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 Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale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)

This is the fourth (and last) volume of Jonathan Barnes' collected essays on ancient philosophy. As its title suggests, the twenty-three papers which it contains cover a wide range of topics. The first paper discusses the size of the sun, and the last looks at Plato and Aristotle in Victorian Oxford. In between come pieces on--inter alia--the theory of just war and the definition of comedy, the nature of the soul according to Plato and Aristotle and Zeno and Tertullian, (...) atheism of Protagoras, Timaeus the Sophist (and his Platonic Lexicon) and the early history of Aristotle's writings, Nietzsche on Diogenes Laertius, the first Christian novel... One of the pieces is new. The others have all been retouched, and some of them revised. Half a dozen were written in French and have been translated into English. The volume is kitted out with a bibliography and with two rather good indexes. The papers are, in parts at least, well written, and some of them are mildly diverting: no-one with a nose for ancient philosophy will sniff at them. (shrink)

Since the advent of industrial animal farming in the mid-nineteenth century, works of fiction have played a vital role in bringing to light the dynamics of violence, resistance, and sabotage that inhabit its spaces. This article addresses the latest configuration of this phenomenon, examining a selection of twenty-first century novels (among them Isabelle Sorente’s _180 jours_, Deb Olin Unferth’s _Barn 8_, and Nadja Niemeyer’s _Gegenangriff_) that confront the sites of large-scale automated breeding, feeding, slaughter, and processing that are the factory (...) farms of today. At the core of these novels are episodes of transgression – break-ins, escapes, abductions – that implicate the whole network of actors involved: humans, animals, machines, and matter. Disrupting the flows of bodies, the rhythms of conveyor belts, and the logistics of transport, these episodes highlight not only the rigorous disciplinary power, but also the permeability of the boundaries, and the fragile interplay of _kinesis_ and _stasis_ that sustain modern meat production. The article thus elucidates how these works crystallize what Georges Bataille characterized as “the chaotic aspect” of abattoirs, theorizing an aesthetics of transgression as the hallmark of contemporary factory-farm fiction and the key vector of its socioethical ambitions. (shrink)

Aristotle is one of the very greatest thinkers in the Western tradition, but also one of the most difficult. The contributors to this volume do not attempt to disguise the nature of that difficulty, but at the same time they offer a clear exposition of the central philosophical concerns in his work. Approaches and methods vary and the volume editor has not imposed any single interpretation, but has rather allowed legitimate differences of interpretation to stand. An introductory chapter provides an (...) account of Aristotle's life, and then guides the reader through the complex subject of what Aristotle actually wrote as a basis for characterising his philosophical development. Subsequent chapters cover Aristotle's writings on logic, metaphysics, science, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. It is a basic assumption of the Companion that its readers will not know Greek. (shrink)

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche observes that Greek tragedy gathered people together as a community in the sight of their gods, and argues that modernity can be rescued from 'nihilism' only through the revival of such a festival. This is commonly thought to be a view which did not survive the termination of Nietzsche's early Wagnerianism, but Julian Young argues, on the basis of an examination of all of Nietzsche's published works, that his religious communitarianism (...) in fact persists through all his writings. What follows, it is argued, is that the mature Nietzsche is neither an 'atheist', an 'individualist', nor an 'immoralist': he is a German philosopher belonging to a German tradition of conservative communitarianism - though to claim him as a proto-Nazi is radically mistaken. This important reassessment will be of interest to all Nietzsche scholars and to a wide range of readers in German philosophy. (shrink)

Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought, the case we focus on in this paper. Perception and action are naturally described in terms of agent-environment dynamics, but can (...) a person’s thoughts about absent, abstract or counterfactual states of affairs also be accounted for in such terms? We argue such a question will seem pressing so long as one fails to appreciate how richly resourceful the human ecological niche is in terms of the affordances it provides. The explanatory work that is supposedly done by mental representations in a philosophical analysis of cognition, can instead be done by looking outside of the head to the environment structured by sociomaterial practices, and the affordances it makes available. Once one recognizes how much of the human ecological niche has become structured by activities of talking and writing, this should take away at least some of the motivation for understanding linguistic thinking in terms of content-bearing internal representations. We’ll argue that people can think about absent, abstract or counterfactual because of their skills for engaging with what we will call “enlanguaged affordances”. We make use of the phenomenological analysis of speech in Merleau-Ponty to show how the multiple affordances an individual is ready to engage with in a particular situation will typically include enlanguaged affordances. (shrink)

Our perceptual experiences stretch across time to present us with movement, persistence and change. How is this possible given that perceptual experiences take place in the present that has no duration? In this paper I argue that this problem is one and the same as the problem of accounting for how our experiences occurring at different times can be phenomenally unified over time so that events occurring at different times can be experienced together. Any adequate account of temporal experience must (...) also account for phenomenal unity. I look to Edmund Husserl's writings on time consciousness for such an account. (shrink)

Arguing that the importance of painting and other visual art for Benjamin's epistemology has yet to be appreciated, Weigel undertakes the first systematic analysis of their significance to his thought. She does so by exploring Benjamin's dialectics of secularization, an approach that allows Benjamin to explore the simultaneous distance from and orientation towards revelation and to deal with the difference and tensions between religious and profane ideas. In the process, Weigel identifies the double reference of 'life' to both nature and (...) to a 'supernatural' sphere as a guiding concept of Benjamin's writings. Sensitive to the notorious difficulty of translating his language, she underscores just how much is lost in translation, particularly with regard to religious connotations. The book thus positions Benjamin with respect to the other European thinkers at the heart of current discussions of sovereignty and martyrdom, of holy and creaturely life. It corrects misreadings, including Agamben's staging of an affinity between Benjamin and Schmitt, and argues for the closeness of Benjamin's work to that of Aby Warburg, with whom Benjamin unsuccessfully attempted an intellectual exchange. (shrink)

This volume reviews and takes stock of legal ethics, at a time when the legal profession globally is experiencing considerable change and challenges, through a re-evaluation of writings that are in some way foundational to the field. Legal ethics, understood here as the study of the ethics and professional regulation of lawyers, has emerged as a novel and important field of study over the last 50 years. It is also one that displays considerable diversity in its scholarship, with distinctive philosophical (...) and interdisciplinary approaches emerging over the years to underpin and supplement the doctrinal 'law on lawyering'. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars from the United States, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, this collection offers not just critical insights into the authors' chosen texts, but a thought-provoking commentary on the current state of legal ethics scholarship and its future directions. In addition to being an essential resource for scholars and students of legal ethics theory, it will also be of interest to academics and researchers in legal theory, the philosophy of law, and applied ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments SARTRE AND SEXISM by Hazel E. Barnes Insofar as is possible, I want to consider here not Sartre the man but Sartre the philosopher—or, more precisely, the philosophy of Sartre. To askwhether Sartre's long association with Simone de Beauvoir was a model of human relations at their best or an example ofbad faith on both sides is not to my present purpose. Nor are his (...) numerous, sometimes rather unsavory affairs with other women. Of course, the man and his work cannot be separated entirely. Sartre himselfadmitted that despite his wholehearted support of women's liberation, there remained in him vestiges of ingrained male chauvinism which he found difficult to eradicate.1 We should expect to find echoes of these in his writing, and we do—not in the ideas but in the imagery and rhetoric, and these not only in the fiction but in the philosophical works. The grossest example is the well-known passage in which Sartre discusses the "existential meanings" ofslime and holes.2 Slime, the great "Antivalue," is "a moist and feminine sucking" and "a sickly-sweet feminine revenge." Moreover—and this is even worse—Sartre allows his meditation on holes to lead by a process of his own associations to the idea ofa woman's sex as "a voracious mouth" evoking the male castration complex. This is not the only place where Sartre links female with notions of a treacherous receptivity. Furthermore, such passages are complemented by others where Sartre employs male sexual imagery to describe the activity of consciousness. Knowledge is portrayed as penetration and conquest. He points out, without objecting, that banal metaphors of everyday language suggest that "knowing" has overtones of carnal knowing and sexual violation: "What is seen is possessed; to see is to deflower.... The unknown object is given as immaculate, as Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 340-347 Hazel E. Barnes341 virgin, comparable to a whiteness.... Man has not yet 'snatched' its secret away from it.... Figures of speech... like that of the 'unviolated depths of nature' suggest the idea ofsexual intercourse more plainly."3 There can be no doubt that a full investigation ofthe linguistic codes in Sartre's writing would reveal him to be a man comfortably ensconced in a world of male dominance. Yet Collins and Pierce in their excellent article, "Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis," even as diey deplore Sartre's sexist language and his failure to depict any fictional female characters as embodiments of existential authenticity, admit that these weaknesses are at variance with the central philosophy ofBeing and Nothingness and not derived logically from it.4 I agree, and diat is why I hold that the sexism is there but is contingent, relevant to our appraisal of die writer but not essential to ourjudgment on the philosophy and its potential value as a support to feminism. In saying this I am partially making the sort of distinction employed by Jean Grimshaw, who points out that a philosophy built on male assumptions may exclude women essentially as with Kant, inconsistendy as with Aristode, or inadvertendy as with Descartes.5 The difference with Sartre is that in spite of the occasional lapse into traditional male linguistic tropes, the work, like its author, is notjust theoretically egalitarian but concerned explicidy with forms of oppression and the problems of disfavored groups. More than that of any other male writer, Sartre's philosophy seems to me to demand feminism as one of its natural consequences. That diis has been historically true is shown, ofcourse, by the fact that Simone de Beauvoir used Sartrean existentialism as the foundation for her own original analysis of women's situation in TL· Second Sex. The irony is diat this book, which played a key role in launching the movement for women's liberation throughout the world, has been adversely criticized by later feminists precisely on the grounds of its Sartrean orientation, along with Beauvoir's emphasis on women's right to share the things men value rather than to challenge those values. Beauvoir herself later recognized that the book did not go far enough, but she never renounced what she had written there. My claim... (shrink)

Whereas Plato's Protagoras rejects the notion that someone who knows what is good for him can nonetheless do something else of his own free volition, his Republic names the particular conditions under which such an act, an act of weakness of the will, can take place: the conditions of democracy. Because democracy, Plato writes, places an excessive freedom at its centre, it fosters desires, weakening the force of reason, destabilizing the will, and thus engendering an unprincipled human being. This paper (...) defends the democratic conception of freedom against this portrayal by advocating a concept of freedom of the will that does not unilaterally identify it with willpower. (shrink)

On 26 January 2021, while announcing that the country had reached the mark of 100,000 deaths within 28 days of COVID-19, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that he took “full responsibility for everything that the Government has done” as part of British efforts to tackle the pandemic. The force of this statement was undermined, however, by what followed: -/- What I can tell you is that we truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, (...) to minimise loss of life and to minimise suffering... -/- Taking these sentiments together, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the government took responsibility only for doing everything right. Such an admission of responsibility, accommodating no admission of error or wrongdoing, is not really about responsibility at all. Indeed, the UK’s pandemic response has been marked from its earliest days by a shifting of focus from institutional responsibility to personal responsibility for individual UK residents. -/- This paper explores the relationship between these two sites of responsibility—the institutional and the personal—in the context of the sort of pandemic that is ongoing as we write. Section 2 offers some initial definitions and discussions of key terms. Section 3 outlines how these two ideas interact in principle during such emergencies. Section 4 turns to the ‘non-ideal’ implications for personal responsibility of failures of institutional responsibility. While our focus is on the specific context with which we are most familiar, the UK governmental approach, where appropriate we also include examples from other states. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hazel E. Barnes FLAUBERT AND SARTRE ON MADNESS IN KING LEAR T'oward the end of the second volume of The Family Idiot (L'Idiot de la famille), in a section called "Exercises and Reading," Sartre discusses Flaubert's reading of Shakespeare.1 In the context Sartre describes how Flaubert spent his time during one of the rare periods when he was not even attempting to write anything; more than two years (...) elapsed between the completion of the first Sentimental Education in January 1845 and die beginning of his collaboration widi Maxime Du Camp on La Bretagne. Along with doing desultory background reading for "an oriental tale," and analyzing the plays ofVoltaire, Flaubert claimed to be studying the Greek and Roman authors and a selected few of the later "great immortals." Sartre shows that Flaubert's way of reading them was entirely different from the critical analysis which he directed on the work of his contemporaries. Essentially it was a series of"rereadings," and its purpose was not to gain knowledge or even a fuller understanding of the text. In a letter to Mlle de Chantepie, Flaubert counsels her to take one of the great writers and "study him in depth," reading from beginning to end and then starting over again: "But do not read, as children read, to amuse yourself, nor as the ambitious read, to instruct yourself. No, read so as to live. Create in your soul an intellectual atmosphere which will be compounded from the emanation of all the great minds."2 How can Flaubert both counsel his correspondent to study in depdi and not to seek instruction? The kind ofstudy he has in mind, Sartre claims, is comparable to the way in which an amateur pianist might "study" Chopin, where die aim is not to understand analytically but to perfect a particular interpretation and to evoke a certain aesdietic reaction. Flaubert resists instruction because new knowledge risks forcing change. What he wants is 211 2 1 2 Philosophy and Literature to rediscover the same eternal truths and emotions.3 It is also to find inspiration for his own dreams, an oneiric reading. In this connection Sartre makes two important points. First, in striving to cultivate for the soul "an intellectual atmosphere... compounded from the emanation of all the great minds," the artist is adding so many strings to his lyre — the laugh of Rabelais, the cosmic passions of Shakespeare, the skepticism of Montaigne. This is whyJules at the end of die first Sentimental Education plans to study die great writers, beginning with Homer — not to learn dieir technique but to enlarge the artist's sensibility. Sartre's second point is made apropos of Flaubert's rereading of Shakespeare. Flaubert fluctuates between two responses. Sometimes he is depressed at the thought of his own lack of genius in comparison with Shakespeare. "That good man will drive me mad.... All odiers seem to me children beside him."* At odier times he experiences what Sartre calls a "glorifying identification." It is as though in imagination he becomes Shakespeare. In part this is because, as he writes in this same letter, we artists "breathe in our existence by means of die sentence." Sartre notes that for Flaubert the existence in question is a literary reality, not that of die everyday world; we may breathe it in either dirough writing or through reading. At this particular moment in his life, Sartre argues, Flaubert's program of study was in bad faith. He allowed die imaginary identification to suffice. Sartre goes so far as to say, "He reads in order not to write; in diis masturbatory substitute for the act, he makes himself an aumor all at once, under anodier name, in order not to work at becoming the writer of genius he wants to be." This comment makes sense if we recall Flaubert's situation in 1845-47. After the nervous crisis at Pont-L'Evêque he knew that either he would be a writer or he would remain a feeble invalid, an object of pity, the "family idiot." "There he is, dien, paralyzed by two opposing forces: hope and die fear of being disappointed " (p. 2021). No wonder he... (shrink)

The Confessions of Augustine can be read as a summary and presentation of the Saint’s past life, but the whole book is a book in the present, since Augustine indicates the events he has had to face, the events in the past of his life, but from the reflective today at the moment of writing. Beyond narrating experienced situations, the Confessions are a permanent self-reflection of what he remembers, of what he is, of what he expects, but all in a (...) present, describing concrete things, trying to find the reason why they are remembered and why they caused an impact on his person. A first step is to say what happened, then try to find out why it happened that way, as well as how you can say what happened. It is a confession with transcendence, to educate, to prevent, to remember, to reach the Truth, which is always present. (shrink)

Participation in research is supposed to be voluntary and informed. Yet it is difficult to ensure people are adequately informed about the potential uses of their biological materials when they donate samples for future research. We propose a novel consent framework which we call “demonstrated consent” that leverages blockchain technology and generative AI to address this problem. In a demonstrated consent model, each donated sample is associated with a unique non-fungible token (NFT) on a blockchain, which records in its metadata (...) information about the planned and past uses of the sample in research, and is updated with each use of the sample. This information is accessible to a large language model (LLM) customized to present this information in an understandable and interactive manner. Thus, our model uses blockchain and generative AI technologies to track, make available, and explain information regarding planned and past uses of donated samples. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hazel E. Barnes BEAUVOIR AND SARTRE: THE FORMS OF FAREWELL There ARE MANY forms of farewell. The formal interview may be one of them, an autobiography another, the biography written by a relative or close friend of the deceased a third. In The Words Sartre bade farewell to his childhood. He thought he was saying goodbye to literature at the same time, though this adieu turned out to (...) be more in the nature of au revoir or even à bientôt. In an extended interview on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and in a three-hour documentary film, Sartre commented on the events ofhis life, his writings, his hopes and aspirations, his political judgments. Each of these was a summing up, and a selfappraisal, a final statement, too, inasmuch as Sartre's ill health and near blindness made it clear to him that he would not be writing anymore. Simone de Beauvoir obviously drew up some kind of final reckoning in the last volume of her autobiography, Tout comptefait {Account Closed). All of these are farewells of a sort, official valedictories. They have been much discussed, and I will not dwell on them here. Two other works bearing Beauvoir^ name are farewells in a different sense. They are preparations for leave-taking and records of remembrance for the bereaved. They have been combined in a volume published in late 1981, a year and a half after Sartre's death. The first of these is La Cérémonie des adieux (The Ceremony ofFarewells).? This is an account of the decade preceding Sartre's death. The title is itself a recollection of a poignant moment, as Beauvoir explains: "Then this is the ceremony of farewells!' Sartre said to me as we were leaving each other for a month at the beginning of one summer. I had a presentiment of the meaning these words would one day assume. The ceremony lasted ten years. It is these ten years that I recount in this book." The record is annalistic, the same kind of detailed year-by-year account of events and her reactions to them 21 22Philosophy and Literature mat Beauvoir employed in the first three volumes of her autobiography. But there her stated intention was to keep herselfas the center offocus and to speak of Sartre only insofar as his existence was intertwined with her own. In the preface to The Ceremony of Farewells she states that she has recorded these ten years as she had lived them, but that the book is devoted wholly to Sartre. Ifshe has spoken also ofherself, it is because "the witness is a part of what he witnesses." The book is dedicated "To those who loved Sartre, love him, will love him." Indeed, it has been written for them by one who is of them. The second work is Entretiens avecJean-Paul Sartre, a collection of interviews she herself conducted with Sartre in the summer of 1974. These have been subjected to superficial editing but by no means reworked into literature. Beauvoir wanted to give to readers the opportunity "to follow the meanders of his thought and to hear his living voice." Here she uses the method adopted in the fourth volume ofher autobiography, where she grouped her reminiscences by topics. Sartre responds at length to her questions on a vast variety ofsubjects, ranging from food likes and dislikes to his changing concepts of freedom, from sexual preferences to politics; there are comments on schoolboy fights with Merleau-Ponty, and later arguments with Camus, thoughts on literature, on death, on God. A reviewer has remarked that these interviews represent "a worthwhile approximation to the autobiography [Sartre] never wrote."2 Thus we have a work that falls in between biography and autobiography, because of the author's close involvement with her subject, and we have a set of autobiographical interviews. In both Beauvoir is recorder and commentator, Sartre central subject and actor. The two may serve for mutual corroboration and correction. Together diey express Beauvoir^ and Sartre's farewell to each other and his farewell to life. I will begin with the Interviews and focus my discussion on a few selected items which seem to me especially... (shrink)

One serious defect of the polemical writings that straightforwardly charge Heidegger with Nazism is that they mostly represent a poor knowledge of his philosophy. Heidegger’s writings are painfully difficult, even to specialists, and his concepts can be easily misinterpreted, especially by those who, instead of searching for truth, embrace a prosecutor’s zeal. For example, in his influential book, Farias completely avoids asking philosophical questions. On the internet, one can easily find hundreds of articles by authors who claim that Heidegger’s guilt (...) has already been decided. My objective is not to blame or to exonerate Heidegger before investigating the relationship between his philosophy and politics in depth. Obviously, given the limited nature of my presentation, I cannot consider Heidegger’s entire philosophical opus. I intend to concentrate chiefly on his critique of the Western metaphysical tradition and on an interpretation of his most controversial statement from An Introduction to Metaphysics about the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. I investigate the essence of Heidegger's philosophy, the quest for the meaning of Being, deduce a political theory from his ontology, and arrive at his politics. (shrink)

Participation in research is supposed to be voluntary and informed. Yet it is difficult to ensure people are adequately informed about the potential uses of their biological materials when they donate samples for future research. We propose a novel consent framework which we call “demonstrated consent” that leverages blockchain technology and generative AI to address this problem. In a demonstrated consent model, each donated sample is associated with a unique non-fungible token (NFT) on a blockchain, which records in its metadata (...) information about the planned and past uses of the sample in research, and is updated with each use of the sample. This information is accessible to a large language model (LLM) customized to present this information in an understandable and interactive manner. Thus, our model uses blockchain and generative AI technologies to track, make available, and explain information regarding planned and past uses of donated samples. (shrink)

The paper recalls my response to Berger’s and Luckmann’s book on reading it shortly after its initial publication. It seeks to convey why it was that I failed to make use of the book at that time, even though I recognised it as an outstanding contribution to my intended field of research, and how later I came to see that this may have been a lost opportunity. The story touches upon diverse important issues including the relationship between epistemology and the (...) sociology of knowledge; the epistemic authority of the natural sciences; the relevance of causal accounting as topic and resource in sociology; the importance of Durkheim in the sociology of knowledge; and the great value of Berger’s and Luckmann’s book as a corrective to the undue individualism that has long been a feature of the social sciences in the English-speaking world. Even so, the paper is more recollection than analysis, and unreliable recollection at that, after many decades in which there has been time to forget, or even to reconstruct, a very great deal. (shrink)

Our way of seeing things depends upon the state of our minds. We can look at the world through the lenses of love, hate or indifference. What remains largely unquestioned about science is its essence. Scientific objectivity is not free from subjectivity. I argue that objective, scientific knowledge is a partial knowledge based on indifference, the state of mind that constitutes the scientific attitude. Hate does not produce knowledge at all, but reinforces our prejudices. However, love gives the possibility of (...) knowing someone or something fully, and not only as an object. Once we accept that our experiences, thoughts, and feelings are not incommunicable, we can arrive at inter-subjective and non-objective moral knowledge which results from our recognition of others as persons and our affective engagement with the world. (shrink)

The present situation in philosophy is paradoxical. On the one hand, thinking men and women all over the world are exclaiming that, while science has made sufficient advance to satisfy all our material needs, what we most need, and must find if we are not to suffer shipwreck, is a new sense of values, a new religious awakening and a new orientation towards life, in short a new philosophy. On the other hand, many professional philosophers are coming to hold the (...) view that philosophy has had its day, or rather that it never in any proper sense had its day, because it is not a rational enterprise but a mistake, an illusion, a farrago of nonsense, “a muddle arising out of the complexities of language.” A new inquiry which goes by the name of Analysis and resembles logic more closely than any other existing discipline is at once to give the quietus to philosophy and to reign in its stead. The modern philosopher cries, with Faustus, “Sweet Analytickes! 'tis thou hast ravished me.” I will not prejudice your minds at the outset by recalling where the study of analysis led the Doctor of Wurtemburg.Those who are thus forthrightly sceptical about philosophy and group themselves under the aegis of analysis are themselves divided into a number of sects. One and all, however, are relentless in exposing the weaknesses of philosophy, zealous in proselytizing and deadly in expounding their new technique which combines scholastic subtlety with modern scientific realism. They represent in fact a modern scholasticism loosely grouped round the dogma: “We pursue logical analysis, but not philosophy,” though, by a curious paradox which demands scrutiny, some of them say: “Philosophy is analysis.”. (shrink)

This collection of eighteen readings provides a basic text for undergraduates taking sociology of science courses. A general survey of articles published between 1961 and 1981, the book is also a useful overview for students taking courses in social and political studies of science; science, technology, and society; and "social issues" components of courses in the environmental sciences, geography, philosophy, and history of science. The editors have organized the book around "the relationship between the subculture of science and the wider (...) culture which surrounds it. Looked at from this perpective, science is primarily a source of knowledge and competence.... Thus to stress its interaction with its context not only highlights these aspects of science which most people find of overriding pragmatic interest, but also raises important basic issues concerning credibility, the distribution of authority in society, and the nature of the interaction between different forms of culture." Essays are grouped in five sections: The Organization of Academic Science: Communication and Control; The Culture of Science; The Interaction of Science and Technology; The Interaction of Science and Society; Science as Expertise. The editors have added a general introduction, part introductions, bibliographical notes, and a lengthy bibliography. Barry Barnes is Lecturer at the Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, and editor of an earlier version of this book, The Sociology of Science, published in the Penguin Sociology Readings series and now out of print. David Edge is Director of The Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh and a joint editor of the journal, Social Studies of Science. (shrink)

The article has two aims: firstly, it provides a holistic account of Zygmunt Bauman’s oeuvre, and secondly, it presents an extensive up-to-date and multilingual bibliography of his published writings. The authors discuss Bauman’s prolificacy, as well as the stylistic, formal and substantive heterogeneity of his work. Taking this into account, they reflect on the curious reception of his oeuvre in the wider disciplinary field of sociology. The bibliography attached to the paper provides the most complete account of Bauman’s writings. Building (...) on previous bibliographies, and drawing on archival research in the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Papers at the University of Leeds, the bibliography spans 63 years from his first publication to his most recent. Many of these papers – both in English and Polish – are presented for the first time in the list of his works. (shrink)

A new formulation of the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) for the existence of God is offered, which avoids a number of commonly raised objections. I argue that we can and should focus on the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe, and show how physics itself provides the probabilities that are needed by the argument. I explain how this formulation avoids a number of common objections, specifically the possibility of deeper physical laws, the multiverse, normalisability, whether God would fine-tune at (...) all, whether the universe is too fine-tuned, and whether the likelihood of God creating a life-permitting universe is inscrutable. (shrink)

Augustine has an argument which goes like this: Belief is assent; Assent is up to us: therefore Belief is up to us. The conclusion is-or was thought to be-a doctrine essential to Christian eschatology. The two premisses come from pagan philosophy. Sections I-II set out the argument and its background. Section III is theological. Section IV looks at the conclusion, with the help of Aristotle, while section V and VI look at the premisses. The last three sections of the paper (...) consider some Stoic views pertinent to premiss , and the reply to those views offered by Alexander of Aphrodisias. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 440-444 [Access article in PDF] Arnd Kerkhecker. Callimachus' Book of Iambi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. xxiv + 334 pp. 5 plates. Cloth, $85.00. The Iambi have been slow to profit from Callimachus' recent popularity, even though our much changed sense of the archaic iambicists, especially Archilochus, makes the collection due for a major reassessment. In Hellenistica Groningana 1 (1993), the Iambi claim scarcely (...) two pages out of two hundred, and in Alan Cameron's iconoclastic Callimachus and His Critics (1995) a bit more than five out of five hundred. Though Callimachean polyeideia cannot be well understood without the Iambi, readers continue to be daunted by these difficult fragments, which in places are little more than a tale told by a diegete, signifying nothing very certain.Now, twenty years after Dee Lister Clayman's fine, short survey of the Iambi, we have not one, but two, book-length readings of the collection. As if the [End Page 440] poet had suddenly risen to sow discord while preaching eunoia, Kerkhecker's formidable Oxford dissertation of 1997 comes to us already in pitched disagreement with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes's Stanford thesis (1995), forthcoming from the University of California Press as Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition. Callimachus would not have it any other way.These rival projects complement each other as well as disagree. Acosta-Hughes accommodates the Greekless reader with translations of the Diegesis and the ten Iambi he discusses; in addressing classicists generally, Kerkhecker provides close guidance to the papyri for nonspecialists. As his title indicates, Acosta-Hughes focuses on aesthetics; Kerkhecker revives J. K. Newman's question, "Do the Iamboi make no moral appeal?" (9). Where Acosta-Hughes reads the collection by thematic groupings, Kerkhecker reads the Iambi in sequence and, importantly, as a single composition in thirteen parts. The operative word in his title is "book." I limit myself below to Kerkhecker's monograph, which provides an indispensable ancilla to and partial updating of Pfeiffer's edition, and which constructs as strong a case as can be imagined, on the current evidence, for the designed unity of the Iambi: "Callimachus is not just collecting and editing his own poems, much like those of others; he is composing with the collection in mind, with a view to the scholarly edition, for the Book" (290).Kerkhecker presents an impressive range of mastery, from papyrology to connoisseurship of a later Aufklärungszeitalter. Wieland, Lessing, Herder, and even Fielding offer a reminder of what was once at stake in debates about art. Kerkhecker writes lucid, lively, and often witty prose that is worthy of his tastes and subject. To counter the current age of theory, he reasserts a reminiscently Enlightenment faith in the text; "social text" and "intertext" join Euhemerus in silence and disgrace. Kerkhecker reads the Iambi as a self-enclosed poetic universe, without relying on speculations about chronology, Ptolemaic patronage, designed correspondence to the Aetia, Horatian imitation, or Cameron's questions about performance. On Greek "poetry books," Cameron and Kerkhecker stand in diametrical opposition. In Kerkhecker's view, Callimachus' book articulates a "new Iambic Spirit" (293) by looking inward: to manners more than morals, to Selbstkritik rather than Zeitkritik, and to self-parody beneath feigned polemic. As in later ages, the mark of such hermetic and self-conscious Buchdichtung is multilayered irony.Reconstructions of Greek poetry books proceed against stiff resistance, but Kerkhecker's monograph securely earns a place on the shelf near Pfeiffer by the rigor and erudition of his interpretation on all levels. Chapters on individual Iambi begin with a reassessment of Pfeiffer's edition based on Kerkhecker's collation of the papyri and with an explanation of Pfeiffer's rationale in combining papyri, quotations, and other evidence. Kerkhecker discusses unpublished readings by Coles, Maas, and Rea, and differs in some sixty places from Pfeiffer, whose authority survives this scrutiny intact. Until the now faded Oxyrhynchus Papyri VII.1011 can be reedited, the reader has a full and fair assessment of how the evidence stands. Kerkhecker forthrightly discloses the extent of his own... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading The Second Sex Sixty Years LaterJulia KristevaTranslated by Timothy HackettPublished in 1949, today The Second Sex is a youthful sixty-year-old woman who has created a scandal, but also a school of thought: She marks a decisive stage in women's liberation and continues to accelerate it.Let's try to place ourselves in that year, 1949: The world has barely dressed its wounds from World War II and onto the scene (...) steps a young French woman—from an aristocratic and Catholic background, enjoying a liberal lifestyle and endowed with philosophical tenacity, pedagogical talents, and contagious style without precedent—who announces to her dumbfounded readers that the second sex is free. To be sure, she immediately issues the following qualification, "the free woman is just being born" (Beauvoir 2010, 751), and this remains the case today. It is, however, already a global phenomenon, one that has not yet finished leaving its effects, since what is at stake is a veritable anthropological revolution: I say "anthropological revolution" for, beyond the freedom of choice with respect to maternity and the right to social, economic, and political equality, what is at stake is a new form of assuring the continuity of the human species along with the bold definition of transcendence as freedom. What becomes of humanity if birth, freedom, and the spectacle are put in the hands of women? Obscurantists, fundamentalists, and puritans of all stripes become alarmed and decry the scandal. If the future is hereby opened up—with all the risks that this entails—does it welcome and offer new possibilities?This anthropological revolution has been in preparation since the beginning of time. The British suffragettes inscribed it in their political agenda and feminist movements after May '68 intended to deepen it. But this revolution [End Page 137] [elle] only became conscious of its magnitude and took the world by storm, thanks to the experience and the pen of Simone de Beauvoir.Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) is already a well-known philosopher and writer by 1949, when she begins to create something of a scandal: she has already published She Came to Stay, Pyrrhus and Cineas, The Blood of Others, Who Shall Die?, All Men Are Mortal, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and America Day By Day. Along with Jean-Paul Sartre and in the wake of the burgeoning (naissant) existentialist movement (whose genesis she would intimately describe in Les Mandarins, 1954), Simone de Beauvoir pursues an experience that is at once personal and political, as well as a philosophical project whose central theme and absolute objective is freedom, which she understands as a form of revolt and non-consent. It remains important to emphasize this today as we begin the third millennium, a time in which freedom, revolt, and non-consent tend to disappear in favor of other concerns that reflect a globalized world: fear, security, adaptation, and integration."Freedom" lies at the heart of the life and the work of the one whom the hostile press disparagingly calls "Sartrean." The freedom of Madame Roland, who acknowledged, "Oh what crimes are committed in thy name," is the same freedom whose risks Simone de Beauvoir downplays in The Ethics of Ambiguity, a work that denounces the ambivalent fascination with communism found in other existentialists.Freedom nevertheless; above all and at all costs: For Simone de Beauvoir, freedom (elle) remains and will remain the inextinguishable star that has incessantly guided philosophical inquiry since Socrates; inspired the noble heights of Christian thought, particularly in Pascal (who deemed man more noble than the universe that crushes him, for he knows that he dies while the universe doesn't). It is the same freedom that fueled the rebellious bodies and spirits of the Enlightenment; that forged the style of great European literature; it is the same freedom that animates Hegel's dialectic and even modern phenomenology, which existentialism takes as its support. So many references and experiences resonate in the work of this forty-year-old author as she sets out to write The Second Sex.Her first novels recount the relentless struggles that women undergo (jealousy, abandonment, solitude, violence, various injustices) in order to extricate themselves from their... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Knowing the EastPatti M. MarxsenKnowing the East. By Paul Claudel. Translated by James Lawler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 136 pp.Fifty years after his death, Paul Claudel (1868–1955) is remembered for many things. Not only was he a major twentieth-century poet and playwright, he was an astute observer of Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese art. Not only was he the brother of sculptor Camille Claudel, he was a (...) diplomat who lived for nearly twenty years in Asia, including a stint as the French ambassador to Japan (1921–1927). When he was elected as a member of the Académie Française in 1946 at nearly 80 years of age he quipped, "For an academic, that is puberty." He died at 87, having lived large in two centuries and on three continents.Following an adolescence marked with indifference toward religion, Claudel experienced a profound conversion to Catholicism during a Christmas night service at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris at the age of 18. With Christianity at the center of his universe and under the influence of Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Mallarmé, he developed a response to the world that was at once poetic and spiritual. Through his poetry, plays, and essays, he insisted on a fundamental unity between matter and spirit, a harmonious and vast universe into which the human mind could enter. And, at least for him, the point of entry was the portal of the Church. He struggled at times, but never lost sight of his faith. For all this, he is often credited with the revival of French Catholicism in the wake of WWI. After all, if Paul Claudel could take religion seriously and find meaning in it, pourquoi pas the rest of us?The facts of his extraordinary biography form a peculiar background to the recent translation by James Lawler of Claudel's collection of prose poems titled Knowing [End Page 229] the East. First published in 1946 as Connaissance de l'est, these sixty-one texts were written between 1895 and 1905 during Claudel's first visits to China and Japan as a young vice-consul stationed in Shanghai. He was twenty-six and still finding his poetic voice. And though his stance in the world is decidedly Christian, the content of this intriguing work reveals an inner dialogue with Buddhist ideas of interconnection, harmony, the ongoing quest for a higher life condition, and the overwhelming impact of nature in the lives of mere humans.In "Pagoda," Claudel describes a seven-story Chinese pagoda as it "amplifies and multiplies the roof, exaggerates the horned corners that rise with an elegant surge, and turns their curves upward to the sky." This form that "does away with walls" and concentrates on the uplifting roof creates a space where "Buddha, Prince of Peace, dwells inside with all the gods." In this architecture he reads a structuring of physical and spiritual space, a kind of never ending upward movement divided into "the seven mystical heavens." The culminating effect is the heavenly achievement of the unknowable. And so, after going as far as he can go into the world of the spirit, he ends this prose poem with an abrupt return to temporal reality. "I have no more to say of the Pagoda. I do not know its name."Elsewhere, in "The Wanderer," he turns his sense of awe toward nature. "Every tree has its personality, every small beast its role, every voice its part in the symphony," he writes. "As one understands music, so I understand nature, like a detailed narrative of proper names; as my walk and the day advance, so does the elaboration of the doctrine." The "doctrine," it seems, is the idea of dependent origination, the interrelation of all life that springs from a single source. In the last line, he states, "I understand the world's harmony. When will I grasp its melody?"In "The Temple of Consciousness" Claudel climbs "the black rock's vertical wall, and only at this late afternoon hour do I know myself to be on the right track." Below, he observes golden rice fields. Ahead there is an "old stairway overlaid with hoary moss... (shrink)

"This book explores the ethical implications of using armed contractors, taking a consequentialist approach to this multidisciplinary debate. While privatization is not a new concept for the U.S. military, the public debate on military privatization is limited to legal, financial, and pragmatic concerns. Missing is a critical assessment of the ethical dimensions of military privatization in general; more specifically, in light of the increased reliance upon armed contractors, it must be asked whether it is morally permissible for governments to employ (...) them at all. To this end, this book explores four areas that highlight the ethical implications of using armed contractors: how armed contractors are distinct from soldiers and mercenaries; the commodification of force; the belligerent equality of combatants; and the impact of armed contractors on the professional military. While some take an absolutist position, wanting to bar the use of private military altogether, this book reveals how these absolutist arguments are problematic and highlights that there are circumstances where turning to private force may be the only option. Recognising that outsourcing force will continue, this book thus proposes some changes to account for the problems of commodification, belligerent equality, and the challenge to the military profession. This book will be of interest to students of private security, military studies, ethics, security studies and IR in general."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Zeno's extraordinary and disturbing paradoxes, the atomic theories of Democritus that so strikingly anticipate contemporary physics, the enigmatic and haunting epigrams of Heraclitus - these are just some of the riches to be found in this collection of writings of the early Greek philosophers. Jonathan Barnes's masterly Introduction shows how the most skilled detective work is often needed to reconstruct the ideas of these thinkers from the surviving fragments of their work. But the effort is always worth while. In (...) forging the first truly scientific vocabulary and offering rational arguments for their views, the pre-Socratics were doing something new and profoundly important; they also posed the questions that have remained at the centre of philosophy to this day. (shrink)

This papyrus was acquired, with some others, for the Egypt Exploration Society in 1914 at Medînet-el-Faiyûm by Dr. John Johnson. It consists of five large pieces; of these four join and together measure 37 × 24·5 cm.; they contain remains of three adjacent columns. Another piece measures 5 × 13·5 cm., and a small unplaced scrap 4·5 × 3·7 cm. The writing of the recto, which runs along the fibres, is large, regular, rounded, and clear, but not elegant; I would (...) assign it to the second century B.C. The verso was written across the fibres; the hand may be the same, but seems more cursive; the surface is very damaged and no whole word is legible. A certain irregularity in the spacing of letters and lines suggests that the papyrus was used again for a document. (shrink)

This papyrus was acquired, with some others, for the Egypt Exploration Society in 1914 at Medînet-el-Faiyûm by Dr. John Johnson. It consists of five large pieces; of these four join and together measure 37 × 24·5 cm.; they contain remains of three adjacent columns. Another piece measures 5 × 13·5 cm., and a small unplaced scrap 4·5 × 3·7 cm. The writing of the recto, which runs along the fibres, is large, regular, rounded, and clear, but not elegant; I would (...) assign it to the second century B.C. The verso was written across the fibres; the hand may be the same, but seems more cursive; the surface is very damaged and no whole word is legible. A certain irregularity in the spacing of letters and lines suggests that the papyrus was used again for a document. (shrink)

‘Moral bioenhancement’ refers to the use of pharmaceuticals and other direct brain interventions to enhance ‘moral’ traits such as ‘empathy,’ and alter any ‘morally problematic’ dispositions, such as ‘aggression.’ This is believed to result in improved moral responses. In a recent paper, Tom Douglas considers whether medical interventions of this sort could be “provided as part of the criminal justice system’s response to the commission of crime, and for the purposes of facilitating rehabilitation : 101–122, 2014).” He suggests that they (...) could “at least in some cases, permissibly be provided without valid consent : 101–122, 2014)” as a form of rehabilitative punishment. He argues for this conclusion by ‘parity of reasoning,’ starting from the currently accepted practice of non-consensual incarceration. His argument appears to be dependent on the successful defence of the following two claims: that non-consensual incarceration is a morally justifiable practice, and that there is no meaningful distinction between the forcible imposition of this practice, and the forcible imposition of medical interventions on prisoners. From both claims, he deduces : if non-consensual incarceration is morally justifiable, so is the non-consensual imposition of medical correctives, in some cases. In this paper, I begin by suggesting that the basic argument behind the Parity Claim results in a reductio ad absurdum, whereby any practice that is sufficiently similar to incarceration in the ways Douglas presents, would also be considered permissible. This appears to be an unpalatable conclusion, casting doubt on the soundness of a key premise. Douglas appears to offer no means of deciding which practices are sufficiently similar to incarceration in terms of harm and threat to agency, and of the practices that I will present, which do seem to be, it does not seem that he could rule them out in any principled way. Next I turn to dispute claim relating to the purported justifiability of incarceration on rehabilitative grounds. If successful, this attack causes a break in reasoning from the justifiability of incarceration, to the justifiability of medical interventions. Medical interventions would then require an alternative, independent justification, through outlining the ways in which they are conducive to a particular aim of punishment, without relying on the justifiability of incarceration. This argument has not been provided, and I suggest that attempts to do so may run into difficulty. I untangle and make explicit the various assumptions made in Douglas’ contention that medical interventions “might be thought conducive to rehabilitation in some offenders,” locating my critique in the wider debate on the causes of crime. Finally, I seek to challenge the normative weight of the Parity Claim, arguing that to show that two practices are comparable in some sense is not sufficient to show that both are equally as permissible. Other social purposes must be considered, leading me to suggest that the forcible imposition medical correctives falls beyond the appropriate remit of the criminal justice system. (shrink)

Sarah Kofman, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and the author of over twenty books, was one of the most significant postwar thinkers in France. Kofman's scholarship was wide-ranging and included work on Freud and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, feminism and the role of women in Western philosophy, visual art, and literature. The child of Polish Jewish immigrants who lost her father in the Holocaust, she also was interested in Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially as reflected in works of literature and (...) philosophy. This book is an anthology of some of Kofman's most significant writings on these and other topics. Its purpose is to provide a general introduction to Kofman's thought, which has been highly influential in both Europe and America. Although some of the selections have been published previously, the majority of the books contents appear in English translation for the first time. (shrink)

Trenton Merricks argues that we need propositions to serve as the premises and conclusions of modally valid arguments (Merricks 2015). A modally valid argument is an argument in which, necessarily, if the premises are true, then the conclusion is also true. According to Mer- ricks, the premises and conclusions of modally valid arguments have their truth conditions essentially, and they exist necessarily. Sentences do not satisfy these conditions. Thus, we need propositions. Merricks’ argument adds a new chapter to the longstanding (...) debate over the exis- tence of propositions. However, I argue that Merricks’ argument does not quite succeed. Merricks has overlooked one viable alternative to pos- tulating propositions. However, this alternative employs the relation of being true-at-a-world, which is difficult to analyze. Thus, the soundness of Merricks’ argument ultimately depends on the comparative merits of accepting propositions as abstract entities, versus accepting truth-at-a- world as an unanalyzed relation between sentences and possible worlds. (shrink)

The Hero Takes a Walk is a philosophical memoir of a Philippine childhood and teenage years in the sixties and the first few years of the seventies. Two chapter extracts are presented here: the first on Beatlemania and what it meant to Filipinos, a cosmopolitanism they desired and sought to practice; the second, on the reception of Marxism in the Maoist version promulgated under the influence of Jose Maria Sison. The first raises its central question while telling the story of (...) the Beatles’ visit in 1966, when they were chased out of the country, an account drawing on neglected local reports. The second remembers how Marxism-Maoism, like any theory, was interpreted against the background of pre-existing belief – in this case, Philippine Catholicism. In his memoir, the author looks back critically on the intellectual movements that deeply affected him, on certain books and writing and his reception of the films and popular music of the time. The Hero Takes a Walk diverges at various points into literary criticism and history, before coming to an end in present-day Greater Manila. (shrink)

The 2018 Varsity Medical Ethics debate convened upon the motion: “This house believes that the constant monitoring of our health does more harm than good”. This annual debate between students from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge is now in its tenth year. This year’s debate was hosted at the Oxford Union on 8th of February 2018, with Oxford winning for the Opposition, and was the catalyst for the collation and expansion of ideas in this paper.New technological devices have the (...) potential to enhance patient autonomy, improve patient safety, simplify the management of chronic diseases, increase connectivity between patients and healthcare professionals and assist individuals to make lifestyle changes to improve their health. However, these are pitted against an encroachment of technology medicalising the individual and home, an exacerbation of health inequalities, a risk to the security of patient data, an alteration of the doctor-patient relationship dynamic and an infringement on individual self-identity. This paper will draw upon and develop these concepts, while contending arguments for and against constant health monitoring. This is not a review of medical devices and health monitoring, but a reflective development and more detailed elaboration of the main points highlighted in the 2018 Varsity Medical Ethics debate. (shrink)

The quantitative problem of old evidence is the problem of how to measure the degree to which e confirms h for agent A at time t when A regards e as justified at t. Existing attempts to solve this problem have applied the e-difference approach, which compares A's probability for h at t with what probability A would assign h if A did not regard e as justified at t. The quantitative problem has been widely regarded as unsolvable primarily on (...) the grounds that the e-difference approach suffers from intractable problems. Various philosophers have proposed that 'Bayesianism' should be rejected as a research strategy in confirmation theory in part because of the unsolvability of this problem. I develop a version of the e-difference approach which overcomes these problems and possesses various advantages (but also certain limitations). I develop an alternative 'theistic' approach which handles many cases that my development of the e-difference approach does not handle. I conclude with an assessment of the significance of the quantitative problem for Bayesianism and argue that this problem is misunderstood in so far as it is regarded as unsolvable, and in so far as it is regarded as a problem only for Bayesians. (shrink)

The Introduction to philosophy written by Porphyry at the end of the second century AD is the most successful work of its kind ever to have been published. Porphyry's aim was modest, but he gave highly influential treatments of a number of perennial philosophical questions. Jonathan Barnes presents a complete new English translation, preceded by a substantial introduction and followed by an invaluable commentary, the first to be published in English and the fullest for a century, whose primary aim (...) is to analyse and assess the philosophical theses and arguments which the Introduction puts forward. (shrink)

In both academic literature and the media, financial conflicts of interest in human subjects research have come center-stage. The cover of a recent edition of Time magazine features a research subject in a cage with the caption human guinea pigs, signifying perhaps that human research subjects are no more protected from research abuses than are laboratory animals. That magazine issue highlights three well-publicized cases of human subjects research violations that occurred at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Pennsylvania, and (...) Johns Hopkins University.At St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a study that was co-sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center investigated an experimental vaccine for malignant melanoma. In that case, the chair of the university's institutional review board — the committee within each medical institution charged with ethics review of human research projects undertaken at that institution — and the dean of the University's College of Medicine allegedly concealed from both the IRB and the United States Food and Drug Administration a report by an outside consulting firm that had found severe deficiencies with the melanoma vaccine study being conducted at the medical center. (shrink)

-/- Hate speech is a concept that many people find intuitively easy to grasp, while at the same time many others deny it is even a coherent concept. A majority of developed, democratic nations have enacted hate speech legislation—with the contemporary United States being a notable outlier—and so implicitly maintain that it is coherent, and that its conceptual lines can be drawn distinctly enough. Nonetheless, the concept of hate speech does indeed raise many difficult questions: What does the ‘hate’ in (...) hate speech refer to? Can hate speech be directed at dominant groups, or is it by definition targeted at oppressed or marginalized communities? Is hate speech always ‘speech’? What is the harm or harms of hate speech? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what can or should be done to counteract hate speech? -/- In part because of these complexities, hate speech has spawned a vast and interdisciplinary literature. Legal scholars, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, and other academics have each approached the topic with exceeding interest. In this current article, however, we cannot hope to cover how these many disciplines have engaged with the concept of hate speech. Here, we will focus most explicitly on how hate speech has been taken up within philosophy, with particular emphasis on issues such as: how to define hate speech; what are the plausible harms of hate speech; how an account of hate speech might include both overt expressions of hate (e.g., the vitriolic use of slurs) as well as more covert, implicit utterances (e.g., dogwhistles); the relationship between hate speech and silencing; and what might we do to counteract hate speech. (shrink)

Knowledge can be transmitted by a valid deductive inference. If I know that p, and I know that if p then q, then I can infer that q, and I can thereby come to know that q. What feature of a valid deductive inference enables it to transmit knowledge? In some cases, it is a proof of validity that grounds the transmission of knowledge. If the subject can prove that her inference follows a valid rule, then her inference transmits knowledge. (...) However, this only pushes the question back to the inference that was made in this proof. What feature of that inference enables it to transmit knowledge? A vicious regress looms here. Every proof requires a valid inference, and every valid inference must follow at least one rule of inference. So every proof must follow at least one rule of inference. Therefore not every valid inference that transmits knowledge can acquire this power through a proof, on pain of vicious infinite regress. So it must be possible to transmit knowledge by making an inference that follows an underived rule. A deductive inference that follows an underived rule is what I will call a basic deductive inference. It must be possible to transmit knowledge by making a basic deductive inference. But how is this possible? What feature of a basic deductive inference gives it this power to transmit knowledge? (shrink)

Miguel Díaz has succeeded quite well not only in providing support for popular Hispanic religion through an analysis of ideas from Karl Rahner, but skillfully meets several possible objections or alternatives. Nonetheless, the more sophisticated forms of Hispanic theology must also be sustained, if only to address adequately the transcendental atheism that the current and subsequent generation of Latino/a college students will encounter.

The subject of this dissertation is the entitlement to modal beliefs, such as the belief that a proposition is necessarily true, or the belief that a proposition is possibly true. My thesis is that the entitlement to modal beliefs has two dimensions, one active and one passive. In the active dimension, someone is entitled to a modal belief just in case he has conducted the appropriate thought experiments. In the passive dimension, someone is entitled to a modal belief just in (...) case the belief fits his evidence, which is constituted by the conceivability or inconceivability of the proposition in question. Thus, my principal contention is that conducting thought experiments, and taking conceivability as evidence of possibility, is both necessary and sufficient for entitled modal belief. Insofar as these methods are a priori, this implies that our entitlement to our modal beliefs is always partially a priori. ;I begin by clarifying the fundamental concepts of entitlement, modality, and apriority. Then I proceed to state and defend a two-dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori. According to such an account, our entitlement to every necessary a posteriori truth is achieved by an a priori deduction from two or more claims, at least one of which is a priori. The a priori dimension of this entitlement involves the very same methods and sources of entitlement as other modal beliefs---thought experiments and states of conceivability or inconceivability. I go on to defend thought experiments and conceivability against skeptical attacks. Much of the criticism of thought experiments turns on a refusal to countenance the relevant sort of modality. However, I defend this sort of modality in an opening chapter of the dissertation. Much skepticism about the epistemic value of conceivability is founded on an illicit demand for a noncircular demonstration of its reliability. However, if universally accepted, this demand would undercut the evidence of the senses as well. Other objections to conceivability are also considered and found wanting. In conclusion, I argue against conventionalism about modality, and defend a form of rationalism in modal epistemology. (shrink)

Perhaps Butler is too dismissive of the emancipatory potential of the liberal tradition and could do more to show how mania and the “fiction” of a relational self can be mobilized to turn violent self-preservation into nonviolent, collective-self-preservation. Nevertheless, her call to build a radically egalitarian world—based on the commitment to a daily practice of deidentifying with even our deepest convictions if they problematize viewing any life as anything less than incalculably valuable—invokes the sublime, nonviolent force of Mandela, King, and (...) Gandhi. Butler does all this in a manner capable of grappling with the multiple, competing streams in popular discourse that have led to such voices losing status as the wisest, most radical, and pragmatic life affirmations in the history of our species. The ability to hold up the nonviolent beacon of humanity to the best postmodern scrutiny marks Butler’s latest book as an essential message for our shared human community, standing, as we do, at the precipice where boundless life-affirmation meets unimaginable destructiveness. (shrink)

James Beattie was appointed professor of moral philosophy and logic at Marischal College, Aberdeen, Scotland at the age of twenty-five. Though more fond of poetry than philosophy, he became part of the Scottish 'Common Sense' school of philosophy that included Thomas Reid and George Campbell. In 1770 Beattie published the work for which he is best known, An Essay on Truth, an abrasive attack on 'modern scepticism' in general, and on David Hume in particular, subsequently and despite Beattie's attack, Scotland's (...) most famous philosopher. The Essay was a great success, earning its author an honorary degree from Oxford and an audience with George III. Samuel Johnson declared in 1772 that 'We all love Beattie'. Hume, on the other hand, described the Essay as 'a horrible large lie in octavo', and dismissed its author as a 'bigotted silly Fellow'. Although Beattie is no match for Hume as a philosopher, the success of the Essay suggests that, unlike Hume, Beattie voices the characteristic assumptions, and anxieties, of his age. The first part of this selection—the first ever made from Beattie's prose writings—includes several key chapters from the Essay on Truth, along with extracts from all of Beattie's other works on moral philosophy. The topics treated include memory, the existence of God, the nature of virtue, and slavery. The second part of the selection is devoted to Beattie's contributions to literary criticism and aesthetics. Beattie's studies of poetry, music, taste, and the sublime are vital to the understanding of the literary culture out of which developed the early Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge. (shrink)

In Stages of Thought, Michael Barnes examines a pattern of cognitive development that has evolved over thousands of years--a pattern manifest in both science and religion. He describes how the major world cultures built upon our natural human language skills to add literacy, logic, and, now, a highly critical self-awareness. In tracing the histories of both scientific and religious thought, Barnes shows why we think the way that we do today. Although religious and scientific modes of thought are (...) often portrayed as contradictory-one is highly rational while the other appeals to tradition and faith-Barnes argues that they evolved together and are actually complementary. Using the developmental thought of Piaget, he argues that cultures develop like individuals in that both learn easier cognitive skills first and master the harder ones later. This is especially true, says Barnes, because the harder ones often require first the creation of cognitive technology like writing or formal logic as well as the creation of social institutions that teach and sustain those skills. Barnes goes on to delineate the successive stages of the co-evolution of religious and scientific thought in the West, from the preliterate cultures of antiquity up to the present time. Along the way, he covers topics such as the impact of literacy on human modes of thought; the development of formalized logic and philosophical reflections; the emergence of an explicitly rational science; the birth of formal theologies; and, more recently, the growth of modern empirical science. This groundbreaking book offers a thorough and persuasive argument in favor of the development of modes of thought across cultures. It will serve as an invaluable resource for historians of religion, philosophers and historians of science, and anyone interested in the relationship between religion and science. (shrink)

In Information Systems development, resilience has often been treated as a non-functional requirement and little or no work is aimed at building resilience in end-users through systems development. The question of how values and resilience (for the end-user) can be incorporated into the design of systems is an on-going research activity in user-centered design. In this paper we evaluate the relation of values and resilience within the context of an ongoing software development project and contribute a formal model of co-design (...) based on a significant extension of Abstract Design Theory. The formal analysis provides a full and clear-cut definition of the co-design space, its objectives and processes. On the basis of both, we provide an abstract definition of resilient system (for the end-user). We conclude that value-sensitive co-design enforces better resilience in end-users. (shrink)

Life can be awful. For this to be the stuff of tragedy and not farce, we require a capacity to be more than we presently are. Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, poses a challenge to this commitment of ethics in his commentary on the instability of memory. But Barnes leads us past this difficulty by showing us that Tony’s real problem is his inability to make sense of himself—a failure of (...) self-knowledge. Tony’s past is tangled up with others he can scarcely see as people. Let us hope we can do better. (shrink)