Le présent article vise à éclairer la nature des activités perceptives et cognitives attribuées au νοῦς d’Anaxagore, en particulier à lever les difficultés liées à l'évaluation de la part des dimensions mécaniques, cognitives et téléologiques dans l'activité du νοῦς cosmique, par une comparaison avec l'usage des verbes γιγνώσκω, νοέω et du substantif νοῦς dans le contexte du champ de bataille homérique. Les rangeurs d'hommes homériques partagent avec le νοῦς d'Anaxagore une description de leurs activités en termes de tri, d'extraction et (...) de mise en ordre, par l'usage commun des verbes διακρίνω, ἀποκρίνω, διακοσμέω. Or l'analyse des opérations perceptives et cognitives de ceux-là révèle un modèle d'action immanente, liant la perception des singularités au sein de touts complexes et mouvants à l'appréhension globale des positions passées, présentes et possibles des troupes en action. Pensé sur ce modèle, le νοῦς d'Anaxagore sera conçu selon un modèle de perception par immersion dont sa nature physique très particulière le rend capable : c'est en faisant intégralement corps avec le mélange matériel que le νοῦς se rend capable d'en faire le tri et d'en anticiper les états possibles. L'illimitation de sa connaissance et de son pouvoir a néanmoins une conséquence qui le différencie du chef homérique : n'avoir aucun choix du fait de la puissance de réaliser toutes les différenciations possibles. (shrink)

Sophists’ apologia. -/- Sophists were the first paid teachers ever. These ancient Greek enlighteners taught wisdom. Protagoras, Antiphon, Prodicus, Hippias, Lykophron are most famous ones. Sophists views and concerns made a unified encyclopedic system aimed at teaching common wisdom, virtue, management and public speaking. Of the contemporary “enlighters”, Deil Carnegy’s educational work seems to be the most similar to sophism. Sophists were the first intellectuals – their trade was to sell knowledge. They introduced a new type of teacher-student relationship – (...) the mutually beneficial communication on equal terms. They taught pupils how to think independently and how to persuade others, which was inseparably connected with the rise of democracy in the most advanced Greek polices. Sophists were the first to proclaim that all people are naturally equal. They put forward the idea of natural rights and social contract, working out the fundamentals of the present-day law. In addition, they developed the basics of philology, psychology, logic, and gave a scientific explanation to the origins of religions. They embodied definite positive ideals of their epoch. Sophistry flourished in the second half of the Vth through he first third of the IVth centuries B. C. The period coincides with the heyday of the entire Greek history – the so called Greek Miracle epoch. Sophists expressed some present-day concepts of Ancient Greek ideology and mentality, characteristic of its Golden Age times. The Ancient Athens of the times of Periclus were similar to the Florence of Renaissance as to the type of social structure. That is why (?) the art of eloquence (public speaking) was highly respected in Florence. The two cities had a lot of features of the present-day capitalist society, which was due to their role as the main centres of industry of their “worlds-economies”. During the subsequent Hellenic period, the Old Order was restored, based on the feudal rent recipients’ rule. The degradation of society resulted in the decline of sophistry. Sophistry represents the highest point in the evolution of Greek philosophy. It is also the most prominent school as to the novelty of its ideas. That was owing to the common propensity for innovation typical of Periclus’ Golden Age, which in its turn resulted from the establishment of the individualistic and rationalistic thinking similar to present-day mentality. Among other aspects, close attention was paid to ethnic issues; some humanistic ideas such as Master and Servant ethics and Enlightment as the primary condition of man’s freedom, received scientific grounding. The genre of philosophical dialogue was developed, as well as the rationalistic scientific gnoceology, aimed at consistently opposing any religion. Dialectics, the most outstanding achievement of the Antiquity, was also worked out by the sophists. Zeno of Helleas was one of the sophists. Democrites’ ideas were, too, quite close to dialectics. Socrates’ contemporaries regarded him ironically, as shown, for example, in the Aristophanes’ comedy “Clouds”. Nevertheless, this scholar can still be referred to as a sophist, although of somewhat weird personality. Socrates’ popularity, which came later, should be attributed to the fact that he was the first philosopher ever to have been sentenced and executed by law, rather than to any valuable scientific contributions. Sophistry as such, rather than Socrates, marks the line between pre-Socratic and post- Socratic schools. Plato, with the exception of his latest works, is considered to belong to the same philosophical school. Specifically, there are valid reasons to believe that he was paid fees by his disciples. In Plato’s Dialogues, all points of view will be proven and then disproved, so that an integral philosophical system is hard to observe. Plato’s “Idealism” is but one of the many possible theories. His ideal philosophy is a high-minded argument of wise men. As late as towards the end of his life, Plato betrayed the ideals of sophistry, turning into the world’s first proponent of totalitarianism. Sophistry is Greek classical literature. Later on, philosophy, as well as the entire Greek civilization, started to fall into decline. Over 500 subsequent years, Hellenistic-Roman scholars never came up with anything novel. The entire process of antique philosophical evolution can be subdivided into the following six stages: Phoenician (IX–VIIth centuries B. C.), archaic (VIth – the first half of IVth century B. C., classic (the epoch of sophistry: the second half of the Vth through the first decades of the IIIrd centuries B. C.), late antique (middle of the IIIrd – first decades of the VI th centuries B.C.) The fact that early in the VIth century B. C. sophistry was rejected in Athens, has a lot to do with the consequences of their defeat in Peloponnesian war, a social catastrophe. Ever since, the prevalent part of the criticism of sophistry is a criticism of sophists’ immoral ways of life and personalities, rather than the essentials of their philosophy. For instance, Aristotle’s criticism primarily concerns their pragmatism and tendency to make a profit out of teaching. However, Aristotle himself taught his disciples along similar lines, showing them how to “be able to prove both opposites”. It was Aristotle who summed up sophists’ century-long elaborations. The traditional modern interpretation of sophists as shown in Plato’s dialogues appears to be groundless. The truth of the matter is that Plato regards sophists as more serious philosophers than Socrates was. It becomes especially clear in the dialogue titled “Protagoras”, which shows the latter as gaining an undoubted victory over Socrates. Generally speaking, Plato’s works never regard sophists as weak or worthless opponents. A common opinion as to the essence of sophists’, in particular, Protagoras’s philosophy, has hitherto not been worked out. Many researchers renounce the very existence of any specific philosophical position in sophistry. The term “relativism” itself now has a bad name. However, it should be borne in mind that Protagoras doctrine emerged as a result of an attempt to get out of the ontological dead-end to which the entire Greek natural philosophy had come. To this purpose, he employed Anaxagoras’s idea about everything comprising everything, whereupon he built his physical-ontological theory, and Zeno of Helleas’s concept that all objects are such and different at the same time in the same respect. According to Protagoras’s philosophy, every object does not only seem, but is different from every other object, including human beings. Therefore, every person is his or her own measure of all other entities. The objective reality is the Ego’s relations with the outer world. Every object’s essence is defined through its interaction with ourselves. Nothing remains stagnant – every existence already contains non-existence, and vice-versa. However, the relativity of being is not to be regarded as absolute. That means, that relatively stable and therefore relatively cognizable entities do exist, among them the words we say. Doubt is not considered absolute by relativists either, which differentiates them from skeptics and agnostics. They dare to believe. Uncertainty is Godly – here, Protagoras becomes very close to the concept of apathetic theology. Gorgius shared Protagoras’s views and tried to prove them applying the same method as Zeno applied when upholding Parmenidis’s philosophy. He argued that if one accepts the opposite point of view and agrees that nothing can exist and not exist at the same time, one is bound to come to an the absurd conclusion that nothing is cognizable and nothing exists. To prove that there is a universal contradiction within the Existence itself, Protagoras and his followers in their turn put forward a number of special logical arguments, called rules of contraries, or sophisms. The most well-known of them is the Euathle’s sophism, which proves that an object can be such and different at the same time in the same respect. Generally speaking, all relationships of any entity are extraneous. The idea that all entities, including concepts, exist and do not exist at the same time, was also accepted by Plato. It should be stressed, that Plato’s philosophy as a whole is relativists’ greatest achievement. In his dispute against relativism, Aristotle put forward the main concepts of his ontology: the existence falls into the existence in possibility and the existence in reality, or substance and accidence – the ever changing “sublunary” world and the stable world of divine heavenly bodies. This division made his system self-contradictory to the point of absurd. Aristotle quite realized, that the direct disproof of relativism is hardly possible, which fact makes his criticism a mere tautology. It is very indicative in this respect that materialists, idealists and even skeptical agnostics applied the same arguments do disprove relativism. That demonstrates that the inner contradiction between any forms of “absolutism” and relativism is the most fundamental philosophical problem. Relativist ideas were repeatedly renewed throughout history, provided the social conditions were favourable. In variations, the concepts were advanced by Tzuan Tsi and ancient Chinese sophists, apostle Paul, Nicolas of Cusa, Galileo, Rene Descartes, G. Berkley, D. Hume, Ch. S. Pierce, E. Mach, A. Bogdanov, F. de Saussure, N. Bore, P. Feuerabend, U. Quain and others. However, no consistent relativist ontological system was developed after Protagoras. Meanwhile, a valid relativist theory could provide a clue to a fuller and more adequate general physical concept of the world, and to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. -/- Relativism as an ontological system of beliefs. -/- The relativist principle of relativity of all that exists is fundamental for the entire system of philosophy. Absolutely everything exists, but, at the same time, no existence is absolute. Anything is possible, but those entities only exist for us with which we interact this way or another, i. e., reality is interaction, “I interact – hence, I exist”. However, an overly close relationship between entities leads to non-existence – in other words, there is a certain existential optimum. For all of us, information, or perceptible heterogeneities, is real. Each of us is the center of a definite system of interactions with the world. If God is an endless Possibility, then the World is but the man’s dialogue with God. However, the ties that bind us with the world are of some definite kind, which predetermines our reality. The principle of relativity constrains itself, as any relativity is relative. On the one hand, that calls forth the Evil – caused by our own weakness. On the other hand, it makes our world relatively stable and cognizable. Generally speaking, the world is what we are. Everybody has an own Universe, but since people are fairly similar, our universes can be regarded as one Universe with common laws and regulations. It is possible for us to change the degree of objects’ existence in relation to ourselves and one another. It is equally important, though, to remain ourselves (keep following our “warrior’s path”). Since everything exists and no existence is absolute, the process of cognition should involve a criticism of everything but never a complete rebuttal of anything. The criterion of verity for any theory then is in its capacity to build itself upon a bigger number of diverse statements than in any other theory. Theoretically, all philosophies should ideally be complementary. The question of what in fact happened is meaningless unless we specify the “we”, the “where” and the “when”. The past can only exist as part of the present. When we change, our past undergoes corresponding qualitative objective changes, all of which are irreversible. The contemporary physics regards all objects of the Universe as existing for one another, which results in absurd conclusions. In fact, only what we interact with, exists. The so called “speed of light in vacuum” c is the maximum speed of direct interaction and direct exchange of signals. Specifically, at the oncoming speed c with a significant blue parallax the gamma-quantum is unable to interact with the matter. When this speed is reached, the gravitational mass of objects in relation to one another becomes equal to zero (imaginary), whereas their inertial mass equals infinity. Further acceleration will bring us into an entirely different Universe. That means that the Universe is an open system, which fact destroys all present-day cosmological models. Anything is possible in this world. Our reality is magic. Every bit of space contains a potentially limitless number of bits of other, however virtual, universes, as well as an infinite number of particles, which are still virtual for us (as postulated by quantum mechanics). In other words, there exists an infinity of different realities. With all the above in mind, the different levels of entities’ existence, in particular, of Life and Reason, should be taken into consideration. For example, to which extent a live system exists in relation to the inanimate forms of being is very indefinite, as what life is has to be determined by living creatures. An even greater compass of levels of existence can be brought about through interaction – that is the core idea of Godel’s theorem. As a result, the range of forms of existence tends towards infinity – the evolution of matter through super-intelligence will bring us up to God’s heights. A more generalized mathematical model of the physical world, including a universal operator of the co-existence of objects, can be developed based on the above considerations. The bonds between objects become weaker owing to 1) a high speed, 2) acceleration, 3) rotation, 4) strong gravity, 5) strong fields of other kinds, 6) the difference of levels of existence , 7) phase shifts. Yet, there always is an existential optimum. Such mathematical model is to operate certain non-transitive algebras. Relativist ontology assumes that the notion of “temperature” is relative, thus making it possible to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In its turn, that will allow for phase shifts. A perpetual motion machine of the second type will become a reality. Rotation could presumably be used to increase inertial and decrease gravitational mass, slowing down the time. An experimental research could shed light on the mentioned effects. (shrink)

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

This is a technical treatise for the scientific-minded readers trying to expand their intellectual horizon beyond the straitjacket of materialism. It is dedicated to those scientists and philosophers who feel there is something more, but struggle with connecting the dots into a more coherent picture supported by a way of seeing that allows us to overcome the present paradigm and yet maintains a scientific and conceptual rigor, without falling into oversimplifications. Most of the topics discussed are unknown even to neuroscientists, (...) biologists, philosophers, and yet are based on the findings published in their own mainstream peer reviewed literature or on deep insights of the scientific, philosophical and spiritual giants of the past. -/- A scientific, philosophical, and spiritual overview of the relationship between science and spirituality, neuroscience and the mystery of consciousness, mind and the nature of reality, evolution and life. A plaidoyer for a science that goes beyond the curve of reason and embraces a new synthesis of knowledge. The overcoming of the limitations of the intellect into an extended vision of ourselves and Nature. A critique of physicalism, the still-dominant doctrine that believes that all reality can be reduced to matter and the laws of physics alone. A review and reassessment of the old and new philosophical and metaphysical ideas which attempts to bring closer Western and Eastern traditions where science, philosophy, consciousness, Spirit and Nature are united in a grand vision that transcends the limited conventional scientific and philosophical paradigm. A possible answer to the questions of purpose and meaning and the future evolution of humankind beyond a conception that posits a priori a purposeless and meaningless universe. A report of the new scientific discoveries of a basal intelligence in cells and plants, on the question if mind is computational, the issue of free will, the mind-body problem, and the so called ‘hard problem of consciousness’. An essay on ancient as modern philosophical conceptions, from the One of Plotinus, the God of Spinoza until the recent revival of panpsychism or the universal consciousness. A journey into quantum physics from the perspective of philosophical idealism and an invitation to adopt new ways of seeing that might help us to transform our present understanding, expanding it into an integral cosmology, with a special emphasis on the spiritual and evolutionary cosmology of the Indian seer Sri Aurobindo. -/- Not just a philosophical and metaphysical meditation but, rather, an appeal to work towards a change of consciousness, a widening of our perspective towards a new way of seeing beyond a purely mechanistic worldview to avoid a social, environmental and economic collapse. Humans are transitional beings that will have to make a choice: relapse into a pre-rational state or evolve towards a new trans-rational species supported by an ideal of human unity in diversity as the expression of a spiritual evolutionary process, the call of the Spirit on Nature. (shrink)

Shaffer takes a tour of some perennial questions in this lucid and simply written primer. How do I know I am not dreaming? How does reality differ from a dream? How can we be certain of our knowledge? Varying viewpoints are briefly summarized. The fallibilist view that even a priori mathematical truths and first person reports of feelings and perceptions are subject to error is examined, as is the anti-fallibilist reply that the theoretical possibility of error, without actual evidence, is (...) not sufficient to disturb the certainty of certain kinds of knowledge. Our knowledge of the external world is questioned by Berkeleyan idealism, which treats matter as nothing but a perception of our minds, and by phenomenalism, which treats material objects as nothing but collections of sense data. Opposed to these views are causal theories, which view physical objects as existing independently of observers, and sense data as the result of the causal interaction of material objects and particular bodies. It should be noted that the book's format requires such drastic foreshortening of Descartes' and Berkeley's views that its characterization of the former's system as "one of the great achievements in man's intellectual history" is in no way confirmed by the textual references. Other questions discussed in lively fashion are the self ; identity theory ; epiphenomenalism ; and interactionism. Is the mind best defined as the collection of mental events one has during a lifetime? If these events are all connected with the same body, the mind seemingly cannot survive the death of the body. Finally, theistic and atheistic views about the meaning of life are compared, with the Aristotelian view of teleological causation as the common denominator. The book asks many questions, provides few answers, but serves as an enticement to further exploration.--A. T. (shrink)

At Tm. 47e, Timaeus steps back from his discussion of what came about through noûs and turns toward an account of what came about through anankê. Broadie, 2012, Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus, sketches out two routes for the interpretation of this ‘new beginning.’ The ‘metaphysical’ approach uses perceptibles qua imitations of intelligibles in order to glimpse the intelligibles (just as we look at our reflection in a mirror in order to view ourselves). The ‘cosmological’ reading assumes we use (...) the perceptible part of the cosmos in order to come to know the entire cosmos. Broadie openly favors the cosmological reading for understanding the Timeaus as a whole. However, she confines its utility to the Timaeus and does not recommend it for other dialogues. I use Broadie’s ‘cosmological reading’ to better understand what Plato distinguishes as anankê in his second beginning. This sets the stage for my argument that Broadie’s cosmological reading is a promising means for understanding the metaphysics and epistemology of the Forms. By making some comparisons to Sophist (251c–256a), I show that a refined understanding of anankê in the second beginning of the Timaeus clarifies what Plato thinks is involved in coming to know a Form. I argue that a close look at what was available to the Demiurge for cosmic creation by means of noûs yields three distinct ways in which his construction of the cosmos was limited by anankê. Clarifying these three ways in which anankê operates shows that the Demiurge’s manipulation of the foundational elements yields a perceptible world that brings out some potential relationships among Forms while suppressing others. In particular, the Demiurge’s geometricization of the elements leads him to make compromises concerning how Forms can combine in the Receptacle. These choices produce nomological relationships among the Forms with respect to where they can overlap in the Receptacle. This produces the law-like and reliable, but unnecessary, behavior of the perceptible world. I argue that our understanding of these limitations and their translation into where the Receptacle can partake in more than one Form simultaneously, figures importantly in the estimating the potential for human knowledge of the Forms. I question the use of ‘necessity’ as a translation for ‘anankê’ in the Timaeus. (shrink)

Background of the study: Physiotherapists in Nigeria renewed their practicing license annually through the regulatory body and are provided with the professional code of ethics which stipulate the appropriate conduct, behaviour to guild and regulate the practice of their profession however, the level of knowledge, attitude and application of the ethical guidelines by Nigerian physiotherapists need to be investigated. Aim of Study: This study assessed the knowledge, attitude and perception of Nigerian physiotherapists in relation to the ethics of their professional (...) practice. Methodology: The cross-sectional study recruited 117 licenced Physiotherapists working in various health institutions in Nigeria. They were recruited for the study during the 2018 annual scientific conference of clinical and academic physiotherapists in Nigeria. Data on demographic, work experience, knowledge, attitude and perception of ethics of professional practise were obtained using a self-administered questionnaire. Data were summarized using a descriptive statistics of percentage and frequency distribution. Results: All the participants 117 (100%) had copies of code of ethics and oath of professional practise. 74.6% of participants had good knowledge of code of professional ethics while 25.39% had poor knowledge. Only 40.8% (48) of the respondents demonstrated good attitudes toward code of professional ethics. Similarly, only 43.4% (51) of the respondents demonstrated good attitude towards oath of professional practise. 57.0 % of the respondents have heard about ethical misconduct among colleagues while only 13.60% have been involved in ethical misconduct with respect to colleagues or patients. Greater proportion of the respondents (78.2%) considered ethics in physiotherapy as very important while 43.4% supported the introduction of physiotherapy ethics as a course to physiotherapy students in year three of their undergraduate training. Conclusion: Majority of Nigerian physiotherapists have good knowledge of professional code of ethics and oath of professional practise, however, their attitudes towards periodic updating their knowledge on code of ethics and professional oath remain poor. Clinical implication and recommendation: Ethical matter are very important to the practise of physiotherapy, however the poor attitudes of physiotherapy toward updating their knowledge on ethical matters calls for the need for the regulatory body and the professional association to organise seminars and workshops on ethics in physiotherapy and introduce pre-renewal test on ethics before annual licence renewal. (shrink)

Women in North America have many childbirth options. However, they must make these choices within a complex culture of birthing discourse characterized by competing knowledges and claims regarding the “ideal birth” as medicalized, natural, or woman centered. We interviewed 21 childless women and 22 new mothers to explore their perceptions of choice and birthing. The women’s interviews indicated that their birthing choices are reflective of tensions embedded in normative femininity; conflicting ideas relating to purity, dignity, and the messiness of birth; (...) and contradictions about women’s bodies as heteronormative sites of pleasure and sexuality on one hand and of asexual, selfless sources of maternal nurturance on the other. Finally, the women’s views reflected understandings of moral and normative constructs about selflessness as a core attribute of femininity and motherhood, particularly in terms of enduring pain as the “proper” means of accomplishing the rite of passage to motherhood. Although all the women described tensions between femininity and motherhood, childless women were more likely than mothers to be worried about achieving ideal, heteronormative sexuality and femininity. Likewise, women who have not yet had children and women who have experienced unplanned C-sections were more likely than those who experienced vaginal births to express that C-section births fail to fully accomplish women’s rite of passage to motherhood. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Die Vorsokratiker: Ein philosophisches Portrȧt by Thomas BuchheimIstván BodnárThomas Buchheim. Die Vorsokratiker: Ein philosophisches Portrȧt. München: C.H. Beck, 1994. Pp. 262. Paper, DM 48.00.This book is a continuous narrative of highlights of presocratic philosophy. The vista offered by Buchheim is revisionary. The presocratics are behind a curve of the road of the philosophical enterprise. What we usually perceive is a mirage created by the doxographic tradition, emanating ultimately (...) from Aristotle. This much might be uncontroversial: the history of presocratic philosophy has been for the last two centuríes a continuous effort to liberate the remains of those early philosophers from the imputations of later authors. But Buchheim’s project is more ambitious than our ordinary occupation with the presocratics. He postulates a specific, markedly presocratic type of appropriation of the world, and then uses this as a yardstick to elicit a new understanding of the mutilated body of the early texts. Presocratic thought is not theoretical, but rather reactive; it cannot extricate itself from the situation in which it is directed at its object.While some of his discussion is perceptive, the chapters abound in idiosyncratic interpretations. It will suffice to mention only a few of Buchheim’s central claims by way of illustration. Although it has been widely held that Anaximander’s apeiron is not only boundless, but also indefinite, Buchheim’s contention that it should be seen as a disorienting and chaotic matrix which provides no foothold for the discerning and distinguishing mind overshoots the mark. This claim does not mesh well with the allowance in Anaximander that there can be a plurality of simultaneous worlds. There can be a disorienting extension beyond the single cosmos, but several (and as some testimonies would claim, evenly distanced) worlds cannot possibly be separated by a medium which defies the notion of extension altogether.Few will be convinced by Buchheim’s claim that Heraclitus did not formulate a doctrine of opposites because he, coming before Parmenides, could have had only a conception of “counteractive parties in an originally unifying contention” (82), since Heraclitus’ provocative pronouncements would thereby be diluted into mere platitudes. Since Empedocles never calls his rhizömata elements, Buchheim impugns the Empedoclean origin of the four element doctrine. For this he needs to explain away much of the evidence of the fragments. Some of the images Empedocles deploys would suggest a mere juxtaposition of the ingredients, some might indicate some more intimate bond arising between these. As Buchheim aptly notes, the choice in this matter is not obvious. Nevertheless there are places where Buchheim’s interpretation is at a serious disadvantage. Empedocles B8, on the standard reading would rule out the [End Page 521] notion of a phusis (growth, generation) or teleutë- (end, perishing) of any mortal thing, and would allow for the mixιs (mixing) and diallaxιs (separation) of what is mixed together. Immortal things, devoid of generation and perishing by default, are understandably not taken into account here. On Buchheim’s reading, however, Empedoclean rhizömata would be allowed to grow, and hence, by a similar reasoning, to perish.In Chapter 5, Buchheim accuses Aristotle of systematically replacing the dynamically loaded expressions of the ancient atomists, characterizing the ultimate building blocks of nature, with static, geometric idioms. The sole exception where Aristotle does not rob the atomists of this dynamic conception of atomic nature, Buchheim claims, is Physics 8.9 265b23ff. But the uniqueness of the passage rests on Buchheim’s idiosyncratic translation. On the standard interpretation (going back at least to Simplicius) Aristotle asserts only that, according to the atomists, nature performs local motion, and not—as Buchheim would have it—that the nature of the atoms is the very performing of local motion.Contrary to Buchheim’s general characterization of presocratic thought as imbued or integrated with the circumstances of cognition, Anaxagoras’ nous is pure and distinct, not mixed with any other ingredient of the universe. For this reason, Buchheim in his final chapter presents Anaxagoras as a transitional figure between presocratic thought and later, classical metaphysics. The details of this claim, just like the overall characterization of the presocratics, are bound... (shrink)

Bodies of collective knowledge evolve through individual action, like all products that have a use. They also can be evaluated from the engineer's optimizing design perspective. But can individual participants in their making recognize local optimality? Can they work to realize it? Are they unable to act seriosly in a way that would ensure acquisition of a certain suboptimal design feature? One might hope for a simple answer: appeal to innate constraints on the form of categorization. But such constraints cannot (...) wholly pre-empt the need for individual checks and thus for agency. The use of categorial schemes engages facts about the world that do not leap to the eye. They are unlike syntactic or phonological constraints of language, or edge-and orientation-detection algorithms of visual perception. What we should thus be looking for will be modest: constraints, innate or otherwise, that rule out the choice of categorial schemes which are clearly suboptimal and that are, in principle, open to agents' instant observation. We look to a limited if important domain of systematic knowledge: medical diagnostic knowledge. (shrink)

An examination of the earliest creation traditions and symbols of China and their similarities to those of other ancient cultures Reveals the deep parallels between early Chinese words and those of other ancient creation traditions such as the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt Explores the 8 stages of creation in Taoism and the cosmological origins of Chinese ancestor worship, the zodiac, the mandala, and the I Ching Provides further evidence that the cosmology of all ancient cultures arose from a single now-lost (...) source Building on his extensive research into the sacred symbols and creation myths of the Dogon of Africa and those of ancient Egypt, India, and Tibet, Laird Scranton investigates the myths, symbols, and traditions of prehistoric China, providing further evidence that the cosmology of all ancient cultures arose from a single now-lost source. Scranton explores the fundamental similarities between the language that defined ancient Chinese cosmology and that of other creation traditions, revealing the connections between the phonetic structure of the words, their glyphs, and their use. He demonstrates striking parallels between the earliest systems of writing in China and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. He examines the 8 levels of creation in Taoism and the cosmological origins of Chinese ancestor worship, mythical emperors, the zodiac, the mandala, and the I Ching. He details the fundamental principles of land-use in ancient China in relation to the symbolism of a Buddhist stupa and the Dogon granary, ritual shrines that are also the central symbol of other creation traditions. Understanding the true meanings of these symbol complexes also reveals the sophisticated scientific understanding of these ancient cultures, for these creation symbols directly correlate with our modern understanding of atoms and the energetic makeup of matter. In exploring Chinese cosmological traditions, Scranton sheds new light on the contention that the sacred knowledge of the ancients is the legacy of an earlier culture who gave primitive humanity the tools they needed to birth the first known civilizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Tony Palmer, “Music Education and Spirituality: A Philosophical Exploration II”Lenia SerghiMy response to Anthony Palmer's paper on "Music Education and Spirituality" consists of certain thoughts and relevant literature aiming to support the ideas presented in the paper from a different perspective.Exploring spirituality and music education Palmer examines (a) the Santiago Theory of Cognition, which acts as a connection between cognition and the process of life, (b) why (...) music education can benefit from ideas of spirituality, and (c) music education and the paths that might be traveled to bring a higher level of consciousness to students, including special attention to process and product.My comments and thoughts derive from ancient Greek Philosophy and mainly the ideas of Aristotle on organic nature and the living being, as well as the ideas of more recent philosophers and educationists like Robert Ulich on self-transcendence. These ideas, I believe, support Palmer's paper in relation to music education processes.The Structure of the Living BeingAccording to Huberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the theoretical biologists who originated the Santiago Theory of Cognition,The perturbation of the environment does not determine what happens to the living being; rather it is the structure of the living being that determines what change occurs in it. This interaction is not instructive, for it does not determine what its effects are going to be.... The changes that result from the interaction between the living being and its environment are brought about by the disturbing agent but determined by the structure of the disturbed system.1The structure of the living being, Soul, Mind, Emotions, and Body are terms that have occupied philosophical thought for centuries.Soul, psyche in philosophical writings of the Greeks such as Aristotle, is a [End Page 216] general term for all those powers which plants and animals possess, but lifeless elements do not. Psyche is therefore of wider range than life (zoe), which is the power of self-maintenance common to plant and animal and is merely the foundation upon which higher physical capacities can be imposed.2Plato in Phaedrus relates soul, Psyche-anima, with motion, kineses. Inanimate objects only move if motion is imparted to them by an outside force. Anything that can move itself on its own initiative we regard it as animate, that is having psyche. This power of moving itself is, indeed, in Plato's words "the essence and definition (ousia kai logos) of soul."3Mind in Greek vocabulary is the word Nous which had been variously used. Anaxagoras and Empedokles had used it to cover all conscious processes. Later philosophers restricted Nous to that intellectual power which, as far as our certain knowledge extends, men alone display.4In the course of time two problems were bound to arise for philosophers: the relation between the soul (psyche) and the body (soma) and the relation between nous in rational beings and psyche. Aristotle's central proposition is that soul and body are aspects of a single substance, standing to one another in relation of form to matter.5Basic matters of Aristotle's psychology are (a) his account of sense- perception, (b) his account of the initiation of movement, and (c) his theory of the operation of Nous in human knowledge.6Aristotle outlines a general theory for the functioning of the senses. Aesthesis (sense) is what we perceive through the senses and these could be images, sounds, flavors, or things touched. Aesthesis consists of the imprints on the mind of the particulars of the world in a variety of ways, whereas Noesis grasps the world of universals.7Emotions and feelings and their relation to the mind were also problems that concerned philosophers. The Greek mystical philosopher, Plotinos, considers feelings of happiness or unhappiness reactions of the soul to its own states of perfection and imperfection. Herbart, one of the founders of modern learning, believes that our emotions and desires result from modifications occurring in our conceptual representations. In other words, feeling is a kind of pre-intellectual or post-intellectual state of mental life. Kant too considers emotion to be related to cognition, although he recognizes the sensuous origin of the... (shrink)

Joel Feinberg : In Memoriam. Preface. Part I: INTRODUCTION TO THE NATURE AND VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1. Joel Feinberg: A Logic Lesson. 2. Plato: "Apology." 3. Bertrand Russell: The Value of Philosophy. PART II: REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 1. The Existence and Nature of God. 1.1 Anselm of Canterbury: The Ontological Argument, from Proslogion. 1.2 Gaunilo of Marmoutiers: On Behalf of the Fool. 1.3 L. Rowe: The Ontological Argument. 1.4 Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Five Ways, from Summa Theologica. 1.5 Samuel (...) Clarke: A Modern Formulation of the Cosmological Argument. 1.6 William L. Rowe: The Cosmological Argument. 1.7 William Paley: The Argument from Design. 1.8 Michael Ruse: The Design Argument. 1.9 David Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2. The Problem of Evil. 2.1 Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Rebellion. 2.2 J. L. Mackie: Evil and Omnipotence. 2.3 Peter van Inwagen: The Argument from Evil. 2.4 Michael Murray and Michael Rea: The Argument from Evil. 2.5 B. C. Johnson: God and the Problem of Evil. 3. Reason and Faith. 3.1 W. K. Clifford: The Ethics of Belief. 3.2 William James: The Will to Believe. 3.3 Kelly James Clark: Without Evidence or Argument. 3.4 Blaise Pascal: The Wager. 3.5 Lawrence Shapiro: Miracles and Justification. 3.6 Simon Blackburn: Infini-Rien. Part III. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: ITS GROUNDS AND LIMITS. 1. Skepticism. 1.1 John Pollock: A Brain in a Vat. 1.2 Michael Huemer: Three Skeptical Arguments. 1.3 Robert Audi: Skepticism. 2. The Nature and Value of Knowledge. 2.1 Plato: Knowledge as Justified True Belief. 2.2 Edmund Gettier: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? 2.3 James Cornman, Keith Lehrer, and George Pappas: An Analysis of Knowledge. 2.4 Gilbert Ryle: Knowing How and Knowing That. 2.5 Plato: "Meno". 2.6 Linda Zagzebski, Epistemic Good and The Good Life. 3. Our Knowledge of the External World. 3.1 Bertrand Russell: Appearance and Reality and the Existence of Matter. 3.2 René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. 3.3 John Locke: The Causal Theory of Perception. 3.4 George Berkeley: Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. 3.5 G. E. Moore: Proof of an External World. 4. The Methods of Science. 4.1 David Hume: An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 4.2 Wesley C. Salmon: An Encounter with David Hume. 4.3 Karl Popper: Science: Conjectures and Refutations. 4.4 Philip Kitcher: Believing Where We Cannot Prove. Part IV: MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE. 1. The Mind-Body Problem. 1.1 Brie Gertler: In Defense of Mind--Body Dualism. 1.2 Frank Jackson: The Qualia Problem. 1.3 David Papineau: The Case for Materialism. 1.4 Paul Churchland: Functionalism and Eliminative Materialism. 2. Can Non-Humans Think? 2.1 Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 2.2 John R. Searle: Minds, Brains, and Programs. 2.3 William G. Lycan: Robots and Minds. 3. Personal Identity and the Survival of Death. 3.1 John Locke: The Prince and the Cobbler. 3.2 Thomas Reid: Of Mr. Locke’s Account of Our Personal Identity. 3.3 David Hume: The Self. 3.4 Derek Parfit: Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons. 3.5 Shelly Kagan: What Matters. 3.6 John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Part V: DETERMINISM, FREE WILL, AND RESPONSIBILITY. 1. Libertarianism: The Case for Free Will and Its Incompatibility with Determinism. 1.1 Roderick M. Chisholm: Human Freedom and the Self. 1.2 Robert Kane: Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes. 2. Hard Determinism: The Case for Determinism and its Incompatibility with Its Incompatibility with Any Important Sense of Free Will. 2.1 James Rachels: The case against Free Will. 2.2 Derk Pereboom: Why We Have No Free Will and Can Live Without It. 3. Compatibilism: The Case for Determinism and Its Compatibility with the Most Important Sense of Free Will. 3.1 David Hume: Of Liberty and Necessity. 3.2 Helen Beebee: Compatibilism and the Ability to do Otherwise. 4. Freedom and Moral Responsibility. 4.1 Galen Strawson: Luck Swallows Everything. 4.2 Harry Frankfurt: Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. 4.3 Thomas Nagel: Moral Luck. 4.4 Susan Wolf: Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. Part VI: MORALITY AND ITS CRITICS. 1. Changes to Morality. 1.1 Joel Feinberg: Psychological Egoism. 1.2 Plato: The Immoralist’s Challenge. 1.3 Friedrich Nietzche: Master and Slave Morality. 1.4 Richard Joyce: The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality. 2. Proposed Standards and Right of Conduct. 2.1 Russ Shafer-Landau: Ethical Subjectivism. 2.2 Mary Midgley: Trying Out One’s New Sword. 2.3 Aristotle: Virtue and the Good Life. 2.4 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. 2.5 Plato: Euthyphro. 2.6 Immanuel Kant: The Good Will and the Categorical Imperative. 2.7 J.S. Mill: Utilitarianism, Chapters 2 and 4. 2.8 W. D. Ross: What Makes Right Acts Right? 2.9 Hilde Lindemann: What Is Feminist Ethics? 3. Ethical Problems. 3.1 Kwame Anthony Appiah: What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? 3.2 Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence and Morality. 3.3 John Harris: The Survival Lottery. 3.4 James Rachels: Active and Passive Euthanasia. 3.5 Mary Anne Warren: The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. 3.6 Don Marquis: Why Abortion Is Immoral. 4. The Meaning of Life. 4.1 Epicurus: Letter to Menoeceus. 4.2 Richard Taylor: The Meaning of Life. 4.3 Richard Kraut: Desire and the Human Good. 4.4 Leo Tolstoy: My Confession. 4.5 Susan Wolf: Happiness and Meaning. 4.6 Thomas Nagel: The Absurd. (shrink)

To determine the role of physical self in body-involving consumption, we explore how body image influences purchasing intention toward hybrid products with body-involving features. In this study, we establish the dual nature of body image: specifically, body image influences intention to purchase via the perception of utilitarian value and symbolic value. Further, we find a competitive mediation in which positive body image (PBI) negatively influences purchase intention (direct effect), while PBI is positively related to purchase intention via utilitarian and symbolic (...) value (indirect effect). This indicates that without the mediation testing of the utilitarian-symbolic framework, the positive influence of body image will be “hidden.” Additionally, the mediated effect of symbolic value is moderated by personal innovativeness toward technology (PITT), suggesting that a consumer’s knowledge of wearables enhances the effect of body image. With the introduction of body image, this paper provides a more comprehensive model to analyze purchase intention with regard to digital products with body-involving features. (shrink)

Photo ID 71252867© Stepan Popov| Dreamstime.com Abstract While Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) has been legalized in Canada since 2016, it still excludes eligibility for persons who have mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition. This temporary exclusion was set to expire on March 17th, 2024, but was set 3 years further back by the Government of Canada to March 17th, 2027. This paper presents a critical appraisal of the case of MAiD for individuals with mental illness as the (...) sole underlying medical condition through the analysis of three ethical theories: principlism, deontology, and utilitarianism. Through evidence and discussion, it will be demonstrated that MAiD, in this context, may be ethically justifiable on the grounds of upholding human rights, protecting dignity, and minimizing suffering. Introduction In June of 2016, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) was legalized in Canada.[1] Throughout the first six years, a temporary exclusion of eligibility for persons suffering solely from mental illness was extended.[2] The exclusion of mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition was set to expire on March 17, 2024.[3] However, on February 1, 2024, just over a month before the set expiration, the Government of Canada once again extended the exclusion, this time setting it back three years to March 17, 2027. There are currently several countries that allow MAiD for mental illness, including Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.[4] Some countries, like Spain,[5] do not give specific guidance, leaving the matter under discussion by ethicists and courts. In these countries, there are specific (although different) requirements for the process; overall, for mental illness, the illness must be verifiable and not simply related to a perception of satisfaction with the length of life. This extension ignited discussion on whether MAiD for persons who have mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition in Canada is ethically acceptable. As a complex, multi-faceted, and interdisciplinary issue, ethicists assessing MAiD must take into account various moral obligations and considerations. This paper analyses MAiD in this context through the application of three ethical theories: principlism, deontology, and utilitarianism. This paper concludes that, based on the current evidence and knowledge of this developing situation, MAiD for persons with mental illness in Canada may be ethically justified on the grounds of upholding human rights, labour obligations, and dignity. Through the exploration of research and discussions, it will be demonstrated that society at large ought to protect liberty and act towards relieving suffering, thereby supporting the potential eligibility of MAiD for persons who have mental illness. Principlism: The Capacity and Ability to Assess and Decide for One’s Own Life Principlism is the application of four principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Principlism supports permitting MAiD for mental illness due to the importance of autonomy in decision-making, equitable and just practices for MAiD assessors, and reducing suffering for patients and their family member(s) and/or friend(s). Carter v. Canada, the Canadian Supreme Court ruling of 2015—which changed Canadian law to allow for MAiD—held that the prohibition of MAiD infringed on Canadians’ right to “life, liberty, and the security of the person.” In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that the criminal prohibition of MAiD violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[6] The Court concluded that the criminal law prohibiting MAiD interfered with people’s autonomy and dignity, which are protected by the rights of liberty and security of the person.[7] The ruling emphasized that Canada’s constitution reflects the fundamental importance of individual autonomy in personal decision-making. Research provides evidence that MAiD improves autonomy: A study among psychiatric patients found that 8 of 48 psychiatric patients said the mere option of accessing MAiD was enough to assess their future options for living wholly.[8] These findings complement a study entailing interviews with 30 adults who have mental illness, which emphasized that the ability to access MAiD allows individuals to analyze their quality of life, envision their desired future, and make decisions accordingly.[9] Although not all participants agreed that mental illness as the only underlying medical condition was appropriate for MAiD eligibility, many participants agreed that patient autonomy in decision-making was paramount and should be respected. However, autonomy as an ethical principle does not immediately grant all persons with mental illness the option to access MAiD. There are multiple eligibility criteria for those who wish to receive MAiD, which still must be approved and assessed. Currently, eligibility criteria for MAiD states that individuals must “give informed consent to receive MAiD, meaning that the person has consented to receiving MAiD after they have received all information needed to make this decision.”[10] Consent requires capability or capacity, which is the ability to understand relevant information, appreciate its potential consequences, and make an informed decision for oneself.[11] Like for many other diseases, disabilities, and conditions, patient capability is determined on a case-by-case basis.[12] Given the stigma surrounding those struggling with mental health, this thorough case-by-case examination of an individual patient’s capability and capacity without prejudice or partiality should lead to equitable and fair treatment. Without appropriate testing, those with mental illness could be wrongly stripped of their decision-making power. Arguments against MAiD for those with mental illness have raised concerns about the potential for individuals to harm themselves and others. A survey of MAiD providers demonstrated that physicians believed that the bereavement experience following MAiD is challenging and profoundly distinct and that bereavement support for all members involved should be required.[13] However, while watching one die (of MAiD) may cause harm to their families, friends, and support system at large, it is also important to recognize that watching someone suffer and struggle through their mental health journey also poses significant harm. Qualitative studies in Ontario, Canada, have interviewed family members of persons with mental illness as a sole medical condition, and interviewees shared that witnessing the illness and its impacts on their close one's lives was a very difficult experience.[14] As it relates to MAiD, participants emphasized that those living with mental illness are in the best position to understand their own pain and suffering and, in turn, make their own decisions about relief.[15] In an interview, a MAiD provider stated that MAiD may provide less suffering and more peace, and that, although it “depends on the family,... usually the family is more prepared and at peace.”[16] On the contrary, a person who has mental illness may perceive choosing MAiD as beneficial to their family member(s) and/or friend(s). Among those who died by MAiD in 2021, 35.7 percent reported that they perceived themselves as a burden on their family and friends.[17] While some authors report their concerns regarding such social burden as a potential driving factor for MAiD requests, others report that there are other additional burdens associated with requesting MAiD that may be financial, societal, and personal.[18] As such, the extension of MAiD eligibility to those with mental illness will likely only allow a small number of people to be granted MAiD.[19] Many others will be diverted to appropriate services and treatments. Patients’ decision to choose MAID noted their ability to make choices about their own care, reflecting the value of autonomy.[20] Although it is difficult to determine what is good for families in individual cases, MAiD presents an option that is both beneficent and non-maleficent. Therefore, these arguments satisfy the principles which do not necessarily conflict with MAiD. Deontology: The Duty to Recognize Vulnerability and Relieve Suffering The argument here begins with the fundamental focus of deontology—that moral duty lies in an action rather than in its consequences. Further discussion is required to analyze the impact of MAiD on healthcare workers. The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) Code of Ethics and Professionalism requires physicians to abide by virtues, commitments, and responsibilities in delivering health care and service.[21] The code states that “a compassionate physician recognizes suffering and vulnerability, … and alleviate[s] the patient’s suffering.”[22] In the context of MAiD for persons with mental illness as a sole underlying medical condition, vulnerabilities could be wide in range. Many Canadians are concerned with the interaction between mental health and other social determinants of health, such as the lack of medical, disability, financial, housing, and social support and resources.[23] As a result, another layer to the ethical issue arises: Does permitting MAiD for mental illness treat the symptoms of the issue rather than the root problem itself (social, economic, and systemic inequities)? Some argue against MAiD, stating that the nation should first focus on developing better quality care and service.[24] Others support MAiD as a potential harm reduction approach, given that most of these unjust conditions require a higher level of long-term structural and public policy overhaul.[25] The CMA Code also calls upon physicians to recognize and alleviate patients’ suffering. Some argue that while physicians and medical professionals do work to relieve suffering, they are trained to do so through a primary care-based diagnose-and-treat approach.[26] Studies that have captured Canadian physicians’ experiences providing MAiD report that, although physicians stated that the work was rewarding, it came with many challenges, including strained relationships with coworkers, increased workload, and inadequate compensation.[27] Physicians report that a part of the problem is that MAiD rules are written by lawyers and experts who are removed from its reality in medical practice. As a result, there is a lack of clarity surrounding practice norms and a lack of support for physicians.[28] Thus, while healthcare practitioners have a duty to relieve patients’ suffering, they should feel adequately trained and supported in doing so. If physicians and healthcare professionals recognize vulnerability and relieve suffering, then they should act accordingly, regardless of potential associations or outcomes. Making persons with mental illness eligible for MAiD ensures that treatment to relieve their suffering is available. However, it is imperative that there are sufficient resources and support available to healthcare professionals to ensure that they feel prepared and supported to provide MAiD, should they wish to do so. Utilitarianism: Minimizing Intolerable Suffering and Dying with Dignity Overall, utilitarianism is largely concerned with the greatest happiness principle—to increase the amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. So far, this paper has analyzed individual, family, and practitioner-based ethical considerations. But if MAiD were to be extended to those with mental illness as a singular underlying medical condition, what implications would this have for the world and society at large? There is a global drive toward authorizing organized ending of life, with an increasing number of countries legalizing MAiD.[29] The medical system is generally seen as a safe and appropriate system to carry out MAiD, especially when suicide and self-harm are regarded as “alternatives.” Yet despite these worldwide efforts, many argue through the theory of utilitarianism that the inability to see long-term consequences renders MAiD a premature solution, particularly for those who are unable or unwilling to seek other forms of potentially healing treatment or for those who may undergo MAiD only for a technological innovation or biomedical advancement to later come along as a potential cure.[30] While it is true that MAiD does not prevent these “premature deaths,” it is also true that it does not claim to.[31] MAiD provides an option to alleviate intolerable suffering. Some individuals with severe mental illness do describe their condition as intolerable suffering. MAiD is seen as an option to minimize suffering. It can also be seen as a way to die with dignity and relief.[32] While predicting outcomes is difficult, extending MAiD eligibility for persons experiencing mental illness does not undermine its ability to end suffering. It allows eligible individuals to take charge of their health, their life, and their future. Conclusion Based on the current evidence, allowing MAiD for persons with mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition presents as an ethically justifiable action. The right to self-determination and fair accessibility demonstrates that there is more harm done by prohibiting MAiD for mental illness than allowing it. Such liberty is a right, and in the context of relieving suffering, it is a duty that healthcare workers must uphold, although the ability to opt out of providing MAiD is well established. Thus, to recognize vulnerability and relieve suffering means to provide methods, such as MAiD, for those deeply impacted by mental illness. These justifications stand at both the individual level and for society at large. Nevertheless, it remains imperative to take an upstream approach that addresses the social determinants of health and aims to prevent mental illness and promote long-term, beneficial social change for those suffering, struggling, and vulnerable in our communities. - [1] Jaro Kotalik and David W. Shannon, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada Key Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 1st ed. 2023., The International Library of Bioethics, 104 (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30002-8. [2] Department of Justice Government of Canada, “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) Law,” February 21, 2024, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html. [3] Health Canada, “Final Report of the Expert Panel on MAiD and Mental Illness,” transparency - other, May 13, 2022, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/corporate/about-health-canada/public-engagement/external-advi sory-bodies/expert-panel-maid-mental-illness/final-report-expert-panel-maid-mental-illness.html. [4] Federal Public Service (FPS) Health Belgium, “Federal Commission for the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia,” n.d., https://consultativebodies.health.belgium.be/en/advisory-and-consultative-bodies/federal-commission- control-and-evaluation-euthanasia.; Government of Netherlands, “Is Euthanasia Allowed in the Netherlands?,” n.d., https://www.government.nl/topics/euthanasia/is-euthanasia-allowed.; “Information on Requesting Euthanasia or Assisted Suicide,” n.d., https://guichet.public.lu/en/citoyens/sante/fin-vie/euthanasie/euthanasie-assistance-suicide.html. [5] Luis Espericueta, First official report on euthanasia in Spain: A comparison with the Canadian and New Zealand experiences, Medicina Clínica (English Edition), Volume 161, Issue 10, 2023, Pages 445-447, ISSN 2387-0206, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medcle.2023.06.021. [6] Government of Canada, “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” March 15, 2021, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/. [7] Supreme Court of Canada, “Carter v. Canada,” Constitutional Law, 2015, https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14637/index.do.; Kotalik and Shannon, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada Key Multidisciplinary Perspectives. [8] Karandeep Sonu Gaind, “What Does ‘Irremediability’ in Mental Illness Mean?,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Revue Canadienne de Psychiatrie 65, no. 9 (September 2020): 604–6, https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743720928656; Lieve Thienpont et al., “Euthanasia Requests, Procedures and Outcomes for 100 Belgian Patients Suffering from Psychiatric Disorders: A Retrospective, Descriptive Study,” BMJ Open 5, no. 7 (July 27, 2015): e007454, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-007454. [9] Hamer Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Walking Alongside: Views of Family Members on Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness as the Sole Underlying Medical Condition,” Qualitative Health Research 33 (September 29, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323231197365. [10] Government of Canada, “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) Law.” [11] Commission sur les soins de fin de vie, “Les conditions de l’admissibilité à l’aide médicale à mourir au Québec: la constance dans l’évolution de la loi concernant les soins de fin de vie,” June 9, 2023, https://csfv.gouv.qc.ca/ fileadmin/docs/autres_rapports/csfv_lcsfv_conditions_ amm_2023-06-29.pdf.; Trudo Lemmens, “When Death Becomes Therapy: Canada’s Troubling Normalization of Health Care Provider Ending of Life,” The American Journal of Bioethics 23, no. 11 (November 2, 2023): 79–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2023.2265265. [12] Justine Dembo, Udo Schuklenk, and Jonathan Reggler, “‘For Their Own Good’: A Response to Popular Arguments Against Permitting Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) Where Mental Illness Is the Sole Underlying Condition,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Revue Canadienne De Psychiatrie 63, no. 7 (July 2018): 451–56, https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743718766055. [13] Konia Trouton et al., “Attitudes and Expectations Regarding Bereavement Support for Patients, Family Members, and Friends: Findings from a Survey of MAID Providers,” British Columbia Medical Journal 62, no. 1 (2020). [14] Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Walking Alongside.” [15] Bastidas-Bilbao et al. [16] Trouton et al., “Attitudes and Expectations Regarding Bereavement Support for Patients, Family Members, and Friends: Findings from a Survey of MAID Providers,” 2020. [17] Ramona Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” Palliative & Supportive Care 21, no. 5 (October 2023): 871–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478951523001025; Health Canada, “Third Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2021,” report on plans and priorities;transparency - other, July 26, 2022, https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-me dical-assistance-dying-2021.html; Lemmens, “When Death Becomes Therapy.” [18] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023.; Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Walking Alongside.” [19] Olivia Stefanovich, “Opposition Parties Call for Indefinite Pause to MAID Expansion for Mental Illness | CBC News,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, January 28, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/special-joint-committee-maid-mental-illness-report-1.7095679; Benjamin Lopez Steven, “Number of Assisted Deaths Jumped More than 30 per Cent in 2022, Report Says | CBC News,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, October 27, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/maid-canada-report-2022-1.7009704. [20] Hamer Bastidas-Bilbao et al., “Searching for Relief from Suffering: A Patient-Oriented Qualitative Study on Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness as the Sole Underlying Medical Condition,” Social Science & Medicine 331 (August 1, 2023): 116075, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116075. [21] Canadian Medical Association, “Canadian Medical Association Code of Ethics and Professionalism” (Canada: Canadian Medical Association, December 8, 2018), https://policybase.cma.ca/link/policy13937. [22] Canadian Medical Association. [23] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023; Stefanovich, “Opposition Parties Call for Indefinite Pause to MAID Expansion for Mental Illness | CBC News.” [24] John Paul Tasker, “Liberal Government Promoting a ‘culture of Death’ with Medical Assistance in Dying Law, Conservative MP Says | CBC News,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, March 6, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/culture-of-death-medical-assistance-in-dying-mental-illness-1.67695 04. [25] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023; Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin, “Choosing Death in Unjust Conditions: Hope, Autonomy and Harm Reduction,” Journal of Medical Ethics, April 26, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2022-108871. [26] Ramona Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” Palliative & Supportive Care 21, no. 5 (October 2023): 871–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478951523001025. [27] Konia Trouton et al., “Attitudes and Expectations Regarding Bereavement Support for Patients, Family Members, and Friends: Findings from a Survey of MAID Providers,” British Columbia Medical Journal 62, no. 1 (2020), https://bcmj.org/articles/attitudes-and-expectations-regarding-bereavement-support-patients-family-m embers-and.; William Robert Nielsen, “MAiD in Canada: Ethical Considerations in Medical Assistance in Dying,” Canadian Journal of Bioethics 4, no. 2 (December 9, 2021): 93–98, https://doi.org/10.7202/1084456ar. [28] Coelho et al., “The Realities of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” October 2023. [29] Lemmens, “When Death Becomes Therapy.” [30] William Robert Nielsen, “MAiD in Canada: Ethical Considerations in Medical Assistance in Dying,” Canadian Journal of Bioethics 4, no. 2 (December 1, 2021): 93–98, https://doi.org/10.7202/1084456ar. [31] Steven, “Number of Assisted Deaths Jumped More than 30 per Cent in 2022, Report Says | CBC News.” [32] A. Plaisance et al., “Quebec Population Highly Supportive of Extending Medical Aid in Dying to Incapacitated Persons and People Suffering Only from a Mental Illness: Content Analysis of Attitudes and Representations,” Ethics, Medicine and Public Health 21 (April 1, 2022): 100759, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jemep.2022.100759. (shrink)

Analytical reflections on tasks and functions of philosophy in the modern world, as well as, efforts deriving novel vision of practically all areas of the philosophical thought may become sound only after consideration of the innovations with which modern natural science has crossed the 20—21 centuries boundary. Discoveries in astrophysics at the end of the 20th century offer new and unprecedented perceptions of our world. In this world only 4% of the total Universe energy is attributed to the known forms (...) of the matter, 20% constitutes “dark matter” and 76% is in “dark energy”. The first decade of the 21st century will go on record inhistory of the civilization as the one associated with breakthrough experiments shedding light on the nature of the mysterious types of the matter, and construction of the unified theory of field. It is safe to regard modern science to be on the verge of profound transformations. These changes are bound to alter our outside world comprehension, redefining human being’s place in it. That advances a set of new serious requirements to philosophy as a science that must present ability to adapt to provide adequate and meaningful methodological interpretations to anticipated discoveries. This article addresses the characteristic features of modern conceptual knowledge of the world, with an attempt of offering their philosophical and methodological comprehension. (shrink)

In the contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness studies, views such as panpsychism or theories of universal consciousness, have enjoyed a recent renaissance of metaphysical speculations in Western philosophy. Its similarities with Eastern philosophical traditions went not unnoticed. However, the potential contribution that the evolutionary cosmology of the Indian poet, mystic and philosopher Sri Aurobindo can offer to these ontologies, remains largely unknown or unexplored. Here, consciousness, mind, life, matter and evolution are interpreted in an extended metaphysical framework, uniting Western (...) and Eastern traditions inside a modern philosophical system where materialism, panpsychism, cosmopsychism and philosophical idealism are not seen as irreconcilable exclusives, but different points of view that can be reconciled in a synthesis of knowledge, as envisioned from higher states of consciousness. This integral view of reality offers a conceptual platform that can complement and incorporate current theoretical approaches in modern philosophy, where their present internal inconsistencies do not emerge, and can be suggestive for scientists as well, especially in the fields of biology and physical sciences. (shrink)

In attending to surfaces, as they wrap, layer and grow within sentient bodies, material formations and cosmological sates, this volume presents a series of ten anthropological studies stretching across five continents and in observation of earthly practices of making, knowing, living and dying. Through theoretically reflecting on time spent with Aymara and Mapuche Andean cultures, the Malagasy people of Madagascar, craftspeople and designers across Europe and Oceania, amongst the architectures of Australia and South Korea, and within the folds of books, (...) screens, landscape and the sea, the anthropologists in this volume communicate diverse ways of considering, working with and knowing surfaces. Together, these writings advance a knowledge of the world which resists any definitive settlement of existential categories and rather seeks to know the world in its emergence and transformation, as entities grow, cohere, shift, dissolve, decay and rebirth through the contact and exchange of surfaces, persisting with varying time, power and effect. The book principally invites readers from anthropology, the creative arts and environmental studies, but also across the wider humanities and social sciences as well as those in neighbouring scientific fields of archeology, biology, geography, geoscience, material science, neurology and psychology interested in the intersections of mind, body, materials and world. (shrink)

How do we perceive the agency of others? Do the same rules apply when interacting with others who are radically different from ourselves, like other species or robots? We typically perceive other people and animals through their embodied behavior, as they dynamically engage various aspects of their affordance field. In second personal perception we also perceive social or interactional affordances of others. I discuss various aspects of perceptible agency, which might begin to give us some tools to understand interactions also (...) with agents truly other than ourselves or “perhaps agents” like present and future social robots. Robots have various kinds of physical and behavioral presence and thus make their agency—if we want to call it that—perceptible in ways that computers and other forms of AI do not. The largely dualist assumptions pertaining to the hidden bodies of traditional Turing tests are discussed, as well as the social affordance effects of such indirect interactions as opposed to interactions in physically shared space. The question is what role various abilities to reveal, hide and dynamically control the body and broader behavior plays in heterogeneous tech or machine mediated interactions. I argue that the specifics and richness of perceptible agency matters to the kind of reciprocity we can obtain. (shrink)

This book focuses on issues in astronomy, cosmology, physics, matter theory, philosophy, and theology vital to the “Copernican Revolution.” It describes efforts among individuals advocating different world views to fit new ideas compatibly into broad perspectives reflecting four traditional patterns of interpretation: teleological, mechanical, occultist, and mathematico-descriptive.

continent. 1.1 (2011): 27-32. “My”—what does this word designate? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to,what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary . I can’t sleep till I devour you / And I’ll love you, if you let me… Marilyn Manson “Devour” The role of poetry in the relationalities between people has a long history—from epic poetry recounting tales of yore; to emotive lyric poetry; to (...) rude, irreverent limericks; to Hallmark cards which have ditties that allow one to cringe, and somehow fall in love at the same moment. Without going into a notion of aesthetics, or attempting to choose which form of poetry is superior, we might want to consider why the form of poetry itself has long been a part of relationality. And whilst doing so, we might always keep in mind that poetry—especially poetry that moves, transports us—is the form that Plato has been warning us about, particularly if we want to become good citizens.As Avital Ronell teaches us in Stupidity : the poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes (287). And considering that the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, we might begin to ask ourselves why one lover is warning against another—if the philosopher is in love with wisdom, then is the poet perhaps his rival, his challenger, for that very love? For, one must also remember that Plato—through Socrates—mentions constantly that Homer is his favourite. Moreover, by adopting both his own voice, whilst mixing it with Socrates’, Plato is adopting the form of poetry that he warns most about—the warning almost serves more as a homage to poetry than anything else. Here, we might open the register that one of the main reasons that he ejects a particular kind of poet is on the grounds of effecting effeminacy on the populace—good poetry moves you, affects you, transports you, shifts you beyond reason, puts you “out of your mind.” However, Plato also teaches us that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon, or the muse. This moment of divine intervention is one that seizes—perhaps even ceases—you; putting you “beyond yourself.” In other words, a good rhetorician must always already be open to the possibility of otherness—the same otherness that possibly resides in the feminine. One could also trace this back to the poet that he both loved, and feared, most—Homer. Perhaps the effect of effeminacy that Homer's poetry opened is precisely the source of its power: through listening to Homer, one's body, one’s habitus is opened to the possibility of the feminine. And here, one must remember that the source of all learning—and all teaching—also lies in mimesis, in repetition, in habit. Once the habitus is opened to the possibility of invasion, of intervention, of otherness, there is quite possibly no possibility of distinguishing whether the mimesis is that of reproduction, or if there is always already a productive aspect to it. And by extension, if learning cannot be controlled, the very notion of teaching itself is shifted from a master-student relationality to one where the master is potentially changed as well—the relationality between the master and the student is not only inter-changing, but one cannot even know who is teaching, or learning, at any point. All that can be said is that they are in a relationality; which means that one is ultimately unable to locate the locus of knowledge, of wisdom—the site of which Plato is attempting to convince us is the sole domain of the philosopher. And it is this that philosophy is cringing from. To compound matters, philosophy is striving for wisdom; which can only come from the Gods. In other words, this is a gift that has to be bestowed on them—and more than that, wisdom is always already exterior to one’s control and knowledge. At best, it is the role of one to recognise the gift, to answer the call as it were. Here, if we listen carefully, we can hear the echo of Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone. And as we are attempting to respond to the call of wisdom—the call that both poetry and philosophy are listening out for—it might be helpful to recall the agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville. In the biography, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude , Robert V. Bruce notes that Aleck and Melly made a “solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communication with the other if it were possible to do so” (63). Since Melville was the one who passed on first, this pact put the onus on Aleck to receive the call of his brother. If you take into consideration the fact that until Melville’s death, both brothers had been working on an early prototype of the telephone, the instrument of distant sound can be read as an attempt by Aleck to maintain the possibility of keeping in touch with Melly, of hearing the voice from beyond. However, this was a connection that was not premised on any knowing, reason, or rationality; it was rather, one that was based on hope, and born out of love. And here, if we eves-drop on a cross-line with The Telephone Book , we can pick up the voice of Avital Ronell once again and hear, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading” (380). In other words, the telephone can be read as the openness to the possibility of responding to the other; one that might always remain unknown. Even in this day of caller-identification, we can never know for sure who the other person on the line is until we pick up: hence, the only decision we can make—the effects of which we remain blind to until it affects us—is to either pick up or not, to either respond or not. And it is not as if the decision to pick up comes without risks: each time we answer a call, we run the risk of it ruining our day. Even when we don’t know who the caller is, perhaps especially when we don’t know who the person on the other end of the line is—and here one only has to think of prank calls—we are leaving ourselves completely open to being affected by another. Thus, philosophy finds itself in the position of Vladimir and Estragon. Since they have no idea who Godot is, they can never know if or when he shows up—thus, if he (and we are taking his gender on the word of the boy, some boy—we don’t even know if it is the same boy—who comes round in the evening) has already come, they would not be in the position to know it. And even if someone comes to them and announces that “I am Godot,” the wait would not be over—without referentiality to the name, they would have to take on faith that that person is indeed Godot. Hence, all they can know is that they are waiting for Godot; and Godot is the name of that waiting itself. All philosophy can know is that it is waiting; and wisdom is the name of that waiting itself. Which brings us to Tina Turner’s eternal question, “what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” In order to begin to consider that, we have to first attempt to examine the notion of love itself. Perhaps we might begin to consider what the difficulty of the statement “I love you.” For, if love is a relationality between two persons—both of whom remain singular, and are attempting to respond to each other—this suggests that neither of them subsume the other under themselves. In other words, the other remains wholly other. If this is so, then the “you” in the statement always remains shrouded in mystery. And even if the “you” was replaced with the name of the person, the veiling remains: for, names refer both to the singularity that is the person, and also every other person bearing that name, at exactly the same time. To compound matters, the only time one has to utter a persons name is in their absence—thus, the correspondence of a name to that particular person is at best an affect of memory. And if we consider the notion of memory, we have to also open the register of forgetting—bringing along with it the problem that there is no object to forgetting. For instance, when one utters “I forgot,” all one is uttering is the fact that one has forgotten, and nothing more—the moment there is an object to the statement, one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. Moreover, we have no control over when forgetting happens to us. And since it is always already exterior to us, affects us, and has no necessary object, there is no reason to believe that every moment of memory might not bring with it a moment of forgetting. Hence, whenever we utter a name—even if we accept the correspondence between the utterance and the person in front of us—all we are doing is uttering the fact that we are naming. Thus, it is not so much that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ but more appropriately, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’—the relationality between its name and the phenomenon of its sweet smell can only be established after that moment of naming, that instance of catachresis. So, whenever one utters “I love you,” not only is it a performative statement, it is the very naming of that love—all you are doing is establishing a relationality between you and the other. And since there is no necessary referent—one is naming that referentiality as one utters it—this suggests that it is always already a symbolic statement; without which the mystery of the other cannot me maintained. In other words, one cannot love the other without maintaining this symbolic distance—through a ritual; in this case the utterance “I love you.” This might be why Valentine’s Day seems to provoke such a massive reaction: the most common one from people (besides florists) being, Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Those among the nay-sayers who maintain a soft spot for Karl Marx would proceed to call it the commodification of relationships; those who prefer the Gods would claim that the sanctity of relationships has been profaned; the gender theorists would note how the fact that males buy the gifts only serves to highlight the unequal power-relation between the genders. Whichever side and variation of the arguments they choose boils down to this: the discomfort lies in the fact that they are confronted with the notion of relationships moving into a mediated sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only; it should not only remain between them, but more pertinently, be an unmediated experience between two persons. Which of course completely misses the point. For, if we reopen the register that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, there must then be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is, one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding; effectively effacing the other. If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationality; all negotiation is gone and the other person is a mere extension of the self—one is in a masturbatory relationality with one’s imaginary. Hence, any relationship must always already carry with it the unknown, and possibly always unknowable. The other person is an enigma, remains—must remain—enigmatic to you. This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person—and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is. For, if the mystery of the other is unveiled, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love: one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; a check-list. And if they are knowable, this suggests that they can also be negated, and hence, the love can also go away. Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event—and if it is an event, then strictly speaking, it cannot be known before it happens; at best, it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realised retrospectively. At the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere: this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, I was struck by love;” or even more so by, “I was blinded by love.” This is a blinding to not only the subject of the encounter—the self—but also of the very object of that encounter, the “you”—all that can be said is that there is an encounter. And it is for this reason Cupid is blind: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time), but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. Since there is an unknowable relationality with the other person, the only way you can approach it is through a ritual. This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the God(s), one has no choice but to approach them symbolically. These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless—the actual content is interchangeable—as it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets; and secrets are never about their content(s). Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret. This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work: since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret. Occasionally the actual content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance. For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings. In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognise the significance of the knowledge of my birthday. This means that you have to know that you know something. Since the God(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the God(s). The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritualised role. It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them. The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange. Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received. This means that the worst thing that one can do is not give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person. This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the reciprocal gift would be nothing more than a calculated return. The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind. In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and also a reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). Naturally, this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. But it is precisely the stupidity involved that saves the relationship from being banal—more importantly, stupidity prevents it from entering the mere profane. This is not to say that an enigmatic love cannot end—of course it can. However, the difference lies in the fact that if the relationality is wholly transparent, it is subsumed under reason—completely predictable, within the self, and thus never open to the possibility of otherness, exteriority, musing. A love that is an event is one that is also open to the possibility of the divine, the sacred—always already closer to the possibility of wisdom. If we establish that both love and wisdom are exterior, to our knowledge, and the finitude to our selves, this suggests that both are names for the possibility of openness to otherness. In other words, and what choice do we have here but to use the words of the other, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—is a name for one who is waiting, and nothing more. But that still leaves us with the question of this uncomfortable relationality between philosophy and poetry. But before we address that question, we have to take a momentary detour, and consider the whether it is possible to call one a poet. For, if we take the notion of a poet to be one who reaches the highest levels of rhetoric (beyond the lawyer, and the orator, who only aim to either please the crowds, or convince by way of sophistry), then we must also acknowledge that one can only become a poet at the moment of seizing, the point of inspiration, by the muses. Without this divine moment, all (s)he can do is practice her craft. As no one can control when the muses make their appearance, one could always be practising in vain—in some way, one is always already practising to be least in the way when the muse whispers into one’s ear; one is practising so as not to be vain. And since one cannot know when the muse will appear, there is no time frame to the practising—unlike the lawyer who speaks against a clock, poetry knows no time; the only time that matters is the time appropriate to poetry itself. Thus, all the poet (if one can use this term) is practising for the possibility of effacing her/him self—and waiting. Thus, in order for poetry to occur, in order to be seized, the poet—along with all her concerns—must cease. In other words, there is no poet; there is only the possibility of poetry. However, even as there is no time frame to this waiting, even as all we can say is that poetry is a name for waiting, the one who is practising is always already also in time. And since (s)he is in a symbolic relationality with the possibility of poetry, this suggests that the practising is her sacrifice, and time is precisely what she is sacrificing. Here, it might be helpful to turn to a strange source when it comes to poetry—Georges Bataille—and consider his teachings in the first volume of The Accursed Share where he reminds us that, the “essence [of sacrifice] is to consume profitlessly .” This is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” He continues: Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” (58) Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie is severed symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice, the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth…Once chosen, he is the accursed share , destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things…” (59). And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (55). For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. Thus, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. So even as (s)he is sacrificing her time to poetry, it is always already beyond her knowledge whether what (s)he is doing is actually preparing her for poetry or not—all (s)he can know is that she is sacrificing and nothing more. Hence, all (s)he can do is to open her self to the possibility of this relationality—all (s)he can do is be in love with poetry. At the moment the muse whispers into her ear, (s)he ceases to be, and becomes a medium for poetry—and since this possession is always already beyond our cognitive knowledge, this is also a moment of divine wisdom. In other words, there is no difference between poetry and wisdom—the moment of poetry is the moment of wisdom. And this might be the very reason for the philosopher’s aversion to poets. Not so much because they may corrupt the youth (this is after all the aim of all thinking, all philosophy), but precisely because in order to do so, the philosopher must wait for a moment of possession, for divine musing, for poetry. Hence, all thought, all thinking, all philosophy, is nothing but the waiting for the possibility of poetry itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Untying Foucauldian Knots of Power/Knowledge and Tying Better Relationships with the Confucian PersuasionJoseph Harroff (bio)Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy. By James Garrison. Albany: SUNY Press, 2021.Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.—Dewey, Democracy and Education (2)There is no pure self to be redeemed here, but perhaps some kind of rehabilitation beyond the problematic trappings of subject (...) life might be possible.—Garrison, Reconsidering the Life of Power (54)The problem of critiquing power by untangling and retangling ourselves more creatively and intelligently in webs of habit and flows of somaesthetic information and value-laden ethical-political imaginative horizons of futurity is taken up by James Garrison in Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy (2021). By asking a series of ethically sustained and interculturally hermeneutically sensitive questions surrounding the critical problematic as to the conditions for the possibility of how "it is possible to use the sign chains of power to chain power," or how it is possible to "tie power up in its own knots" (p. 18), Garrison makes creative use of "subjectality theory" that foregrounds somaesthetic practices seeking to be in many ways recasting rather than simply reconsidering the life of power. It is through a methodological sounding of the depths of somaesthetic experience and a creative-critical inquiry into the ways in which the complex of social arts understood in the broadest possible conception, including at all ethical and political intersections, that this book enters into the domain of Confucian theorizing of persons as part of never-simply-located root-body-persons (shenti 身體)—that is, as offering a theory of relational persons that is simultaneously and intersectionally caught up in a manifold of social practices of aesthetic, ethical, political, and religious signification. It is by critically interrogating the historical a priori that condition the possibility for any specific knowledge-power discursive interpellation by drawing attention to the complex interplay and entanglement of forces and signification involved in tool-making and tool-using practices as a "sedimentation" (jidian 積澱) of [End Page 809] somaesthetic arts that straddle a polarity of natural-cultural form-functioning, that Garrison makes creative advances in pushing critical theory past a problematic pessimism and/or nihilism that stems from any brute recognition of the "skintight prison" houses we inhabit as a result of Foucauldian power knots.Using the idea of "sedimentation" to better articulate the complex strata of social experience as mediated by aesthetic culture Garrison draws heavily from Li Zehou. Li is suspicious of a Maoist model of conflating theory and practice, subject and object, especially when the treatment is part of a civic and political religiosity that renders the Great Helmsman a supreme leader and unilateral decision-maker in a Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the historico-teleological revolution. For Li, aesthetic sensibility is the "manifestation of the sedimentation of society in nature, and the sedimentation of humankind as a species in the individual."1 And moreover, the "animal structure and quality of psychology" is "transformed into something that has a human nature, in which sensation and rationality are dissolved and combined."2 This complex process of dissolution and combination is more like a Hegelian dialectic of spirit than it is a linear-totalitarian realization of Maoist voluntarism. However, this is what I want to begin challenging by asking what degree Garrison draws upon this aspect of Li. I would suggest that Maoist voluntarism can be read as part of a traditional Chinese philosophical problematic that prioritizes practice in order to realize the truth of nature (gongfu jishi benti 功夫即是本體).This way of approaching the Maoist dynamic of voluntarism seems much closer to the Expansive Learning 《大學》 dynamic of "from the King to the commoners, everyone takes self-cultivation as the root," but would avoid any problematic Maoist hubris regarding the limits, methods and confines of class "struggle." The post-linguistic turn and then return to a Deweyan process metaphysical and creatively democratic inquiry into experience to garner more intelligent methods for critiquing and cultivating embodied and relationally configured habits of perception, speech, and thought via the vocabulary of... (shrink)

This paper is for the purpose of clarify that perception is a conscious act through Bergson’s theory of images and perception in Matter and Memory. And yet this ‘act’ is not a pure action of consciousness or of sprit, which is transcendental from the reality and composes or recomposes it. That is, our perception is not pure knowledge. A pure conception is unconscious one, which takes place infinitely within the system of matter that is an ‘aggregate of images’ in which (...) all the elements act and react upon one another according to the law of nature. This system is excentric. On the contrary, the consciousness comes into being in themoment when these unlimited actions/reactions are limited and with choice, that is, when the passage from the ‘immediate’ to ‘useful’ in done. Therefore an activity of consciousness is already a practice of life. However, this perception as act reveals at the same time a proper capacity to subject/being, in that it forms a realm of subjectivity and creates its own field of perception, which are not reducible to the movement or nature of matter, so are different system from matter, every moment through memory. (shrink)

This paper investigates mathematical ideas found in a Jaina non-mathematical text, by which I mean a work not dedicated to mathematics as a separate scholarly discipline. The Aṇuogaddārāiṃ, a Prakrit text from the Śvetāmbara Āgamas, explains the methods a Jaina monk should use in investigating a scriptural text. This work shows a remarkable ability to deal with numerical concepts and quantitative descriptions of all kinds. I shall often compare its mathematical content with texts from different Sanskrit bodies of knowledge. This (...) paper demonstrates that the Aṇuogaddārāiṃ, as well as presenting a wealth of mathematical information, expounds a Jaina theory of numbers that has been so far disregarded by historiography. In order to understand this formulation, I shall propose an analytical-interpretative model to then improve the English translation by Hanaki 1970. In Jainism, the knowledge of the true nature of the universe was a requisite to progressing towards a full awareness of the human condition and hence towards the path of liberation. Numerical data and detailed calculations provide minute descriptions of the universe and matters related to karma and liberation. I shall argue that the Aṇuogaddārāiṃ testifies that mathematics was a perfect, functional instrument for representing Jaina cosmological and soteriological models. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. In the history of early American philosophy, the movement of American transcendentalism occupies a special place. Its peculiarity was that it combined great literature, idealistic philosophy and an irrational worldview. Exploring the phenomenon of nature in their philosophical reflections, American transcendentalists turn to the cosmic levels, endowing the universe with mind and soul. M e t h o d s. The article uses the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to reproduce the (...) context of the emergence of American transcendentalism, the hermeneutic method for the interpretation of philosophical texts, with the aim of revealing the ideas of the universe, micro- and macrocosm, as well as consciousness, which are conveyed through symbols and metaphors. For a comprehensive consideration of various aspects of the philosophy of American Transcendentalism as a whole system, a comparative method and a systemic analysis integrating ideas about the cosmos, consciousness and metaphysical principles were involved. R e s u l t s. The image of the "transparent eye-ball" of R. W. Emerson, described in the essay Nature (1836), symbolizes the state of complete fusion of man with nature, when the personal "I" disappears, giving way to the perception of the universe. The eye of the American transcendentalist is directed towards the cosmos, it passes through all reality, emphasizing the deep connection between man and the cosmos. On the other hand, the unity with nature is thoroughly researched and tested in the solitude experiment of H. D. Thoreau. In his work Walden (1854), H. D. Thoreau describes the desire for unity with nature, separating himself from society and immersing himself in life alone with nature. His experiment demonstrates how a simple, contemplative life can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself and the Universe. In addition, the space poetry of W. Whitman, especially the collection Leaves of Grass (1855), is full of tropes of the cosmos, where space and time are perceived as a single whole, and the images of the Earth and heavenly bodies are interconnected with the human soul, creating a symbolic picture of the unity of humanity with the boundless universe. C o n c l u s i o n s. American transcendentalism was not only a literary movement, but also a powerful philosophical trend that contributed to a deeper understanding of the relationship between man and nature in particular, and the cosmos and spiritual forces in general. Transcendentalist philosophers, such as R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, and W. Whitman, interpreted the cosmos not only as a physical space, but also as a symbol of a higher truth that man can approach through the harmony of consciousness with nature. American Transcendentalists emphasized inner knowledge, intuition, and spirituality, which remain relevant today, as do calls for living in harmony with majestic nature. (shrink)

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning (...) have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)

What happens to artist and to viewer when painting or sculpture emancipates itself from all physical mediums? What happens to art-world experts and to museum goers and amateurs when the piece of art turns immaterial, becoming indiscernible within its surrounding empty space and within the parergonal apparatus of the exposition site? What type of verbal depiction, of critical understanding and specific knowledge is attempted under these programmed and fabricated conditions? What kind of aesthetic experience–namely embodied and sensitive–is expected when a (...) performative utterance of the artist about his art takes the place of a real piece of artwork seen or perceived, or that may be seen or perceived? For Andy Warhol, «wasted space is any space that has art in it.» In the spring of 1958, in Paris, an artist already well-known among the neo-avantgardes and accredited by the international art-world, shows up empty-handed and presents himself as a painter without paintings in a empty space. In a singular never-wasted space, Yves Klein displays himself as a snob, with an extraordinary showbiz glamour and literally sine-nobilitate, without the traditional marks of artistic manual skills. Against the modernist issues, he writes: «Credit was given to me. The gesture alone was enough. The public had accepted the abstract intention.» What’s the matter with this powerful prestige and its influence on the critic and public? How to understand the public trust in the artist as a producer of an institutional “make-believe” without any objecthood, devoid of any individual artwork presented to the sight or to any other sense? For Modernism and Minimalism, the work of art seems to have an internal coherence, whether formal or expressive, and is thus autonomous from the surrounding world, existing with only the clear opposition to the living space and set as a specialized and situated objection to the enclosing field. Instead, now the object melts into the air and becomes undetectable, confused with the atmosphere of the theory of art and with the stylish and snobbish life of the artist. What type of interpretation is put on regarding this unclassifiable and ambiguous field, simultaneously an-aesthetic and existential, theoretical and sensitive, charismatic and motionless, at same time without a specialized position in the world made by the artist himself? And what kind of embodied experience is performed by the spectatorship? What type of phenomenology and pragmatics of aesthetic relationship is necessary to describe how the body of the beholder absorbs this vacated and boring space via a direct and immediate perception-assimilation? What kind of artistic rhetoric, what kind ontology of art? Until this day, after more than 50 years, Yves Klein’s The Void has not ceased asking these and other questions on aesthetics, philosophy and the history of art. (shrink)

Understanding of principles forms the basis of mastering Greek Philosophy. This article focuses on the idea of Principled Knowledge. Plato, too, seems to hold that grasping a body of knowledge requires a grasp of its principles. One example is the Republic where Socrates explains the image of the line. He has divided the line into two sections, the intelligible and the perceptible. The Timaeus, like the Republic, emphasizes the need for us to grasp the proper principle of our disciplines of (...) study. The major principles enlisted in the Timaeus are as follows: Being is that which is graspable by intelligence with an account ; becoming is that which is graspable by opinion with unreasoning perception. Everything that comes into being has a cause. When a craftsman uses an eternal model, his product is necessarily fine ; if he uses a generated one, the product is not fine. The article further elaborates upon the standards of the cosmological argument and the most proper principle of coming into being which Socrates argues is the prelude. (shrink)

At the intersections of social anthropology, philosophy, and Asian studies, my paper explores the body ecologic through a phenomenological frame in the context of Chinese culture engaging both theory and method. How can qì cultivation experiences transporting bodies and persons in movement, within the world and their “life‐world,” be interpreted through a phenomenology of perception? Based on ethnographic study data collected mainly in South China (Guangzhou) and in Taiwan (1990s–2000s), this exploration is situated within qìgōng experiences (training, cultivating and mastering (...) the qì). Anchored in martial, religious, and healing arts and their meanings, qìgōng’s myriad of forms and infinite variations invite journeys into religious Daoist and Buddhist practice, Chinese thought, and politico‐religious issues of past and present Chinese society. The qìgōng world, paths of knowledge transmission, healing horizons, claimed affiliations, and views of practitioners unveil an ontology and a cosmology grounded in religious (Daoist and Buddhist) lore. (shrink)

For both Gadamer’s project of a philosophical hermeneutics as for Heidegger’s early understanding of facticity (Faktizität) as practical knowledge, the problem of application is central and is always linked to the specific conditions under which an individual decides to act within a community. Both also agree on the fact that the sciences of man do involve more than the epistemic subject, this is why the context i.e. the phenomenological concept of ‘world’ becomes part of the understanding process, one that cannot (...) be ignored or transformed into an abstract matter. Understanding is therefore also in a specific way ‘historical’, as the application is dictated by momentary circumstances in life situations, which come before any use of theoretical knowledge and thus do not represent an appendix to theory. While Gadamer continuously insisted on the idea of a practical knowledge (Wissen) that surpasses the separations between theory and praxis, sophia and phronesis, Heidegger radicalized the idea of active thinking as an experience of language in connection to an essential ‘perception’ of Being itself, that goes beyond any subjectivity. The term by which he often characterizes this essential thinking (wesentliches Denken) is Vernehmen: a kind of receptive thinking. This conception of receptive thinking, as some conversations around the Zollikon Seminars and Le Thor/Zähringen will briefly show, lead Heidegger also to some interesting considerations on the human body. (shrink)

Through a close study of T. Yunkaporta's 2019’s Sand Talk, this article explores fractal thinking and the pattern of creation in Indigenous cosmology; the role of custodianship in respectful interaction between living systems; alternative Indigenous understandings of nonlinearity, time, and transience; the process-panpsychism and animism present in Indigenous perceptions of cosmos as living Country, illustrated in the Dreaming and Turnaround creation event; the role of embodied cognition and haptic and situated knowledge in Indigenous science; Indigenous holistic reasoning and the mind-body (...) connection; the process-relational metaphysic embedded in ritual and yarning practice; the knowledge encoded in place-based totemic mythology, lore, and ritual; and Indigenous understandings of complex systems as adaptive, self-organizing, and patterned. This article does not offer a process reading of Indigenous thought but rather demonstrates the significant contribution to process metaphysics that may be provided by an Aboriginal Australian perspective. Yunkaporta's text carves out a language of resistance to the McDonaldization of Indigenous research. While historic scholarly engagement with Aboriginal culture has overemphasized content, Yunkaporta demonstrates how this has occurred to the exclusion of the processes of Indigenous knowledge transmission and creation. Yet a process view requires engagement with the how, not only with the what. Such knowledge transmission is discerned in daily lived relationships among land, spirit, and people—binding epistemology to participation in a specific landscape embedded within a living culture. Place-making for Indigenous knowledges requires exploring how Indigenous ways of valuing, knowing, and being, shaped by cultural activities on Country, offer new understandings for Western metaphysics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Locke on the Knowledge of Material Things ROBERT FENDEL ANDERSON IT IS nOT John Locke's intention, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to deal with matter and material substance nor with how these are able to affect the mind. These are considerations for natural philosophy; Locke counts himself rather among the moral philosophers. He does not propose, therefore, to meddle with the physical aspects of the mind, nor with (...) the physical production of sensations through the organs, nor with the production of ideas in the understanding, nor even with whether ideas depend upon matter for their source. He defers to the wisdom of such men as Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens and Newton in these considerations, and finds it "... ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge....,, 1 It is true that Locke's Essay is characterized chiefly not by an interest in matter and the mechanics of perception but rather by an interest in epistemology and in the ordering and assessment of our knowledge. Because of the very nature and emphasis of this epistemology, however, Locke finds that he must, from time to time, at least mention the nature of matter and how it affects us. Finally, it becomes apparent, certain changes or ambiguities in his point of view regarding the mode of our knowledge and its certainty are consequences of his understanding of matter. It is a demonstration of these elements of his doctrine, which seem not to have obtained the full attention of such scholars as Aaron, Fraser, and Gibson, that I shall attempt in this paper. Fundamentally, Locke's theory of matter appears to be that of Democritus and Epicurus. Like the Greek atomists, he conceives of matter as consisting of particles or corpuscles infinite in number. At least some of these are so minute as to be individually insensible, and probably he intends that all are, although, to my knowledge, he never states that this is so. In the aggregate, in any case, particles do constitute perceptible bodies. As for the Greeks, so also for Locke, the particles arc all extended, having size and shape. They are said also to possess motion or rest, although he takes care to say that matter cannot produce motion in itself,e Locke frequently mentions other properties as being "primary" or "really in" material things. Some of these are solidity, texture, cohesion of parts, situation, and number. Apparently some of these may be ranked under others since, as he 1"Epistle to the Reader," Vol. I, p. 14. All footnotes refer to passages in John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, collated and annotated, with prolegomena, biographical, critical, and historical by Alexander Campbell Fraser, in two volumes (New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1959). Large Roman numerals refer to books of the Essay; small Roman numerals refer to chapters of the books; Arabic numerals refer to sections of the chapters. 2 IV, x, 10. [205] 206 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY remarks, figure presupposes extension, and receiving or communicating motion through impact presupposes solidity. The influences of these particles upon one another are treated by Locke under the topic of "powers," a notion which includes in it some kind of "secret relation of parts." 3 The capacities in any substance to give alterations of primary qualities are active powers; the capacities to receive such alterations are passive powers. This alteration must be accomplished by impact or impulse since this, Locke says, is the only way in which bodies can be conceived to operate. Sensation in the percipient being then is to be understood as a special case of this impact of particles upon others. It is evident to Locke that from external obiects some motion must be conveyed by some parts of our bodies to the brain or seat of sensation to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of these external objects. We are able by sight to perceive at a distance the primary qualities of bodies of observable size. Locke reasons that therefore "... some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them to the eyes, and thereby convey to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian-Science Dialogue at the BoundariesPaul O. IngramMuch of the discussion in current science-religion dialogue focuses on "limit" or "boundary" questions.1 In the natural sciences, boundary questions are questions that arise in scientific research that cannot be answered by scientific methods. Boundary questions arise because of (1) the intentional limit of scientific methods of investigation to extremely narrow bits of physical processes while ignoring wider bodies of experience, as well (...) as (2) the resulting incompetence of scientific methods when applied to aesthetic, moral, and religious experiences. Furthermore, scientific theoretical constructions are intentionally falsifiable. Often scientific theories themselves require further theoretical explanation. For example, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) proposed a theory of gravity as a general explanation of the motion of terrestrial objects—such as falling objects like apples—and of the orbits of planets in the solar system. But Newton was unable to offer an explanatory theory of gravity itself and was deeply troubled by the notion of "action at a distance," which he believed was intrinsically impossible. Albert Einstein's (1879-1955) general theory of relativity, although maintaining Newton's three laws of motion, fills in this gap in Newton's theory by explaining gravity as the warping of space occupied by objects such as planets, stars, and galaxies rather than action at a distance.In other words, boundary questions create methodological and conceptual constraints that often lead to deeper knowledge of the universe's physical structures. At the same time, boundary questions also tend to engender metaphysical questions along with scientific questions. For example, standard Big Bang theory about the origins of the universe imposes a temporal boundary that constrains what cosmologists can know about the universe. Why is there a universe at all? The standard response is that cosmologists can describe how the universe originated with a high degree of probability, but are ignorant, or at least agnostic, about why the universe exists. Here, a boundary question generated by the application of scientific methods in cosmology generates a metaphysical question cosmology is incapable of answering. Whenever this happens, an opening is created for science-religion dialogue in general, and a science-Buddhist-Christian "trilogue" in particular.But boundary questions are not limited to the natural sciences. Religious questions [End Page 165] incapable of solution through the application of theological or philosophical methods arise at the boundaries engendered by what Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) called "the universals of human experience," meaning experiences all human beings undergo no matter what their cultural or religious environments might be. For example, the experience of suffering raises the theodicy problem for classical Christian theism. How can a loving, omnipotent creator of the universe permit unmerited suffering? Here, the assertion of God's creative power and love creates a boundary question that cannot be resolved apart from rethinking the nature of God, as in process theology.Anxiety and confrontation with death, as well as experiences of beauty, joy, hunger, fear, hope, and anger, and the need for community are also examples of universals of human experience. Buddhists and Christians theoretically interpret the meaning of such experiences according to their particular texts, doctrinal formulations, and practice traditions. Similarly, the work done by scientists is influenced by their cultural contexts, although on a shorter-term basis than is the case with religions. As in the natural sciences, religious constructs are also theory laden, so that neither Christian theology nor Buddhist philosophy can claim complete knowledge. What, exactly, is the nature of God? What, exactly, is Awakening? The standard Christian and Buddhist responses are that God or Awakening are ultimately beyond human thought because both transcend anything human beings can imagine them to be, or not to be.Still, boundary constraints do not imply that significant and reliable knowledge is impossible in the sciences or in Buddhist or Christian thought. To conclude that scientists, Buddhists, or Christians cannot achieve complete knowledge via scientific method, the practice of Buddhist philosophy, or the practice of Christian theological reflection because of boundary constraints does not imply that the sciences have not amassed an incredible body of reliable knowledge about physical reality, or that Buddhists and Christians have not accumulated large bodies of reliable knowledge... (shrink)

In this book, I will discuss three main topics: the roots and aims of scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge in society, and science and values I understand scientific knowledge as being a planned and continuous production of the general and common knowledge of scientific communities. I begin my discussion with a brief analysis of the main differences between sciences, on the one hand, and everyday experience, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, on the other. I define the concept of science as a set (...) of family resemblances (in Wittgenstein's sense). The sciences can be distinguished along three lines, in terms of the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences, differences in degrees of theoretical and methodological structure among individual sciences and scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge is based upon some grounds, paradigmatic knowledge bases. Scientific knowledge is founded on a unified paradigmatic knowledge base. The latter includes fundamental theories, basic facts, generally accepted empirical regularities (laws), scientific research methods, scientific explanations, and established relations to other sciences. Scientific knowledge in general is defined well in classical terms by the definition that knowledge is a true and rationally-justified belief. In this connection, scientific truth is relative, depending on the given paradigmatic knowledge base and on the precision and accessibility of the measurements and observations involved. In the book's first part, I consider the production and testing of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanations, the structure of scientific theories, and the problem of scientific realism. I consider explanation an integral part of a wider nexus of heuristic and theoretical activities in science like giving reasons, understanding, clarification, and founding. Continuous production of scientific explanations is a necessary condition for the systematic reproduction of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it does not suffice to describe them in terms of the logical structure of the arguments on which they are based, but rather, scientific explanations ought to be given complete with an epistemic and pragmatic context of the explanation. I consider especially deductive-nomological, inductive-statistical, dispositional, teleological-functional, and genetic explanations. I emphasize the ever-increasing importance of explanations by analogy and by model. Orthogonal to these distinctions lies the distinction between causal and epistemic explanation. Epistemic explanations relate scientific discoveries to epistemic progress, and causal explanations are these epistemic explanations that relate scientific discoveries to reality too. Causal explanations inform us that certain changes occur in the world as agents of other changes, or rather, that certain changes are real consequences of other changes. Thus, by having explanations of causes, we can intervene in the world to induce by design certain changes in some course of phenomena. I consider scientific theories as logically and epistemically ordered wholeness of scientific knowledge in a realm of research that enables us to construct useful models of reality. After the discussion of different 'statement' views on theories and different interpretations of the theory-experience relation, I introduce the 'model' theoretical (non-statement) views on theories, especially the structural theory of science. The model views on theories transcend the realism-antirealism dualism by introducing models between theory and reality. Therefore, the question of scientific realism is not merely whether and, if so, which element(s), of scientific theories represent reality, but rather which conditions suffice to infer from a theory that one of its models truly expresses reality. In other words, under which conditions do models of a theory represent models of reality? Generally, models are just as much images of reality in a theory as they are images of a theory in reality. The actual problem of scientific realism doesn't originate in the observable-unobservable distinction (even if this distinction is otherwise theoretically loaded), but rather in ontological quandaries, of the sort especially encountered in modern physical theories such as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and cosmological theories, although they are known to arise in other sciences as well. Scientific theories may be real, even if they describe nothing about the world. However, such theories can be given this status only if their formal, mathematical postulates exhibit some formal homology between reality and mathematical forms. The very fact that it is possible to describe reality with the help of mathematics even in cases, where every (representational, conceptual) language and thought fall short, would indicate that even mathematics itself is, in some sense, a part of reality, although 'outside' of the empirical world. It follows we have to distinguish the non-empirical reality and the empirical world. Formal objectivity and non-arbitrariness of theories do not emerge from either our language or thoughts, or from the world of facts, causes, and effects, but rather from non-empirical reality, which frames the world as some kind of objective transcendental condition for the possibility of the existence of the world, thoughts, and language. In the second part of the book, I consider the incorporation of scientific work and scientific knowledge into modern society and its relations to values and ethics. Production of scientific knowledge goes on as a parallel distributed process of a special kind of social (shared) cognition. The central part of this cognition is the presentation of parts of the world by scientific (theoretical) models which are warranted by the shared and public practice of justification, and in reflective acting in the world as it would. I consider various formal concepts of collective propositional knowledge (distributed, mutual, common knowledge). Scientific knowledge is an achievement to be ascribed to a scientific community or, indirectly, to all those who apply or expand it, rather than to individuals per se. It presents the continuous and partially planned production of non-trivial common knowledge of the research communities in modern societies. However, besides common knowledge, shared dispositional knowledge (knowledge how of scientific teams) and shared knowledge by acquiring (knowledge of fundamental similarities and differences in scientific teams) are parts of the real body of scientific knowledge. Scientific common knowledge implies the projection into idealized universal knowledge of all real or potentially rational and well-informed individuals. The respect of scientific knowledge thus presents the norm of rationality. Science as the intensively shared and socially distributed kind of cognition enters into modern society as a special kind of work (general work), as a productive force (social invention drive), and as a form of capital (human, social, cultural, informational, etc.). However any of these categories can adequately represent the socio-economical role of science in modern societies, and we are still waiting for a more adequate general concept that would theoretically cover the 'scientification' of modern societies. My thesis is that the most important general effect of scientification is (and will be) the growth of social processes that structurally resemble parallel distributed shared social cognition of science, and not so much the rise of the use of scientific knowledge and scientifically based information in all kinds of production. Scientification of modern societies inevitably includes a much stronger need for moral and social responsibility of scientists for their work and its effects in their local society and the global world. This need comes in contradiction with the quite large accepted idea (and even the 'norm') on value-free research. I discuss to some degree different arguments for the absence of non-epistemic values and ethical reasoning from science and find them non-convincing. The sound idea of value-free research lies in the need for the absence of categorical value statements from scientific explanations and theoretical deductions. Values and ethical judgment have, and sometimes they even have to play an important role in another part of research and its application in science or outside it. Not the value-loudness of research is a danger for science but its blind, non-reflective use. It leads to the ideologization and politicization of science. A similar danger lies in the purely value-neutrality of research. It leads to the instrumentalization of science to the technical or bureaucratic means for 'any' aims. (shrink)

This article argues for the need to put into practice a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution, affecting to a greater or lesser extent all branches of scientific and technological research, scholarship and education. This intellectual revolution differs, however, from the now familiar kind of scientific revolution described by Kuhn. It does not primarily involve a radical change in what we take to be knowledge about some aspect of the world, a change of paradigm. Rather it involves a radical change in (...) the fundamental, overall intellectual aims and methods of inquiry. At present inquiry is devoted to the enhancement of knowledge. This needs to be transformed into a kind of rational inquiry having as its basic aim to enhance personal and social wisdom. This new kind of inquiry gives intellectual priority to the personal and social problems we encounter in our lives as we strive to realize what is desirable and of value – problems of knowledge and technology being intellectually subordinate and secondary. For this new kind of inquiry, it is what we do and what we are that ultimately matters: our knowledge is but an aspect of our life and being. (shrink)

Western civilization was built on the concept of God. Today modern science, based on the critical method and so-called objective facts, denies even the existence of our soul. There is only matter: atoms, molecules, and DNA sequences. There is no freedom; there are no well-grounded beliefs. The decline of Western civilization is not the simple consequence of decadence, hedonism, and malevolence. Modern critical science has liberated us from the old dogmas but failed to establish our freedoms, values, and beliefs. However, (...) human knowledge is not objective but personal. We are the children of evolution. Everybody sees the world from his own personal point of view anchored into his/her body. We use our billions-of-years-old evolutionary skills and thousands-of-years-old cultural heritage to recognize and acknowledge the personal facts of our reality, freedom, and most important natural beliefs: respect and speak the truth. In reality, even science itself is based on our personal knowledge. Only our false conceptual dichotomies paralyze our thinking. God or matter?—there is a third choice: the emergence of life and human persons. This is the only way to defend our freedoms and the Christian moral dynamism of free Western societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seventeenth-Century Catholic Polemic and the Rise of Cultural Rationalism: An Example from the EmpireSusan RosaIn Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Sagre-do, an intelligent, cultivated, and well-traveled young man who is persuaded of the truth of arguments in favor of the Copernican opinion presented by the philosopher Salviati, dismisses the counter-arguments of the Aristotelian Simplicio with sympathetic condescension: “I pity him,” he proclaims,no less than I should (...) some fine gentleman who, having built a magnificent palace at great trouble and expense, employing hundreds and hundreds of artisans, and then beholding it threatened with ruin because of poor foundations, should attempt, in order to avoid the grief of seeing the walls destroyed, adorned as they are with so many lovely murals; or the columns fall, which sustain the superb galleries, or the gilded beams, or the doors spoiled, or the pediments and the marble cornices, brought in at so much cost—should attempt, I say, to prevent the collapse with chains, props, iron buttresses, and shores. 1 [End Page 87]This elegant simile, which suggests that the fine gentleman can only preserve his palace by destroying its beauty, is meant to evoke the dilemma of the scholastic philosopher who is confronted by the evident disintegration of his intellectual home. Like the desperate owner who seeks to shore up his real palace, he must rebuild a philosophical edifice whose apparent beauty and coherence have been achieved at the expense of substance and can only be preserved by recourse to means so ugly and inadequate that they destroy even the illusion of credibility.Such a dilemma, I would argue, was the legacy bequeathed to many defenders of traditional religion in the seventeenth century by more than one hundred years of confessional rivalry. To simplify a complex process, this lengthy period of controversy and apologetic, to say nothing of warfare and mutual persecution, had generated a discourse which objectified and prob-lematized religion, making it something to think about rather than to think with. 2 In other words, the formal statements of conviction issued in the wake of the Reformation by competing denominations within Christendom, like the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Augsburg Confession, the Genevan Confession, or the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England had encouraged the development of the notion of religion as adherence to a set of propositions. As Peter Harrison has explained, this creation of a propositional religion in turnenabled discussion of the merits of other “religions” conceived to exist similarly as sets of beliefs. The truth or falsity of a religion had become a function of the truth or falsity of the propositions which constituted it. True religion... [had become]... a body of certain knowledge. 3Harrison’s remarks are significant because they suggest that the origins of rationalized discourse about religion and its consequent transformation from a way of thinking to an object of thought are to be found squarely within orthodoxy itself. 4To be specific, the competing content of official doctrinal pronouncements led not only to the comparison of the religions but implicitly to their emergence as subjects of a discourse which proposed reason as the norm, a [End Page 88] development clearly reflected in the wave of pamphlets, broadsides, printed disputations, and formal polemical treatises written in both Latin and the vernacular languages which poured from the presses of Catholic and mainstream Protestant denominations in England and on the continent throughout the seventeenth century. In this literature, Protestants accused Catholics of “superstition” and “idolatry,” while Catholics urged potential converts to compare the religions with a view to discovering their “marks of truth,” argued for the compatibility of Catholic faith and “natural light,” and identified heresy, on the contrary, with unreason, passion, lust, and self-contradiction. On both sides of the confessional fence, polemicists frequently insisted that religious discussion conform to the rules of logic, accusing one another of failing to argue from incontrovertible first principles, and of succumbing to the fatal dangers of petitio principii and circular reasoning. In other words, they claimed that in religious matters poor argumentation is a sure sign of error, and it would not be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God. By NICHOLAS LASH. Oharlottesville, Virginia: Uni· versity Press of Virginia, 1988. Pp. 313. $29.95 (hardbound). Nicholas Lash sets out "to construct an argument in favor of one way of construing or interpreting human experience as experience of the mystery of God " (p. 3), and to show that this awareness of God has nothing to (...) do with analyses of " religious experience " or of theism. Recent attention to religious experience, such as that of the philosopher Riohard Swinburne or of the research unit established by the zoologist Alister Hardy at Oxford, relies on a conception of that experience as individualistic rather than communal and as a matter of feeling or sensation in contrast to thought. Lash aMrihutes ·this view of religious experience to the legacy of William James, and contrasts it with that of Frederick Schleiermacher. According to Lash, James identifies the personal wi~h the individual, contrasts thought with feeling, and regards religious experience as private in contrast to public, or " naked " with respect to language, institutions, and other cultural forms. Schleiermacher avoids these errors by focusing not on discrete, datable experiences that one can identify as religious, hut on a moment that pervades all human experience, to the source or object of which the grammar of Christian doctrine gives the name "God." Lash acknowledges that Schleiermacher can he read in support of either of these two different ways of construing religious experience (pp. 112, 129), hut he does not realize that James can also he read in a way that blurs the dichotomy he sets up. Both James and Schleier· maoher provide uncommonly sophisticated accounts of the social character of the self and of the role of language and thought in shaping perception and feeling. In his Ethik, Schleiermacher locates the individual in social and cultural institutions, and elaborates the anthropology that informs his influential lectures on hermeneutics. Three of many notable contributions of James' Principles of Psychology are a chapter on the self that is the source of conceptions of the social self in American sociology and social psychology, a critique of classical empiricism showing that the distinction between sense impressions and ideas is an artifact of an erroneous psychological theory, and a famous chapter on the stream of thought in which he argues human experi505 506 BOOK REVIEWS enoe is not divided into ideas, sensations, and feelings, but is a continuous flow of consciousness. Toward the end of his career, he gave up the concept of consciousness as too closely associated with the mental in contrast to the physical, and spoke instead of the flux of experience. Lash accuses James of Cartesi1an dualism, and attributes to him the view that there is a "little person," a Cartesian self imprisoned in the body. He admi,ts that the Principles contains no such view, hut sug· gests that Jaines becomes mo't'e and more Cartesian as he develops, his radical empiricism. In fact, there is very little in James that could accurately be called Cartesian, and nothing ei,ther in the Principles or in the late Essays in Radical Empiricism that would condone any such picture of an homunculus inside the body. Contrary to Lash's view, the idea of "pure experience" in the latter work does not refer to experience that is independent of language, culture, or institutions, but is rather a reminder that such distinctions as that between objec· tive and subjective, feeling and thought, or perception and fantasy, are not girven in experience, but are products of our interpretations. Despite their social views of the self, both Sohleiermacher and James focus on the consciousness of the individual when they come to ex· amine religious experience or piety. James says.that he will stress the more extreme or devdoped reports of religious experience in order to examine the " ripe fruits " of,tJhe religious life. Both share a Protes· tant bias toward personal piety as the heart of religion, and regard ritual and institutional forms as the communal context for that piety, and an insufficient appreciation for the value of the routine and conventional. But this is not to be identified in either... (shrink)

The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and refuted in the present paper. The hypothesis of reductionism finds no obstacle within contemporary natural sciences. Determinism in classical physics is irrefutable, unless classical physics is itself refuted. From quantum mechanics, some authors argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism (...) in the natural laws, and that the mind is responsible for the wave function collapse of matter, which leads to a choice among the different possibilities for the body. However, here I defend the opposite thesis because indeterminism does not imply free will, and because the considerations about an autonomous mind sending orders to the body is against neuroscience or evolutionary theories about human beings. The quantum theory of measurement can be interpreted without the intervention of human minds, but other fields of science cannot contemplate the mentalist scenario. A fatalistic or materialist view, which denies the possibility of a free will, makes much more sense in scientific terms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman JacksonBernabé S. Mendoza (bio)Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World New York: By New York University Press, 2020, 320 pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-9004-0the radical work of black feminism is to upend Western dualistic ways of thinking that structure our understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Human: Matter and (...) Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson troubles the dominant dualistic distinction of the human and the animal. Jackson argues that antiblackness undergirds Enlightenment discourses on the human-animal divide such that blackness cannot be extricated from the very concept of the animal because both “are not only interdependent representations but also entangled concepts” (28). Central to Jackson’s argument on the animalization of blackness is the notion of “ontologized plasticity,” which posits the being of black(ened) people as infinitely malleable and mutable matter and further points to the fluidification of form and “fleshly existence.” Far from seeing the human as a category that has “ontological integrity,” as scholars in the fields of animal studies, new materialisms, and posthumanism presuppose, Jackson instead seeks to redefine the concept of the human through the theorization of blackness (16). She points out that such theorization has been, for such scholars, a lacuna and the “space of the unthought,” which thus marks her intervention in these fields. [End Page 211]The author offers a sustained engagement with the knowledge claims of science and philosophy, reading them through and against the intellectual contributions of black feminist writers and artists. She draws from such luminaries as Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the artist Wangechi Mutu to show the ways in which they reject an enclosed notion of the human that is defined only by keeping the racialized other at bay and in a degraded animalized and liquified state. As such, she showcases how black feminist visual and literary culture “theorizes and philosophizes” and reveals the faulty, antiblack premises upon which science and philosophy establish their claims of knowledge on the human.Offering a materialist theory of black ontology and temporality, Jackson poses three main arguments on the racialization of the human-animal distinction. The first is the aforementioned notion of ontologized and black(ened) plasticity that speaks to the constant modulation and manipulation of black matter as it relates to gender, sexuality, and sexual reproduction. Reading US slavery as an experimental playground for testing the limits of the human, Jackson argues that “black female f lesh... functions as the limit case of ‘the human’ and is its matrix-figure” (4). She defines plasticity as a “praxis that seeks to define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable in antiblack, often paradoxical sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating sex/gender, reproduction, and states of being more generally” (11). There is, in other words, an inversion that takes place in that it is only through opposition and the imposed instability and illegibility of blackness—of black matter and the black mater(nal) situated as “chaos by design”—that such categories as “woman,” “mother,” and “female body” can themselves take hold and become intelligible forms (11). Jackson engages with the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter in order to argue that “Man,” as the object of analysis within liberal humanism, “produces an untenable dichotomy—‘the human’ versus ‘the animal,’ whereby the black(ened) female is posited as the abyss dividing organic life into ‘human’ or ‘animal’ based on wholly unsound metaphysical premises” (12). This claim on the centrality of the black female in the plasticization of blackness is given support in chapter 2, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative novel Brown Girl in the Ring, where plasticity gives way to opacity.In this chapter, Jackson explores the ways in which the black female body, as that which is opaque and nonrepresentable within the “dominant grammar of representation,” shatters what she argues is Heidegger’s metaphysical and hierarchical ordering of human, animal, and world. In exploring “how our received conceptions of being hinges on our im/perception of black mater... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the Classical Age by Maria Serena MirtoJoseph W. DayMaria Serena Mirto. Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the Classical Age. Trans. by A. M. Osborne. Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture 44 Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. x + 197 pp. 10 black-and-white figs. Paper, $19.95.Mirto (with Osborne) has given us a readable book on a topic of (...) perennial interest, full of learning but unencumbered by the development of a comprehensive argument with full scholarly apparatus (there are no footnotes or endnotes). I devoured it on a couple of airplane rides, during which its intelligent presentation thoroughly distracted me from my physical discomfort. The book provided a clear and concise review of important topics which I have not studied intensely for years, and it initiated me into recent trends and made me thirsty to approach its suggestions for further reading—while avoiding the spring by the white cypress, of course.The volume is an expansion and updating, as well as a translation, of the Italian original, La morte nel mondo greco (Rome 2007). Much scholarship from 2007 and later is cited, especially in discussions of Dionysian and “Orphic” material (chap. 2). Important additions are a useful section on the confusing (to the uninitiated) topic of hero cults and “an appendix outlining fundamental developments in modern studies of death in the Greek world” (x). The latter traces an interesting journey through the history of mentalities from R. Hertz (Durkheim’s student), through E. de Martino and P. Ariès, on to C. Sourvinou-Inwood’s disagreement with I. Morris about change and stability in early Greek attitudes toward death.Mirto articulates her goal in the preface as “a general synthesis of people’s relationships with death in the Greek world... [a] survey of the ways in which archaic and classical Greek culture dealt with the trauma of death” (ix). One does not judge such a book on its original interpretations and scholarly arguments; other criteria apply. For example, how comprehensive (or representative) is the selection of topics, approaches, and examples? How useful (or user-friendly) is the selection, especially for the audience to which it is addressed?At the level of overall structure, Mirto scores high for comprehensiveness. Any treatment of Greek death must devote major attention to the three topics she announces : (1) “beliefs about the afterlife, on the boundary between literary imagination and religious faith”; (2) “funerary rituals and material evidence of the cult of the dead”; (3) “ideologies... that construct an ideal model of death, making it an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, event” (ix). Chapter 1 on traditional views, mostly derived from Homer (also treated in chap. 5.1), commences Mirto’s discussion of the first topic, which is continued in chapter 2 on more [End Page 337] optimistic eschatologies, especially those associated with Dionysus and Orpheus. The second topic is treated in chapters 3 (on death, mourning, and last rites) and 4 (on markers, epitaphs, and tomb and hero cult). Chapter 5 is devoted to the third topic, with particular attention to the development of the polis and Athens’ patrios nomos and funerary legislation. R. Garland’s widely used survey (The Greek Way of Death [Ithaca 1985], 2d ed. 2001) covers much the same ground, though that book’s feel is quite different. Garland provides a richness of source and scholarly citations that Mirto eschews; for example, Garland devotes twenty-three pages (chap. 7 and its dense endnotes) to visits to the grave, while Mirto barely touches on the matter.At the level of specifics, Mirto’s comprehensiveness is uneven. Reflecting her expertise in archaic and classical poetry, as well as her engagement with the history of mentalities, discussions of literature and some sub-literary textual material are excellent, while she is less full but still useful on iconography (especially that of white-ground lekythoi and sculpture) and polis regulations. Perceptions of comprehensiveness, of course, will vary among readers. Because of gaps in my knowledge, I learned most from Mirto’s presentation of Dionysian and “Orphic” material: the gold lamellae, the Olbia bones, the Derveni papyrus (chap. 2, with the... (shrink)

The Self of the Homeric man can be called a weak one. Men depicted in the Iliad and in the Odyssey are determined by fate, gods’ plans and interventions, and their own emotional impulses perceived as independent forces. Hermann Schmitz links this weakness of the Self with the character of the Homeric man’s experience of the body. According to Schmitz the perception of the body as directly experienced, i.e. as Leib, constitutes the Homeric idea of man. This article stresses the (...) point that the Homeric man cannot be considered as being directed only by the external forces and that the notion of Leib, however helpful, does not suffice to describe him. Being directed and being leiblich the Homeric man is also independent. He is able to master the impulses of his emotions, his actions seem to originate from himself, he can be regarded as a unity coordinated by his Self. The independence of the Homeric man is unstable: it can be said that it appears and disappears. This status of the human position seems to pose problems for a reader who is accustomed to modern notions of personal freedom, free will or choice. May that be a chance for us in our attempts to understand ourselves? (shrink)

Few fields in philosophy are so seemingly distant from ordinary human experience as theories of knowledge. How much information do we draw in from bodies outside of us? And to what degree do our perceptual and mental processes subjectify that information to the point of becoming non-objective? The Heart of Matter: Bridging the Kantian Gap in How we Know Things presents both a back history of current theories of perception, and a plausible theory to span the gap between subject and (...) object. This book begins with K. Popper's theory of falsifiability, as a twentieth-century version of Kantian subjectivism. Before considering eighteenth-century transcendental philosophy, a look at both the empirical and rational theories that inspired Kant helps place his Critique of Pure Reason in context. This book highlights the developments in Kant's thought, as he struggled to solve important problems within his Copernican revolution. How far does Kant's theory coincide with our actual perceptual experience? Twentieth-century experimentation in perception sheds important light on human knowing. The Heart of Matter follows C. Fabro's study of those psychological findings, and especially his ability to incorporate those findings into a coherent description and explanation. Many current theories of knowledge dismiss any possibility of our objectively knowing bodies outside of us; this book takes a candid look at both the major dilemmas implied in such a dismissal, as well as our actual perception of things. On this account, a fruitful exchange does appear to take place between the mind and reality in perception. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Evidence, Authority, and Interpretation: A Response to Jason HelmsCarol PosterAs someone with a long-standing interest in Heraclitus, I am delighted that Philosophy and Rhetoric is providing a forum for an ongoing discussion of his work.1 Although Jason Helms and I do disagree on specific matters concerning Heraclitean interpretation, we are, I think, in full agreement concerning the importance of Heraclitus for both rhetorical and philosophical studies and intend these (...) essays as contributions to what, it is hoped, will be a fruitful ongoing discussion of Heraclitus within the interdisciplinary tradition of this journal. Rather than address many minor points of disagreement superficially, I will concentrate below on close analysis of a few specific issues that I consider paradigmatic of differences in method rather than merely in conclusions.Panta Rhei (All Things Flow)That Heraclitus was interested in establishing any sense of orthoepia plays down his insistence on the panta rhei (everything flows). To suggest any final rightness of words would suggest that everything flows but the Logos.(Helms, this issue)Actually, I do not use the phrase “final rightness of words” but, rather, describe Heraclitus as “focus[ing] on the problem of correctness of names” and as [End Page 288] “consider[ing] the possibility that one can learn something about the nature of things by examining the non-literal sense of their names” (2006, 15).2 Name is an English equivalent of the Greek onoma (Latin nomen, substantive as opposed to verb or particle), not rhêma (word, verb, phrase) or logos (word, account, speech, saying, story, ratio, reason, etc.). The phrase “correctness of names” alludes to an ongoing discussion among scholars in classics and philosophy about a specific problem in early Greek thought (normally discussed in relation to Heraclitus, Protagoras, Prodicus, Plato’s Cratylus, and Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation).More importantly, Helms seems to think it impossible a priori that Heraclitus might have considered some sort of doctrine of flux compatible with a belief in correctness of names. Ancient evidence, however, suggests that Heraclitus did, in fact, consider stability of logos, correctness of names, and sensible flux compatible in some manner.For logos as unchanging, dk22b1 begins, “Of the logos that exists always [eontos aiei] uncomprehending are men.”3 Although the syntax is ambiguous, eontos aiei suggests some stability of logos. Sextus Empiricus states that Heraclitus considered the “divine logos” stable and eternal and human reason grounded in its participation therein (Adv. Math. 7.126–33).4 The “commonality” of logos in dk22b2 also suggests some interpretive stability, in the sense of logos not varying with respect to the perception of the individual.The phrase panta rhei, although solidly entrenched in the reception history of Heraclitus, often as part of a “doctrine of flux,” is not actually a well-attested Heraclitean saying (included in the dk “b” fragments) but, rather, derived from early testimonia. Whether the phrase is a paraphrase, indirect quotation, or Platonic/Aristotelian recasting of Heraclitus is uncertain. The earliest sources are Platonic:Therefore you [Theaetetus] were quite right in saying that knowledge is nothing else than perception, and there is complete identity between the doctrine of Homer and Heraclitus and all their followers— that all things are in motion like streams [hoion rheumata kineisthai ta panta]—the doctrine of the great sophist Protagoras that man is the measure of all things—and the doctrine of Theaetetus that, since these things are true, perception is knowledge.(Theaet. 160d) [End Page 289]Those... would agree well enough with Heraclitus that all things move and nothing remains still [panta menein ouden].(Crat. 401d)Heraclitus says that all things move and nothing remains still [hoti panta chorei kai ouden menei], and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice in the same stream.(Crat. 402a)Nor will he condemn himself and all things and say that there is no health in them, but that all things are flowing like leaky pots [panta hôsper keramia rhei], or believe that all things are just like people afflicted with catarrh, flowing and running all the time [rheumatos te kai katarrou panta ta chrêmata].(Crat. 440c–d... (shrink)

This book investigates the relationship between our present and future selves. It focuses specifically on diachronic self-regarding decisions: choices involving our earlier and later selves, in which the earlier self makes a decision for the later self. The author connects the scientific understanding of the neurobehavioral processes at the core of individuals' perceptions of their future selves with the philosophical reflection on individuals' moral relationship with their future selves. She delineates a descriptive theory of the perception of the future self (...) that is based on empirical evidence and that systematizes and integrates the current theoretical literature. She then argues for the morality of prudence and interprets diachronic self-regarding decisions as decisions between two agents-the earlier and later selves-that belong to the realm of intergenerational ethics, which regulates the relationship between contemporary people and future generations. Finally, the author provides a moral theory of prudence based on respect for one's agency. This theory identifies what the present and the future selves owe to one another in diachronic self-regarding decisions. Moral Choices for Our Future Selves will be of interest to researchers and students working in ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have recently taken renewed interest in cognitive penetration, in particular, in the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. The question is whether cognitive states like belief influence perceptual experience in some important way. Since the possible phenomenon is an empirical one, the strategy for analysis has, predictably, proceeded as follows: define the phenomenon and then, definition in hand, interpret various psychological data. However, different theorists offer different and apparently inconsistent definitions. And so in addition to (...) the usual problems (e.g., definitions being challenged by counterexample), an important result is that different theorists apply their definitions and accordingly get conflicting answers to the question “Is this a genuine case of cognitive penetration?”. This hurdle to philosophical and scientific progress can be remedied, I argue, by returning attention to the alleged consequences of the possible phenomenon. There are three: theory-ladenness of perception in contexts of scientific theory choice, a threat to the general epistemic role of perception, and implications for mental architecture. Any attempt to characterize or define, and then empirically test for, cognitive penetration should be constrained by these consequences. This is a method for interpreting and acquiring experimental data in a way that is agreeable to both sides of the cognitive penetration debate. Put crudely, the question shifts to “Is this a cognitive-perceptual relation that results in (or constitutes) one or more of the relevant consequences?” In answering this question, relative to various data, it may turn out that there is no single unified phenomenon of cognitive penetration. But this should be no matter, since it is the consequences that are of central importance to philosophers and scientists alike. (shrink)

The matter of the soul has been one of the most important and central matters in the history of Islamic science and thought. For the soul constitutes one of the two elements that make up the human being, and the issue of the human being has undoubtedly been one of the most prominent matters in Islamic civilization and has been a major preoccupation for Islamic intellectuals. In this context, the Islamic basin of knowledge and thought has constructed two main definitions (...) of the soul, one based on the Qur’anic teachings and the other inspired by Ancient Greek philosophy. Theologians conceived of the soul as a “subtle body”. Philosophers, on the other hand, conceived it as an “abstract substance”. This dispute between kalām and philosophy over the soul has not only been confined to the physical realm, but has also extended to the eschatological dimension, leading to a polemic that has lasted for centuries. As with many issues in post-classical Islamic thought, the influence of philosophy on this issue has been seen to be greater than that of other traditions. In fact, in the aforementioned period and later on, works on the soul from a theological perspective could not bypass the philosophical perspective. Within this framework, the theological perspective criticized the philosophers because they disagreed with it and especially because one end of the issue extended to the eschatological axis, and found it important to refute their conceptions in this regard. One of the most prominent figures of the aforementioned period, i.e., post-classical Islamic science and thought, was Abū Muhammad Rukn al-Dīn Ubaydallāh b. Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Samarqandī (d. 701/1301), a member of the Māturīdī and Hanafī sects. Samarqandī wrote many works and treatises on kalām, Qur’anic sciences, tafsīr, fiqh, hadīth, and mysticism. Among the author’s works/risālas/treaties that have reached the present day, there is a work titled “Risālat al-rūḥ” on the humanitarian-nātik (speaking) rational human soul (al-rūh al-nātiq al-insānī). Comprising an introduction and ten chapters, al-Samarqandī used a theological and mystical style, drawing on the teachings of the Qur’ān on the one hand, and partly on rational arguments on the other. The work includes the subject of the soul and the essence of the human being in this context, the definition and essence of the soul, the comparison between the views of the Ahl al-Sunnah and the philosophers in this regard, and the criticisms against the philosophers, the issue of ma‘ād (the end) in eschatology, the thoughts of the Sufis on the soul, the perception of Allah through the saying “Whoever knows himself, knows his Lord”, which the author considered as a hadith, and similar issues. As a mutakallim and following the line of Ahl al-Sunnah, the main problem of al-Samarqandī’s treatise revolves around what should be understood when it comes to “human being”, the nature of the soul, the manner in which ma‘ād will be realized, and his criticisms of philosophers over these issues. Based on our research and studies, it has been observed that the aforementioned treatise has not yet been analyzed and published. Furthermore, two manuscript copies of the treatise in question were found as a result of our investigations. This study covers the critical edition and review of al-Samarqandī’s Risālat al-rūḥ. (shrink)

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae proposed a theory of everything. Like other Presocratics, Anaxagoras addressed topics that could now be placed outside the sphere of philosophical inquiry: not only did he explore metaphysics and the nature of human understanding but he also offered explanations in physics, meteorology, astronomy, physiology, and biology. His aim seems to have been to explain as completely as possible the world in which human beings live, and one's knowledge of that world; thus he seeks to investigate the universe (...) from top to bottom. This article explores Anaxagoras's world from its basic foundations. It undertakes to show the connections among the metaphysical, epistemological, and cosmological parts of Anaxagoras's theory. The discovery and publication of new material has also enhanced the understanding of Presocratic thought. A spectacular example is the new material from Empedocles of Acragas that has become available. (shrink)

The Perfection of the Universe gives an account of the idea of the universe and its perfection in Aquinas's philosophy, but at the same time it provides an example of how a cosmology can be developed in a teleological framework. Although this is the cosmology of one who was first and foremost a theologian, the book tries to show how it was articulated philosophically and in relation to a particular model of the universe. As a contribution to the history of (...) philosophy, and Thomistic studies in particular, it seeks to draw more attention to Aquinas's view of the world, which has been relatively neglected in favor of emphasis on his theory of knowledge and theory of being, and at the same time to show how it is integral to his very understanding of being. The book thereby brings out a dimension of rationality in Aquinas's philosophy that is often ignored, especially as it concerns creation as a whole and what Aquinas refers to as convenientia in this whole. The systematic nature of Aquinas's conception of the universe is highlighted by the author's attempt to reconstruct the movement of his thought. Thus Oliva Blanchette focuses not just on the universe or on perfection but on the perfection of the universe as a unified idea that recurs frequently in both the philosophy and the theology of Aquinas and that has its own philosophical dynamic both as a logic and as an actuality. In doing so, he endeavors to correct misconceptions about Aquinas's idea of the universe, such as that found in Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, and to show how the idea stands up philosophically even while being connected with a scientific model of the universe now viewed as obsolete. (shrink)

We enjoy immediate knowledge of our own limbs and bodies. I argue that this knowledge, which is also called proprioception, is a special form of perception, special in that it is, unlike perception by the external senses, at the same time also a form of genuine self-knowledge. The argument has two parts. Negatively, I argue against the view, held by G. E. M. Anscombe and strengthened by John McDowell, that this knowledge, bodily self-knowledge, is non-perceptual. This involves, inter alia, rescuing (...) from McDowell’s attack the very idea of receptive self-knowledge. On the positive side, I develop, by drawing on the work of Brian O’Shaughnessy, a detailed account of bodily self-knowledge as a special form of perception. This account spells out how this special form of perception is epistemologically mediated by sensations of a special class of primary qualities—vital-dynamic sensations as I call them—in one’s limbs. (shrink)