This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Defining Terms: Relativism, Pluralism, Tolerance What Is Logic? One Route to Pluralism: Logic ‐ as ‐ Model The Boundary Between Logical and Non ‐ Logical Terminology Vagueness Relativity to Structure References.

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Peirce and Husserl both realized that our habits and habitual conceptions, though vital to the success of most activities, nevertheless occlude large portions of the experiential canvass. So, unless preparatory work puts us in the right mindset, we risk perceiving the world—not as it is—but rather as we expect it to be. While Peirce and Husserl were predominantly concerned with supplying a better observational basis for inquiries like science, semiotics, and mathematics, I draw on their phaneroscopic/phenomenological tools to combat the (...) addictive and mind-narrowing effects of technology. I go over several examples to show how, when we (try to) rid ourselves of presuppositions and relax the pursuit of efficiency, we enable contemplative possibilities conducive to flourishing and the pursuit of meaning. My overall message is that, in an age when we increasingly depend on devices like Smartphones (and soon VR) to form flat and one-sided worldviews, re-establishing an unmediated contact with our everyday surroundings can have tangible existential benefits, nipping in the bud tyrannical trends as well as wasted lives. (shrink)

With his massive redeployment hypothesis (MRH), Anderson claims that novel cognitive functions are likely to rely on pre-existing circuits already possessing suitable resources. Here, we put forward recent findings from studies in numerical cognition in order to show that the role of sensorimotor experience in the ontogenetical development of a new function has been largely underestimated in Anderson's proposal.

In this paper we propose to take seriously the claim that at least some kinds of paraconsistent negations are subcontrariety forming operators. We shall argue that from an intuitive point of view, by considering paraconsistent negations as formalizing that particular kind of opposition, one needs not worry with issues about the meaning of true contradictions and the like, given that “true contradictions” are not involved in these paraconsistent logics. Our strategy will consist in showing that, on the one hand, the (...) natural translation for subcontrariety in formal languages is not a contradiction in natural language, and on the other, translating alleged cases of contradiction in natural language to paraconsistent formal systems works only provided we transform them into a subcontrariety. Transforming contradictions into subcontrariety shall provide for an intuitive interpretation for paraconsistent negation, which we also discuss here. By putting all those pieces together, we hope a clearer sense of paraconsistency can be made, one which may liberate us from the need to tame contradictions. (shrink)

IntroductionEngaging undergraduates in the research process is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a professor because it more deeply connects us to our work and helps shape the professional futures of students by immersing them in the culture of research (including peer-to-peer mentoring and authoring publications; Russell, Hancock, & McCullough, 2007). But there is a real trick to working with undergraduates in a way that both shapes students’ futures and produces high-quality, publishable research because mentors must invest a (...) great deal of time developing undergraduates’ technical and writing abilities, and this effort is time not spent on the research itself. In this article, we describe a powerful, flexible approach that makes the production of publishable research possible. For context, we teach and conduct research at a small liberal arts college with a population of just over 2000 undergraduates. Research at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) does not benefit a system of graduate students, post-docs, and paid research staff, so we have found it necessary to developed a structured, team-based approach to faculty-student research that provides excellent mentorship and produces publishable research (see Detweiler-Bedell & Detweiler-Bedell, 2013). Importantly, this team-based model can be put into practice with a broad array of students, including underrepresented and first-generation students. What we have learned in adopting this approach reflects... (shrink)

There is a close conceptual relation between the notions of religious disenchantment and scientific naturalism. One way of resisting philosophical and cultural implications of the scientific image and the subsequent process of disenchantment can be found in attempts at sketching a reenchanted worldview. The main issue of accounts of reenchantment can be a rejection of scientific results in a way that flies in the face of good reason. Opposed to such reenchantment is scientific naturalism which implies an entirely disenchanted worldview. (...) However, one of the main problems of scientific naturalism are placement problems. A reenchanted worldview does have the conceptual resources to avoid placement problems, yet seems to throw out the baby with the bathwater. A dilemma results: the Scylla of an undesirable scientific naturalism and the Charybdis of a rampant, seemingly prescientific reenchanted worldview. In this article I argue that there is a safe middle passage between these two options, i.e. the recently proposed liberal naturalism which allows for a moderate normative reenchantment. Liberal naturalism lets us have it both ways: avoiding the placement problems while retaining a necessary and reasonable adherence to science, thereby avoiding both an all-too restrictive scientific naturalism. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe debates over Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge oppose libertarianism and paternalism, or defend the authors’ proposed manipulation of individuals’ ‘choice architectures’ as a consistent system of libertarian paternalism. My essay looks beyond the terms of this debate and revisits Bentham’s ‘Indirect Legislation’ in order to excavate the issues raised by the deployment of technologies of behavioural economics in schemes of government. On the one hand, nudging is nothing other than a mild and carefully considered mode of indirect legislation, and the (...) authors are right to join Bentham in pointing out that the landscape they seek to improve is always with us; we are always already governed and governing others, and we might as well govern and be governed better than we do/are. On the other hand, nudge-like innovations reveal the extent to which Bentham’s insights have been captured by a disciplinary orientation that removes its subjects from political space. Put differently, the issue with this kind of government is not that it interferes with our liberty so much as that it presumes our lack of political orientation and efficacy. Bentham’s liberal subjects inhabit a public and even republican space that Sunstein and Thaler’s neo-liberal subjects have long since abandoned. (shrink)

Although much has been written about the truth-conditions of de re attitude reports, little attention has been paid to certain ‘ultra-liberal’ uses of those reports. We believe that if these uses are legitimate, then a number of interesting consequences for various theses in philosophical semantics follow. The majority of the paper involves describing these consequences. In short, we argue that, if true, ultra-liberal reports: bring counterexamples to a popular approach to de re attitude ascriptions, which we (...) will call ‘descriptivism’; and combine with independently plausible principles about the logic of belief to imply that subjects can achieve omniscience about what exists from the armchair. Although we are not committed to the view that ultra-liberal reports are false, in the final part of the paper we discuss the prospects of pursuing a line according to which the acceptability of such reports ought not be taken at face value. We conclude by arguing that those who are sympathetic with this move might have reason to doubt the truth of an even broader class of acceptable de re attitude reports, namely those that have been taken to undermine orthodox accounts of de re attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

Considerable progress is being made in robotics, with robots being developed for many different areas of life: there are service robots, industrial robots, transport robots, medical robots, household robots, sex robots, exploration robots, military robots, and many more. As robot development advances, an intriguing question arises: should robots also encompass religious functions? Religious robots could be used in religious practices, education, discussions, and ceremonies within religious buildings. This article delves into two pivotal questions, combining perspectives from philosophy and religious studies: (...) can and should robots have religious functions? Section 2 initiates the discourse by introducing and discussing the relationship between robots and religion. The core of the article (developed in Sects. 3 and 4) scrutinizes the fundamental questions: can robots possess religious functions, and should they? After an exhaustive discussion of the arguments, benefits, and potential objections regarding religious robots, Sect. 5 addresses the lingering ethical challenges that demand attention. Section 6 presents a discussion of the findings, outlines the limitations of this study, and ultimately responds to the dual research question. Based on the study’s results, brief criteria for the development and deployment of religious robots are proposed, serving as guidelines for future research. Section 7 concludes by offering insights into the future development of religious robots and potential avenues for further research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Let Us Be Human:Primo Levi and Ludwig WittgensteinDavide SpartiThe demolition of a man is difficult, almost as much as creating one.— Primo Levi1The modest but also remarkable ambition of Primo Levi's most important book Se questo è un uomo is "to provide material for a quiet [pacato] study of certain aspects of the human soul [animo umano]."2 More precisely, its ethical core (and its title) concerns itself with the (...) loss of our humanity, with the inexorable destruction of what is human.3 The book describes such patterns of dehumanizing through a number of mechanisms operating in the concentration camps of Auschwitz–Birkenau, where Levi was deported. By showing how the Nazis viewed the camp inmates as completely disconnected from their own lives, Levi bears witness to the Nazis' restricted willingness to grant humanity, to their denial of the internal relation which ties them to the inmates. Since the book offers insights for those who ask themselves "what is it to be human?" (and what remains of the human in extreme situations?), its main philosophical issue is whether or not something admits being seen as human.4Wittgenstein describes the attitudes we adopt in reacting to other creatures by analyzing the grammar of "seeing something as something:" only of a living human being, he famously adds, can we say: he [End Page 444] or she has a soul (see also PI, § 281).5 That the human body stands as one of the criteria for the ascription of psychological predicates—that human beings are endowed with an expressive power that neither statues nor animals possess; that human beings around us exert by their very presence a power which belongs uniquely to them—is suggested by the fact that even when we fantasize about living chairs or tables, for example in cartoons, we tend to lend human features to such animated furniture. So, according to Wittgenstein there is a conceptual connection between psychological predicates and certain kinds of human expression. But, one must add, this connection is achieved only through use, and is given only within the context of a form of life. The context of a shared form of life is needed because without it those forms of expressive behavior would not be intelligible: only if I am prepared to regard the object before me as a human being will I smile back and even talk to it. A living body is hence not enough: what is needed is a role through which such expressions are performed and have a point.In a similar vein, Levi shows the extent to which our experience of something as human depends on our relation to it—on the quality of our stance towards it. If it makes sense to speak of seeing somebody as a human being, it is because we can imagine individuals who lack or lose such a capacity or willingness. And it is precisely within the context of the concentration camp that what admits being seen as human changes drastically.In this essay I will draw lines of connection between Levi and Wittgenstein by relying on Stanley Cavell's crucial notions of avoidance and acknowledgment. After showing how such notions play a role in Wittgenstein's remarks on the so called "other mind" problem, I will turn to Levi and show how his remarks on the denial of the human in the concentration camp supplement Wittgenstein's grammatical remarks and can also be fruitfully read using the categories of avoidance and acknowledgment.6Although Wittgenstein does offer some remarks on Nazism, was personally engaged in protecting his family after the annexation of Austria, and mentions the Russian gulags in conversation with Rhees, he was never concerned with any empirical analysis of specific, let alone extreme, human situations. In light of this, it is clear that life in the concentration camp cannot be grasped and explained by simply relying on a few Wittgensteinian categories. However, the points Levi raises, as I will show in the conclusion, reveal an analogy with some of the [End Page 445] questions that worried Wittgenstein. This will also lead me to discuss a stylistic element that links the Austrian philosopher to the... (shrink)

It is common for normative legal theorists, economists and other policy analysts to conduct and communicate their work mainly in maximizing terms. They take the maximization of welfare, for example, or of wealth or utility, to be primary objectives of legislation and public policy. Few if any of these theorists seem to notice, however, that any time we speak explicitly of maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing other things and of equalizing yet other things. Fewer still seem to (...) recognize that we effectively define ourselves by reference to that which we distribute and equalize. For it is in virtue of that which we distribute and equalize that our policy formulations treat us as politically “counting” or “mattering” for purposes of social aggregation and maximization. To attend systematically to this form of inter-translatability, with a view in particular to that which maximization formulations latently prescribe that we distribute and equalize, might be called “putting distribution first.” It is explicitly to recognize the fact that all law and policy are implicitly as equalizing and citizen-defining as they are aggregative and maximizing, and to trace the many salient consequences that stem from this fact. It is likewise to recognize that all law and policy treat us as equals in some respects and as non-equals in other respects. Putting distribution first by attending explicitly to these “respects” yields greater transparency about how well or poorly our laws and policies manage to identify, count, and treat us as equals in the right respects. This Article works to lay out with care how to put distribution first in normative legal and policy analysis. The payoffs include both a workable method by which to test proposed maximization norms systematically for their normative propriety, and an attractive distributive ethic that can serve as a workable normative touchstone for legal and policy analysis. Indeed, the Article concludes, much — though not yet quite all — of our law can illuminatingly be interpreted as giving inchoate expression to just such an ethic. (shrink)

‘Biodiversity’ is widely recognized as an extremely ambiguous concept in conservation science and ecology. It is defined in a number of different and incompatible ways in the scientific literature, and is also “exported” beyond the scientific community, where it may take on a host of other meanings for governments, policy-makers, non-governmental organizations, and the general public at large. One might respond to this ambiguity by either pushing for its clarification, and by extension the adoption of a single, univocal biodiversity concept, (...) or by rejecting the term entirely, replacing it with a relevant, more precise concept in each context. In this paper, I argue for a third approach. Drawing on literature describing change in large organizations, I explore ways in which ambiguity might be seen as productive – as a manner, at the very least, in which we can enable action by a mixed coalition of actors with different and, at times, contradictory interests and value commitments. I explore how this literature – in particular, a taxonomy of rhetorical uses of ambiguous concepts – could enable us to put the ambiguity of biodiversity to work for us, offering us a way to intervene in conflicts about the concept by helping to develop both clearer descriptive analyses and normative “rules for engagement” in debates surrounding biodiversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dialogue and Liberation:What I Have Learned from My Friends—Buddhist and ChristianPaul KnitterMy co-coordinator for this conference, Kyeongil Jung, has given me a rather daunting assignment for this lecture: within no more than forty minutes, I am supposed to (1) draw some insightful conclusions for our conference, (2) bid farewell to Union Theological Seminary as I sail off into retirement, and (3) reminisce on the past fifty years of my (...) life. The easiest and most enjoyable of these assignments will, I suspect, be the most effective in covering them all: I’m going to focus on reminiscing.It all started for me more than fifty years ago as I stood in the Piazza San Pietro on October 11, 1962, having just arrived in Rome two weeks earlier to begin my theological studies at the Gregorian University. There, awestruck and euphoric, I watched Pope John XXIII lead some two thousand bishops into the Basilica of St. Peter to begin the Second Vatican Council. That council, especially in its revolutionary “Declaration on the Church’s Attitude toward Non-Christian Religions” (Nostra Aetate), is where for me things took off—where I first felt the challenge of religious diversity and the inspiration to take up the challenge. Vatican II opened the door and beckoned Christians to enter into a life-giving dialogue with other religious communities—and to work out a theology that would support and animate such a dialogue. That, essentially, has been the business I have been about over these past fifty years: laying the foundations for, and then trying to engage in, an interreligious dialogue that will be truly life-giving and world-healing.But on the occasion of this conference and of this lecture, surrounded by so many old and new friends, I’ve come to realize, with a stunning clarity that I did not have before, that what has inspired and guided me in my efforts to respond to religious diversity over these past five decades has been friends much more than books. Yes, over the years, I have tried to put in my required academic hours of study: I have developed a sizeable amount of what Germans call Sitzfleisch. But tonight, as I look upon the faces of so many old friends with whom I have walked, and of so many new, younger friends with whom I try to keep pace, it is clear to me that most of the theological convictions and spiritual discoveries that have sustained my professional and personal life have become true for me—really true and trustworthy—because I have [End Page 173] seen them embodied in the lives of my friends and fellow searchers. Other people, in the kind of lives they live, have inspired me, challenged me, convinced me, more than any coherent, creative theological, philosophical, or political argument. That’s the kind of realization that becomes clear especially after one tips seventy. On some matters, you just have to get old before you can get wise.So let me spend this time with you this evening reminiscing on some of the Christian and Buddhists friends who have guided me and formed me over these past fifty years. They have also contributed to the gifts I have tried to bring to, and hope to leave behind for, Union Theological Seminary. Clearly, too, these friends embody and confirm what I suspect are some of the principal points of consensus for our conference on Enlightenment and Liberation. With only forty minutes to speak, and with seventy-four years full of friends, I’ll have to be painfully selective.karl rahner, john hick, stanley samartha: the theological challenge of religious diversityThree of my oldest friends, all of them now of blessed memory, were clear-cut and beautiful examples for me of both the honesty and the courage that are required in taking other religious traditions seriously. All three of them, in differing ways and degrees, recognized that if Christians are going to be able to engage in the kind of dialogue that Vatican II and eventually the World Council of Churches were calling for, then Christians and especially Christian theologians are going to have to do some heavy... (shrink)

The foregoing proposals are examples of inexpensive projects in science and technology in the developing countries; they are feasible even in a time of shrinking budgets. Although they are based on actually perceived needs, none of them is a certainty. They are no more than efforts to open the path of exploration, put forward with the intention of arousing the imagination and will of scientists and officials, governmental and academic.We still know little about the institutional workings of science. There is (...) no body of systematically studied experience available to us in such a domain as that discussed above. It is mainly through interest, enthusiasm, and above all a dogged perseverance and incessant readiness to try new things that we can make progress towards the goal. (shrink)

Stich & Ravenscroft (1994) have argued that (contrary to most people's initial assumptions) a simulation account of folk psychology may be consistent with eliminative materialism, but they fail to bring out the full complexity or the potential significance of the relationship. Contemporary eliminativism (particularly in the Churchland version) makes two major claims: the first is a rejection of the orthodox assumption that realistically construed propositional attitudes are fundamental to human cognition; the second is the suggestion that with the advancement of (...) scientific understanding of the mind it will be possible to entirely eliminate the mentalistic and intentional from our ontology, thus dissolving the mind-body problem. The first claim (which has been argued in detail) supplies the principal grounds for accepting the second, much more ambitious and significant, claim. Robert Gordon's (1995, 1996, 2000) radical simulation theory of "folk psychology", proposed initially (Gordon, 1986) as an alternative to "theory theory" accounts of self and interpersonal understanding, but subsequently developing into a quite general challenge to symbolic computational accounts of mind, is not merely consistent with, but actually provides considerable additional support for, the first eliminativist claim. However, although radical simulationism has no use for reified propositional attitudes, it relies on another family of mentalistic and intentional notions, including perspective taking, "seeing as", pretending, imagery, and, most centrally, imagination. It is thus inconsistent with eliminativist metaphysical ambitions. Nevertheless, from this perspective the mind-body problem is transformed. Its solution no longer depends on accounting directly for the intentionality of the attitudes, but rather on accounting for the intentionality of imagination. Although standard accounts of imagination derive its intentionality from that of the attitudes, the recently proposed "perceptual activity" theory of imagery and imagination (Thomas, 1999) can provide a direct account of the intentionality of imagination that is consistent with physicalism.. (shrink)

"Liberal Perspectives for South Asia" discusses the essentials of the liberal philosophy, while also indicating how appropriate it is in the South Asian context. In the past, the subcontinent was renowned for the skill with which it took up the dominant ideologies of the west and articulated them for the Asian context. In the post-colonial period, the only dominant ideology that was sidetracked by all political parties was liberalism, the ideology that promoted freedom of the individual. The idea (...) of a book about the need for liberalism in the subcontinent was the brainchild of Chanaka Amaratunga, who set up the first avowedly Liberal Party in Sri Lanka. Many political parties have implemented liberal policies on an ad hoc basis and without a proper framework to guide them. Not all parties would accept all aspects of a liberal programme, however, in a context in which many parties are seeking an ideology that accords both with the present times and trends, and also with some of the goals they accepted in the past. It is hoped that this volume will provide food for thought and ideas for adoption and incorporation within the party programme. Ranging from erudite expositions of classic liberal thinkers to lively discussions of liberal economic principles put into practice by imaginative entrepreneurs, this volume is essential reading for a region making a swift transition into the contemporary, globalized world. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary work, Paul W. Kahn argues that political order is founded not on contract but on sacrifice. Because liberalism is blind to sacrifice, it is unable to explain how the modern state has brought us to both the rule of law and the edge of nuclear annihilation. We can understand this modern condition only by recognizing that any political community, even a liberal one, is bound together by faith, love, and identity.Putting Liberalism in Its Place (...) draws on philosophy, cultural theory, American constitutional law, religious and literary studies, and political psychology to advance political theory. It makes original contributions in all these fields. Not since Charles Taylor's The Sources of the Self has there been such an ambitious and sweeping examination of the deep structure of the modern conception of the self.Kahn shows that only when we move beyond liberalism's categories of reason and interest to a Judeo-Christian concept of love can we comprehend the modern self. Love is the foundation of a world of objective meaning, one form of which is the political community. Arguing from these insights, Kahn offers a new reading of the liberalism/communitarian debate, a genealogy of American liberalism, an exploration of the romantic and the pornographic, a new theory of the will, and a refoundation of political theory on the possibility of sacrifice.Approaching politics from the perspective of sacrifice allows us to understand the character of twentieth-century politics, which combined progress in the rule of law with massive slaughter for the state. Equally important, this work speaks to the most important political conflicts in the world today. It explains why American response to September 11 has taken the form of war, and why, for the most part, Europeans have been reluctant to follow the Americans in their pursuit of a violent, sacrificial politics. Kahn shows us that the United States has maintained a vibrant politics of modernity, while Europe is moving into a postmodern form of the political that has turned away from the idea of sacrifice. Together with its companion volume, Out of Eden, Putting Liberalism in Its Place finally answers Clifford Geertz's call for a political theology of modernity. (shrink)

We still ask the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Every generation seems to offer new and contradictory answers to the question. In the last thirty or so years, the most interesting characterisations of Enlightenment have been by historians. They have told us that there is one Enlightenment, that there are two Enlightenments, that there are many Enlightenments. This has thrown up a second question, ‘How Many Enlightenments?’ In the spirit of collaboration and criticism, I answer both questions by arguing in this (...) article that there are in fact three Enlightenments: Radical, Sceptical and Liberal. These are abstracted from the rival theories of Enlightenment found in the writings of the historians Jonathan Israel, John Robertson and J.G.A. Pocock. Each form of Enlightenment is political; each involves an attitude to history; each takes a view of religion. They are arranged in a sequence of increasing sensitivity to history, as it is this which makes it possible to relate them to each other and indeed propose a composite definition of Enlightenment. The argument should be of interest to anyone concerned with ‘the Enlightenment’ as a historical phenomenon or with ‘Enlightenment’ as a philosophical abstraction. (shrink)

This paper sketches some developments in the discussion of liberal nationalism since the early 1990s and proposes a generic understanding of nationalism according to which its main feature is the act of sorting people into members and non-members of the nation with a view to regulating access to political goods linked to the state. One discussion of liberal nationalism that has recently received renewed attention is the relation between nationalism and multiculturalism. Liberal nationalism sees nationalism as a (...) response to increased diversity and involves normative demands on nationalism for accommodating this diversity. In light of the proposed generic understanding of nationalism, the question arises whether such a liberal nationalism is coherent. This question requires us to distinguish between a substantive and a performative perspective on nationalism, raising the possibility that liberal nationalism can be substantively coherent but performatively incoherent. (shrink)

This essay reviews three books that engage the writings of Michel Foucault. It examines to what extent and in what ways Foucault has been made to ‘work’ in educational practice and research. It suggests that Foucault has been narrowly appropriated in a way that is, ultimately, ironic—namely, as either liberating us from or entrapping us within our culture's structures and practices. This essay concludes by suggesting that Foucault's work was an attempt to avoid and subvert exactly such binaries.

This paper explores how philosophical inquiry and Critical Discourse Analysis can mutually benefit from each other to produce new methodological and reflexive directions in neo-liberal policy research to examine the phenomenon of 'What is '. Through this we argue that augmenting linguistic analysis with philosophical perspectives develops and supports CDA scholarship more broadly by accommodating the shifting complexity of social problems of ideologically driven inequality that are inbuilt through, in our case, social policy texts. In discussing philosophical-methodological issues, the (...) paper argues for the need to continually adapt CDA to the particular data so as to remain sensitive to and avoid hegemonic tendencies in analysis. Through adopting the principles of a working methodology, we discuss a micro-meso-macro CDA framework that draws on the analytical concepts of movement, metaphorical superfluidity, thematic condensation, and surrealism to conceive of a research approach capable of examining and comprehending evolving discourses of political economies. The most immediate benefit of this framework is its capacity to illustrate how forms of valuations perpetuated by and through policy discourse are the motivational locus of meaning making insofar as they strongly inform the moral underpinning the ideology of economic growth. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article begins with a consideration of whether the January 6, 2021, attack on the United State’s Capitol building can be considered a form of “legitimate political discourse” and compares the insurrectionists to the Black Lives Matter protest movement. Both movements, as different and antithetical as they are, raised meta-questions about how it is that we establish by means of law the forms to express dissent. It is proposed that “constitutionalism,” namely, the doctrine that the primary means to create (...) and sustain free institutions are constitutions, which were and are result of historical events, i.e., revolutions such as the French, the American, and Haitian, that nonetheless unleashed normative powers and aspirations. After an analysis of constitutionalism through the lens of the US Constitution, the text turns to an analysis of what here are called “constitutional deconstructions.” Six such deconstructions are discussed: of the written constitution itself, of the law, of rights, of the people, of the state, and finally, of the Supreme Court as the protector and ultimate reader of the constitition. In this last section, the 2021 Report of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States is considered. (shrink)

In this dissertation I seek to answer the question, “What are the virtues of the excellent citizen in a liberal democracy?" This question is important on three levels. First, if civic virtue is as important to the perpetuation of liberal democratic community as neo-liberal and communitarian thinkers have argued, then curiosity alone should motivate us. Second, if projects to foster the virtues are critical, then we must understand the virtues in order to foster them effectively and appropriately. (...) Third, those who wish to attain greater excellence in citizenship need to know what the virtues are so that they may pursue them. In Chapters One and Two, I argue that current accounts of civic virtue are deficient because they fail to explore its basis, nature, and constituents. To better understand civic virtue, we must explore specific citizen virtues. To fulfill this aim, we require a citizen virtue catalog structured by an explanatory framework that is anchored in the role-based nature of citizen virtue. Such a framework provides the rationale for determining which virtues should be included in the catalog and which should not as well as a basis for comparing competing catalogs. As the role of citizen is to assist his state, the citizen virtues are those qualities that enable the citizen to assist the state in achieving its aims” in protecting, promoting, and realizing the liberal democratic ideals (namely, freedom, equality, self-government, collective cooperation, and stability). In the remaining chapters, I survey neo-liberal accounts of citizen virtue proposed by Richard Dagger, William Galston, David Jones, Mark Kingwell, Stephen Macedo, and Thomas Spragens, Jr. I apply the Chapter Two framework to assess the virtue candidates they propose. These chapters share a common format but differ in focus. Chapter Three takes up the citizen virtues that treat political community: cooperation, participation, vigilance, deliberative excellence, and obedience to law. Chapter Four, the liberal citizen virtues: allegiance to liberal democratic community, tolerance, and respect for rights. And Chapter Five, the citizen virtues relating to self-governance: autonomy, responsibility, and restraint. Chapter Six concludes. (shrink)

Problems and solutions for an act theoretic account of propositions. I discuss the relation between the primary source of intentionality, namely tokens of propositional acts or propositional acts simpliciter, and their representations, and I propose a measure-theoretic representation of propositional acts. On this basis, I argue for a Hanks-like conception of propositional acts as forceful acts. Propositional acts are forceful not only because they are truth-apt, but moreover because they are bearers of rational commitments and entitlements. I will point out (...) some undesirable consequences of adopting force cancellation or simulation contexts. These are that there seems to be an uncontrolled proliferation of force cancellation or simulation contexts, as suggested by the cases of probability judgments, comparative probability judgments, comparative preference directives, and the like. One might be dissatisfied with the lack of a unified account of what a cancellation context is supposed to be. I propose to liberate propositional acts so that they can be performed with a variety of forces, such as conditional assertion, disjunctive assertion, modified by degrees assertion etc. On the basis of a measurement theoretic representation of propositions, I propose the notion of act by surrogates to account for target-shifting in propositional acts. (shrink)

O presente artigo examina o projecto ético-politico de Richard Rorty nas suas vertentes teórica (enquanto projecto ideal de sociedade - a democracia liberal) e prática (enquanto tentativa de efectivação dessa Utopia). Porém, uma análise atenta permite concluir que ele redunda no seguinte paradoxo: por um lado, Rorty argumenta que a democracia liberal é o 'melhor regime político', mas, por outro, admite que ele não é realizável na prática. O autor do artigo vai mais longe: se fosse realizável, tornar-se-ia (...) num dos 'piores regimes políticos'. Sugere-se que as diflculdades no pensamento rortyano não estão tanto nos pressupostos, mas antes no modo como deriva as suas conclusões porque: algumas vezes as conclusões não são deriváveis das premissas; noutras são simplesmente contraditórias. /// This article examines Richard Rorty s ethical and political project both in its theoretical (as an ideal social project - a liberal democracy) and practical (as an attempt to implement this Utopia) aspects. However, a closer analysis permits us to conclude that it falls into the following paradox: on the one hand, Rorty argues that liberal democracy is the 'best political regime', but, on the other, he admits that it cannot be put into practice. The author of the article goes further: if it could be realized, it would be one of the 'worst political regimes'. It is suggested that the difficulties in Rorty's thought are not so much at the level of the presuppositions but rather in the way it derives its conclusions because: sometimes the conclusions are not derivable from the premises; at other times they are simply contradictory. (shrink)

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil(Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. Many people deny that evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. After all, they say, the grounds for belief in God are much better than the evidence for atheism, including the evidence provided by evil. We will not join their ranks on this occasion. Rather, we wish to consider the proposition that, setting aside grounds for belief in God and relying only (...) on the background knowledge shared in common by nontheists and theists, evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. Our aim is to argue against this proposition. We recognize that in doing so, we face a formidable challenge. It’s one thing to say that evil presents a reason for atheism that is, ultimately, overridden by arguments for theism. It’s another to say that it doesn’t so much as provide us with a reason for atheism in the first place. In order to make this latter claim seem initially more plausible, consider the apparent design of the mammalian eye or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life. These are often proposed as reasons to believe in theism. Critics commonly argue not merely that these supposed reasons for theism are overridden by arguments for atheism but rather that they aren’t good reasons for theism in the first place. Our parallel proposal with respect to evil and atheism is, initially at least, no less plausible than this proposal with respect to apparent design and theism. (shrink)

As with any proposal for institutional reform, and especially one that has gained so much ground in such a short amount of time, this paper asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement is good for corporations. Are businesses stronger with DEI practices and ideas or weaker? We believe that the DEI movement is asking the right questions: How do we create more just and equitable institutions? The challenge, however, is whether this movement is giving the right answers to such (...) questions. The main premise of our paper is that without deeper principles than DEI itself, these qualities of corporate life will be misunderstood, misused, and disordered in our increasingly fragmented and politicized culture. We propose in this essay that “subsidiarity” serves as one of those deeper principles that can order and enrich our understanding of DEI. It serves as a gift principle that begins to reveal the deepest nature of our work, namely, that our work allows us to exercise our gifts in serving others. (shrink)

As with any proposal for institutional reform, and especially one that has gained so much ground in such a short amount of time, this paper asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement is good for corporations. Are businesses stronger with DEI practices and ideas or weaker? We believe that the DEI movement is asking the right questions: How do we create more just and equitable institutions? The challenge, however, is whether this movement is giving the right answers to such (...) questions. The main premise of our paper is that without deeper principles than DEI itself, these qualities of corporate life will be misunderstood, misused, and disordered in our increasingly fragmented and politicized culture. We propose in this essay that “subsidiarity” serves as one of those deeper principles that can order and enrich our understanding of DEI. It serves as a gift principle that begins to reveal the deepest nature of our work, namely, that our work allows us to exercise our gifts in serving others. (shrink)

Considering the play written by Daniel Berrigan about his own civil disobedience (burning hundreds of draft files in Catonsville, Maryland), the author asks whether Catholics have adopted the American dream at the expense of Christianity. How should we live and philosophize in an age of American empire? Philosophy must be both practical and transformative. We need to question our political situation since 2001, and arrive at a liberatory philosophy and social theory “from below” so as to meet Berrigan’s liberatory, prophetic (...) theology “from above,” resulting in a philosophy and theology of liberation of and from the seductive imperialist center. The author further stresses individual self-appropriation and the critique of imperialism through a Marxist understanding of surplus value (as arising from labor time for which workers are not paid). There is a link between capitalistic imperialism and militarism, and President Bush has made illegitimate use of religion in the attempt to legitimate empire. Liberation is the good and the happiness that together result from doing the work of justice, free from capitalist corruption. In challenging capitalist empire, we ought to aim for the “downward mobility” of a simpler lifestyle, where self-appropriation leads to moral, religious, and practical conversion. An inhumane, capitalist society is fundamentally at odds with us as human beings, as philosophers, and as Christians. (shrink)

Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value empiricism. This alternative is (...) aesthetic liberalism. On this view, an object’s aesthetic value is fully grounded in any value—not just the hedonic value—of a correct and complete experience of its sensory features. To demonstrate the advantages of liberalism over hedonism, I apply both views to analyze the aesthetic value of the Spring Temple Buddha and Anselm Kiefer’s Seraphim. I detail four advantages of liberalism over hedonism, and I conclude by defending liberalism from two kinds of objection. (shrink)

The Enlightenment marked a shift inmoral debates away from notions of sin and eviltoward the more secular concept of virtue basedin reason. Perhaps the most notable example ofsuch liberal thought can be found in JohnDewey's 1934 A Common Faith, where he arguesthat people should set aside bickering overreligious differences and work in a utilitarianspirit to achieve public good through science.Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, theChinese cultural revolution, and the Cold War'sthreat of mutually assured destruction haveinspired philosophers and theologians (...) to revivethe concept of evil to explain atrocities tooextreme to be incorporated into conventionalunderstandings of virtue and reason. In theirstruggle to explain the enormity of humancapacities for destruction, they have replacedtraditional religious definitions of evil witha more secular one: the construction anddefense of a systemic contempt for life.Assuming that bad consequences are simply theunintended result of good intentions, socialscientists have resisted employing such aconception of evil. Persisting in thisassumption may prevent us from seeing theperversity of the liberal economicjustification for promoting and perpetuatingdestructive tendencies in the industrialagricultural system. This paper seeks tooperationalize a conception of evil and toapply it to policy debates surrounding the 1985Food Security Act in the hope of evaluating oursociety's inability to resolve social andenvironmental consequences generated byindustrial agriculture. (shrink)

If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of institutions and actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Surprisingly, this question has been neglected in the literature. This paper questions the assumption that it is only justifiability to presently existing citizens that matters, and provides reasons for thinking that legitimacy requires justifiability to future (...) citizens as well. Further, it is argued that the presently dominant interpretation of Rawls’s principle is unable to take future citizens into account in an adequate way. Therefore, the inclusion of these citizens among those to whom justifiability is owed gives us good reasons to reject this interpretation, and to adopt a different understanding of the view. (shrink)

In 1886, as Nietzsche's thought becomes more explicitly oriented toward the project of a revaluation of all values, he reframes BT and three middle period books with prefaces. Four out of the five prefaces show Nietzsche noticeably occupied with the theme of health, which serves in each of those four as a lens orienting the reader toward his earlier work. In his "Attempt at Self-Criticism," for instance, Nietzsche suggests that the principal contribution of BT lies in the idea of the (...) Dionysian, which carries the promise that there might exist "neuroses of health".1 The preface to GS finds Nietzsche looking for a "philosophical physician" who might "pursue the problem of the total... (shrink)

What should be the aim of LGBT-inclusive, state-mandated curricula in liberal, pluralist societies? In this article, I identify two distinct aims that such curricula might have. The first, LGBT Respect, aims to teach that LGBT individuals have equal political status and rights. The second, LGBT Approval, aims to teach a positive attitude towards LGBT relationships, including that there is nothing wrongful about these forms of relationship. I examine what arguments in favour of these different aims are available to the (...) liberal concerned with accommodating pluralism. To capture this concern, I adopt political liberalism's strict standard for legitimate political interventions that these must have justifications that all reasonable citizens can accept. This initially seems to recommend curricula that aim at LGBT Respect but stop short of LGBT Approval. Can the political liberal go any further? I propose and critically discuss the most promising arguments in favour of LGBT Approval, including the need to prevent harm to children, ensure political equality, and secure the social conditions needed for the development of the primary good of self-respect. I tentatively conclude that there exists a cumulative case for state-mandated curricula aiming at LGBT Approval, at least in the contingent, nonideal circumstances that currently obtain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John R. Boly NIHILISM ASIDE: DERRIDA'S DEBATE OVER INTENTIONAL MODELS DERRIDA'S PHILOSOPHY, or perhaps antiphilosophy, emerges from phenomenological thought. But to a great extent, he has been permitted to define that emergence on his own terms, particularly in his writings on Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. This is, of course, highly questionable. It in effect licenses Derrida to become a revisionist historian of his own origins. So I propose (...) a variation. Instead of placing phenomenology against Derrida's backdrop, I want to question his deconstructive project in its relation to the phenomenological venture. The difficulty with this is apparent. What would such a venture be? Even posing the question raises problems in that it presupposes an impossible vantage, an uninvolved point from which to look down in serene mastery at a game rigged in advance. Yet perhaps a synoptic point ofview may be indulged in for a while, provided no one forgets its provisional nature. In that case, the phenomenological venture includes four moments. 1. Suspension (or epoche). Human beings cannot perceive reality in itself. They can only experience meaning through the operations of intentionality, which may be thought of as the exclusions, selections, and combinations of a mediating system. This truism is no less terrifying for being so true, and every mediating system bears within itselfan impulse towards protective closure, an impulse to veil its own forming activity. Such closure eventually encrusts a mediating system and hardens into what Marxists call ideology, the early Barthes called myth, or contemporary response theorists call repertoire. Suspension involves a questioning attentiveness that remains within the closure it questions. Every fact is reconsidered, as factum, a deed brought forth through a process ofmaking. The consequently bracketed "fact" is both sacred object, granting reflexive ac152 John R. Boly153 cess to its formative process, and utter pretension, trying to conceal that process and thereby promote itself as fact rather than facture, origin rather than product. Phenomenology begins with a questioning of that pretension. Like a difficult child, it is perplexed at the self-evident and wonders at the obvious. 2.Reduction. Yet this questioning attentiveness takes only a first step. Suspension disenchants or disillusions, but it does not advance toward an understanding of the intricate patterns through which meaning emerges from the infinite possibilities of perception. That is the task of reduction, to which Husserl assigned two phases, the eidetic and the transcendental.1 In the eidetic phase, phenomena are released, so far as this is possible, into a preflective and preconceptual mode, as pure perceptions still awaiting the activity of mediation. Here, phenomena are boundless as well as exhilarating in their semantic potential. This return to primary perception, however, generates an opposing phase, the transcendental reduction, which traces the way in which mediating systems or what John Wild called versions of the life-world, select and arrange a potentially infinite semantic potential into actual meanings.2 Eidetic and transcendental phases work together, as inseparable antagonists within a continuous dialectic of disclosure. Because these two phases oppose one another, reduction involves a continuous interplay between energy and order, dynamism and system, with the result that it tirelessly traces patterns in the life-world, yet does so only to modify and transform those patterns through the very act of its tracing. Efforts to set the patterns of a life-world into a stable structure at the same time set free their infinite possibilities.3 The eidetic phase of the reduction thus provides a relentless semantic pressure that qualifies, elaborates, and eventually disperses every order of the transcendental phase. Yet without the revealing provocation of such inadequate orders, the eidetic phase would become incoherent and lapse into a speechless nihilism. Though it enacts a comic drama, reduction is the central task of the phenomenological venture, which halts the instant it is denied access to the intentional realm of the life-world. 3.Opening. So important is this access that it generates a separate moment, which pauses to meditate on the conditions of such access. The issues that arise here dominated Heidegger's thought after Being and Time, and they are among the most abstruse yet important concerns of phenomenology. How can models of intentional patterning be... (shrink)

Challenging the claim that policy of gender separation on buses does not imply segregation and discrimination against women but rather an innocent concern for the cultural concept of modesty, this Paper attempts first to analyze and refute the respective arguments presented by Professor Harel by establishing counter arguments and examining counter examples which may produce different conclusions. At its second stage the paper proposes a broader field of analysis for scrutinizing the justifications for gendersegregated practices that is based on considerations (...) of rationality. Its main thrust directs to the claim that from a liberal point of view, the difference between acceptable and non-acceptable practices should be depended upon two conditions: a) the rational justification of the practice. b) Its immunity to the burden of harm or oppression towards helpless individuals or groups. At its third and final part, the Paper attempts to produce a careful definition of the cultural meanings implied by the practice of gender separation. By proposing alternative conceptual structure of explanation, based on cultural phenomenological analysis, it aims to expose the deep discriminatory structure of power-relations between men and women in traditional societies, including the Ultra-Orthodox community, as exemplified by the practice of gender separation. (shrink)

IN KANT’S ETHICAL THOUGHT, Allen W. Wood powerfully argues in defense of Kant’s alleged notion that we ought not to compare ourselves with others on the moral scale, however much such comparison may be meaningful and permissible with respect to our other skills and characteristics, such as the artistic, practical, or technological. Meaningful, permissible, comparable or not, those skills and characteristics have no inherent worth anyway. These have a market price or a fancy price but no dignity, and it is (...) only dignity which confers incomparable moral worth. A human being, says Kant, “possesses a dignity by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world. He can measure himself with every other being of this kind and value himself on a footing of equality with them.”. (shrink)

In this paper, by applying a feminist bioethical perspective, we identify a new form of medical paternalism that still shapes contemporary legal policies on human egg cryopreservation performed without medical reasons. The fear of negligent, careless women who opt to delay their pregnancy for mere convenience is a widely known gender biased stereotype. Nevertheless, the opinions and judgments of medical professionals on this issue have not yet been sufficiently explored by in-depth research. In this essay, therefore, first we look at (...) the broader bioethical, legal, and social aspects of human egg cryopreservation. In the second part of the paper we discuss a unique qualitative study conducted with professionals working at Hungarian IVF clinics. We argue, based on a bioethical analysis of the collected data, that when new reproduction technologies provide opportunities for women to widen their range of reproductive choices, the traditional forms of medical paternalism can be reinforced by gendered paternalism, as well. We identify several elements of gendered paternalism that characterized the attitudes of the IVF staff and discuss the professionals’ resistance to elective egg freezing and vitrification of eggs for the future. We conclude by suggesting directions for future policy. Although we focus on the Hungarian case in this paper, we are aware that similar attitudes can be observed in some other countries where this technology has become available and requested by women, but where they also face difficulties in their access to it. (shrink)

Gold & Stoljar are right in their thesis but incomplete in not pointing out that there are many other arguments from cognate sciences suggesting that a radical eliminativist neuroreductionism is unlikely to be achieved. The radical neuron doctrine they criticize is only a hoped for dogma that cannot be verified, whereas a constrained monistic materialism (with only partial reductionism) is subject to immediate test by applying such criteria as combinatorial complexity and thermodynamic irreversibility.

A negative judgment (“S is not p”) says what is not the case, but since what is not the case is nothing and does not exist, a negative judgment says nothing, and is not a judgement at all. Wittgenstein called this “the mystery of negation.” By negation I can be right in what I say even though I say nothing at all. No less fastidious a logician than Rudolf Carnap sneered at philosophers who take such trifles seriously. Parmenides, the first (...) of many who did, drew the conclusion that one simply cannot say or think what is not, admonishing followers, “Say and think only this, being is.” The challenge philosophers inherit from Parmenides is to explain an account of thought and being that liberates negation from its ontological prison and lets it loose into the world again. The price they usually pay for their explanation is metaphysical idealism. The truth of thinking (including thinking what is not) must depend on nothing but thinking itself, and the favorite way of explaining that is to identify being with thought. If I think it, truly think it, then it is. With Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus, and Hegel, this is also Kimhi’s position, though I find him too discreet about the idealistic quality of the philosophy he explains. To brutally summarize, the idea is that to think what is not is to think what is, with a self-consciousness of disagreement. There is no difference of content between “S” and “not-S”; the difference lies entirely in the self-consciousness we bring to it. That sounds fine until we ask, what is this self-consciousness, and what is happening when one becomes self-aware of agreement or disagreement? Is that a natural activity like respiration, or an evolved animal power like vision? Kimhi says the thinking in “S thinks that p” is an activity sui generis, without analogy in living nature, a conclusion that is not available to anyone who takes Darwin seriously. He says nature does not include thinkers or thinking, which places us somewhere beyond nature. Nature is a whole, but not the whole of being. And beyond nature is . . . what? We have to use our imagination. So much onto-psychology just for a puzzle about negation? Why not naturalize logic, and truth too? Kimhi acknowledges resistance to the putative uniqueness of thinking then sets it aside. He does not explain how his theory speaks to the reasons against idealism, rationalism, or androcentric human exceptionalness. These are serious challenges to philosophical practice that should not be ignored, not even by logicians. (shrink)

The Western world is currently gripped by an obsessive concern for the rights of animals - their uses and abuses. In this book, Leahy argues that this is a movement based upon a series of fundamental misconceptions about the basic nature of animals. This is a radical philosophical questioning of prevailing views on animal rights, which credit animals with a self-consciousness like ours. Leahy's conclusions have implications for issues such as bloodsports, meat eating and fur trading.

: Free-market libertarians have long supported incentives to increase organ procurement, but those oriented to justice traditionally have opposed them. This paper presents the reasons why those worried about justice should reconsider financial incentives and tolerate them as a lesser moral evil. After considering concerns about discrimination and coercion and setting them aside, it is suggested that the real moral concern should be manipulation of the neediest. The one offering the incentive (the government) has the resources to eliminate the (...) basic needs that pressure the poor into a willingness to sell. It is unethically manipulative to withhold those resources and then offer payment for organs. Nevertheless, the poor have been left without basic necessities for 20 years since the passage of the prohibition on incentives. As long as the government continues to withhold a decent minimum of welfare, liberals should, with shame, cease opposing financial incentives for organ procurement. (shrink)

In defending a new framework for incorporating metacognitive debiasing strategies into critical thinking education, Jeffrey Maynes draws on ecological rationality theory to argue that in felicitous environments, agents will achieve greater epistemic success by relying on heuristics rather than more ideally rational procedures. He considers a challenge presented by Mercier and Sperber’s “interactionist” thesis that individual biases contribute to successful group reasoning. I argue that the challenge can be met without assuming an individualist ideal of the critical thinker as a (...) solitary reasoner. Focusing on cognitive laziness and myside bias, I then argue that a more complete reckoning with the implications of interactionism about reasoning will require us to transcend individualism more fully to embrace the selection, design, regulation, and navigation of dialogic environments as central pedagogical aims of critical thinking education. (shrink)

Systems of urban transportation are largely shaped through planning practices. In transport economics, the benefits of infrastructure investments consist mainly of travel time savings calculated using monetary values of time. The economic interpretation of the value of travel time has significantly shaped our urban environment and transportation schemes. However, there is often an underlying assumption of transferability between time and money, which arguably does not sufficiently take into account the specific features of time. In this paper, we analyze the various (...) properties of time as an economic resource using findings in behavioral economics and psychology. Due to limitations in the standard model, it is proposed that an alternative model value should be investigated in which time rather than money is the primary carrier of and the basic features of such a model are outlined. An improved understanding the nature of time as a source of utility puts us in a better position to determine what aspects of time matter. Additionally, the analysis can be applied to further develop modeling where value of time plays a significant role; such as new models for the planning of urban transport. (shrink)

“Developmentalism” is often regarded as the bête noire haunting liberal political theory, justifying modern civilizational hierarchies and liberal imperialism. But are all developmentalisms equally tied to Eurocentric, imperialist philosophies? I consider this question through a close reading of two of the most prominent, influential, and divisive modern accounts of historical development: those of Kant and J. S. Mill. I argue that Kant's philosophy of history is embedded in an Enlightenment idealism treating non-Europeans as bound to either adopt (...) Western norms or fade into obscurity. Conversely, the influences of Romanticism and sociology led Mill to recognize cultural differences as indelibly affecting any society's development. Given this, I argue, against much of the current literature, that Mill provides us with a significantly more capacious liberalism than Kant's; that his developmentalism holds the conceptual resources to understand progress as a pluralistic and culturally differentiated process; and so, more broadly, that not all liberal developmentalisms are equally bound to imperialist politics. (shrink)

This article gives a brief overview of Christian-Muslim Relations in sub-Saharan Africa. It points out that in recent years, due to the pentecostalisation of Christianity and the increased influence of fundamentalist Islamic groups, relations in sub-Sahara Africa seem to deteriorate, despite initiatives to work on harmonious interfaith relations. The article then identifies three current trends in Christian-Muslim relations: an increase in polarisation and polemics, the debate on the implementation of shari’a and joint social action programmes.

During the 19th century, the Belgian Liberal Party was frequently divided between its «progressive» or «radical» wing and its conservative majority.Between 1880 and 1900, the program of the progressive liberalism was worked out and stated precisely during seven political meetings.The one hold in 1887 put the headlines into shape, chiefly : big extension of the franchise, compulsory education, disestablishment of the Church.In spite of their small number of members, the progressists were surely most influential upon the adoption of the (...) universal franchise. (shrink)

In this paper, an account of two novel ontologies is given to point to the need to revise the status of facts in school curriculum. It is argued that schooling is in dire need of re-enchantment. The way to re-enchant schooling is to re-enliven the world we inhabit. We need to fall head over heels in love with the world again. In order to do that, we need to shake up our conception of “the hard and cold facts of the (...) world” to make the latter come alive radiating vibrancy and luminosity out into the world. Facts have to be liberated from their “cold and hard” status and become things that captivate us with their uniqueness and dynamism. To the extent that facts enchant (instead of merely re/present the world), working with them leads to educative experience. To work out how to let the facts do that, two thinkers and two ways to reconceptualize ‘facts’ are discussed: Graham Harman and his objects, and Ken Wilber and his holons. (shrink)