Negative facts get a bad press. One reason for this is that it is not clear what negative facts are. We provide a theory of negative facts on which they are no stranger than positive atomic facts. We show that none of the usual arguments hold water against this account. Negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence and conform to an acceptable Eleatic principle. Furthermore, there are good reasons to want them around, including their roles in causation, chance-making (...) and truth-making, and in constituting holes and edges. (shrink)

This paper argues that the new metaphysics of powers, also known as dispositional essentialism or causal structuralism, is an illusory metaphysics. I argue for this in the following way. I begin by distinguishing three fundamental ways of seeing how facts of physical modality — facts about physical necessitation and possibility, causation, disposition, and chance — are grounded in the world. The first way, call it the first degree, is that the actual world or all worlds, in their entirety, are the (...) source of physical modality. Humeanism is the best known such approach, but there are other less well-known approaches. The second way, the second degree, is that the source of physical modality lies in certain second-order facts, involving a relation between universals. Armstrong’s necessitarianism and other views are second-degree views. The third way, the third degree, holds that properties themselves are the source of physical modality. This is the powers view. I examine four ways of developing the third degree: relational constitution, graph-theoretic structuralism, dispositional roles, and powerful qualities. All these ways are either incoherent, or just disguised versions of the first-degree. The new metaphysics of powers is illusory. With the collapse of the third degree, the second degree, the necessitarian view of law, collapses as well. I end the paper with some reflections on the first degree, on the problem of explaining necessary connections between distinct existences, and on the dim prospects of holist ontology. (shrink)

Bird argues that Armstrong’s necessitarian conception of physical modality and laws of nature generates a vicious regress with respect to necessitation. We show that precisely the same regress afflicts Bird’s dispositional-monist theory, and indeed, related views, such as that of Mumford & Anjum. We argue that dispositional monism is basically Armstrongian necessitarianism modified to allow for a thesis about property identity.

In this paper we present a new metaphysical theory of material objects. On our theory, objects are bundles of property instances, where those properties give the nature or essence of that object. We call the theory essential bundle theory. Property possession is not analysed as bundle-membership, as in traditional bundle theories, since accidental properties are not included in the object’s bundle. We have a different story to tell about accidental property possession. This move reaps many benefits. Essential bundle theory delivers (...) a simple theory of the essential properties of material objects; an explanation of how object coincidence can arise; an actual-world ground for modal differences between coincident objects; a simple story about intrinsic properties; and a plausible account of certain ubiquitous cases of causal overdetermination. (shrink)

Let us call dispositional monism the view that all natural properties have their identities fixed purely by their dispositional features, that is, by the patterns of stimulus and response in which they participate. DM implies that natural properties are pure powers: things whose natures are fully identified by their roles in determining the potentialities of events to cause or be caused. As pure powers, properties are meant to lack quiddities in Black's sense. A property possesses a quiddity just in case (...) its identity is fixed by something independent of the causal–nomological roles it may enter into. Paradigmatically, a categorical property is thought of as a property whose identity is fixed by a quiddity .The key question about the viability of DM as a theory of properties is how properties can be pure powers devoid of any quiddity. Bird provides an answer. According to Bird , ‘all there is to a property is a matter of second-order relations to other properties’. The second-order relation is just the relation that a disposition, its stimulus condition, and a manifestation condition bear to each other. Call this relation SR. SR is not causation or physical necessitation. The latter relations are first-order relations between concrete events. SR is a second-order relation. Its possession by properties explains why events featuring those properties can enter into certain first-order relations of causation or necessitation.Bird's thought then is this: the sense in which properties have their identities fixed purely by their causal–nomological roles is that they are relationally constituted, where the relation doing the constituting is SR. 1 This thesis of relational constitution does not imply that natural properties are themselves relations. Nothing prevents the identity …. (shrink)

Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appears. We motivate (...) this approach in terms of modal analyses of material constitution, but argue that ultimately it fails. The monist must instead accept a deflationary, symmetrical use of ‘materially constitutes’. We argue that this is a serious cost for her approach. (shrink)

Are all instances of the T-schema assertable? I argue that they are not. The reason is the presence of conventional implicature in a language. Conventional implicature is meant to be a component of the rule-based content that a sentence can have, but it makes no contribution to the sentence's truth-conditions. One might think that a conventional implicature is like a force operator. But it is not, since it can enter into the scope of logical operators. It follows that the semantic (...) content of a sentence is not given simply by its truth-conditional content. So not all instances of the T-schema are assertable in the relevant sense. Consequently, there is a strong case to be made against truth-conditional semantics of the disquotational variety and deflationism about truth. (shrink)

I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at fault, since, in their context (...) of assertion V was bivalent. This theory requires a theory of assertion that is a form of cognitive expressivism. (shrink)

Can hybridism about moral claims be made to work? I argue it can if we accept the conventional implicature approach developed in Barker (Analysis 2000). However, this kind of hybrid expressivism is only acceptable if we can make sense of conventional implicature, the kind of meaning carried by operators like ‘even’, ‘but’, etc. Conventional implictures are a form of pragmatic presupposition, which involves an unsaid mode of delivery of content. I argue that we can make sense of conventional implicatures, but (...) doing so requires we embrace a form of pure, non-hybrid expressivism. This is a cognitivist expressivism I have developed elsewhere. We need cognitivist expressivism to make sense of how we evaluate—judge as correct or incorrect—implicature-bearing sentences. Once we embraced the possibility of this pure expressivism, we might as well be pure expressivists about normative discourse too. I show how we can do that. The motivations for a specifically hybrid theory are dialectically undercut. (shrink)

My goal is to illuminate truth-making by way of illuminating the relation of making. My strategy is not to ask what making is, in the hope of a metaphysical theory about is nature. It's rather to look first to the language of making. The metaphor behind making refers to agency. It would be absurd to suggest that claims about making are claims about agency. It is not absurd, however, to propose that the concept of making somehow emerges from some feature (...) to do with agency. That's the contention to be explore in this paper. The way to do this is through expressivism,. Truth-making claims, and making-claims generfally, are claims in which we express mental states linked to our maipulation of concepts, like truth. In particular, they express disposition to undertake derivations using inference rules, in which introduction rules have a specific role. I then show how this theory explains our intuitions about truth's asymmetric dependence on being. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider the prospects of globalizing expressivism. Expressivism is a position in the philosophy of language that questions the central role of representation in a theory of meaning or linguistic function. An expressivist about a domain D of discourse proposes that utterances of sentences in D should not be seen, at the level of analysis as representing how things are, but as expression of non-representational states. So, in the domain of value-utterances, the standard idea is that speakers (...) are expressing affective-states, such as approval or disapproval focused on objects or conditions. Global expressivism is the thesis that for all domains of discourse, we treat utterances, at the level of analysis, as expressing non-representational states. I set out several conceptions of how one might formulate this programme. The first involves minimalism about truth and semantic content – and only partially gives up representationalism (viz., the thesis that some utterances express representational states). The second is Price’s conception, which incorporates minimalism, Brandomian inferentalism, and concepts from Carnap, but still clings to representationalism. I then arrive at my favoured third conception, which does not employ minimalism or inferentialism, and eliminates vestiges of representationalism. It does the latter by embracing expressivism about meaning-attribution. Having set out key aspects of the approach I then address the question of metaphysics. What metaphysical conception of reality goes with global expressivism so understood? I argue it implies a form of metametaphysical nihilism. This is that idea that reality lacks any ultimate nature. (shrink)

This paper falls into two parts. In the first part, I argue that consideration of general indicative conditionals, e.g., sentences like If a donkey brays it is beaten, provides a powerful argument that a pure material implication analysis of indicative if p, q is correct. In the second part I argue, opposing writers like Jackson, that a Gricean style theory of pragmatics can explain the manifest assertability conditions of if p, q in terms of its conventional content – assumed to (...) be merely (p⊃q) – and the conversational implicature contents which utterance of if p, q may gain in certain contexts. I also defend the pragmatic approach against a recent objection by Edgington that appeal to pragmatics cannot explain what we are inclined to say about the believability conditions, as opposed to the assertability conditions, of indicative if p, q. (shrink)

I argue that figurative speech, and irony in particular, presents a deep challenge to the orthodox view about sentence content. The standard view is that sentence contents are, at their core, propositional contents: truth-conditional contents. Moreover, the only component of a sentence’s content that embeds in compound sentences, like belief reports or conditionals, is the propositional content. I argue that a careful analysis of irony shows this view cannot be maintained. Irony is a purely pragmatic form of content that embeds (...) in compound sentences. The standard view cannot account for this fact. I sketch out a speech-act theoretic framework that can. But in accepting this alternative framework we are giving up on the whole idea of an autonomous semantics. (shrink)

I use the principle of truth-maker maximalism to provide a new solution to the semantic paradoxes. According to the solution, AUS, its undecidable whether paradoxical sentences are grounded or ungrounded. From this it follows that their alethic status is undecidable. We cannot assert, in principle, whether paradoxical sentences are true, false, either true or false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. AUS involves no ad hoc modification of logic, denial of the T-schema's validity, or obvious (...) revenge. (shrink)

I argue that Lewis's counterfactual theory of causation, given his treatment of counterfactuals in terms of world-comparative similarity faces insuperable problems in the form of the problem of effects and the problem of epiphenomena.

The standard view about counterfactuals is that a counterfactual (A > C) is true if and only if the A-worlds most similar to the actual world @ are C-worlds. I argue that the worlds conception of counterfactuals is wrong. I assume that counterfactuals have non-trivial truth-values under physical determinism. I show that the possible-worlds approach cannot explain many embeddings of the form (P > (Q > R)), which intuitively are perfectly assertable, and which must be true if the contingent falsity (...) of (Q > R) is to be explained. If (P > (Q > R)) has a backtracking reading then the contingent facts that (Q > R) needs to be true in the closest P-worlds are absent. If (P > (Q > R)) has a forwardtracking reading, then the laws required by (Q > R) to be true in the closest P-worlds will be absent, because they are violated in those worlds. Solutions like lossy laws or denial of embedding won't work. The only approach to counterfactuals that explains the embedding is a pragmatic metalinguistic approach in which the whole idea that counterfactuals are about a modal reality, be it abstract or concrete, is given up. (shrink)

The essay continues the discussion on democracy begun in Derrida Today 4:2, interrogating the associations between the nature of the pharmakon and democracy ‘itself’, seen as ‘the sovereignty of the people’. Starting with Derrida's notion of writing (and grammatology in general) as what he calls the ‘errant democrat’, shared by – and indeed defining – all, and at the same time prior to the demos, Bernard Stiegler makes the further claim that this foundation of democracy, the pharmakon, is not simply (...) a dialectical site of poison and remedy, as it is often seen, but rather a neutral space or referent that simultaneously connects and disconnects through Stiegler's wider sense of grammatisation, which includes Derrida's sense but extends to all tertiary memory, those external mnemonic devices that not only articulate but guide and indeed anticipate culture and its evolution. The implications of a pharmako-democracy are enormous in a hypertechnological epoch in technics as a tool has emerged as a controlling cultural force. In this sense pharmacopolitics are the only politics. The essay considers how Derrida's exploration of this pharmako-neutrality is at work in Specters of Marx as well as ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, and how it provides a frame for and a bridge to Jean-François Lyotard's related sense of desire in Libidinal Economy, where pharmacological neutrality must also be seen as excess or, in Lyotard's word for it, ‘inascribable’. (shrink)

Can we believe that there are non-existent entities without commitment to the Meinongian metaphysics? This paper argues we can. What leads us from quantification over non-existent beings to Meinongianism is a general metaphysical assumption about reality at large, and not merely quantification over the non-existent. Broadly speaking, the assumption is that every being we talk about must have a real definition. It’s this assumption that drives us to enquire into the nature of beings like Pegasus, and what our relationship as (...) thinkers is to them. However, I argue this assumption only holds if you think your language, and in particular that aspect of it to do with referring to entities works in a specific way. This is the specific way generally assumed by the discipline called ‘Semantics’. I sketch out an alternative, call it global expressivism, in which talk of referring is given an expressivist, speech-act theoretic treatment. If we accept that our talk of the non-existent works as the global expressivist tells us it does, then the question of the metaphysical nature of non-existent entities is utterly void. You might say that Pegasus is empty of any metaphysical nature. Since the non-existent lacks any metaphysical nature, the metaphysics of the non-existent, Meinongianism, as a form of inquiry, lacks a subject matter, despite the fact that we talk happily, and indeed unavoidably, of the non-existent. (shrink)

I argue that conventional implicatures embed in logical compounds, and are non-truth-conditional contributors to sentence meaning. This, I argue has significant implications for how we understand truth, truth-conditional content, and truth-bearers.

I argue that a new solution to the semantic paradoxes is possible based on truth-making. I show that with an appropriate understanding of what the ultimate truth and falsity makers of sentences are, it can be demonstrated that sentences like the liar are alethically undecidable. That means it cannot be said in principle whether such sentences are true, not true, false, not-false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. I argue that this leads to a solution (...) to the semantic paradoxes that appears to be free of revenge problems, allows us to maintain classical logic and the validity of the T-schema. (shrink)

Ruins, their evocations and enigmas, have been a source of fascination since the advent of civilization. Both coordinating and distressing the relations of space and time, ruins are unparalleled catalysts of cultural analysis, as both history and adumbration. Ruins, and the concept of ruin on which they ‘rest’ and through which they decay, can be regarded in space, as strata, in time, as sedimenta, and in dynamic terms, as lamina. This essay works down through each focusing on the forceof ruin (...) occurring between them. The essay itself is a lamination: Anselm Kiefer's exploration of ruins as artefacts, in recent works such as ‘Falling Star’, shown at Paris’ Grand Palais in the summer of 2007 as the first installation in its Monumenta series, plays across many dimensions of ruins’ themes; Derrida's exploration of the very idea of ruin – not ruins but ruin, as artefacture – conceptualizing ruins’ liminal nature, at the very limit of phenomenology, in Mémoires d'aveuglesand elsewhere; the ruin-caught-in-motion of the virtually unknown French-Italian painter ‘Monsù Desiderio’; and the linguistic ruin of Samuel Beckett's ‘D'un ouvrage abandonné’ and ‘Sans’. Each contributes to the others as ruins and ruin accumulate. Finally, ruin's decay passes into and through a passe partout into the uninhabitable. (shrink)

Combining a Nietzschean framework with close attention to a wide range of carefully selected literary texts, Autoaesthetics presents a case for Nietzche's centrality in contemporary aesthetic and literary studies. Based on Nietzche's own practice of combining poetry and philosophy by transcending ressentiment and approaching life to its fullest, Autoaesthetics engages in a heated but intricate debate through and with Nietzche's re-articulation of the self as a strategic (and impossible) aesthetic creation." "Stephen Barker argues that all notions of self are aesthetic, (...) literary, strategic, and teleological, and must be seen not in the context of any essential self but as a complex series of self-articulations. He sets out a strategy of reading that combines Nietzschean "psychology" with subsequent theoretical investigations and shows how Nietzschean dialectics of the self are at work in all (self-defining) human experience in the (post)modern world. His book itself is a play of dialectics (again after Nietzche), designed for interdisciplinary scholars and graduate students interested in exploring the scope of literary and aesthetic theory and philosophy. (shrink)

This is a collection of essays concerned with the thematic implications of Freud's deep interest in the art objects in his collection of antiquity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME ON THE LOGIC OF DESIGN (i) Respectable Inductive Thinking Readers seeking to understand Hume's views concerning inductive reasoning often turn just to the obviously relevant sections of the Treatise and the 2 first Enquiry. In this paper I want to suggest that a broader approach is desirable, and specifically that the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion shed additional significant light on Hume's views about induction. In those well known (...) passages of the Treatise and the first Enquiry Hume presents his critique of the idea of necessary connection; central to this critique is his point that thinking which goes beyond its premises in order to arrive at non-trivial factual conclusions cannot be demonstrative reasoning. Does this lead Hume into a radical scepticism concerning factual knowledge? A majority of interpreters do regard him as holding that because this kind of thinking is not demonstrative reasoning it cannot have any justification for the conclusions it reaches. In this connection, Hume is said to be committed to "deductivism" — the assumption that only demonstrative (deductive) reasoning can succeed in justifying conclusions. Interpreted in this way, Hume holds that demonstrative reasoning cannot establish non-trivial factual conclusions and that non-demonstrative thinking cannot establish them either; Hume is therefore committed to the view that non-trivial factual claims cannot be established, and so cannot be known. Thus, Hume is a radical sceptic who denies that we can attain any knowledge of non-trivial factual conclusions. Of course Hume does not stop with this negative result, but proceeds to affirm that our human nature impels us to derive conclusions about matters of fact even when it is not rational to do so. This occurs in accordance with the innate propensity by which the imagination operates, so that we cannot help but 2. engage in a specific style of non-rational thinking about these matters. This style may be characterized roughly as that of expecting to have future experiences which resemble our past experiences. This way of interpreting Hume which I have just sketched has been quite widely accepted, and I think it represents the way of understanding Hume which most readers are likely to arrive at if they simply read those well known passages of the Treatise and first Enquiry. It does seem to me to be essentially correct as a reading of those passages. To be sure, this interpretation has been challenged by several writers, and recently it has been denounced with especial vigor by Beauchamp and 4 Rosenberg in their stimulating book. Beauchamp and Rosenberg maintain that nowhere in the Treatise or Enquiry does Hume voice any general scepticism about the drawing of conclusions concerning matters of fact. On their reading, Hume is merely rejecting the view that factual conclusions can be proved demonstratively; he is not at all suggesting that the drawing of such conclusions is in general unjustified. They see him as a staunch and consistent advocate of inductive reasoning. I shall not take time here to try to thresh out the complex details of this controversy. For present purposes I shall merely indicate where I stand. I believe that Beauchamp and Rosenberg have read the Treatise and the Enquiry too much in the light of what they think Hume ought to be saying in order for him to have a consistent and plausible position. I think they water down too much his acid remarks about the lack of rationality of thinking which reaches non-trivial factual conclusions, and I think they attach too little weight to the manner in which Hume aligns himself with ancient scepticism. Unlike Beauchamp and Rosenberg, I consider that Hume is not a highly consistent writer, I think he sometimes has not thought through the implications of what he says in one place so 3. as to reconcile it with what he says in some other places. (To say this is not to denigrate the value of his work; much of the excitement of his thought stems from his willingness to press his opinions to inconsistent extremes.) Therefore, I think it best in reading Hume to be alert for possibly conflicting lines of thought which are present in the texts and which should not be... (shrink)

Hybrid theories are metaethical theories concerning the content of sentences about moral value. These theories claim that sentences with ethical content express two kinds of mental state. One state is an affect‐like state. The other is a belief‐like state. The expressed affect‐like state will involve a moral attitude of some kind, such as approval, but it is not part of the truth‐conditions of the sentence. We can divide hybridists into two kinds.

I argue that indefinite descriptions are referring terms. This is not the ambiguity thesis: that sometimes they are referring terms and sometimes something else, such as quantifiers . No. On my view they are always referring terms; and never quantifiers. I defend this thesis by modifying the standard conception of what a referring term is: a modification that needs to be made anyway, irrespective of the treatment of indefinites. I derive this approach from my speech-act theoretic semantics . The basic (...) thought is that referring terms have as their meanings speech-acts of a certain kind called proto-referring acts. These are acts in which speakers advertise or present intentions to denote, where denotation is a word-world relation, and advertising an intention is acting as if one has intentions, where it is open whether one has them or not, or whether the referring term used denotes or not. I show how this works for proper names. The meaning of a proper name is the speech-act proto-referring act type defined by a certain referential tree. This gives us the basis for an account of proper name meaning irrespective of denotation: a uniform treatment of full and empty names. Applied to indefinites, we can capture cases where speakers perform proto-acts—in which they advertise an intention to denote something—where they intend to denote, but others where they do not, but they still perform the proto-act: advertising an intention to denote. Two cases are ‘Fred saw a hippo’ and ‘Jane did not see a hippo’. In both cases U performs the same proto-act, represent it as Rpro, but possesses the advertised intention in the first case, but not in the second. In the first case, Rpro gains referential content—its descriptive content is expanded to include seen by Fred, whereas in its second token use it has no content augmentation or sentential determination of reference. In the second case ‘a hippo’ is an empty referring term, just as ‘Pegasus’ is empty in ‘Fred did not see Pegasus; he does not exist’. But in both sentences ‘a hippo’ functions in the same basic way: in both cases the basic proto-referring act Rpro is performed. Using this approach, I show how definite descriptions can be construed as indefinites with added meaning. (shrink)

_Disorientation_ is the first publication in English of the second volume of _Technics and Time_, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins (...) and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology—including alphabetical writing—is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment. (shrink)

In the first two volumes of _Technics and Time_, Bernard Stiegler worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship to technics and technology. Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, particularly in the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, which precedes cinema itself but reaches an apotheosis in it as the _exteriorization process_ of schema, through tertiary (...) retentions and their mechanisms. The book focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry"— as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer—that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic. (shrink)

Touching on Nancy and Derrida offers a glimpse not only into the thesis both of Jean-Luc Nancy's critique of touch and of Derrida's Le Toucher, but also into the threshold of a technology of (the) sense to come. This glimpse is an interrogation, and one that is both historic and historical, in the sense that Derrida, in addressing Jean-Luc Nancy's work, has presented us with an encyclopedic history of touch in the philosophic tradition from Aristotle to Nancy, one in which (...) what Derrida calls “transcendental archifacticity” is accorded its proper value, and within which any seeming anthropological privilege, as an inherent aspect of the Phenomenological Reduction is, as Derrida says, ‘overshadowed.’ Such an overshadowing is both strategic, in terms of a historical phenomenological project, and tactical, in Derrida's investigative sense: tactical in terms of implementation, manifestation, manipulation (i.e. through the application of the hand, manus) and in terms of tact, tactility; to which must be tacked on, à la Nancy, con-tact, ‘with touch,’ a ‘with-touch’ in which a béance, a gash or dash, opens out in-between, ‘at the very point’ to use Derrida's repeated specification, of bifurcation and of con-tact, at the junction point of the ‘spacing out’ of a laminated différance con-noting more than it has or had ever done in Derrida's work itself. *. (shrink)

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, _Testing the Limit _ claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and (...) the first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology, in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form. (shrink)