its core: a brief history of how we left the world of fact for the world of information. (shrink)

We hear a lot about bubbles and echo chambers these days. People talk only to others who have similar ideas to themselves. Supporters of political parties, believers in conspiracy theories (such as QAnon), members of many other groups continually talk to fellow believers, and seldom seriously consider what outsiders say. However, we need to acknowledge that we ourselves also exist within bubbles. While perhaps not in the same league as the examples above, philosophy for/with children (P4/wC) advocates and researchers can (...) also fall into the trap of listening only to others within our field. In many ways, this is understandable. Over more than 50 years, the P4/wC literature has ballooned, and it is unlikely that any one person has had the time to be able to read it all, let alone chasing down other literature. Yet we are not the only people who are interested in classroom discussions. For example, when I was doing my PhD, I read a fascinating and informative book by JT Dillon—Using Discussion in Classrooms—which I have never seen referenced in the P4/wC literature. The book under review here is another example. Published in the Ed Psych Insights series by Routledge, it is edited by P Karen Murphy, the Harry and Marion Royer Eberly Faculty Fellow and Professor of Education at The Pennsylvania State University. Of the eight other contributors to this book, seven are doctoral students, and one a post-doc, at either The Pennsylvania State University or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is quite a tight little bubble: the Quality Talk bubble. Quality Talk (QT) is the name of the approach to classroom discussions devised by Murphy and her collaborators. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Receiving the Gift of Life: My Kidney Transplant StoryJudith W. RyanAs one of three siblings who all inherited an unfortunate gene from our mother, I was born with polycystic kidney disease (PKD). None of us knew of this, however, until later middle age, and my mother not until she was 76. I was the last sibling diagnosed at the age of 56. My brothers had been diagnosed some years (...) before and jokingly started to look at me as a universal donor. Since I had a 50-50 chance of having PKD and with a mother who was one of eight children with none of her siblings known to have the disease, I had not felt an urgency to be tested. Besides, I had no signs or symptoms. But now there was a reason. I made an appointment for a renal ultrasound and while having the procedure, I tipped the screen so that I could see the results. Although the technician was not happy with this, I was repaid with the view of my kidneys looking full of bubbles. Yes, our family was three for three in the genetic game of roulette.I knew immediately how I was going to navigate this health issue. As an adult nurse practitioner I had a very good understanding of what was to come. I knew my blood type “O” was the most common and would mean the longest wait for a deceased donor transplant, at least five years if I were lucky and only after enduring several years of progressing renal failure. In addition, I had cared for dialysis patients and watched my mother endure with difficulty both peritoneal and hemodialysis prior to her death a year before my diagnosis. Knowing I would not choose dialysis left me hoping for a miracle of a living donor or, more realistically, managing my disease as best I could until I died.The next step was managing PKD symptoms and issues as my kidneys continued to fail. One of the errors in my thinking during this time turned out to be that because I had two brothers who had the same disease and were ahead of me in their disease progression, I could follow their lead. It turned out that we manifested our disease very differently. My younger brother, who was diagnosed first, had to deal with significant pain from persistent cyst ruptures, monthly, biweekly then weekly. This continued even after his transplant until he had his native kidneys removed. The other two of us did not have to deal with cyst ruptures. Additionally, anemia was no problem for my younger brother but was for us older siblings. Significant fatigue and weariness were a problem for both of my brothers but not for me.And so it went, as we compared our blood test results, that the idea of a living donor entered the conversation. I knew this would be a problem for me because how do you ask people to consider being a donor? I had difficulty asking friends for a ride to the airport. This is where the grace and kindness of others and divine intervention enter [End Page 107] our story—word about our medical dilemma spread through the visibility of my younger brother, a minister in New England.Fortunately for me, my much beloved younger brother had dozens of people who wanted to be his donor. About 12 of these potential donors were actually tested before finding a match. One of his unmatched donors became the donor for my older brother (our first family transplant). Two years later, my other brother received his transplant. Three years later, after being told he was not a good match for my brother, this dear man came forward to be a possible donor for me. Hence, I got my transplant from an unused donor from my younger brother’s group. Overall, we had living donors from three different churches located within an hour of each other in New England. I even lucked out and acquired the minister of one of the churches as my donor. All three of us received kidneys over five years from living donors who did not know my older brother... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and PurposeDaniel A. MetrauxJapan Unbound: A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and Purpose. By John Nathan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.Immediately after my return from an eight-day visit to Japan in late March 2004, I happened upon a long article in the New York Times (March 27, 2004, p. A4) featuring Hitomi Kanehara, a twenty-year-old author of a novel about (...) her post-bubble generation. Her portrait of a radically changing society in Japan reflects what I learned from two dozen interviews with Japanese friends and colleagues over the course of my visit.The Times article praised Kanehara for the portrait of young people in Japan since the 1990 collapse of Japan's "bubble economy" of the 1970s and 1980s:It is a world of "freeters," young Japanese surviving on part-time jobs and unconcerned with their future; of unsentimental sex and a profound inability to communicate verbally; a world in which a killing is viewed with amorality. The institutions that built postwar Japan—the family, school and companies—are noticeable by their absence. In a nation known for its social cohesion, the characters have no interest in playing a role in society, but only in finding personal satisfaction among themselves. Unlike Japanese in, say, their 30s, the characters in the novel are not disillusioned at Japanese society, since they had few expectations to begin with. "There are many people who don't expect anything from society," Ms. Kanehara says. "That's precisely why they are looking inward or to people [End Page 678] closest to them. I never knew the bubble era, so my way of looking at things can't help being different. Since I was born, I've never experienced a time of prosperity. Without my being aware, it's possible that my writing reflects the era."The Japan that I observed ever so briefly in March 2004 after a four-year absence is a society that is undergoing revolutionary changes in values and behavior in every sphere of life from education and popular culture to business and government. The result is a process that is radically changing the Japanese cultural landscape, making it a place vastly different from its traditional and even recent past.This view of Japan is carefully chronicled in John Nathan's most recent work, Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and Purpose. Nathan, the Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of highly praised books on Mishima Yukio and Sony, explores many facets of contemporary Japanese society ranging from education and families to business, politics, and foreign relations.Nathan analyzes a nation experiencing dramatic change as Japan moves away from many of its traditional values toward a very uncertain future. A long and demeaning recession has weakened the foundations of the traditional family system and has contributed to the rapid rise of divorce and an increase in the physical abuse of children by their families. The recession has contributed to the weakening of the bond between Japan's corporations and their employees, who are losing their right to lifetime employment. More and more Japanese are growing skeptical of their nation's dependant relationship of over a half-century with the United States, and nationalistic and xenophobic books are climbing up the best-seller list.One matter that Nathan discusses brilliantly is the traumatic breakdown of order and cohesion in Japan's primary and secondary schools and the increasingly rebellious nature of Japanese youth. He writes about riotous conditions in classrooms in a country once famous for respectful children. His best chapter depicts chaos in the classroom, where teachers across the country have simply lost control of their students. Disruptive students rule the roost, bringing intolerable disorder and engaging in physical attacks on other students as well as teachers and administrators. Nathan writes:Classroom breakdown is only part of a larger crisis of anger and withdrawal that has bewildered parents and educators.... In the United States, suspension is a legal option; in Japan suspension and expulsion are taboo under any circumstances. Promotion is based... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist Women and Interfaith Work in the United StatesKate DuganWomen from a wide array of backgrounds and interest areas continue to shape the face of Buddhism in the United States—from women who encountered Buddhism during the women's movement in the 1960s to ordained women founding temples for large immigrant populations; from women carving out a space for Buddhism in colleges and universities to Buddhist women engaged in interfaith dialogue (...) and working in interreligious settings. As Buddhist scholar Rita Gross notes, the experiences of women in Buddhism in the United States are wide and varied.1Increasingly, whether they are ordained Buddhist nuns or are Buddhist activists, women in the United States are engaging with questions of interfaith conversations within this multireligious nation. Around the country, Buddhist nuns dialogue with their Catholic counterparts. In local communities, Buddhist women assume leadership roles in interfaith groups. Behind prison walls, women offer Buddhist meditation instruction. Some women introduce tenets of Buddhism to their communities, while others promote justice with people from various faith traditions. On college campuses, Buddhist women work as chaplains and women Buddhologists integrate Buddhism and interfaith dialogue into their academic interests. This article aims to explore several snapshots of Buddhist women engaged in interfaith dialogue and working as Buddhists in interreligious settings; it is not intended to provide all-inclusive coverage of the many and diverse women in Buddhism in the United States engaged with an increasingly religiously diverse country.2Historical Glance: Buddhist Women and Interfaith Dialogue in the United StatesRita Gross suggests that women in the United States began practicing Buddhism in the 1960s and 1970s because "the basic teachings [of Buddhism] were gender-free and gender-neutral, and many found the practice of meditation... intensely liberating."3 Yet, the history of Buddhism is dominated by patriarchal structures and male-centered liturgical and ordination practices. As Buddhism [End Page 31] grew American roots, women found that "deeper explorations into the traditional texts revealed misogynistic passages as well as a strong overall tendency to favor men over women in matters of study and practice."4 No longer certain that Buddhism was any less fettered by patriarchy than other traditions, uneasiness bubbled within the experiences of Buddhist women.In the early 1980s, Cambridge Buddhist Association member Suzie Bowman noted the similarities among women's experiences of American Buddhism—including struggles of motherhood in a tradition that emphasizes the quiet of meditation halls and an alarming number of stories about abusive male teachers. In 1983, Bowman and the Providence Zen Center hosted a conference called "The Feminine in Buddhism"; seventy women attended. A two-day conference, with 120 participants, followed in 1984. In 1985, they hosted a three-day gathering.5These inspired budding Buddhist Sandy Boucher to take to the road to understand Buddhism in women's lives. She interviewed more than one hundred Buddhist women in their homes, workplaces, sangha. In Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism, Boucher paints portraits of women in Buddhism in the United States in the mid 1980s—immigrant women from Asia who transplanted their Buddhism, white women who discovered Buddhism in tandem with feminism, women of color who encountered a white-dominated Buddhism. In these women's experiences, she suggests, is American Buddhism with "the possibility for the creation of a religion fully inclusive of women's realities."6Against this background, Rita Gross was blazing a trail for Buddhist women in interfaith dialogue. In 1980, an eager Gross attended the first International Buddhist-Christian Dialogue conference. She presented ideas that, twenty years later she says, encompassed "everything to which I have devoted my scholarly attention:... feminism, non-Christian religions, accurate information about world religions, Buddhism, Buddhism and feminism, interreligious interchange, even theology of religion."7 After this first splash, Rita Gross attended the 1984 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter—the only woman in attendance.8 The organizers were eager to have more women participate; so was Gross. After that conference, she made her further involvement contingent upon more women's involvement. Because of this insistence, members did, and continue to, work toward equal gender representation.9 In 1992, Gross explained, from a personal perspective, the potential... (shrink)

A recent breakthrough has moved the concept of a "warp drive" another step along its path from a fictional SF prop-idea to a well founded physics concept that might one day be realized. This improvement on the Alcubierre warp drive was devised by general relativity theorist Chris Van Den Broeck of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He has eliminated seemingly insurmountable problems with the Alcubierre warp-drive scheme. His improvement employs topological gymnastics to keep the interior of the warp (...) bubble large while making its external surface very small. But before describing Van Den Broeck’s work, I’ll summarize the Alcubierre warp drive concept itself, first featured in my column (#81) in the November-‘96 Analog. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 87-90 [Access article in PDF] Phenomenological and Biological Psychiatry:Complementary or Mutual? James Morley Keywords: phenomenology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, ontology. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered the problems of life have still not been touched at all. (Witgenstein, Tractatus, 6.52) IF ONE WAS TO PERFORM a thought experiment by imagining a scientifically explained universe, how would this explained (...) class='Hi'>universe resolve my issues of value and meaning? Would it help me to live a better life? In one sentence, Witgenstein expressed exactly the issues dividing, and defining, the phenomenological and biophysical approaches to psychiatry. (Natural) scientific questions are concerned with relations of physical causality while phenomenology is aimed at the problems of life, i.e., the elucidation of lived personal meanings.Clarifying the relation between phenomenology and the general psychiatric literature is clearly a significant undertaking. At this juncture in the history of psychiatry where the biophysical model is so dominant, the authors' efforts are especially welcome, as I wholeheartedly appreciate, and thank the authors for this endeavor. I only wish to explicate a few issues latent within the article and perhaps add a few supportive points. Explicitly or implicitly, the need for phenomenology in psychiatry is long enduring and will always persist (Ellenberger 1981, 1993). The integration of phenomenology with general psychiatric practice would certainly serve the needs of patients and society generally. But, in the present state of affairs where the biological model is so preeminent, a full accounting of the dramatic divergences between the two approaches is necessary if there is to be authentic dialogue between them.Essentially, I want to stress that phenomenology and natural science medicine are genuinely distinct paradigms for construing reality and organizing knowledge. As distinct scientific paradigms, each one is holistically self-contained. Like soap bubbles, if pushed together too forcefully one or the other may burst. In this case, it is more likely that the smaller, less prevalent paradigm would burst by becoming absorbed into the more dominant paradigm. I believe that this is precisely the risk when phenomenology is introduced to conventional psychiatry as "complementary." Whereas one could hardly object to any application of empathy and understanding toward the experiences of patients, it would be tragic if the [End Page 87] full philosophical power of phenomenology were to be overlooked in favor of its mere utility as a preliminary stage of diagnosis and assessment, a framework for bedside manners, or worst of all, an appendage to neuroscience or pharmacology. This would not be phenomenology but the very symptomatology that the authors have has so clearly distinguished from true phenomenology.This equation of phenomenology with symptomatology is exactly the misunderstanding that the authors so effectively address. However, I would hesitate to join the authors' optimism in regard to phenomenology's potential complementary role to conventional psychiatric practice. Furthermore, in the process of paradigm mix, certain constituents of each paradigm may be taken out of context and the strength of each paradigm thus diluted. For example, the very power of the experimental method is its reduction of phenomena to measurable variables that can be altered in order to discern causality. Unmeasurable variables detract form the rigor of this entire approach. Then on the other hand, phenomenological empathy is only possible within a standpoint that is severed from the causal thinking of experimental science. This is the holistic perceptual shift that cannot be accomplished when one only appends phenomenological insights to an otherwise materialist approach to psychiatry. Thus, it is not at all clear how one can be both phenomenological and nonphenomenologically natural scientific. Instead of positioning phenomenology as a potential complimentary component of natural-science psychiatry, both world views need to be examined, on their own terms, in a framework of mutuality.Empathy or the understanding of other peoples subjective experience is indeed an essential component of the application of phenomenology to clinical assessment and especially therapeutic treatment. But, to limit phenomenology to this theme alone may not honor the profoundly radical character of this paradigm. As the authors point out, phenomenology asks the practitioner to... (shrink)

The grandest unification theory of them all got its start in 1948, when two remarkable publications appeared. Claude Shannon's paper ''A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" and Norbert Wiener's book ''Cybernetics'' brought to the world's attention an idea that had been bubbling beneath the surface for years: information, like matter and energy, can be considered a thing in itself -- a fundamental building block of reality. Ever since, there has been a growing effort to explain the brain, the (...) body, civilization and, most recently, the universe itself as information processors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 299-309 [Access article in PDF] Conscious Fiction Mary Clayton Coleman Bard College Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, by David Lodge; 320 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, $24.95 boards, $16.95 paper. Fictional Minds, by Alan Palmer; 275 pp. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, $45.00. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, by Dan Lloyd; 357 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The (...) MIT Press, 2004, $24.95 boards, $14.95 paper. What contributions can fiction make to the representation and investigation of conscious experience? Might fiction help us to develop and advance new theories about the nature of consciousness? And might such theories, in turn, inform our understanding of the process of reading fiction? Three recent volumes—one by English critic and novelist, David Lodge; another by literary theorist, Alan Palmer; and a third by philosopher and (now) novelist, Dan Lloyd—raise these important, genre-bending questions, and they offer challenging if not always convincing answers to them. More generally, these volumes make valuable contributions to the fruitful cross-pollination that has developed between philosophers, scientists, literary theorists, and novelists who are interested in the nature of consciousness.Lodge's new collection of essays is called Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, and like all of the criticism he has written since the late eighties, this volume is intended for a general audience, not for [End Page 299] literary theorists. The title essay, "Consciousness and the Novel," is a revised version of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature that Lodge gave at Emory University in 2001, and the other nine essays, all previously published, cover such topics as Howards End; the novels of Evelyn Waugh; The Letters of Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis's memoir, Experience; and the relationship between literature and criticism. I will focus on "Consciousness and the Novel."Lodge's thesis in this essay is that novels play an essential role in our exploration of the nature of human consciousness. This thesis is certainly true, but it is also entirely banal. Much more interesting is what Lodge says in support of it. He argues that because of the unique representative possibilities of the novel, conscious experiences can be represented more effectively in novels than they can be in scientific writing. Taken literally, as an assertion about the relative representational power of novels and scientific discourse, this is extremely implausible. However, taken more loosely—as an invitation to those of us interested in consciousness to take a closer look at the ways conscious experiences are represented in novels—Lodge's claim is sensible and appealing. I will consider the literal reading of Lodge's claim first and then turn to the looser one.It is undoubtedly true that, as a whole, novelists devote more energy to representing conscious experiences than writers of scientific discourse do. However, science writers can use whatever techniques best serve their aims, including the aim of describing conscious experiences, so there is no reason to think that conscious experiences can, in principle, be represented more effectively in novels than in broadly scientific discourse. Given that Lodge discusses such creative science writers as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker in the course of his essay, it is surprising and disappointing to find him caricature scientific writing in the following way: "science... is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper... it would be edited out" (p. 11). Qualia are the supposedly subjective qualitative aspects of conscious experiences. How the plucked string of a cello sounds to you; how the rotting fish in the garbage smells to you; and how it feels for you to inch down into the smooth, almost-too-hot water of a perfect bubble bath—these are all (supposedly) examples of qualia. Lodge is simply mistaken when he says that there is no hint of qualia in scientific writing. There is no consensus about whether qualia can be explained scientifically. In fact, there is no consensus about whether they exist. [End Page... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 321-323 [Access article in PDF] Frederick J. Streng Book Award David Loy Interview The 1999 winner of the Frederick J. Streng Book Award is David R. Loy, professor on the Faculty of International Studies at Bunkyo University in Chigasaki, Japan. Professor Loy received the award for his book, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism, published by Humanities (...) Press (New Jersey) in 1996. The book places Western patterns of thought developed in tandem with Christian ideas into dialogic contact with Buddhism. It is thus a very Buddhist book, but a signal contribution to the practice of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Buddhist-Christian Studies asked David about his writing of the volume.Buddhist-Christian Studies: Why did you write this book?David Loy: It was the product of an existential crisis, both intellectual and personal. My father, who had always been healthy and full of life, suddenly became ill with pancreatic cancer. Then my Zen teacher Yamada Koun had a bad fall that led to his death a year later. Not long before that my relationship with him and the Sanbo Kyodan had become somewhat problematic. This threatened my 'spiritual ground'. Finally, I was without a job. All this gave me plenty of time not only to sit intensively but also to read widely everything I could find on death and related issues.Did you think that sitting and studying would lead to a book?I didn't know. I could feel something gestating. I realized something was needed in this area. I was (and still am) very impressed by the last two books of Ernest Becker, but despite their brilliance his notion of death-denial is a little off-center from a Buddhist perspective. Fear of death projects our problem into the future, while the groundlessness of our sense-of-self accounts better for our sense-of-lack right here and now.What was the final trigger for doing the book?Another Zen teacher suggested that I try to write a Zen teisho [sermon or talk]. I sat down but after a few lines so many other thoughts began to bubble up that I couldn't write them down fast enough. There was no obvious or immediate logical connection among them, but they kept coming. This went on for about two, almost non-stop, days. After that the thoughts slowed down. I read over the notes I'd written, which led to more ideas, and then I began to perceive their relationship. After five days or so I had a detailed outline for the book, and the real work began. [End Page 321]What kind of response to the book, both positive and negative, have you received?There have not been many reviews, but they have generally been positive. It's not an easy book to evaluate: it brings together many different thinkers and traditions in order to address many different issues. In the process it attempts what is almost a grand synthesis of Buddhism, existentialism, and psychotherapy around the notion of our 'sense of lack', which I argue motivates us all. This involves close readings of Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Nagarjuna, and many others. Unfortunately, the print is small and not easy to read, the cover is ugly, and the price is too high. For all these reasons readers have my sympathies! But there are some readers for whom the book really 'clicks'. I'm pleased that it seems to work on the existential as well as the intellectual level, for such people.After several years of reflection, would you write it any differently today?Yes, probably. The first thing I would do is take out the last chapter "Transcendence East and West," which was an afterthought and doesn't really fit in very well. As published, the chapter takes the concept of 'lack' into a new dimension which needs to be worked out much more carefully than I did in the book. It argues that, in place of the usual East-West dichotomy, it is more insightful to view South Asian Indian- influenced cultures as in some ways... (shrink)

The various institutional reforms which have led since the end of the 70s to the « privatisation of currency » have formed the main base on which the subsequent power of finance has been built, and, concurently, the dismantling of Welfare could take place. Core of this was the so-called autonomy of central banks, as their « umbilical cord » to national treasuries was severed. From then on, deficit financing and « keynesian » social expenditures became near-impossible. Emphasizing the autonomy (...) of central banks from politics was mostly an institutional mutation meant to free monetary policies from social pressure and make it totally subordinate to rent creation and financial accumulation. No wonder then that « securitisation » of the public debt closely followed on the prohibition to deficit financing social expenditures. And then the outcome was not a reduction, but an explosion of public debt! And as debt servicing becomes a principal item on the budget, the « excessive costs » of welfare provisions is blamed, and a further break-down of social services is called for. It is in the same vein that price inflation is controlled, but assets inflation and speculative bubbles dominate « developped » economies. Meanwhile, in order to compensate for increasing income inequalities and diminishing welfare benefits, an exacerbated form of « private households deficit spending »has come into its own, as witnessed by the subprime crisis and mounting credit card defaults. So we are moving from an entitlements-based provision of social goods to one based on the pure logic of capital and its cycles. The only way out lies in the resocialisation of currency, profound fiscal reforms, the demise of rent-seeking, and the institution of an universal « basic income ». (shrink)

In this review of three recent books on higher education, Alexander Sidorkin shows how the disinterested discourse that appears to be anticapitalist and anticommercial is actually a way of obtaining income from state subsidies. What links the books under review—Cary Nelson's No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, and Jennifer Washburn's University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education—is their critical evaluation of the corporatization and (...) commercialization of higher education. In his analysis of this common theme, Sidorkin considers discourse as a means of production, and he maintains that the semiotic fields produced by discourse may create inflationary bubbles unless they engage in innovative discursive practices. Higher education is shaped by the trend toward massification, which makes the innovative discourse essential. Sidorkin concludes that the discursive energy of proponents of higher education should be focused on solving the numerous problems that arise from the massification of higher education rather than trying to reverse the trend and return to some golden age of academia. (shrink)

“Looking for Asian America shows real people engaged in the full range of human activity. This is no small accomplishment for the photographer or his subjects. For Asian Americans it is extraordinary to be merely ordinary. To others, even if not to themselves, Asian Americans appear to be contradictions of identity—a Chinese-Yankee is a knockoff.” —Frank H. Wu, from the Foreword In search of contemporary Asian America, celebrated photographer Wing Young Huie—the only member of his family not born in China—traveled (...) with his wife Tara through nearly forty states to explore and document the funny, touching, and sometimes strange intersection of Asian American and American cultures. Looking for Asian America illustrates their rich and surprising journey across the United States. Through Huie’s eyes, keenly aware of his own Midwestern roots and perspective, we witness such images as a Vietnamese Elvis, Miss Congeniality on her cell phone in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a Hmong street sign in rural North Carolina, a meditating Falun Gong protestor in Washington, D.C., a bubble tea Valley Girl, and a Chinese theme park in Orlando. Huie’s camera captures ABCs, FOAs, and a self-described “redneck” Chinese restaurant owner near the Okefenokee Swamp. Taken together the photographs reveal a complex portrait of the U.S. cultural landscape, and their dignified elegance invites a closer, deeper look. Accompanied by the personal reflections of both Wing and Tara Huie, the nearly one hundred spectacular photos tell a story that both mirrors and contradicts stereotypes of Asian Americans, ultimately questioning what it means to be ethnic and American in the twenty-first century. Wing Young Huie has received widespread acclaim for his works, including Lake Street USA, documenting the cultural landscape of his native Minnesota. He is a recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship and two-time recipient of the McKnight Photography Fellowship. He lives in Minneapolis. Frank H. Wu is dean of Wayne State University Law School and the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Anita Gonzalez teaches in the Master of Liberal Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. (shrink)

In the _The Undivided Universe_, David Bohn and Basil Hiley present a radically different approach to quantum theory. They develop an interpretation of quantum mechanics which gives a clear, intuitive understanding of its meaning and in which there is a coherent notion of the reality of the universe without assuming a fundamental role for the human observer. With the aid of new concepts such as active information together with non-locality, they provide a comprehensive account of all the basic features (...) of quantum mechanics, including the relativistic domain and quantum field theory. It is shown that, with the new approach, paradoxical or unsatisfactory features associated with the standard approaches, such as the wave-particle duality and the collapse of the wave function, do not arise. Finally, the authors make new suggestions and indicate some areas in which one may expect quantum theory to break down in a way that will allow for a test. _The Undivided Universe_ is an important book especially because it provides a different overall world view which is neither mechanistic nor reductionist. This view will ultimately have radical implications not only in physics but also in our general approach to all areas of life. (shrink)

In this note, we cast doubt on the requirement of spacetime inextendibility; it is not at all clear that our universe is “as large as it can be.”.

The Well-Ordered Universe argues that Cavendish's natural philosophy, social and political philosophy, and medical theory share an underlying concern with order. This reveals interesting connections among Cavendish's natural philosophy and her views on gender, animals and the environment, and human health, and explains her commitment to monarchy and social hierarchy.

I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters (...) of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. (shrink)

The Comprehensibility of the Universe puts forward a radically new conception of science. According to the orthodox conception, scientific theories are accepted and rejected impartially with respect to evidence, no permanent assumption being made about the world independently of the evidence. Nicholas Maxwell argues that this orthodox view is untenable. He urges that in its place a new orthodoxy is needed, which sees science as making a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions about the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, (...) these assumptions asserting less and less as one ascends the hierarchy. This view has significant implications: that it is part of scientific knowledge that the universe is physically comprehensible; that metaphysics and philosophy are central to scientific knowledge; that science possesses a rational, if fallible, method of discovery; that a new understanding of scientific method and rationality is required. Maxwell argues that this new conception makes possible a natural resolution of long-standing philosophical problems about science, regarding simplicity, induction, and progress. His goal is the reform not just of the philosophy of science but of science itself, and the healing of the rift between the two. (shrink)

What does reality encompass? Is it exclusively physical, or does it include mental and 'abstract' aspects? What are the elements of being, reality's raw materials? John Heil offers stimulating answers to these questions framed in terms of a comprehensive metaphysics of substances and properties inspired by Descartes, Locke, and their successors.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Perfection of the Universe According to Aquinas: A Teleological Cosmology. By OLIVA BLANCHETTE. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Pp. xvii + 334. $35.00 (cloth). This work represents a significant and most welcome contribution to Thomistic interpretation as well as to the broader study of medieval philosophy. While its tone is unpretentious, its theme, the structure and purpose of the whole created (...) universe, is crucial for Aquinas's philosophy. Those familiar with Thomas's corpus know how often this theme appears-frequently supplying the foundation for the argument-and know equally well how elusive it becomes when one seeks an extended treatment of it. Hence, to have recognized the chief elements of the larger picture, to have identified and collected the pertinent texts, and to have ordered and synthesized them as this book has done represents a major and lasting scholarly achievement. Moreover, while primarily concerned with Aquinas's own philosophical thought, the book also places him in conversation with a number of classical and modern thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Collingwood. Blanchette begins his study by clarifying the very notion of perfection (Chapter 1). It first refers, in the order of our conceptions, to the completion of a process. A thing is perjectum, "thoroughly made," when its process of generation is finished. Motion, in fact, is precisely a passage from imperfection to perfection. By extension, the term can then be applied apart from motion to anything which lacks nothing it should have, or, as in the case of God, which lacks nothing at all. Analyzing the Greek and Latin terms connected with generation and perfection (poiein/facere; genesthai/fieri; teleion/perfectum; telos/finis; teleiosislperfectio) Blanchette shows why it is that for the Greeks the infinite usually signified imperfection, while Aquinas was able to conceive of an infinity which was perfection. For the present study, a crucial distinction among the kinds of perfection is that between first and second perfection, i.e., between a being's "ontological " perfection, the complete generation of its nature with all its natural powers, and its "operational" perfection, the activities carried out by means of those powers. Only in its operations does a being attain its ultimate perfection, which always lies in a relation to something exterior to itself. This fundamental distinction between first and second perfection underlies the basic 485 486 BOOK REVIEWS structure of the book. Part One describes the universe in its first perfection, i.e., the constituent parts whose presence gives it its integrity. Part Two takes up the activities of the parts which taken together constitute the order within the universe and by which the universe attains to its external good, God himself. At the level of first perfection, the universe is considered to be perfect first of all simply because it is the universe, i.e., the whole of what is (Chapter 2). As a whole, it is perfect (complete) in comparison to any of its parts. Thus it is a priori impossible to have plural universes, since each "universe" would in fact be only a part of the whole which was the universe. Second, simply as a body, the universe enjoys the perfection of having all three dimensions. Third, not having any bodies outside it, the universe does not share the imperfection of being limited by bodies external to it, as does every particular body. Finally, in containing the perfection of each kind of being, the universe possesses a universal perfection not shared by any one kind of being. These perfections belong to the universe simply qua universe. Beyond these, however, we can speak of the perfection of this universe. As Blanchette points out, for Aquinas there is no "best of all possible worlds" in the sense that God could not create a better one. Yet we can speak of the perfection (or completeness) of this world that God, for reasons not accessible to human reason, actually chose to create. The perfection of this universe is such that were any new essential parts, i.e., new species, added, it would no longer be the same universe, but rather a new universe of which the old now constituted a part... (shrink)

This article discusses Journey of the Universe as a project that consists of a film, book, conversation series, online classes, and a website. It describes how the creators worked to integrate science and humanities, not privilege or elevate science. It refutes arguments made in Lisa Sideris's Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World that suggest that Journey overlooks religion and distorts wonder. The article observes that Journey does not dismiss religion but includes it in explicit ways. It does (...) not dictate wonder; it evokes wonder. In short, Journey is a living or functional cosmology with implications for mutually enhancing human–Earth relations. (shrink)

A central area of current philosophical debate in the foundations of mathematics concerns whether or not there is a single, maximal, universe of set theory. Universists maintain that there is such a universe, while Multiversists argue that there are many universes, no one of which is ontologically privileged. Often forcing constructions that add subsets to models are cited as evidence in favour of the latter. This paper informs this debate by analysing ways the Universist might interpret this discourse (...) that seems to necessitate the addition of subsets to V. We argue that despite the prima facie incoherence of such talk for the Universist, she nonetheless has reason to try and provide interpretation of this discourse. We analyse extant interpretations of such talk, and analyse various tradeoffs in naturality that might be made. We conclude that the Universist has promising options for interpreting different forcing constructions. (shrink)

This article defends the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) from a simple and direct valid argument according to which PSR implies that there is a truth that explains every truth, namely an omni-explainer. Many proponents of PSR may be willing to bite the bullet and maintain that, if PSR is true, then there is an omni-explainer. I object to this strategy by defending the principle that explanation is irreflexive. Then I argue that proponents of PSR can resist the conclusion that (...) there is an omni-explainer by denying that explanation distributes over conjunction. In the final section, I consider a plausible revision of this assumption. I argue there that, given the revised assumption, PSR seems to yield a striking picture of the explanatory structure of the universe. I explain why the resulting model does not appear utterly implausible to me. (shrink)

Many philosophers and scientists believe that we need an explanation as to why the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe are fine-tuned for life. The standard two options are: theism and the multiverse hypothesis. Both of these theories are extravagant and arguably have false predictions. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind, I outline a form of panpsychism that I believe offers a more parsimonious and less problematic explanation of cosmological fine-tuning.

At Home in the Universe presents and extends the intellectual core ofKauffman's earlier book The Origins of Order (OUP 1993) for any intelligentgeneral reader can understand and appreciate. The reader is very effectivelyinvited into Kauffman's vision and thought processes, in one of the moreexhilarating and important books of popular science.

In the The Undivided Universe, David Bohn and Basil Hiley present a radically different approach to quantum theory.

Two familiar worldviews dominate Western philosophy: materialist atheism and the benevolent God of the Abrahamic faiths. Tim Mulgan explores a third way. Ananthropocentric Purposivism claims that there is a cosmic purpose, but human beings are irrelevant to it. Purpose in the Universe develops a philosophical case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism that it is at least as strong as the case for either theism or atheism. He draws on a range of secular and religious ethical traditions to conclude that a non-human-centred (...) cosmic purpose can ground a distinctive human morality. Our moral practices, our view of the moral universe, and our moral theory are all transformed if we shift from the familiar choice between a universe without meaning and a universe where humans matter to the less self-aggrandising thought that, while it is about something, the universe is not about us. (shrink)

Storrs McCall presents an original philosophical theory of the nature of the universe based on a striking new model of its space- time structure. He shows how his model illuminates a broad range of subjects, including causation, probability, quantum mechanics, identity, and free will, and argues that the fact that the model throws light on such a large number of problems constitutes strong evidence that the universe is as the model portrays it.