God - believers - questions -- How God became a problem in western culture -- The Christian response, I: natural theology -- The Christian response, II: theological theology -- The presence and absence of God.

This chapter introduces the difficulty of acquiring phenomenological terms by examining Carnap’s and Derrida’s criticisms of phenomenological speech; their criticisms show that any account of how phenomenological speech is acquired must clarify its distinction from ordinary speech about things while not falling prey to an esoteric separation. The chapter then reviews the way Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger offer “indication” as the way to distinguish but not separate the one and the other, and it argues that indication, even with the support (...) of analogy, metaphor, and metonym, suffers from Quinean indeterminacy and therefore requires some other resources for its successful enactment. Finally, the chapter outlines a novel solution to the problem of phenomenological speech by approaching the question as one of genesis and acquisition: ordinary language embeds certain experiential terms, such as “presence” and “absence,” that, when inflected, introduce the learner into the transcendental dimension of experience. The chapter demonstrates that the question of language learning or acquisition is necessary for unraveling the nature of phenomenological language and clarifying its relation to ordinary speech. (shrink)

The development of diagrammatic logics is strongly motivated by the desire to make formal reasoning accessible to broad audiences. One major research problem, for which surprisingly little progress has been made, is to understand how to choose between semantically equivalent diagrams from the perspective of human cognition. The particular focus of this paper is on choosing between diagrams that represent either the presence or absence of individuals. To understand how to best make this choice, we conducted an empirical (...) study. We found that representing the presence of individuals supported task performance either significantly better than, or no worse than, representing the absence of individuals. The particularly striking feature of our results was that representing the absence of individuals in a way that makes the diagram highly cluttered is detrimental to human cognition. As a result, diagrams with this feature should be avoided, but diagrams using presence or low-cluttered absence can be used to support cognition in the context of the tasks performed in our study. (shrink)

THESE are difficult days in which to philosophize, and not only for institutional, historical, or political reasons. Nor is it a matter mainly of a disconcertingly eclectic pluralism of possible ways of doing philosophy; this has been a problem, or at least a temptation, ever since the disciples of Plato clustered into competing sects. More alarming, and more challenging, is the fact that the very idea of thinking and writing reflectively in various ways hitherto acknowledged by a broad consensus as (...) "philosophical" has come into serious question. The particular form in which such doubting has emerged is itself various. In Europe, it has taken the shape of undermining the self-assurance of the "metaphysics of presence" by attempting to show that the notion of determinate presence is constricting and groundless, or self-deceptive and self-deconstructing, or relative to historical epistemes or epochs of Being. In Anglophone countries, strikingly complementary efforts have been made to dissolve traditional philosophical concerns with knowledge and reality, mind and other persons, into a tenuous tissue of language, of word-play and word-use: all becomes "wordwork" in Joyce's prophetic term. Or else--in a move that expressly conjoins continental and analytic tendencies--all becomes "conversation" of an unending and self-reabsorbing sort. (shrink)

The article shows that prior to the debate with the Monothelites, Maximus the Confessor followed the Christian tradition going back to Gregory of Nyssa in recognizing the presence of προαίρεσις in Christ and the saints. Later during the debate, Maximus declined to apply προαίρεσις to Christ and started to speak about the deactivation of προαίρεσις in the saints in the state of deification. Maximus was the first Orthodox author who distinguished deliberate choice and natural will, and defended the (...) class='Hi'>presence of natural will in Christ according to His humanity. At the same time, the opposition of desire and deliberate choice can be found in some Neoplatonists, such as Iamblichus, Proclus, and Philoponus. Iamblichus and Proclus rejected the presence of προαίρεσις in the gods and god-like humans, admitting only the presence of βούλησις - the desire for the Good. Thus, the evolution of the doctrine of Maximus the Confessor, regarding the application of προαίρε- σις to Christ and the saints, finds a parallel doctrine in Neoplatonism. (shrink)

CHAPTER I THE EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF HUSSERL'S 'PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC'. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WEIERSTRASS AND THE ARITHMETIZATION OF ANALYSIS In ...

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” considers how the ultramodernist aesthetics of Central Europe has related to and reacted against the region's political history and cartography. Central Europe has been a rich source of “soluble” realities that can be observed as they emerge, mature, and rapidly decay. Central European modernism, represented here by Adolf Loos in architecture and by Arnold Schoenberg and Leoš Janáček in music, experimented with blurry regions between presence and absence, light and (...) shadow, sound and silence. Loos disrupted the logic of architecture, while Schoenberg and Janáček nearly dissolved the acoustic paradigm of sound. This essay argues that the curious positioning of Central Europe, with its frequently changing borders and national entities, conduced both to positive experiments in cultural vagueness and to a corrosive reaction against existing and potential identities, parameters, distinctions, foci, and logics. (shrink)

This paper discusses the individuation of characters for the use asunits by geneticists at the beginning of the 20th century. Thediscussion involves the Presence and Absence Hypothesis as a case study. It issuggested that the gap between conceptual consideration and etiological factorsof individuating of characters is being handled by way of mutual adjustment.Confrontation of a suggested morphological unit character with experimentresults molded the final boundaries of it.

Husserl describes arithmetic as a branch of formal ontology. It is an ontology because its goal is to lay out the essential truths about a region of objects, and it is formal because the determinate region of number deals with a characteristic of every possible object. The mathematical experience proper requires something more than the constitution of "concrete numbers" in acts of collecting and counting, for its objects are "ideal numbers" that emerge from eidetic variation over corresponding concrete numbers. With (...) remarkable clarity, Miller coordinates Husserl's various writings on the nature of number by stressing the key theme of identity in presence and absence. Concrete numbers are "determinate multitudes" which are not presented in sensuous intuition, but rather in sensuously founded categorial operations, i.e., explication, in which the parts of an indiscriminately given whole are explicitly articulated as parts, and comparison, in which the multitude generated through such explication is explicitly related to other multitudes. These operations account for the original presence of number. But we can intend numbers in their absence as well as in their presence. For example we may intend a determinate multitude in the absence of the sensuous group in question, or we may experience a different mode of absence when an intended number is frustrated by subsequent intuitive registration, or we may deploy the distinctive absence generated by signs in the process of calculating without authentic articulation of the relevant determinate multitudes. The presence of ideal numbers requires the free play of fantasy, for we must imagine collections of items and also imagine ourselves counting the items in order to disengage their purely formal character. We must discern an identical presence of "four" in a cluster of persons, a collection of apples, and even in some arbitrarily contrived group such as a "feeling, an angel, the moon, Italy." The absence of generic community in the latter example helps us to appreciate what Husserl means by the purely formal nature of arithmetic. Formal ontology is not restricted in scope to some particular region, but is concerned with properties that belong to every possible object precisely as such. Thus, whereas Euclidean geometry is a regional ontology, set-theory and number-theory must be considered as branches of formal ontology, for the basic concepts of these disciplines are strictly formal. Anything that can be thought of can be counted. (shrink)

Despite its complex experiential structure, the phenomenon of grief following bereavement has not been a major topic of phenomenological research. The paper investigates its basic structures, elaborating as its core characteristic a conflict between a presentifying and a ‘de-presentifying’ intention: In grief, the subject experiences a fundamental ambiguity between presence and absence of the deceased, between the present and the past, indeed between two worlds he lives in. This phenomenological structure will be analyzed under several aspects: regarding bodily (...) experience, as disruption of a shared intercorporeality; as a loss of the shared world and shared habitualities, leaving the bereaved person with ubiquitous indications of absence and with a contraction of their own self; regarding temporality, as a separation of two strands of time, namely a still ongoing past and an alienated present which become more and more desynchronized; finally, as an “as-if presence” of the deceased which the bereaved continue to feel and sometimes to perceive, leading to a cognitive-affective conflict between two experienced realities. The transforming process of grief is then analyzed as a gradual adjustment to the loss, finally enabling a re-integration of the conflicting realities. This is achieved through an incorporation and identification with the deceased on the one hand, and through various forms of representation on the other hand, in particular by recollection and symbolization. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the claim that the determination conditions for thought must include absences.

This article focuses on the question of whether the doctrine of the real presence of Christ's body and blood, and likewise the doctrine of the real absence of bread and wine, can be defended philosophically. It argues for an affirmative answer, and does so by considering a variety of metaphysical models, including that of Aquinas. It will appear, thus, that transubstantiation is a philosophical possibility. If it is possible for two substances to be in the same place at (...) the same time, consubstantiation will be a philosophical possibility as well. Of course, the question of actuality is a theological one. (shrink)

While the presence or absence of consciousness plays the central role in the moral/ethical decisions when dealing with patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), recently it is criticized as not adequate due to number of reasons, among which are the lack of the uniform definition of consciousness and consequently uncertainty of diagnostic criteria for it, as well as irrelevance of some forms of consciousness for determining a patient’s interests and wishes. In her article, Dr. Specker Sullivan reexamined the (...) meaning of consciousness in the DOC taxonomy and proposed to go away from the routinely used clinical definition of consciousness as “wakeful awareness”, and adopt the meaning that is common in the Eastern tradition which is a form of “pure experience” (Specker Sullivan 2018). She further argued that understanding consciousness as a “pure experience” is ethically relevant for DOC patients. This suggestion is original, novel and important since it preserves the importance of the notion of consciousness for the clinical practice while simultaneously offering an additional ethical tool for the moral decisions in medicine. At the same time, without placing such Eastern notion in the Western tradition it is difficult to see how pure experience could be usefully operationalized to make sense in the clinical practice with DOC patients. It is so because pure experience is a subjective phenomenon which is completely inaccessible in noncommunicative DOC patients and also it does not express behaviorally (Monti et al 2010), therefore some objective-like operationalization is needed. This is why the fusion of Eastern and Western traditions is required to gain the full potential of Dr. Specker Sullivan’s suggestion. We propose that such fusion could be achieved on the basis of the Operational Architectonics (OA) theory of brain-mind functioning (Fingelkurts et al. 2010; 2013a) which suits ideally the purpose due its compatibility with both Western and Eastern traditions of consciousness. (shrink)

This volume explores the relevance of classical texts and thought-systems alongside contemporary philosophical consciousness. It also evaluates the absences in contemporary thought patterns and the new epistemes relevant to the Indian subcontinent. The book discusses the present lack of original philosophical discourse in the context of South Asia, especially India. Raghuramaraju investigates the reasons for the decline of traditional philosophical schools and Sanskritic studies in the subcontinent.

Chiefly on Desire and libearion by Vaddera Chandidas, b. 1938.

Du Yu’s 杜預 commentary on the Zuo Tradition 左傳 is often touted as an enduring scholarly achievement from a latter-day perspective, because early Tang scholars treated it as the definitive official interpretation of the imperially approved Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhengyi 春秋左傳正義. But few studies have analyzed the specific components of Du Yu’s thought that sometimes adapt, other times maintain, previous conceptions of the Annals and Zuo. This paper argues that Du Yu’s schematization of the Annals into three categories of material—Zhou/institutional “general (...) norms,” Confucian/moral “transformed norms,” and historical/neutral “non-norms”—configures older ideas into a new structure of understanding designed to elevate the authority of the Zuo Tradition, unofficial but influential in the Western Jin, above that of rival Gongyang 公羊 and Guliang 穀梁 traditions during his time. Included in this discussion is Du Yu’s treatment of the Annals as a text that can be checked against a parallel ancient source newly available to him, the Bamboo Annals. (shrink)

An account of intentionality should be adequate to the following two theses: “Mental phenomena can succeed in achieving objective reference” and “Mental phenomena are distinguished by the fact that they may be directed upon objects that do not exist.” The second thesis is sometimes said to involve “the problem of error” or “the problem of presence in absence.” The first, therefore, might be said to involve “the problem of truth” or “the problem of presence in presence.”.