This article explores Kierkegaard’s largely overlooked 1838 paper “Telegraph Messages from a Mousvoyant to a Clairvoyant concerning the Relation between Xnty and Philosophy,” and argues that it can be read as a polemic against the speculative unity of philosophy and Christianity and speculative thought’s epistemological optimism, especially targeting the Danish speculative theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. It will be suggested that the “Telegraph Messages” offer a corrective to this view by separating Christianity and philosophy and underlining the ambiguity of human existence (...) and the paradoxicality of the religious sphere, thus foreshadowing key themes in Kierkegaard’s mature pseudonymous authorship. (shrink)

The discovery of F.M. Dostoyevsky by young E. M. Cioran marks a turning point for a better understanding of his first Romanian work and his later production in French. His first work, Pe culmile disperării [On the Heights of Despair] has a tragic breath, typically dostoyevskyan, which reminds us of the tragical and sick conscience of the hero of his Notes from the Underground.

The cases of Norman the Clairvoyant and Mr. Truetemp form classic counterexamples to the process reliabilist's claim that reliability is sufficient for prima facie justification. I discuss several ways in which contemporary reliabilists have tried to deal with these counterexamples, and argue that they are all unsuccessful. Instead, I propose that the most promising route lies with an appeal to a specific kind of higher-order defeat that is best cashed out in terms of properly functioning monitoring mechanisms.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The founder of Psychical Research, though he has not yet received the honour due to him, seems to have been King Croesus of Lydia, who reigned from 560 to 546 B.C. He carried out an interesting experiment, recorded in detail by Herodotus,2 to test the clairvoyant powers of a number of oracles. He sent embassies to seven oracles, six Greek and one Egyptian. They all started on the same day. On the hundredth day each embassy was instructed to ask its (...) oracle, “What is King Croesus, the son of Alyattes, now doing?” The answer was to be written down and brought back. The oracle of Delphi replied as follows, in hexameters, as its custom was: “I know the number of the sands and the measures of the sea. I understand the dumb, and I hear him who does not speak.” Then it went on: “There comes to my mind the smell of a strong-shelled tortoise, which is being cooked along with lamb's flesh in a brazen vessel; brass is spread beneath it, and with brass it is covered.” As a matter of fact, this answer was perfectly correct. Herodotus tells us that “having considered what would be the most difficult thing to discover and to imagine,” Croesus “cut up a tortoise and a lamb, and himself boiled them together in a brazen pot.” What happened afterwards illustrates the difficulties of this sort of investigation, difficulties which still perplex us to this day. Croesus argued, reasonably enough, that if the Delphic priestess had clairvoyant powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers which she claimed to have. But when he consulted the oracle later about his forthcoming expedition against the Persians, he received two answers, one of which was ambiguous—“When Croesus crosses the Halys he shall destroy a great empire”—and the other correct, but too obscure to be easily interpreted. (shrink)

This paper argues that John Greco’s agent reliabilism fails in its attempt to meet the double requirement of accounting for the internalist intuition that knowledge requires sensitivity to the reliability of one’s evidence and evading the charge of psychological implausibility.

The present article deals with a kind of parapsychology called metapsychics ( metapsíquica) as conceived and practised in Spain between 1923 and 1925. First we focus on the reception of a treatise by Richet that evoked both support (Ferrán) and criticism (Mira). Then we examine some experiments on clairvoyance performed at the Marquis of Santa Cara’s home, dealing chiefly with the rise and fall of a case of prodigious vision. The analysis gives special attention to the question of how (...) metapsychics was understood and to which discussions it gave rise. The authors argue that the project of metapsychics must be understood within a frame of two tendencies, namely, the increasing popularization and the demarcation of science that were under way in modern society. (shrink)

Many attempts have been made to solve Hume's problem. However, the assumptions leading to the problem have remained largely unnoticed. Moreover, since Goodman introduced the predicate "grue", philosophers without relevant mathematical education have been confused. In addition, various delusive arguments from convergence have been presented. In this book, it is maintained that knowledge has to be feasible and relevant and that several solutions fail to meet that demand. It is argued that the crucial presupposition of the problem of induction is (...) that clairvoyance is impossible and that this presupposition is unproven. Generalized Goodman predicates are introduced. To criticize arguments from convergence, the notion of "undecided game" is introduced. A relationship between Zeno's paradox and the problem of induction is revealed. A distinction between "do not know" and "cannot know" is consistently held. It is concluded that, as yet, we do not know the future and that it is impossible to prove that it is impossible to know the future. This book should be useful to professionals in epistemology and philosophy of science, and might be of interest to logicians and mathematicians. (shrink)

Reliability theories of epistemic justification face three main objections: the generality problem, the demon-world (or brain-in-a-vat) counterexample, and the clairvoyant-powers counterexample. In Perception and Basic Beliefs(Oxford 2009), Jack Lyons defends reliabilism at length against the clairvoyant powers case. He argues that the problem arises due to a laxity about the category of basic beliefs, and the difference between inferential and non-inferential justification. Lyons argues reliabilists must pay more attention to architecture. I argue this isn’t necessarily so. What really matters for (...) understanding and solving the case involves paying closer attention to the origins of our belief forming capacities, both inferential and non-inferential. Reliabilists should make origins matter more. (shrink)

This book arrives with a reputation. Apparently, it is the first book on psi and other anomalous human experiences to be published by the rather traditionalist APA (American Psychological Association). If this is true, this is likely due to the fact that much of the book relies on carefully monitored and repeated experiments to demonstrate the statistical veracity of such things as precognition, remote viewing, clairvoyance, mental telepathy, and even psychokinesis. This is the key to the authors’ claim of (...) empirical testing and scientific proof. (shrink)

A blindfolded clairvoyant walks into a room and immediately knows how it is arranged. You walk in and immediately see how it is arranged. Though both of you represent the room as being arranged in the same way, you have different experiences. Your experience doesn’t just represent that the room is arranged a certain way; it also visually presents the very items in the room that make that representation true. Call the felt aspect of your experience made salient by this (...) contrast its presentational phenomenology. Many philosophers have observed that perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology. In this paper I explore its nature, scope, and significance. I argue that in addition to perceptual experiences, presentational phenomenology can be found in intuitive, introspective, imaginative, and recollective experiences. I also argue that presentational phenomenology is epistemologically significant: it plays a central role in explaining why the experiences that have it justify beliefs and give us knowledge. (shrink)

Our only channel of information about the world is the impact of external forces on our sensory surfaces. So says science itself. There is no clairvoyance. How, then, can we have parlayed this meager sensory input into a full-blown scientific theory of the world? This is itself a scientific question. The pursuit of it, with free use of scientific theory, is what I call naturalized epistemology. The Roots of Reference falls within that domain. Its more specific concern, within that (...) domain, is reference to concrete and abstract objects: what such reference consists in, and how we achieve it. (shrink)

Over the past hundred years, a number of scientific investigators claim to have adduced experimental evidence for phenomena information” seems to behave like a weak signal that has to compete for the information-processing resources of the organism, a reduction of ongoing sensorimotor activity may facilitate ESP detection. Such a meaningful convergence of results suggests that psi phenomena may represent a unitary, coherent process whose nature and compatibility with current physical theory have yet to be determined. The theoretical implications and potential (...) practical applications of psi could be significant, irrespective of the small magnitude of psi effects in laboratory settings. (shrink)

Judgment and Agency contains Sosa’s latest effort to explain how higher epistemic value of the sort missing from an unwitting clairvoyant’s beliefs might be a special case of performance normativity, with its superior value following from truisms about performance value. This paper argues that the new effort rests on mistaken assumptions about performance normativity. Once these mistaken assumptions are exposed, it becomes clear that higher epistemic value cannot be a mere special case of performance normativity, and its superiority cannot be (...) guaranteed just by truisms about performance value. Sections 1 and 2 set the stage, clarifying the thesis and the relevant features of Sosa’s strategy, and explaining why the strategy requires the mistaken assumptions. Section 3 presents a dilemma for the new account of higher epistemic value. Section 4 deepens the case for one of the horns. Section 5 takes stock and draws some broader morals. (shrink)

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things stand (...) from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on armchair inquiry. Thought experiment has the feel of clairvoyance, thus eliciting awe in some and suspicion in others. But the wonder of thought experiment is just a special case of our vague puzzlement about how a question could be answered by merely thinking. There is no mystery when investigators look, measure, and manipulate. Their answers come from the news borne by observation and experiment. But if you just ponder, then the information you have leaving the (...) armchair is the same as the information you had when you sat down. It is argued that part of our wonder is based on a modal fallacy. The theories of armchair inquiry that promise answers to the legitimate portion of our wonder are surveyed. Finally, a cleansing model of rationality that sets the stage for a detailed analysis of how thought experiments work is developed. (shrink)

Anthropology diffracted : originary humanicity -- Just figures?: forensic clairvoyance, mathematics, and the language question -- Enumerating language : "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" -- Natural convers(at)ions : or, what if culture was really nature all along? -- (Con)founding "the human" : rethinking the incest taboo -- Culpability and the double-cross : Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty.

This paper responds to Sven Bernecker’s argument that agent reliabilism cannot accommodate internalist intuitions about clarvoyance cases. In section 1 we clarify a version of agent reliabilism and Bernecker’s objections against it. In section 2 we say more about how the notion of cognitive integration helps to adjudicate clairvoyance cases and other proposed counterexamples to reliabilism. The central idea is that cognitive integration underwrites a kind of belief ownership, which in turn underwrites the sort of responsibility for belief required (...) for subjective justification. In section 3 we say more about what cognitive integration amounts to, drawing on some recent accounts of desire ownership from the literature on autonomy and moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how a general epistemic norm of action that I have proposed in earlier work should be specified in order to govern certain types of acts: assertive speech acts. More specifically, I argue that the epistemic norm of assertion is structurally similar to the epistemic norm of action. First, I argue that the notion of warrant operative in the epistemic norm of a central type of assertion is an internalist one that I call ‘discursive justification.’ This (...) type of warrant is internalist insofar as it requires that the agent is capable of articulating reasons for her belief. The idea, roughly, is that when one asserts that p, one is supposed to be in a position to give reasons for believing that p. Bonjour’s reliable clairvoyant Norman, for example, is not in an epistemic position to make assertions regarding the president’s whereabouts—even if Norman knows the president’s whereabouts. In conclusion, I briefly consider whether a type of skeptical argument—often labeled Agrippa’s Trilemma—is motivated, at least in part, by the fact that responses to it violate the relevant epistemic norm of assertion. (shrink)

« Amours anfractueuses, revenez,Déchirez le corps clairvoyant.La lumière affectionne les lèvres éclatées. »Jacques Dupin(Le Corps clairvoyant, 1999, p. 86) Quand on parle du corps, on recourt au blasonnement : des morceaux de corps épars donnent à voir un corps fragmenté, en archipel. Une image unitaire/relationnelle du corps semble contrebalancée par sa dimension osirienne/« archipélagique ». Un imaginaire du démembrement hante la tradition poétique qui depuis le xvie siècle s’attarde, conte...

This paper focuses on Schellenberg’s Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence, according to which if one is in a phenomenal state constituted by employing perceptual capacities, then one is in a phenomenal state that provides phenomenal evidence. This view offers an attractive explanation of why perceptual experience provides phenomenal evidence, and avoids difficulties faced by its contemporary alternatives. However, in spite of the attractions of this view, it is subject to what I call “the alien experience problem”: some alien experiences (e.g. clairvoyant (...) experience) are constituted by employing perceptual capacities, but they do not provide phenomenal evidence. This point is illustrated by a counterexample which is similar to, but also different in some important respects from, Bonjour’s famous clairvoyant Norman example. At the end of the paper, I sketch a restricted version of Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence by putting some etiological constraint on the perceptual capacities employed. (shrink)

The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate prima facie epistemic justification to evaluative belief has been amassing significant philosophical support in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies my belief that I’ve been wronged putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive immediate and defeasible justification for our evaluative beliefs. With many notable advocates in the literature, this justificatory thesis of emotion is fast becoming a central (...) facet in how we conceive of the emotions’ epistemic role with respect to our everyday lives. Interestingly, however, despite the fact that the justificatory thesis is fundamentally an epistemological proposal, comparatively little of the philosophical literature has been dedicated to exploring the epistemological avenues through which emotions might be capable of delivering such an epistemic yield. Accordingly, the central purpose of this thesis is to provide a novel and thorough analysis of how emotional experience might be capable of playing this justificatory role. Here, I present and evaluate three broad models of emotional justification: emotional dogmatism, emotional reliabilism, and agent-based views. Emotional dogmatist views, I argue, fail in virtue of being vulnerable to over-generalisation worries and problematic commitments to the contents of emotional awareness. Emotional reliabilism, while possessing the resources to avoid some objections, is vulnerable to worrisome clairvoyance-style challenges which establish the insufficiency of emotional reliability for epistemic justification. Finally, having learned our lessons from the shortcomings of these views, I argue that an agent-based theory grounded in the development of learned emotional competences provides the most plausible account of how emotional experience can epistemically justify evaluative belief. This discussion, I believe, will both illuminate contemporary discussions of the justificatory thesis of emotion found in the literature, and provide novel insight into the epistemic capacities of the emotions. (shrink)

This article examines one of Italo Calvino’s most beloved novels, (1957), contextualizing it in its landscape and exploring the multifaceted strands of its environmental creativity. Unsuspected paths of political ecology, environmental history, and even biosemiotics and plant neurophysiology will emerge, thus showing the timeliness and clairvoyance of his books vis-à-vis our planetary crises. Written in a seminarrative form, this piece is an invitation to read literary works not only along with their landscapes, but their landscapes, and to consider the (...) potential of more-than-human stories for the shaping of our ethical-environmental imagination. (shrink)

Rosemary Brown (1916-2001), a housewife from South-London, was one of the most famous mediums of her time. Throughout her lifetime, famous composers such as Liszt, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy and Chopin sought her from the realm of the dead to dictate their posthumous compositions. Brown’s ‘received’ musical pieces became a case study for musicians and psychologists. None, however, ever came up with a convincing explanation for the pieces’ existence. Rather than being a story of sheer madness or clairvoyance, in this (...) paper I read Brown’s musical forgeries as a ‘testament’ to twentieth‐century Western culture’s fascination with originality and the cult of genius. Ideologies of authorship and authenticity shape our aesthetic appreciation, so that music’s essential value is for us more than just ‘sounding good’. Drawing on recent philosophical discussion in aesthetics, I question this cultural framework by scrutinizing the concept of artistic creativity. It is because art is a form of creative achievement that history and provenance count as central factors of our evaluation. This, in turn, may reveal us something about the value of musical forgeries. (shrink)

I offer here a solution to a mystery about William James's theory of the self. Among the many students of James who have been mystified is Gerald Myers, who expresses surprise in William James: His Life and Thought that, given the religious and mystical overtones of his later metaphysics, James did not abandon the apparent bodily self of the earlier Principles of Psychology for a “nonbodily, spiritual, and mysterious referent for the first-person pronoun,” instead of consistently adhering “to his claims (...) that the body is at the center of any experience of self, that nothing nonbodily shows itself definitely to introspection, and that nothing about using I makes a mystery of the self”. The mystery is particularly deep because James explicitly avowed the coherence of the Principles treatment of the self with the later metaphysical treatment, such as the material in Essays in Radical Empiricism. Arguing in “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” from the Essays that a metaphysics of pure experience should replace the dichotomy between consciousness and the body, James adduces in support his earlier discussion of the self: “In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the ‘passing thought’.” On the other hand, Myers observes, “if telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition actually occur,” as James was disposed to think, “our everyday equation of the self with bodily experience will surely require some revision”. Then too James's religious convictions as expressed in The Varieties of Religious Experience would also seem to call for revision of the earlier equation. James wrote there, for instance, that “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance” and that “union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end.” “Yet instead of suggesting how his psychological concept of the self might have shifted during the progression from Principles to the metaphysics of pure experience,” Myers comments with a note of puzzlement, “James wrote in his later period that this concept was a natural ally if not the original herald of that metaphysics.”. (shrink)

The following paper will present some outcomes of research into the topic of clairvoyance in a European context and the depiction of the spiritual in film in order to suggest that a cultural analysis of the perception of the angelic imaginary can offer insights into the interrelation between the subject areas of cinema and consciousness. This research on clairvoyance began in 1997 as part of an interdisciplinary study arising out of the disciplines of Cultural Anthropology and Film Theory (...) at the University of Amsterdam: it focused on the phenomenon of the clairvoyant perception of angels and compared this with the treatment of the spiritual in film. One major outcome of this study reveals a significant correspondence between the general cinema experience and the clairvoyants' perception of apparitions: both could be adequately described as multi-sensorial experiences reaching beyond the audio-visual perception into a stimulation of an internal affection (in the Bergsonian use of the term) imbricated with thought, memory and association, embracing the importance of the often underrated sensations of touch, smell and emotions. What follows will summarize these insights and situate them within a broader theoretical context, in which the work of Henri Bergson will be revisited through the subsequent insights of Gilles Deleuze in order to re-evaluate Deleuze's contribution and place my own research within an interdisciplinary framework of Philosophy, Film Studies and Cultural Anthropology. (shrink)

Imagine that you’ve just spent the last several months reading Don Quixote—and that you’re all but fifty pages away from finishing. Unfortunately for you, the book was due back before you could finish, and so begrudgingly, you turn it back in, having not known what happens in the end. Riddled with curiosity, you make your best guess about Quixote’s eventual fate and suppose it is the most likely scenario. Entirely unbeknownst to you, it turns out that you were right; Quixote’s (...) ultimate destiny was just what you had supposed it would be! What luck! Quite naturally, we would say that, when all is said and done, knowing what happens to Don Quixote in the end is surely better than merely believing truly what happens in the end—the predicament you find yourself in having not actually finished the book. After all, it was just by dumb luck that you guessed the ending right—a point you could deny only on the pain of some embarrassing claim of clairvoyance. We might put the idea more generally by saying that from a purely cognitive standpoint, it is better to know the truth than to stumble upon it by luck. This general idea betrays two distinct insights about knowledge. The first is the insight that while true belief is valuable, knowledge is distinctively so—knowing the truth is valuable in a way that merely having a true belief is not. The second insight here is that you lack knowledge if it’s just by dumb luck that the belief you have is true. Call these the value insight and the anti-luck insight: Value insight: Knowledge is distinctively valuable. Luck insight: Knowledge excludes luck. In contemporary epistemology, and especially over the past five years, separate projects have arisen in correspondence with these distinct intuitions: value-driven epistemology is concerned with issues surrounding the first insight, and projects under the description of anti-luck epistemology have arisen out of the second. Now we might reasonably suppose that whatever it is that makes knowledge relevantly un-lucky would be something we could cite in accounting for what makes knowledge distinctively valuable. This natural idea reflects the thought that the insights about value and luck should not be entirely disconnected. There is a problematic tension though between this reasonable expectation and the resources epistemologists have provided for us to accommodate it. What explains the tension is the fact that value-driven and anti-luck projects in epistemology have by and large been developed apart from each other, each focused on one of our two guiding insights at the expense of the other. Consequently, value-driven epistemology’s focus on the normative but not modal properties of knowledge leaves these two aspects of knowledge disconnected much in the way that anti-luck epistemology’s focus on the modal but not the normative properties of knowledge leaves these same aspects disconnected. The lacuna here between what value driven epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge valuable and what the anti-luck epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge exclude luck is troubling. We may resist that there should be such a disconnect if we avoid the common flaw shared by each of these projects pursued in isolation from the other. The flaw here is essentially one of naivety: that of supposing that we can give an account of knowledge exclusively in terms of conditions that would accommodate one of the two insights, while still managing to account for the other insight—which itself we did not appeal to directly in our theory of what knowledge is—e.g. in the analysis provided of it. This is the flaw behind the value-driven approaches that think about knowledge in terms of valuable properties they can’t explain to ensure modal robustness and the anti-luck projects that think of knowledge in terms of modal properties into which we can’t well smuggle the normativity needed to explain its value. To avoid this flaw, then, we should let both of these insights dictate the conditions our analysis offers as essential to knowing. The project with which I’ll be engaging here develops substantially on this widely overlooked and promising idea. (shrink)

The purpose of this text is to analyze the social representations of feminism in divinatory practices. Our research in a few Moldavian counties has identified two main types of social representations of the relationship between magic/divination and feminism. Therefore, there are some dual representations of the feminine divinatory agents versus the masculine ones. Even though women are well represented among clairvoyants, clients, and spectators, these valorizations function as negative stereotypes and do not serve the women. Another representation of feminism in (...) divinatory practices that does not necessarily imply negativism and damnation is a more recent one. Old stereotypes are tamed and attenuated. The results of our research have shown that women continue to be associated with the survival of these practices. This is proof that old myths and representations are still alive. They are discretely present in social expressions. Finally, they will dominate us completely. (shrink)

Based on empirical evidence we discuss the nature of precognition, and address the questions whether retrocausation/ precognition violates causality, whether precognition implies determinism, the questions of actual or probable futures, from where does the information arise, and other observed properties of precognition. This is followed by a discussion on the primacy of precognition by examining the various categories of psi. In our analysis, precognition is most likely the only form of psi, subsuming within it clairvoyance, telepathy, micro-PK, and the (...) survival hypothesis. In this paper, we examine the various arguments for this assertion, the primary one being that it is impossible to close the precognition door. (shrink)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is not just a name today but a philosophy, lifestyle, and A symbol of peace and harmony worldwide. Having clairvoyance regarding the dreadful consequences of modern technology and consumption patterns of his time, Gandhi said, “Nature has everything for Human beings’ needs, not for their greed.” Gandhi represents a culture of truth and non-violence. His ethical perfection is exemplary for us and generations to come. His philosophical and ethical transformation as an individual will also encourage generations, (...) though his political life is criticized severely. The paper talks about environmental sustainability as the end, and the ecosophy of Gandhi is the means to achieve that while critically discussing a few models of sustainable development and their limitations. It also gives a narrative on the application of Gandhi’s fundamental virtues/philosophies in the context of ecosophy models as a. the philosophy of Satya (Truth) and Ahimsa (Non-violence), b. the philosophy of Sarvodaya (welfare of all or Humanism), c. the philosophy of Swarajya (Village Economy), d. the philosophy of Aparigraha (Non-possession) and e. the philosophy of Trusteeship. (shrink)

The making of music has been sufficiently deep and widespread diachronically and geographically to suggest a genetic imperative. C.G. Jung's 'Collective Unconscious' and the accompanying archetypes suggest that music is a psychic necessity because it is part of the brain structure. Therefore, the present view of aesthetics may need drastic revision, particularly on views of music as pleasure, ideas of disinterest, differences between so-called high and low art, cultural identity, cultural conditioning, and art-for-art's sake.All cultures, past and present, show evidence (...) of music making. Music qua music has been a part of human expression for at least some forty-thousand years and it could well be speculated that the making of music accompanied the arrival of the first human beings. As Curt Sachs states, "However far back we tracemankind, we fail to see the springing-up of music. Even the most primitive tribes are musically beyond the first attempts".Why do humans continuahy create music and include it as an integral part of culture? What is music's driving force? Why do cultures endow music with extraordinary powers? Why do human beings, individuahy and as societies, exercise preferences for specific works and genres of music? In probing these questions, I chose one aspect of Jungian psychology, that of the Collective Unconscious with its accompanying archetypes, as the basis upon which to speculate a world aesthetics of music. Once we dispense with the mechanistic and designer idea of human origins, we have only the investigations of the human psyche to mine for data that could explain the myriad forms of artistic activity found the world over. An examination of human beings, I believe, must lead one ultimately to the study of human behavior and motivations, in short, to the psychology of human ethos. This study wih take the following course: first, a discussion of consciousness and the Collective Unconscious, plus a discussion of archetypes; then, a description of musical archetypal substance; and finally, what I beheve is implied to form a world aesthetics of music.By comparison to Jung, Freud gives us little in the way of understanding artistic substance because for him, all artistic subject matter stems purely from the personal experiences of the artist. In comparing Freud and Jung, Stephen Larsen states that "Where Freud was deterministic, Jung was teleological; where Freud was historical, Jung was mythological". Jung drew on a much wider cross-cultural experiential and intellectual base than Freud. His interests in so-cahed primitive peoples led him to Tunis, the Saharan Desert, sub-Saharan Africa, and New Mexico in the United States to visit the Pueblo Indians; visits to India and Ceylon and studies of Chinese culture all contributed to his vast knowledge of human experience. Jung constructed the cohective unconscious as a major part of the psyche with the deepest sense of tradition and myth from around the world. He was criticized because of his interests in alchemy, astrology, divination, telepathy and clairvoyance, yoga, spiritualism, mediums and seances, fortunetelling, flying saucers, religious symbolism, visions, and dreams. But he approached these subjects as a scientist, investigating the human psyche and what these subjects revealed about mental process, particularly what might be learned about the collective unconsciousness. Jung's ideation, in my view, is sufficiently comprehensive to support the probe of a world aesthetics of music. (shrink)

With the publication of the Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought was his due. Described by Schopenhauer himself as 'incomparably more popular than everything up till now', the Parerga is a miscellany of essays addressing themes that complement his work The World as Will and Representation, along with more divergent, speculative pieces. It includes his 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', reflections on fate and clairvoyance, trenchant views on the (...) philosophers and universities of his day, and an enlightening survey of the history of philosophy. The present volume offers a new translation, a substantial introduction explaining the context of the essays, and extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of the work. This readable and scholarly edition will be an essential reference for those studying Schopenhauer, the history of philosophy, and nineteenth-century German philosophy. (shrink)

The problem of cultural environment is not new, but the use of the theory on cultural environment is clearly a new approach to the consideration of familiar questions. That is the problem, is it true that the context has become such that man, as an individual, is becoming increasingly smaller, weaker, more tightly defined and restrained, in a society which is steadily developing in the direction of becoming multi-dimensional and ambiguous with its “logic of imposition”? As for the cultural environment, (...) is it true that the part in it where man has no right to choose, the part which he is compelled to adapt to, will grow bigger and bigger than the part each individual, each community can create, build, and amend? More concretely, is it true that the European rationalist and anthropological culture has become too “classical” and “secular,” now getting replaced by a “fast-food culture” or “stewing-pot culture”? Or is it only a “superficial choice” of globalization times? Is the present philosophy too weak, leaving society to the mercy of less-than-clairvoyant logics of life, in which “such environment, such man” is only one of many behavioral logics which are not too bad in modern social relation? Or has the role of philosophy itself changed - the “Flat world” philosophy now deprived of the responsibility to control, regulate, and, as necessary, determine the context, as it was in the past? Base upon reliable qualitative and quantitative datas, thepaper prover that: 1. If natural environment is the regrouping of factors outside the social-human system making conditions necessary for this system to exist and develop, then cultural environment is regrouping of factors inside the social-human system making sufficient conditions for each subsystem of this system to identify itself and progress. 2. Never in the past has the cultural environment in Vietnam been so rich and varied, so dynamic and positive, so encouraging and attractive, with so many opportunities and challenges as is now the case. The degree of richness and diversity, the dynamic and active rhythm of Vietnam’s cultural environment are now enough to foster good ideas and stimulate discovery and creation. But on the flip side, there are still many challenges andattractions, so hopefully every individual, family, and community will become vigilant before the risk of losing the way or making a mistake. (shrink)

In this essential early work, the preeminent European philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offers a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary meditation on humanity's tendency to refuse the world. Developing the first seeds of his anthropotechnics, Sloterdijk develops a theory of consciousness as a medium, tuned and retuned in the course of technological and social history. His subject here is the "world-alien" in man that was formerly institutionalized in religions, but is increasingly dealt with in modern times through practices of psychotherapy. Originally written in 1993, (...) this almost clairvoyant work examines how humans seek escape from the world in cross-cultural and historical context, up to the mania and world-escapism of our cybernetic network culture. Chapters delve into the artificial habitats and forms of intoxication we develop, from early Christian desert monks to pharmaco-theology through psychedelics. In classic form, Sloterdijk recalibrates and reinvents concepts from the ancient Greeks to Heidegger to develop an astonishingly contemporary philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Suppose that paranormal phenomena really exist. Telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and communication with the dead actually take place. In this article, Timothy Sprigge asks to what extent this would impact on our world view. In particular, how would it affect science, philosophy and religion?

Plato's definition of philosophy as a mania (in Phaedrus) in the first place distances philosophy from prudence of the so-called common sense and places it between the enthusiastic madness of poets and clairvoyants on the one hand, and ironic concealment on the other, which in this very madness prove to be parts of the same question: How can that which is unhidden be revealed in the hidden? Erotic enthusiasm of philosophy is a special sort of madness. It is the paradoxical (...) closeness that is rendered possible by distance. Approaching the distant is recollection. Recollection is by no means a reproduction of anything, but a (loving) thought of that which is always preconceived in previous intelligibility (disclosure of everything), so that it is always being concealed in it. (edited). (shrink)

Norman forms the belief that the president is in New York by way of a clairvoyance faculty he doesn’t know he has. Many agree that his belief is unjustified but disagree about why it is unjustified. I argue that the lack of justification cannot be explained by a higher-level evidence requirement on justification, but it can be explained by a no-defeater requirement. I then explain how you can use cognitive faculties you don’t know you have. Lastly, I use lessons (...) from the foregoing to compare Norman’s belief, formed by clairvoyance, with Sally’s theistic belief, formed by a sensus divinitatis. (shrink)

The title The Imprisoned Splendour derives from the author's conviction that there is a world of unfolding "spiritual" potentiality interpenetrating the world of matter, and that to understand ourselves, and our relationship to nature and the creatures of the physical world we inhabit, this interpenetration must be philosophically considered. In this book, physicist, Raynor Johnson explores natural science, psychical research and mystical experience. The book is valuable for the serious and casual reader alike or anyone wishing to explore the mystical (...) world of paranormal phenomena. Telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis, poltergeist phenomena, phantoms of the living and the dead, trance phenomena, automatic writing, and the evidence for the "etheric body" are all discussed, Johnson the Scientist is clearly a mystic at heart, and this makes for fascinating reading; No stone is left unturned and theological dogma is cast aside. Pre-existence is discussed in depth. Johnson explains, "If the general conception of evolution be regarded as applicable to the soul as well as to the physical world, it is not either improbable or unreasonable that the soul should adventure forth into the physical world in a newly-built body to acquire further experience of the kind which this world can provide. The fact that the soul has done so once was presumably for adequate and compelling reasons, and whatever these are, it is apparent that more might be gained by a series of such incarnations." The imprisoned Splendour is deeply impressive and now considered a classic in psychical research literature. (shrink)

This book explores the nature of modern culture as a culture of anxiety, analyzing the modes in which such anxiety presents itself. Drawing on sociological and philosophical concepts of modernity, the author builds on the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud to offer an understanding of modern anxiety culture as the reverse side of risk culture, which stabilizes itself by concealing or making familiar the social phenomena of risk society. Through explorations of memory, politics, art, clairvoyance, notions of national (...) community and identity, this volume sheds light on the fissures in our culture where anxiety appears, thus revealing its underlying volatility. A study of the ruptures in our modern culture, Anxiety and Lucidity will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, anthropology and philosophy with interests in late modern culture. (shrink)

Evidentialism is one of the most sensible claims of recent philosophy. Yet it is often joined with other theses about the structure of justification and the nature of experience that are dubious. In this paper, I argue that experience is not a basic source of evidence. I contend that for an experience to justify a belief, it must be independently plausible that the experience is reliable based on background information. The paper develops an account of plausibility and examines cases, including (...) differences in expertise, clairvoyance, and social perceptions, to illustrate how background knowledge is necessary for the justification of experiential beliefs. I consider challenges from Bergmann's distinction between learned and unlearned doxastic responses and Lyons's inferential reliabilism. I conclude that these challenges do not succeed; perceptual evidence requires a broader perspective that supports the reliability of the experiential evidence. (shrink)