There has long been a tension in Fredric Jameson’s work regarding the extent to which it is possible or warranted to develop transhistorical categories for literary interpretation across of the whole of the capitalist mode of production. In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the problem of how Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology participates in such questions in its consideration of periodisation and narrativisation through the particular construction of allegory, from the early modern age to our financial present.

While climate change involves spatial, epistemological, social, and temporal remoteness, each type of distance can be bridged with strategies unique to it that can be borrowed from analogous moral problems. Temporal, or intergenerational, distance may actually be a motivational resource if we look at our natural feelings of hope for the future of the world, via Kant’s theory of political history, and for our children. Kant’s theory of hope also provides some basis for including future generations in a theory of (...) justice. (shrink)

Genetic engineering is a social invention as much as a biological one. Ordinary citizens interested in the well-being of life on the planet should therefore be involved in the ethical debates concerning the future of nonhuman animals. The creations of genetic engineers ought to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis by what the American philosopher R. G. Frey calls Frey is an advocate for putting animals in perspective, which means that animals matter, but not as much as humans. He therefore (...) supports the prevailing moral orthodoxy, which currently in the West means that animals can be eaten, dissected, hunted, and exhibited, provided that these things are done humanely and that the benefits to humans outweigh the harms to the animals. The he suggests, would have no objection to humans killing animals as long as the animals do not suffer. In the present paper, my aim is to raise some of the ethical, welfare, and social issues from an animal-protectionist perspective which ordinary citizens would need to consider if they were ever asked to vote on the benefits or otherwise of the impact of genetic engineering on animal welfare. (shrink)

In a project The Hastings Center is now running on the future of prenatal testing, we are encountering clear examples, both in established law and in the practices of individual providers, of failures to respect women's reproductive autonomy: when testing is not offered to certain demographics of women, for instance, or when the choices of women to terminate or continue pregnancies are prohibited or otherwise not supported. But this project also raises puzzles for reproductive autonomy. We have learned that (...) some clinicians and patients do not discuss the fact that prenatal testing can lead to a decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy—they just don't talk about it. And while the decision whether to agree to prenatal screening and diagnostic testing is to be made with women's free and informed consent, many screening tests have been routinized in such a way that some women do not even recall agreeing to testing, while others feel that agreeing to testing is what their clinicians expect of them or that the testing is necessary to protect themselves and their families from the significant financial hardship of raising a child with a disability. In the face of these pressures, can one really say that women are freely choosing to undergo testing or are freely choosing to continue or terminate a pregnancy following receipt of test results? The reality of these pressures is requiring us to consider expanding the scope of our investigation beyond the clinical encounter to the broader context—to think harder about what reproductive autonomy means and how best to enhance it. (shrink)

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities constitutive (...) of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived (despite our losses) and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of (critical) social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being otherwise (in)visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemological-political project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and knowing (non)being of coloniality/modernity. (shrink)

In the interview conducted with Giovanna Borradori, after the attack on the World Trade Centre, in September 2001, Jacques Derrida is pressed to specify connections between his own thinking, Heidegger's deployment of the term ‘event’, and the use of the term ‘event’ to pick out the unprecedented character of that attack. Derrida intimates that the attack is, perhaps, not as unprecedented, not the ‘wholly other’ which it has been framed as being. His reading of that event is to move it (...) from a naive status, as ‘wholly other’, to a philosophically inflected thinking of the political, in the mode of the ‘wholly otherwise’, that is, in a sense to be made out here, whereby politics takes precedence over physics, as the originator of the basic components to be thought, and whereby the future takes precedence over the past, as the site at which what is arrives. The principal aim of this article is to consider how to think this counter-factual ontology, in the mode of a future anteriority. The article will set out Heidegger's move from affirming a fundamental ontology, of Dasein, to an ontology in parentheses (vom Ereignis) but will show how both of these are objectionable, on different counts, to Derrida and to Levinas. Derrida explores the options of supplementing an inadmissible thetic stance, with respect to the future, and therefore with respect to what there is, by developing the notion of the prosthetic, that which stands in for the impossible, timelessly asserted thesis. Levinas invents a new mode of phenomenology which opens a route into this ‘wholly otherwise’. These two strands of enquiry contribute to an analysis displacing these versions of ontology, in favour of a reformulation of political ontology. A subsidiary aim is to clarify Derrida's reservations with respect to the Heideggerian notion of the event. These reservations about Heidegger's usage throw light on his reluctance to deploy the term, within an analysis of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments THE FUTURE PRESENT TENSE by Justin Leiber Perhaps the simplest, most general, and oldest claim about fiction is that it should instruct and entertain. A logical positivist might draw a sharp line between the factual content of a discourse and the pleasurable emotional release available to the auditor. Aristotle straddles this distinction in seeing (dramatic) fiction as imitation of, principally, human action, an imitation which is, (...) Aristotle assures us in Poetics, both naturally pleasurable to perform or to observe performed. The distinction is straddled because for something to be an imitation of something else it must convey some body of rough fact about that thing; and granted various conventions of form and good form, the more accurate, compact, and revealing the imitation, the more the entertainment. Indeed, Aristotle also insists that drama is more universal than history, for the poet depicts what is necessary and probable in human action, while history depicts what is actual, though perhaps improbable, and the historian may not illume what is necessary, representative, exemplary, or prophetic in the mass of supposed actualities. There is a puzzle here in Aristotle's attitude. All humans by nature desire to know is the resolute thesis of the Metaphysics and he suggests there and elsewhere that this desire is a noble one and one whose fulfillment is an important form and ingredient of happiness. In Poetics it is quite clear that both the poet and the audience must have some of the sort of stuff that Aristotle considers fully genuine knowledge, explanatory knowledge, knowledge of universals, for otherwise they could not produce or understand the work as successful (or unsuccessful) imitation of the probable, 203 204Philosophy and Literature necessary, exemplary, etc., in human action. So in entertaining the work inevitably instructs. Aristotle does say that Homer gives in hexameters an imitation of human action, while Empedocles gives in hexameters physical philosophy. But what if Empedocles were providing us psychology? The example could be made more telling if we consider a twentieth-century psychoanalytic Empedocles who tracks or elucidates some generalizations of psychology through giving imagined, or partly imaged, case histories — how would such a work be psychology as opposed to fiction? Imitation (mimesis) wouldn't do thejob, for Aristotle mentions Socratic Dialogue as a form of it. To move to contemporary instances, what may we suppose is the difference between Plato's Republic and Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet? l In Space Cadet, we find some hundred years hence a modernized version of the Platonic Republic, with an elite outgrowth of the United Nations, the "Space Patrol," playing the role of the philosopher kings to the whole earth. Heinlein presents Plato's three-component theory of human psychology and of the meritocratic, tripartite, hierarchic structure of the most real, or healthy, state, and he argues and illustrates the basic Platonic thesis. Ethics is as much an objective science as mathematics, immorality is a form of ignorance (no one knowingly does wrong), and the general solution to the problem of statescraft is the creation of an educational system that will winnow, at level after level, and further educate an intellectual/ethical elite who will monopolize ultimate weaponry and political power, who will use the "divine lie" tojustify their authority, and who will act out of ethical knowledge, not for individual gain. Heinlein gives his account of these matters from the point of view of a Mathew Dobson, a Patrol candidate, who resembles a Candide who finds himself within a reasonable facsimile of the Just State, if not the Best of All Possible Worlds. One concedes that Plato provides us a substantially original, more detailed and coherently worked out set of speculations and theories, while Heinlein provides us a perhaps banal version of these ideas in a sentimental (perhaps fascistic) vision. Similarly, one eagerly concedes that Plato's Republic has played a potent role in European Civilization and the sweep of human thought, while Space Cadet has not. But, plainly, the distinction between a work of philosophy, or of physics, and a (dramatic) fiction or science fiction, cannot be this. One can have unoriginal, false, or impotent works of physics, psychology, or philosophy. So one cannot argue on... (shrink)

This paper investigates how we can enact, collectively, affording food systems. Yet rather than asking simply what those assemblages might look like the author enquires as to how they might also feel. Building on existing literature that speaks to the radically relational, and deeply affective, nature of food the aims of this paper are multiple: to learn more about how moments of difference come about in otherwise seemingly banal encounters; to understand some of the processes by which novelty ripples (...) out, up, and through social bodies; to speak to, and suggest ways to resolve, ontological asymmetries within the agrifood literature pertaining to Cartesian dualisms; and to offer ways forward that allow agrifood scholars to talk about phenomena such as feelings and structures/barriers in the same sentence. The empirical flesh of the paper comes from an admittedly unconventional case study. On December 10, 2012, Amendment 64 was added to Colorado’s constitution making it legal for adults to consume marijuana for recreational purposes. The case examined is not about pot, however. The paper, rather, is about hopeful, hydroponic-inspired, agrifood futures; novel doings, feelings, and thinkings sparked by, among other things, food grown in basements and spare bedrooms. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that we can’t change the past. But what about the future? Though the thought that we can change the future is familiar from popular discourse, it enjoys virtually no support from philosophers, contemporary or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that the thesis that the future is mutable has far more going for it than anyone has yet realized. The view, I hope to show, gains support from the nature of prevention, can provide a new way of (...) responding to arguments for fatalism, can account for the utility of total knowledge of the future, and can help in providing an account of the semantics of the English progressive. On the view developed, the future is mutable in the following sense: perhaps, once, it was true that you would never come to read a paper defending the mutability of the future. And then the future changed. And now you will. (shrink)

The Precautionary Principle is frequently invoked as a guiding principle in environmental policy. In this article, I raise a couple of problems for the application of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to policies concerning Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). First, I argue that if we accept Stephen Gardiner’s sensible conditions under which it is appropriate to employ the Precautionary Principle for emerging technologies, it is unclear that GMOs meet those conditions. In particular, I contend that GM crops hold the potential (...) to provide more than a mere bonus; they hold the (admittedly uncertain) potential to prevent serious harm to millions of people. This means that, if proponents of the Precautionary Principle take prevention of harm as seriously as avoidance of harm, then precaution may tell in favor of GMOs rather than against them. Second, I observe that the use of GM technology in the developing world is likely to be identity-affecting; it will cause people to exist who otherwise would not have. I argue that this undermines Precautionary Principle-based objections to GM technology that appeal to the potentially harmful effects of GMOs on future generations. (shrink)

Patrick Todd argues for a modified Peircean view on which all future contingents are false. According to Todd, this is the only view that makes sense if we fully embrace an open future, rejecting the idea of actual future history. I argue that supervaluational accounts, on which future contingents are neither true nor false, are fully consistent with the metaphysics of an open future. I suggest that it is Todd's failure to distinguish semantic and postsemantic levels that leads him to (...) suppose otherwise. I also show how one can resist Todd's argument (with Brian Rabern) that the conceptual possibility of omniscience requires us to reject Retro‐closure (). (shrink)

Black, Indigenous and otherwise minoritized communities of color are amongst the most vulnerable to the adverse consequences of environmental crises and the solutions proposed to remedy them. The participation and subsequent erasure of non-White youth activists and organizers within environmental sustainability struggles, and their subsequent erasure in global media coverage on climate activism has complicated any neat hierarchy of single concerns facing humanity. How is it that White and Western climate activists come to be the faces of the global (...) youth climate movement? This essay examines the salience of race to the education and framing of environmental and sustainability efforts. It suggests that the separation of environmental concerns from the socio-political (and thus racial) contexts that produce them not only further marginalizes the contributions of non-White activists and the communities that they represent, but also engenders a violently White, and thus narrow, vision of a global, Green future. (shrink)

While philosophers feel relatively comfortable about talking of the present and the past, some of them feel uncomfortable about talking in just the same way of future events. They feel that, in general, discourse about the future differs significantly from discourse about the past and present, and that these differences reflect a logical asymmetry between the past and future beyond the merely defining fact that the future succeeds, and the past precedes, the present time. The problem is: how can we (...) talk about events which have not yet happened, or at any rate are not yet bound to happen, or whose participants do not yet exist? The effect of these worries has led them to claim to recognise restrictions on our talk about the future which do not govern talk about the past and present. The most famous of these views is Aristotle's. According to one familiar interpretation, he holds that a statement about a future event which is not yet settled, a contingent event in the future, is neither true nor false, even though the statement that the event either will or will not happen is necessarily true. Proponents of this view felt that if a future-tensed statement were already true then the fact that it stated would already be settled. I do not propose to discuss this well-known and muchdiscussed doctrine of Aristotle's, but I do want to consider some allied views which have been aired recently, and to look at their philosophical significance. Before I look at these, however, it will be convenient to recall three of the main reasons why the Aristotelian doctrine is unpopular. In the first place it is paradoxical to accept that a statement of the form p v ∼ p is true while claiming that neither of its disjuncts is true. Then there are misgivings about the notion of truth involved: many feel that truth is essentially an attribute of timeless propositions and that it is nonsense to talk of a statement's becoming true as you would of Aristotle's views if the event described became inevitable. There is also the difficulty of accounting for the meaning of a future-tensed sentence which may express a statement that is neither true nor false simply because what it states is not yet settled. It could not be said of the sentence expressing such a statement that you know what it means if you know what it is for the sentence to express a true statement. I know the meaning of the present-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle is now being waged’ if I know that it can normally be used to make a true statement precisely in the event of there being a sea-battle being waged at present. But I do not know the meaning of the future-tensed sentence ‘A sea-battle will be waged tomorrow’ simply by knowing that the sentence expresses a true statement if it is already settled that there is going to be a battle: the statement doesn't mean that the battle is already settled, otherwise it would not lack a truth-value when the matter was still open – it would be false. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Kant's fundamental problematic is the articulation of a finite rationality. The central problematic of the finitude of reason is how to think of a manner of thinking which is appropriate to a finite being. The relevant aspect of the finitude of a finite being is its temporality: a finite being is a temporal historical being. A finite rationality will, therefore, be a manner of thinking appropriate to this temporality--that (...) is, it will be a temporal, mobile rationality. The mobility of this rationality must be conceived of as unending, otherwise it will ultimately be conceived of as static. This constant mobility is achieved in Kant's writing by relating thinking to ideals which can only be approached in infinite approximation. Against a non-finite conception of reason as oriented by the present, Kant's conception of a finite rationality is one oriented by the future. However, this constant mobility--infinite approximation to a postulated ideal future--raises the question of how such a rationality can be conceived of positively: is not such a rationality a rationality of infinite defeat, a rationality of despair? If it is, then Kant will have not thought finitude, since a truly finite rationality--that is, a truly appropriate rationality--cannot be one which creates a negative self-conception. Such negativity reveals an inappropriate criterion, i.e., the opposite of what the question of finitude demands. So the central question of the finitude of reason is how to conceive of a manner of thinking which is temporal , and does not result in a negative self-conception. However these two demands seem to be exclusive. We will argue that this dilemma is addressed in Kant's attempt to articulate the finitude of reason by giving hope a central role in his account. In hope constant mobility can be embraced without leading to a negative self concept. For Kant, a finite rationality is ultimately a hopeful rationality. (shrink)

Genetic testing poses fundamental questions for insurance. Testing can predict a low probability of future illness and disability, which can help promote the insurability of individuals with a family history of genetic risk, but it can also invite insurers to reject applicants, increase premiums, exclude people with certain illnesses and disabilities, and otherwise adjust the underwriting processes for individuals with certain genotypes. In the workplace, these issues may cause employers who offer or pay for insurance to alter their hiring (...) behavior, either by selecting those with desirable genetic makeup or rejecting, dismissing, or reassigning those who carry an unwanted risk, ultimately threatening employability and the safety net that insurance is intended to provide. (shrink)

Recently, a time-honored assumption has resurfaced in some parts of the free will debate: if past divine beliefs or past truths about what we do depend on what we do, then these beliefs and truths are, in a sense, up to us; hence, we are able to act otherwise, despite the existence of past truths or past divine beliefs about our future actions. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a novel incompatibilist argument that rests on. This argument is (...) interesting in itself, for it is independent of a number of assumptions about the nature of God that have played an essential role in the classical defense of incompatibilism about divine foreknowledge and human free will. Moreover, the argument enables us to identify a difficulty compatibilists encounter when employing to block incompatibilism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Future Directions for Oversight of Stem Cell Research in the United StatesCynthia B. Cohen (bio) and Mary A. Majumder (bio)Human pluripotent stem cell research, meaning research into cells that can multiply indefinitely and differentiate into almost all the cells of the body, has become a minefield in which science, ethics, and politics have collided over the last decade in the United States. President Barack Obama entered this highly charged (...) territory when he indicated during his campaign that once in office he would issue an executive order expanding federally funded human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research and introduce rigorous oversight of it (Obama 2008a & b). Candidate Obama stated that he would require that the hESC lines involved were derived with donor consent from early embryos that otherwise would be discarded following in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. However, in contrast with the policy of President George W. Bush, he would do so without regard to the date of their derivation. He added that he would call upon the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop guidelines for federally funded hESC and other pluripotent stem cell research that would draw from the guidelines developed in 2005 by the National Academies of Science (NAS) for privately funded research (National Research Council 2005).A similar policy was written into the 2008 version of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, which reiterates the policy enunciated in earlier versions of this bill, passed twice by the Congress but vetoed by President Bush each time (House of Representatives, 110th Congress 2008).1 Depending on how one reads the 2008 version of the act, it could also apply in certain respects to hESC research that is not federally funded. We proceed on the assumption that the act applies at least to federally funded stem cell research. Therefore, it appears that the president or the Congress, or both, will approve of an expanded policy of federal funding of hESC research, as well as other forms of human pluripotent stem cell research. [End Page 79]This policy would make the guidelines developed by a committee appointed by NAS, a prestigious private body of American scientists and related experts, the primary basis for the development of new federal guidelines for oversight of hESC research in the United States. This would have certain advantages in that those familiar with the relevant scientific issues are likely to address them accurately and stem cell investigators are apt to accept restrictions on their research written by fellow scientists and ethics and policy experts whom they perceive as strong supporters of stem cell research. However, it also would have certain disadvantages. Chief among these is that the NAS committee appointed to write guidelines for this research, in its concern to see stem cell science move forward after a period in which many scientists and others maintained that it had been unduly restricted, might have overlooked or deferred consideration of some pressing ethical and policy issues. We maintain that this is the case—although we also maintain that the NAS guidelines provide a responsible foundation for developing NIH guidelines for stem cell research. Consequently, we propose that an NIH task force charged by the director of NIH with writing new guidelines for hESC and other stem cell research should revise and expand the NAS guidelines in ways that we propose below, as well as others that it considers necessary, and make it obligatory for those seeking federal funding of such research to follow these new guidelines.We highlight certain areas in which an ethical case can be made for strengthening the existing NAS guidelines and certain areas in which more fundamental ethical reflection—and building on that, additional guideline/policy development—seems warranted. Among the sections of the NAS guidelines that need clarification and reworking, we include those regarding consent to embryo donation, which provide one of their central focuses, and the development of human-nonhuman chimeras, which they address relatively briefly. In addition, we maintain that new guidelines need to be written to address the nascent ethical and policy issues raised by the possibility that human gametes will be induced from pluripotent stem cells in the next few years and that... (shrink)

Scientists often reach provisional agreement solutions to problems central to their disciplines, whereas philosophers do not. Although philosophy has been practiced by outstanding intellects for over two thousand years, philosophers have not reached agreement, provisional or otherwise, on the solution or dissolution of any central philosophical problem by philosophical methods. What about philosophy’s future? Until about 1970, philosophers were generally optimistic. Some pinned their hopes on revolution in methodology, others on reform of practice. The case for gradual reform still (...) finds articulate advocates in philosophers like Michael Dummett and Timothy Williamson, but many philosophers today suspect that perennial disagreement may be inescapable. I consider three explanations for the inescapability of perennial disagreement—Richard Rorty’s relativism, Colin McGinn’s skepticism, and Nicholas Rescher’s pluralism—and find each wanting. I argue that a better explanation is the resistance of philosophers to commit, as scientists do, to formulating testable theories and collecting data to help decide between competing theories. I close by proposing that experimental philosophy, a movement still in its infancy, holds the promise of reuniting philosophy with science and moving philosophers closer to agreement on the solution of its central problems. (shrink)

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of (...) an agent and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher-level one on a par with other higher-level phenomena such as agency and intentionality. (shrink)

The principal aim of this article is to examine the relations between positioning and belonging in terms of the potential for critique of existing social conditions. The underlying purpose is to inform social scientific engagement with social life in order to illuminate the potential for social transformation via reflexivity. These discussions will be informed by the division of reflexivity into two dimensions: endogenous and referential. It is argued that this enables the social scientist to highlight the pre-reflexive world and render (...) it problematic and demonstrates how the objectivity of the social world is both a presupposition and ongoing achievement of everyday interactions. To that extent, the possibility for social conditions to be otherwise is then open to scrutiny. (shrink)

In this essay I survey the key themes within China's discourse on international order, especially how China views its position and role in shaping the existing and future order. I go on to explore the possible implications of China's thinking and actions toward the existing international order. I conclude that overall, China sees no need for and hence does not seek fundamental transformation, but rather piecemeal modification of the existing order. In fact, China has been quite content with the existing (...) order that supports globalization, despite occasional rhetoric indicating otherwise. In the near future, China will likely invest heavily in two key issue areas: (1) regionalism in East Asia and Central Asia; and (2) interregional cooperation and coordination. Perhaps unsurprisingly, China's ambitious “One Belt and One Road” initiative seeks to integrate these two issue areas. (shrink)

Our everyday notions of responsibility are often driven by our need to justify ourselves to specific others – especially those we harm, wrong, or otherwise affect. One challenge for contemporary ethics is to extend this interpersonal urgency to our relations with those future people who are harmed or affected by our actions. In this article, I explore our responsibility for climate change by imagining a possible ‘broken future’, damaged by the carbon emissions of previous generations, and then asking what (...) its inhabitants might think of our current behaviour, our moral thinking, and our excuses. In particular, I will focus on a simplified scenario where present people can only avoid a broken future by sacrificing Rawlsian favourable conditions. Suppose we refuse to avoid a broken future, on the grounds that we cannot be expected to make such great sacrifices. If the broken future lacks favourable conditions, will its inhabitants accept our excuses? Will they hold us responsible for things we regard as excusable? If so, should we be guided by their judgements or by our own? (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that medical professionals should protect a future child's rights by prohibiting disabled parents from using technology to deliberately have a disabled child because disability is taken as an inevitable, severe threat to a child's otherwise “open” future. I will first argue that the open future that allegedly protects a child's future autonomy is precluded by the very conditions needed to develop that future autonomy. Any child's future will be narrowed as they are socialized in a (...) way that gives them the capacity for autonomous choice. However, oppressive master narratives can diminish a future child's autonomy by distorting their narrative identity and constricting their agency. In fact, the open future argument does just this by advancing one of the most damaging master narratives about disability: that disability inevitably and severely restricts a person's autonomy and closes their future. (shrink)

It is sometimes suggested that new research in such areas as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and genetic engineering should be halted or otherwise restricted because of concerns about possible catastrophic scenarios. Proponents of such restrictions typically invoke the precautionary principle, understood as a tool of policy formulation, as part of their case. Here I examine the application of the precautionary principle to possible catastrophic scenarios. I argue, along with Sunstein (Risk and Reason: Safety, Law and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, (...) Cambridge, 2002) and Manson (Environmental Ethics, 24: 263–274, 2002), that variants of the precautionary principle that appear strong enough to support significant restrictions on future technologies actually lead to contradictory policy recommendations. Weaker versions of the precautionary principle, which do not have this feature, do not appear strong enough to support restrictions on future technologies. (shrink)

Future-biased individuals systematically prefer positively valenced events to be in the future (positive future-bias) and negatively valenced events to be in the past (negative future-bias). The most extreme form of future-bias is absolute future-bias, whereby we completely discount the value of past events when forming our preferences. Various authors have thought that we are absolutely future-biased (Sullivan (2018:58); Parfit (1984:173) and that future-bias (absolute or otherwise) is at least rationally permissible (Prior (1959), Hare (2007; 2008), Kauppinen (2018), Heathwood (2008)). (...) The permissibility of future-bias is often held to be grounded in the structure of the temporal dimension. In this paper I consider several proposals for grounding the permissibility of such preferences and evaluate these in the light of the preferences we would have, and judge that we should have, in various time-travel scenarios. I argue that what we learn by considering these scenarios is that these preferences really have nothing to do with temporal structure. So if something grounds their permissibility, it is not temporal structure. (shrink)

The talk deals with Aristotle’s famous sea-battle problem concerning the truth values of sentences about contingent future events: If an utterance of the sentence “There will be a sea battle tomorrow” is true, then it seems that it is determined that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. For otherwise, how could the utterance be true? If, however, an utterance of the sentence “There will be a sea battle tomorrow” is false, then it seems that it is determined that (...) there will be no sea battle tomorrow. For otherwise, how could the utterance be false? Thus, it seems that it is determined whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow or not – and so for any future event whatsoever. This, however, is in conflict with the assumption that there is such a thing as an open future, i.e., that at least for some future events, it is not determined whether they will take place or not. Some have argued, in light of this problem, that sentences about f uture events are neither true nor false. In this talk, however, it shall be argued that the sea-battle problem can be resolved in an intuitively plausible manner without giving up the principle of bivalence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reduction's FutureTheology, Technology, and the Order of KnowledgeKevin L. HughesLet me begin with something of a confession. When as a young undergraduate I first encountered medieval texts, and so, for the first time, began to know something of the medieval "way of seeing," I was intoxicated. And I was intoxicated, in part, by the comprehensiveness and unity of this worldview, where God, humans, the cosmos, science, theology, philosophy, nature, (...) supernature – all of these elements fit. So often in my thinking I have repaired to those famous last lines of Dante's Comedy, to the "Love which moves the sun and other stars," as the epitome of the comprehension, coherence, and harmony of the medieval worldview.Perhaps this is one of the reasons I have been attracted to the work of St. Bonaventure. We may all be familiar with the statements that now have become almost truisms, that to know Bonaventure at all, one needs to know the whole system, and that the whole system is found in every kind of work that he had done. "Procession, exemplarity, return, this is the whole of our metaphysics."1 This principle of Order in Bonaventure, as described and analyzed by Wayne Hellmann, is a kind of keystone to all of Bonaventure's work.2 [End Page 227]If you understand the "order," you understand Bonaventure. Such admirable consistency and harmony! Such remarkable unity of perspective! And, at least by many accounts, the Reduction of the Arts to Theology3 is a perfect concise instance of Bonaventure's synthetic vision.It is precisely this unity, as found in the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, that Dieter Hattrup finds problematic. For Hattrup, the notion of unity itself is not problematic; rather, it is the unity of knowledge as conveyed in the Reduction that approaches a deeply problematic modern understanding of knowledge. Hattrup believes he has discovered in this brief treatise the seeds of what we might call a technological or manipulative knowledge. Whatever the limits of Dieter Hattrup's historical and textual brief against the authenticity of the Reduction, his theological queries should put us all on guard if we are to imagine a future for any "reduction of the arts to theology," Bonaventurean or otherwise.A Theological QuestionBonaventura zwischen Mystik und Mystifikation4 begins with a basic theological premise: Christian theology is interested in the relationship between faith and reason, and this interest follows from the even more basic Christian claim that God is distinct from the world. If one has an intra-cosmic notion of the divine, wherein gods are the greatest or most powerful beings among all other beings, then the question between faith and reason does not arise. Gods who are beings can be known in the way we know all other beings, i.e., through reason. Faith, on the other hand, describes the kind of knowledge we can have of the One who is not part but [End Page 228] Maker of the created order. From the time of Philo on, Jewish and Christian believers5 have drawn this careful distinction and explored how faith and reason might be related without being reduced one into the other. Hattrup suggests that this perpetual question is raised with particular intensity with the revival of Aristotelian philosophy in the High Middle Ages, and Bonaventure stands as a major figure in scholastic inquiry. But, he tells us, this question remains crucial to our own time under the sign of "secularization."6It is important to note this opening overture, as it tells us that Hattrup is exploring what he takes to be first and foremost a theological puzzle: Does the Reduction of the Arts to Theology faithfully represent Bonaventure's understanding of the relationship between faith and reason as ways of knowing? Is it consistent with what we find (and what Hattrup has studied elsewhere)7 in his Sentence Commentary, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, and the Collations on the Hexaëmeron? Most importantly, and more theologically, does the Reduction distinguish properly between faith and reason, as would befit this Doctor of the Church? Or is it the beginning of the collapse of this classic distinction... (shrink)

We offer a precautionary account of why business managers should proactively rethink about what kinds of automation firms ought to implement, by exploring two challenges that automation will potentially pose. We engage the current debate concerning whether life without work opportunities will incur a meaning crisis, offering an argument in favor of the position that if technological unemployment occurs, the machine age may be a structurally limited condition for many without work opportunities to have or add meaning to their lives. (...) We term this the axiological challenge. This challenge, if it turns out to be persuasive, leads to a second challenge, to which managers should pay special attention: the teleological challenge, a topic especially relevant to the broad literature about corporate purpose and governance. We argue that both the shareholder profit-maximization model and its major alternative, stakeholder theory, are insufficient to address the meaning crisis. Unless rebutted, the two challenges compel business leaders to proactively rethink the purpose of business for future society. Otherwise, businesses will be contributors to a major ethical crisis and societal externality in the coming society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift by Claudia BaracchiJoseph GamacheBARACCHI, Claudia. Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift. Translated by Elena Bartolini and Catherine Fullarton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 146 pp. Paper, $30.00Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift offers a series of reflections on friendship that "outline thoughts, visions, stories." It is well to bear this in mind. There is no sustained discussion of (and (...) not many references to) other commentators or interpreters of the ancient Greeks. Nor is there, despite the title, a sustained philosophical treatment of friendship or its future. It is a series of reflections on ancient Greek texts. These reflections are unified by the theme of friendship, even when friendship seems to recede into the background. Each chapter is organized around a specific text, the reading of which is interspersed with the aforementioned thoughts, visions, and stories.The first chapter focuses on Plato's Timaeus. Friendship in its "most elementary sense" is "looking at the sky" and seeing not only myself, but "myself as us." This sort of cosmic friendship is a look, a "unitive force, a capacity for seeing the bonds and holding together the elements that form every living organism." The second chapter takes up the analogy of the soul and the city in the Republic. I am a friend to myself when the parts of my soul are in harmony.In the third and longest chapter, Baracchi takes up friendship between equals as discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. The thematic focus is now friendship between persons, and we read that friendship is a "privileged place in which to be," that it "corroborates, strengthens, amplifies, and emphasizes" the friends, that it is the "condition and context for the utmost explication of human dynamis." Friends resemble each other like poetic images "that illuminate and elucidate one another." The third chapter also takes a swipe at "us moderns," whose notions of liberty undermine our ability to appreciate friendship. We moderns "struggle to contemplate seriousness, fidelity, and the depth they entail, without cynicism." The critique is familiar, and trades, at times, on what seems to be a conflation of Hobbes with the entirety of early modern philosophical anthropology. [End Page 535]Chapters 4 through 6 return to Plato, first with a reflection on the Apology and Symposium, and then with a discussion of Aristotle's friendship with Plato. The fifth chapter takes up the tension between the pursuit of truth and the love of one's friends, as that dilemma manifests in the life of a philosopher. Baracchi convincingly argues that Aristotle should be read as honoring the deeper teachings of Plato, and Socrates before him, that one should care about not who holds a belief but only whether the belief is true. Thus did Aristotle resolve the dilemma between truth and friendship. His pursuit of the truth, even when it caused disagreement with Plato, was an act of friendship.Chapter 6 focuses on the origin of the polis as described in the Republic. Baracchi shows how Socrates tries in the Republic to widen the circle of those who count as one's friends, from select others within the polis, to everyone within the polis, to the entire Greek world, as well as to push back against those who argue that enmity is the necessary foundation of the polis. The last three chapters of the book return to Aristotle's views about friendship: first, about the relationship between friendship and justice, second, about friendships between unequals, and lastly, about the embodied aspects of friendship, its sweetness, and pleasure.There are limits, however, to how helpful the work might be to philosophers interested in friendship. The language is often too abstract, as in the recommendation, "to learn to think human community in its entirety, without this entailing the elimination of differences, and without reducing the differences to identity-related and localistic velleities." Or in the claim that the difference between complete and derivative friendship is the former's ability to "to grasp the broader reasons in the finite, and thus to place the contingent in an otherwise articulated context." Too often there are exaggerations that obscure whatever point is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD'S KNOWLEDGE OF FUTURE CONTINGENTS: A REPLY TO WILLIAM LANE CRAIG DAVID B. BURRELL, c.s.c. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana IT IS FORTUNATE that other duties kept me from responding to William Lane Craig's "Aquinas on God's Knowledge of Future Contingents" when it came out (Thomist 54 [1990]: 33-79), for my initial perusal found me at once impressed and dismayed, and quite unable to disentangle the two (...) responses. A more careful subsequent reading allows me, I believe, to pinpoint where he goes wrong in reaching the conclusion which he does, yet to do so in such a way as to send readers back to an essay which is otherwise quite remarkable in the way it learns from Aquinas and offers us useful ways to read him on these perplexing issues. In doing so, he corrects many a misreading, and amasses sufficient textual and conceptual clarifications as almost to correct his own misreading. And best of all, I can hope that my rejoinder will send readers back to Aquinas above all. Indeed, one cannot but feel that the current climate of controversy regarding the proper understanding of his nuanced synthesis in philosophical theology would please Aquinas far more than attempts earlier in this century to distill it all into a " doctrine." Craig's conclusion reads: In maintaining that God's knowledge is the cause of everything God knows, Thomas transforms the universe into a nexus which, though freely chosen by God, is causally determined from above, thus eliminating human freedom (79). I shall claim that he reaches this conclusion only because ( 1) he presumes God's knowledge to be propositional knowing (52-53), 317 318 DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C. even though he asserts that it is not (60, n.61); and (2) that such a presumption leads him to overlook the vast difference between scientia visionis and scientia simplicis intelligentiae, though he insists on the difference and formulates it nicely in parallel with practical and speculative knowing in God (40). Such presumptions about divine knowing are not uncommon, of course, and what they lead to is one's overlooking what Josef Pieper called the "hidden element in the philosophy of St. Thomas "-creation. Indeed, my critique could begin there, remarking how Craig's careful delineation of Aquinas on God's eternal knowing of contingent things proceeds oblivious of the central fact that God's knowing in such cases is that of a creator (" In summary, then, Thomas has appealed e%clusively to the tradition of God's timelessness in order to defuse the threat of fatalism" [61, emphasis mine]). The simple observation that the God in question is always the free creator of all-that-is would have allowed him to see that Aquinas does not make the relation of God to contingents turn solely on that of an eternal knower of temporal things, but that the eternity/time relation subserves that of creator/creature. (This ordering is the more crucial, we shall see, for its power to correct the endemic tendency to equate " eternal " with " timeless," which Craig manifests throughout.) And despite Pieper's reminder that creation is largely hidden, it remains sufficiently present to a careful reader that Craig must indeed confront it at the end. Yet by the time he does so, his earlier presumptions have led him to complain that Aquinas's insistence that "God's knowledge is the causa essendi of the things that are going to happen... seems nearly unintelligible " (73). Indeed what I shall offer as the key to resolving his crucial dilemmas, and so overturning his stated conclusion, Craig introduces as a " final issue [which] threatens to undermine Thomas's attempt to preserve contingency in the face of divine knowledge, [viz.] his doctrine that God's knowledge is the cause of its objects rather than the objects' being the cause of God's knowledge" (70-71). The theologian in me would prefer to begin right here, with the radical eruption into an Aristotelian world of a free creator, GOD'S KNOWELDGE OF FUTURE CONTINGENTS 319 whose relation to the universe is indeed such as to turn our sense of knowing inside-out.1... (shrink)

A direct path that has been missed for 100 years leads from the oldest paradoxes straight to mysticism, via (the concept of) logical and mathematical truth, since the purely formal truth is an absolutely univocal, absolutely timeless and absolutely unbounded reference. I present three theses in passing: (1) logicians fail to fully appreciate the basic mathematical idea of truth and consequently push the semantic paradoxes aside. Otherwise they would have come to adopt the reflexive logic LR* right after Cantor (...) (more on this briefly in Sect. 4. For a more precise elaboration see my Logik der Unbestimmtheiten und Paradoxien (Blau 2008)). (2) Mathematicians fail to fully appreciate the basic mathematical concept of number and push Zeno’s paradoxes aside. Otherwise they would have come to adopt linear arithmetic ${\mathbb{L}^{*}}$ right after Cantor (more on this briefly in Sects. 1 and 5, for further elaboration see my planned Grundparadoxien und grenzenlose Arithmetik. The technical parts are complete, yet philosophically it is as incomplete as Sect. 6). (3) Philosophers fail to fully appreciate the paradox of subject and object and push the Darwinian argument for Cartesian (mind–body)-interaction aside, otherwise they would have been en route towards mysticism since Darwin’s times (more on this in Sect. 6, for a little more precise elaboration see Blau in Die Logik der Unbestimmtheiten und Paradoxien. Synchron Publishers, Heidelberg, 2008, Ch. 1.5). (shrink)

This essay introduces a formal structure to model the indeterminacy of the future in Einstein-Minkowski space-time. We consider a first-order language, supplemented with an operator for predicate-term negation, and defend the claim that such an operation provides an appropriate model for the indeterminacy of future contingents. In the final section, it is proved that given a language otherwise adequate to represent a physical theory, at least some of the predicates of that language are indeterminate when the future is not (...) causally determined by the present and the past. (shrink)

The development of technologies for gene editing in the wild has the potential to generate tremendous benefit, but also raises important concerns. Using some form of public deliberation to inform decisions about the use of these technologies is appealing, but public deliberation about them will tend to fall back on various forms of heuristics to account for limited personal experience with these technologies. Deliberations are likely to involve narrative reasoning—or reasoning embedded within stories. These are used to help people discuss (...) risks, processes, and fears that are otherwise difficult to convey. In this article, we identify three forms of collective narrative that are particularly relevant to debates about modifying genes in the wild. Our purpose is not to privilege any particular narrative, but to encourage people involved in deliberations to make these narratives transparent. Doing so can help guard against the way some narratives—referred to here as “crafted narratives”—may be manipulated by powerful elites and concentrated economic interests for their own strategic ends. (shrink)

Research based on construal level theory (CLT) suggests that thinking about the distant future can prime people to solve problems by insight (i.e., an “aha” moment) while thinking about the near future can prime them to solve problems analytically. In this study, we used a novel method to elucidate the time-course of temporal priming effects on creative problem solving. Specifically, we used growth-curve analysis (GCA) to examine the time-course of priming while participants solved a series of brief verbal problems. Participants (...) were tested in two counterbalanced sessions in a within-subject experimental design; one session featured near-future priming and the other featured far-future priming. Our results suggest high-level construal may temporarily enhance analytical thinking; far-future priming caused transient facilitation of analytical solving while near-future priming induced weaker, transient facilitation of insightful solving. However, this effect is short-lived; priming produced no significant differences in the total number of insights and analytical solutions. Given the fleeting nature of these effects, future studies should consider implementing methodology that allows for aspects of the time-course of priming effects to be examined. A method such as GCA may reveal mild effects that would be otherwise missed using other types of analyses. (shrink)

The articles in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy explore emerging technologies, medical innovations, and shifting moral norms, expanding present discussions around topics in bioethics both old and new. Some question whether novel definitions of death and harm change the moral permissibility of killing, particularly at the hands of a physician. Others question how increased or decreased abilities affect responsibility and achievement. Another illustrates how rhetorical appeals to character have been used to justify otherwise morally illicit (...) actions within the clinic. Together, these articles shed new light on topics in the field of bioethics. (shrink)

Andrew Dickson White played a pivotal role in constructing the image of a necessary, and even violent, confrontation between religion and science that persists to this day. Though scholars have long acknowledged that his position is more complex, given that White claimed to be saving religion from theology, there has been no attempt to explore what this means in light of his overwhelming attack on existing religions. This essay draws attention to how White's role as a historian was decisive in (...) allowing him to posit a future for religion purified of dogma by science. It argues, furthermore, that this effort is better understood as religious innovation, rather than a plea for strictly secular science. In so doing it hopes to lay the foundation for a more fruitful historical treatment of White, and a range of other figures whose devotion to science has otherwise been difficult to grasp. (shrink)

This essay explores care ethics and possibilities for caring otherwise through the lens of prefigurative praxis. It draws on the conceptualizations and critiques of care, care practices, and care futurism of writers, theorists, activists, and organizers from Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC), disabled, and/or LGBTQIA+ communities, particularly those whose work is underpinned by disability justice and prison industrial complex abolition. It understands disability justice and abolition as integral to our ability to collectively respond to care crises in (...) ways that think beyond austerity, carcerality, and institutional forms of care. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD'S KNOWLEDGE OF FUTURE CONTINGENT SINGULARS: A REPLY THEODORE J. KoNDOLEON Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania I N A RECENT article in The Thomist William Lane Craig has discussed certain aspects of Saint Thomas's teaching on God's knowledge of creatures. While for Craig Saint Thomas's concept of God's knowledge of vision (scientia visionis) is not fatalistic, his concept of God's knowledge of approbation (i.e., God's causal knowledge) is.1 Craig believes (...) that this latter type of divine knowledge implies fatalism since, on his reading, its causality determines everything that takes place in this universe. In developing his argument Craig makes a number of statements (and arguments) which are not only at variance with Saint Thomas's expressed thought but which, I believe, are also clearly mistaken. Some of his errors are of a trivial sort and may in part be due to the fact that he occasionally misspeaks himself. One can single out in this regard his statement, on page 78, that "God's knowledge does not necessitate an effect because an effect may be impeded by its secondary cause," and also his observation, on page 79, that "God's knowledge is the cause of everything God knows." 2 However, there are a number of more 1 See William Lane Craig, "Aquinas on God's Knowledge of Future Contingents," The Thomist, 54 (January 1990): 33-79. For his discussion of Thomas's teaching on God's knowledge of vision see particularly pp. 32-67; on Aquinas's teaching on God's causal knowledge, pp. 68-79. 2 Contrary to Craig's way of stating this, Aquinas never speaks about an effect being impeded by its secondary cause. Rather, a contingent cause may be impeded from producing its effect by the intervention of another secondary cause. Examples would be frost preventing the production or development of the fruit of certain plants, or a drug preventing the development of a normal embryo. For Aquinas's discussion of a contingent cause see De veritate, q. 2, a. 12, c. and also Summa contra Gentiles, Book I, chap. 67. Concerning 117 118 THEODORE J. KONDOLEON serious errors to be found in his discussion of God's knowledge of creatures, and it is to these that I would like to address this reply. I. In discussing the topic of God's knowledge of future contingent singulars, Craig considers Saint Thomas's explanation as to how it is possible for God to know what is future and contingent (i.e., something which, from the standpoint of its proximate cause, can either come to be or not come to be). As generally known, his explanation points out that while what is future and contingent with respect to its proximate cause(s)-and thus also from our vantage point-is something indeterminate in being and therefore in truth and knowability, as falling within the scope of God's eternal knowledge it is something already present (and thus determined to one of two opposites) and, consequently, can be known with certitude.3 In this Thomistic view, then, there is no past or future in God's knowledge of created things; everything is known at once and as present. At this point in his discussion, when he has yet to consider Saint Thomas's position that God's knowledge of things is also a causal knowledge (i.e., a knowledge which involves God's will as First Cause of His creatures and their actions), Craig claims that Saint Thomas employs the Boethian notion of God's eternity, and thus of His timeless knowledge, in order to " defuse the threat of fatalism." ' He holds this view because, he argues, otherwise, i.e., if God's knowledge were something past with respect to a future contingent singular (so that God could be said to " foreknow " it), that future would be something which would necessarily come to be-either that or else God could be mistaken-and therefore not truly Craig's second observation, it is not true to say, even of God's causal knowledge, that God's knowledge is the cause of everything God knows since God knows many things He will never cause... (shrink)

Any first step in organisational adaptation starts with individuals’ responses and willingness (or otherwise) to change an aspect of themselves given the transcontextual settings in which they are operating (Bateson in Small arcs of larger circles: framing through other patterns, Triarchy Press, Axminster, 2018). This research explores the implications for organisational adaptation strategies when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being embedded into the ecology of the organisation, and when employees have a dominant fixed or growth mindset (Dweck in Mindset: changing (...) the way you think to fulfil your potential. Robinson, London, 2017). Research participants were supplied with a single scenario based in 2030, where—as a result of Artificial Intelligence technology implementation—employees were going to be displaced. Using Torbert’s (Organizational wisdom and executive courage, New Lexington Press, San Francisco, 1998) ‘first, second and third person’ research theory, participants were asked to independently review their thoughts, sense, and image of the future from a fixed mindset position (considered to be the worst case), then from a growth mindset perspective (best case), and then do the same collectively. Five key findings are outlined which support the principle that having a growth mindset is a key component of adaptive capacity and futures literacy. The five key findings conclude that AI adaptation processes need to include compassion and authenticity, embodiment, fundamental needs and motivations, mutual learning and considering what lies beyond the edges of the organisation (Bateson in Small arcs of larger circles: framing through other patterns, Triarchy Press, Axminster, 2018). (shrink)

Calling post-modernism merely "the last tortured gasps of the old paradigm, not the birth-cries of the new," Martin (affiliations, academic or otherwise, not noted) seeks to move along to a "post-Western" perspective on history. He writes from a Green viewpoint (anarchist, feminist, and ecological), giving much credit to American anarchist Murray Bookchin, who he calls the last great Western philosopher. Double-spaced. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

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

Research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP) makes pathogens substantially more lethal, communicable, immunosuppressive or otherwise capable of triggering a pandemic. We briefly relay an existing argument that the benefits of ePPP research do not outweigh its risks and then consider why proponents of these arguments continue to confidently endorse them. We argue that these endorsements may well be the product of common cognitive biases—in which case they would provide no challenge to the argument against ePPP research. If the (...) case against ePPP research is strong, the views of professional experts do little to move the needle in favour of ePPP research. (shrink)

In this paper I evaluate the soundness of the prototype paradigm, in particular its basic assumption that there are pan-human psychological essences or core meanings that refer to basic-level natural kinds, explaining why, on the whole, human communication and learning are successful. Instead I argue that there are no particular pan-human basic elements for thought, meaning and cognition, neither prototypes, nor otherwise. To illuminate my view I draw on examples from anthropology. More generally I argue that the prototype paradigm (...) exemplifies two assumptions that dominate cognitive science: (1) If human beings use words they mean something particular and what they mean can be discovered by scientific methods. (2) There is a fixed number of domains of categorization, each made up of a fixed number of basic categories. I suggest that these two assumptions lead to Brave New World. (shrink)

The framework in which, better than in any other, cultural complexity becomes clear as a network of perspectives is the city: it is here that the greatest variety of subcultures, together with the widest range of contrasting modalities, seems able to handle its meaning. The city is at the same time an active place of cultural production and a passive and active place of memory keeping. It fuels styles and models of sensitivity also, and especially, through art and architecture. Therefore, (...) it becomes itself a cultural model able to orient taste, but also to continually disorient it through agency. Starting from the revitalization of the cultural capital of the cities, art can play the important role of cultural magnet by catalyzing moods and emotions, conveying otherwise chaotic needs and languages, promoting new tolerance and social and cultural integration. However, in the meantime, from a secluded and distinct place that organizes the use of cultural and artistic products within recognizable boundaries, the city is becoming an undifferentiated place, a city-beyond, scattered and/or boundless. Characterized by the undifferentiated and the mutant, the uncertain and the liquid, the deformable and the relative, the space of art perception will be rethought within and without the city. (shrink)

The article discusses two bioart projects that bring the symbolically core human substances of blood, sweat and tears into technologically mediated relationships with plants and fungi to explore human kinship with other species: Tarah Rhoda’s BS&T (short for ‘blood, sweat and tears’) and OurGlass, and Saša Spačal’s MycoMythologies: Patterning. The article analyses the art projects through the lens of the molecular gaze and different perspectives on kinning, bringing anthropological conceptualizations of kinship together with Haraway’s pathways to connect with other species. (...) How can bioart use technologies to explore interspecies kinship through a molecular gaze? And may such artworks contribute to the toning down of human exceptionality in the face of a precarious future? We find that artworks providing a molecular gaze on interspecies biological processes may risk a decontextualized approach to complex relational processes but may also create new visions of filiation even with biological organisms imagined to be genetically distant from humans, thus spurring awareness of the fragile interrelationships among species. (shrink)

Why do we labour so hard to sustain relationships that are fundamentally harmful to our wellbeing? That is the question which lies at the heart of Maja Borg’s poetic and alternatively distributed documentary film, Future My Love. The detrimental bonds on which the film focuses are those that maintain our connection to an economic system that has thrown us into an acute state of crisis and the stillborn emotions that keep us hopefully attached to a romantic partnership that we have (...) already outgrown; this elision imbricates and implicates the personal in the political. Through a prism of painful and, at times, unbearable emotion, and by blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, the real and the fictional, this film urges us to imagine ourselves into a future in which it might be possible to live otherwise; but this requires us to abandon the future we have already imagined and, as the film evinces through archival imagery from the 1950s or golden age of capitalism, imaged ourselves into. By drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotion, Judith Butler’s work on the act of mourning, and the writing of Eva Illouz, Luce Irigaray and Alain Badiou on love in the age of late capitalism, this article contends that Future My Love pleads with us to abandon, in Ahmed’s words, ‘happiness for life’, to forsake an ideology that is invested in a highly specific notion of what it means to flourish and to thrive, to mourn and name our losses, and to think about the future creatively and without cynicism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Demanding Environmental Ethics for the FutureJames P. Sterba (bio)As we contemplate the present and future effects of global climate change, it is hard not to be disillusioned by what we see. Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more intense and erratic weather patterns, wide-scale extinction of endangered species—what can we as environmental philosophers do that might be helpful in this regard? My suggestion is that we respond by drawing (...) on the resources of traditional normative philosophy to ground a demanding environmental ethics that will justify the kind of sacrifices that are needed to cope with our unsettling future.This is a project that, with a lot of help from others, I have been working on for the last twenty years. I will present it, at least in outline, in my presidential address at the APA Central Division Meeting next spring, entitled "Completing the Kantian Project: From Rationality to Equality." By equality here I mean substantive intergenerational equality. This will require that we limit our current use of resources to simply meeting our basic needs. So the argument moves from a neutral nonmoral rational foundation to a very demanding set of practical moral requirements. So far sketched, the argument does not yet take into account the requirements that nonhuman living nature places upon us. But surprisingly, so demanding is this morality as sketched so far, that when additional considerations are introduced to take nonhuman living nature into account, not much more is required of us other thansome further constraints on population policy.Now I know some environmental philosophers are more skeptical than I am about the usefulness of traditional moral philosophy. Even I am unhappy with certain debates currently raging among contemporary moral philosophers, such as the realist/anti-realist debate. In fact, my argument is designed to make that very debate unnecessary. Still, if we leave most of traditional moral philosophy behind, what do we as philosophers bring with us to the new disciplines with which we now propose to collaborate? Do we bring an ability to do values clarification and a good sense of argument? I don't think these skills and others like them alone will be enough for the task at hand. We need a very demanding ethics, and if we don't look to philosophy to ground such an ethics, where do we look? [End Page 146]There is also an additional advantage here to grounding a demanding environmental ethics in traditional normative philosophy. Such an approach is more likely to force traditionalists and conservatives, philosophers and otherwise, to take notice of our arguments. If we are out in "left" field just talking to those both inside and outside of philosophy who happen to agree with our practical agenda, it is easier for us to be dismissed by others who are not committed to that same practical agenda. By contrast, if we address our opponents by appealing to very traditional values by which they claim to live their lives, then we do have at least a fighting chance of changing the way they do live their lives. At least, as moral philosophers, we would have then done our best to respond to the environmental crisis. Provided of course that we are also willing to reach out with our demanding ethics in hand and do that interdisciplinary collaboration that needs to be done to secure fully practical and effective solutions to the problems we face.James P. Sterba James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He has published 24 books, including the award-winning Justice for Here and Now (Cambridge, 1998), Three Challenges to Ethics (Oxford, 2001). Terrorism and International Justice (Oxford, 2003), Affirmative Action and Racial Preference: A Debate, co-authored with Carl Cohen (Oxford, 2003) and The Triumph of Practice Over Theory in Ethics (Oxford, 2005) He is president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division. E-mail: [email protected] © 2007 Indiana University Press... (shrink)

Metaphysics as an independent discipline has a surprisingly short history. Until the early eighteenth century, many, perhaps even most, writers on “metaphysics” primarily had the eponymous work of Aristotle in mind. In the writings of the early eighteenth-century German rationalists—Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten—we find a conception of metaphysics that is no longer necessarily tied to Aristotle’s great work. But metaphysics as a discipline was not blessed with longevity, as a dozen years or so before Louis XVI it was condemned (...) to the guillotine by Kant’s first critique. The fate of metaphysics after the Kantian revolution is a story that still needs to be told, but it would be fair to say, I think, that for the past two centuries engagement with heavy metaphysical concepts such as eternity has been taken to be either a form of backwardness (religious or otherwise) or a kind of eccentricity. Luckily, things seem to have changed somewhat over the past twenty years. Suddenly, for example, we are seeing debates about monism appear in mainstream journals. (This could hardly be imagined in the 1970s or 1980s.) The emergence of interest in metaphysical monism as well as the persistent engagement with the philosophy of modality may open a window of opportunity through which eternity could again take her rightful seat as a fundamental notion of metaphysics. (shrink)

The radical contingencies attending human reproduction indicate that attempts to improve the living conditions of future generations result in generations populated by different individuals than would otherwise have been born. This remarkable consequence challenges the widespread belief that the present generation has responsibilities to its remote successors. I contend, first, that while the radical genetic contingency and epistemological indeterminacy of future persons obsolves us of obligations to act "in behalf of" them as individuals, this moral absolution does not entail (...) a permission to disregard entirely the remote consequences of our policies. Since relevant moral principles bind us to persons in general, not to particular individuals, we remain obligated to improve the life prospects of whatever individuals eventually come into being. Second, I suggest that by applying an analogous argument within the lives of persons rather than to the long history of civilization, we arrive at the morally repugnant result of negating long-term obligations to contemporary persons. Conversely, the condition of continuity which affords moral legitimacy of personal obligations among contemporaries likewise entails moral responsibility for the life conditions of distant generations. (shrink)