The present article analyses the concept of lecture in the thought of Simone Weil. Lecture is connected to the rational activity of human being and it allows man to orientate inside the structure of reality, by virtue of the meaning lecture itself determines. The different levels of lecture culminate in the possibility, for lecture itself, to reach a dimension of self-knowledge, and therefore to convert itself into non-lecture. Non-lecture corresponds to the state of abandonment and detachment which is typical of (...) mysticism. When man reaches this condition, he can overcome the fallacy of form and affirm the real presence of the things, in order to access a superior knowledge of reality and to a full experience of divine love. Non-lecture permits human being to face the malheur, understanding that malheur is a contradictory sign of divine grace. (shrink)

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 Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam: Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996)David RosandMeyer Schapiro, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, died at home in New York City on Sunday 3 March, at the age of 91. With his death, the worlds of art and learning have lost a legendary figure.“The humanity of art lies in the artist and not simply in what he represents,” Schapiro had declared in his lectures on abstract art. “It is the (...) painter’s constructive activity, his power of impressing a work with feeling and the qualities of thought that gives humanity to art.” Informing his own life and work, these were the values that enabled him to give such expressive voice to so much of the art of the past and of the present, to articulate the passions of eighth-century Northumbrian manuscript illuminators and Romanesque stonecarvers as well as of the most creative painters of our own century. Schapiro’s range as an art historian was universal, for he believed in the universality of art.Meyer Schapiro was born 23 September 1904, in Siauliai, Lithuania, and emigrated to the United States with his family when he was three. He grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he was first exposed to art in evening classes taught by John Sloan at the Hebrew Settlement House. He entered Columbia College in 1920 at the age of 16, having won both Pulitzer and New York State Regents Scholarships, and received his AB in 1924. Five years later he submitted his dissertation for the Ph.D., the first in fine arts and archaeology awarded by Columbia. “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac,” parts of which were published in The Art Bulletin of 1931, opened an entirely new critical perspective on Romanesque art; recognizing its creative and expressive imperatives, Schapiro’s study articulated the aesthetic quality of that art as well as situating it historically and culturally with new precision. Supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, he travelled widely in Europe and the Near East in 1926–27, leaving behind a trail of anecdotal legends that continued to be recounted long after by those who met the brilliant young graduate student—including Bernard Berenson, who compared the eloquence of the “very handsome youth” to Solomon himself.Schapiro began his teaching career at Columbia in 1928 as a lecturer and rose through the professorial ranks, becoming full professor in 1952; he was named University Professor in 1965 and became University Professor Emeritus in 1973. Throughout his career, he moved between the university campus on Morningside Heights and his home neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Lecturing as well at the New School for Social Research from 1936 to 1952, he reached the larger community of the New York art world, especially the artists, in the years when New York was becoming the most dynamic center of contemporary art. And he brought the artists uptown; auditing and participating in his classes at Columbia, their presence in his classroom seemed to validate his wisdom. At the other end of Schapiro’s range were the mathematicians, [End Page 547] scientists, and philosophers, in whose worlds he moved with equal confidence and, importantly, enthusiasm.During the ‘30s Schapiro’s was an important voice of moral balance in the cultural debates of the political left. Although he demonstrated with new insight and undogmatic focus the social bases of art, he insisted on recognizing “its own conditions which distinguish it from other activities.” Even as he avidly pursued knowledge—of history, culture, languages—Schapiro remained an artist. He talked about pictures as an artist. His criticism was an act of re-creation, as he lovingly reconstructed decisions made by the painter on the canvas; every stroke demanded attention. Choice was important, that freedom of the individual responding to the world around him and to the challenge of his own creation. In the anonymous art of the early Middle Ages Schapiro discovered the artist, the human maker; he intuited the feeling individual responsible for the invention of such expressive form. Distant art took on life and became accessible through his recognition of and insistence on its humanity.Schapiro’s learning was legendary, and yet, however intimidating it may have... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of SpiritAndy R. GermanRobert B. Pippin. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 103. Cloth, $29.95.If Hegel's system cannot be understood without the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is certainly impossible to understand the Phenomenology without understanding its famous transition, in chapter 4, to self-consciousness and the (perhaps (...) all-too-famous) master-slave dialectic. In these published lectures, then, Robert Pippin has compelling reasons for seeking the heart of the Phenomenology in two of its crucial assertions: that "Self-Consciousness is desire itself" and that "Self-Consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness" (¶¶167 and 175 in Miller's translation).Pippin's Hegel is essentially Kantian, concerned with the apperceptive nature of self-consciousness, i.e. not as mere receptivity to sensory or intellectual form, but as an activity, a judging or "taking" the world to be such and so. For Kant, this activity is transcendental or purely formal, the unification of the spatio-temporal manifold by a continuous, apperceptive "I" (31). Pippin argues that Hegel jettisons Kantian formality in favor of a broader question: how, rather than being subject to my desires, am I the subject of my desires? (32). An answer is possible only if self-consciousness is neither observational nor an immediate self-presence but instead (i) a practical achievement (15) that (ii) requires other self-conscious subjects (19). Unlike Platonic erōs, then, which points away from human life, self-conscious desire is constant self-examination of the reasons for our actions or beliefs. This is Hegel's version of Kant's insight that reason is the desire for justification, ultimately before "all others" (56–57).Thus we pivot to the claim that the successful or "satisfying" achievement of self-consciousness involves recognition by others. "Our answerability to the world," as Pippin writes, "is inextricably bound up with... our answerability to each other" (61). Unlike John McDowell's interpretation of the master-slave dialectic as an analogy for the struggle between the passive and active elements within one mind (42), Pippin argues that self-consciousness is social all the way down. It is "something like having a position," i.e. avowing a practical commitment or making a normative claim (65), which implies the presence of another self-conscious subject who recognizes my right to such claims, or challenges that right, even to the outermost—a struggle to the death over recognition and authority. Self-consciousness, then, is "not... a reflection of some substantive or metaphysical nature but... a social achievement... bound up with... social conflict" (75). On the decisive point, Pippin agrees with Brandom's neo-pragmatism: "[S]elf-conscious beings do not have natures, they have histories" (68), specifically, the history of struggle and reconciliation among rational, mutually recognizing subjects.But what, then, does recognition mean and how does it "satisfy"? And in what does our "answerability to others" consist if there is no "non-question begging... standard" (83) by which to judge our answers? Hegel, Pippin writes, "has a ‘pragmatic' or a ‘historicized' or ‘dialogical' view of what counts as the appeal to reasons.... He understands practical reason as a kind of interchange of attempts at justification among persons... " (84). Justification, however, cannot mean an appeal to nature. Indeed, in the struggle for recognition, self-conscious freedom means indifference to mere natural life or desire. Nature no longer points to philosophical wholeness, as our love of seeing does in Aristotle's Metaphysics. To paraphrase Pippin's titles, he shows with superior clarity that Hegel's idealism really is modernism: i.e. the most thoroughgoing rejection of the Greek link between eleutheria and eudaimonia.But when Hegel writes of "the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself... where Concept corresponds to object and object to Concept" as the necessary "goal" of knowledge (¶80), this suggests that the "interchange of justifications" reaches an end. Even if this end is the socio-political order of mutual recognition among rational persons, it is surely not the mere fact of recognition that satisfies us... (shrink)

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers From 1971 until 1984 at the College de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended , Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that (...) could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern. (shrink)

This splendid little volume is the edited version of a series of lectures delivered at the Catholic University of America in March, 1981, by a noted authority on both Stoicism and the history of medieval philosophy. Its aim is not to track down all of the Stoic elements imbedded in the philosophic and theological literature of the Middle Ages--a vast enterprise to which scholars have yet to turn their attention--but to offer a preliminary survey that could conceivably "serve as a (...) stimulus for further research". The assembled material, and there is much of it, has been conveniently organized under the following chapter headings: "The Challenge of Materialism", "Ethical Perspectives", and "Fatalism and Freedom". In the interest of time and space, other important considerations, such as those pertaining to Stoic cognitive theory and Stoic logic, have been mostly left aside. Chapter One, which constitutes an introduction to the work as a whole, is devoted to an examination of the various sources to which the medievals were indebted for their knowledge of Stoic philosophy. The achievement is an impressive one by any standard and the reader can only admire the ease with which the author, who is so obviously in command of his subject, is able to move from one topic to another or from one author to another. (shrink)

This lecture treats the theme of habitual cognition in both its commonplace and unusual senses in the tradition of ancient and medieval philosophy. Beginning with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and its teaching on habits, it traces how the ancient and medieval Peripatetic tradition received and developed the idea of habitual knowledge. The lecture then turns to three case-studies in which the notion of habitual knowledge is used in unusual senses: Aquinas’s treatment of self-knowledge; Scotus’s account of human awareness of the concept (...) of being; and Peter Auriol’s observations regarding memory and subconscious awareness in ordinary reptitive acts. Aquinas and Scotus seem to identify habitual knowledge in its unusual sense with the presence of an intelligible in the mind prior to actual cognition of that object. Auriol extends habitual knowledge to cover the cognitive state of someone performing an act without any conscious attention. The uses by both Aquinas and Scotus seem somewhat parallel to the use of habit or pre-conscious knowledge in Hume and Kant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality by Christina Van DykeAnn W. AstellA Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality. By Christina Van Dyke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xxv + 228. $41.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-886168-3.Building upon Étienne Gilson’s The Mystical Theology of St. Bernard (1940), which identified a systematic structure in the thought of a great contemplative (...) theologian, Jean Leclercq’s paradigm-shifting book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (1960), won a place for medieval monastic theology alongside Scholastic theology, broadening the canon for scholars of medieval theology. That theological canon has long since been further broadened to include the books of women mystics.Van Dyke’s book similarly aims to widen the canon of texts studied under the rubric of medieval philosophy to include contemplative writings by women and men, some of whom are also regarded as mystics. This short, wise, and winning book is “perhaps the first book-length reintegration of the medieval contemplative tradition into discussions of medieval philosophy” (208).Van Dyke urges her fellow philosophers to engage seriously with meditative and mystical writings as a corrective of historically false claims: first, that “women didn’t do philosophy in the Middle Ages” (1); second, that mystical and contemplative writings, by definition, lack philosophical/rational content; third, that Scholastic disputations arose purely within the “isolated bubbles” of the universities and did not reflect ongoing societal and ecclesial “conversations that frequently included women” (2). Beyond this corrective [End Page 707] function, Van Dyke argues that the pairing of contemplative with Scholastic texts enriches the study of medieval philosophy through complementation by reinforcing philosophy’s status as a transformative pursuit of wisdom, highlighting its inherent variety as a field, engaging the historical voices of men and women alike in discussions of topics of common interest, and demonstrating the mutual complementarity of the Scholastic and contemplative philosophical traditions, which have distinctive emphases and provide different angles of approach to given questions and topics.What topics? The adjective “hidden” in the title has a double meaning. It gently points to the medieval contemplative tradition as “hidden” to presentday philosophers who, Van Dyke hopes, will discover its philosophical richness. The adjective also pairs with the adjectival noun “contemplatives” in the subtitle, suggesting the interplay in Van Dyke’s vocabulary, which treats “mystic” (a word often glossed as “hidden to the senses”) and “contemplative” as synonyms, but favors the latter as more directly indicative of willed and embodied cognition. In this choice, she draws encouragement both from Bernard McGinn’s broad definition of mysticism (namely, as a contemplative way of preparing one for the direct experience of God’s presence) and from Nicholas Watson’s description of mystical experience as “phenomenological” and “transcendent” (20); she distances herself from the purely psychological interests of William James and the homogenizing views of Evelyn Underhill.In chapter 1, “Mysticism, Methodology, and Epistemic Justice,” Van Dyke takes her fellow philosophers to task for defining “mysticism” narrowly in a way that excludes “embodied, non-unitive states... visions, auditions, and other somatic experiences” (4). This too-narrow definition, she argues, has worked “‘against the recognition of women’s experiences as properly mystical’” (10), excluded meditative practices belonging to the contemplative path practiced by medieval Christians, and effected “the exclusion of philosophers from most of the ongoing interand intradisciplinary conversations about mysticism” (20).The subtitle of Van Dyke’s book conveniently lists five topics—self-knowledge, reason, love, persons, and immortality—that reflect the major themes of chapters 2 through 6. These short chapters each have a similar arrangement, showcasing both the questions common to Scholastics and contemplatives and the differences in their approaches.Chapter 2, “Self-Knowledge” opens with the observation, “The importance of self-knowledge is a truth universally acknowledged in the contemplative philosophical tradition” (33). According to Van Dyke, university-based discussions about the self tend to inquire “about ‘what’ we are and how we come to know this, while contemplative and mystical discussions tend to focus on ‘who’ we are and to emphasize the significance of self... (shrink)

Seven lectures graced the second in the annual series at the Irish college devoted to the 13th-century saint and theologian. The topics include friendship and love, the desire for happiness as a way to God, the separated soul's natural knowledge, and truth as a good. Appended is a guide to consultat.

Two books on Whitehead, a major study by the noted philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers, and a shorter one by Didier Debaise are reviewed, along with two earlier mathematical and scientific works by Whitehead himself, which have been re-issued. This provides the basis for a wide-ranging discussion of the relationships between Whitehead's love of poetry and Heidegger's approach to it, Whitehead's background in mathematics and theoretical physics and his attitude to empirical science and more general problems of the philosophy of (...) the event, in particular how radical change can come about. (shrink)

Since the modern age the attacks against faith and religious belief have been raised. One of the major arguments against the existence of God who is described in theistic religious holy books as Almighty and all loving God come in terms of suffering in human life and the presence of evil in the world created by God. The challenge according to the critics against the religious life and faith is how a believer can be considered rational in his faith while (...) there are many suffering in human life and evil in the world. The aim of this paper is to deal with this challenge and the solution is given on the basis of Islamic teachings. There are different responses for this challenge both in Islamic theology and Christian theology. This research is limited to Quranic teachings and the main claim as one possible response and defense for the presence of evil in human life is to point out that evil plays a main role in provoking inborn knowledge of God in human nature. Keywords - life, inborn, faith, Quran, evil. (shrink)

This paper attempts to fill an epistemological gap in our theorizing about love with a sketch of an epistemology of love that unfolds by addressing Whitney Houston’s famous epistemological questions pertaining to how we can know whether another loves us. After arguing for three possible sources of the knowledge of love, it offers initial answers to how the knowledge of the presence or absence of another’s love can be acquired from the relevant possible sources previously established. These initial answers, though, (...) are unsatisfying because they invite more difficult questions that are then addressed, such as those pertaining to the kinds of things that constitute love’s expressions along with how to detect these expressions given the possibility of false positives. Addressing these questions ultimately leads to a sharpened, Aristotle-inspired account of how to acquire the knowledge of the presence or absence of another’s love by inferring it, respectively, from the successful or failed detection of love’s expressions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society eds. by Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. SorrelsMichael Le ChevallierLove and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and Society Edited by Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. Sorrels WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 400 pp. $119.00 / $39.95Fredrick Simmons and Brian Sorrels present an impressive, cohesive volume of essays by twenty-two leading scholars who engage different facets of love and (...) theological ethics. although dedicated to gene outka—thus setting the broad theme and establishing his work as a privileged point of reference throughout the volume—Love and Christian Ethics should not be confused with a Festschrift. it accomplishes far more in intellectual diversity and depth, making a significant contribution to scholarship.The volume is organized into three sections: tradition, theory, and society. across the first section, the authors address love within major sources and figures, treating scripture, greek philosophy, augustine, aquinas, Kant, and Kierkegaard. Far from a textbook presentation, each essay marks out its own argument regarding the place of love in the respective subject. The second section is devoted to major theoretical questions raised within scholarship on love and ethics, addressing topics like the relation of eudaimonism to love (a running thread that emerges in the book), forgiveness, friendship, and evolution. The final section moves into the field of practice, application, and society, including an essay critically engaging implicit presentations of love found in the law, another treating love and international development, and one poignant essay by Mark D. Jordan calling for a moratorium on strong pronouncements in sexual ethics until ethicists can cultivate a loving knowledge of sex. This final section also includes reflections on love in the Jewish and Muslim traditions. Simmons's introduction and William Werpehowksi's afterword provide useful bookends. although no single thesis blandly governs this volume as a whole—incorporating complementary, divergent, and competing positions—in constructing this volume, Simmons and Sorrels argue that love is not eclipsed in Christian ethics but has a rich and variegated tradition. Werpehowski appraises [End Page 210] the volume as a whole, identifying key threads that emerge, like relations of love to eudaimonism and the theme of neighbor love.The volume is admirable in its breadth and depth. It offers a robust encounter with major figures and questions, providing historical recovery as well as critical and constructive engagement. That said, depth can work against breadth, with essays like Oliver O'Donovan's demanding a familiarity with Augustine Confessions that will send the reader back to his or her bookcases. Missing too are other notable figures and topics, such as the Protestant Reformers, Christian mystics, and feminist ethicists. Nevertheless, these gaps do not diminish the volume as a whole. I found myself again and again excited by the insights offered by the contributors, unsettling easy assumptions regarding the relation between eudaimonia and love, illustrating the depths of accounts of friendship for thinking about polity and mediating institutions, and cautioning against overconfidence in sexual ethics as its boundaries destabilize.Love and Christian Ethics would benefit scholars, teachers, and students alike. Its broad engagement with contemporary scholarship on love makes it a useful starting point for any researcher dipping or diving into this field. Introducing professors to key and sometimes obscured questions within figures and topics, it can round out lectures and help introduce students to the growing edge of scholarship on love. It would serve as a useful reference for any upper division or graduate course engaging with this significant, but often ignored, theme in Christian ethics.Rare is it to find a book that embodies the very theme it presents. These essays on love are a scholarly gift of the best sort—one not diminished but enhanced in its sharing.Michael Le ChevallierUniversity of ChicagoCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This lecture presents the text of the speech about Elizabeth I Queen of England delivered by the author at the 2008 Raleigh Lecture on History held at the British Academy. It explores the religious movement called the Family of Love and discusses Sir Walter Raleigh's knowledge about the discourse on Dover Harbour, which was later spuriously attributed to him. The lecture provides an excerpt and interpretation of Queen Elizabeth's poem titled On Monsieur's Departure.

The computer has increasingly become the principal model for the mind, which means our most basic experience of ""reality"" is as mediated through a screen, or stored in a cloud. As a result, we are losing a sense of the concrete and imposing presence of the real, and the fundamental claim it makes on us, a claim that Iris Murdoch once described as the essence of love. In response to this postmodern predicament, the present book aims to draw on the (...) classical philosophical tradition in order to articulate a robust philosophical anthropology, and a new appreciation of the importance of the ""transcendental properties"" of being: beauty, goodness, and truth. The book begins with a reflection on the importance of metaphysics in our contemporary setting, and then presents the human person's relation to the world under the signs of the transcendentals: beauty is the gracious invitation into reality, goodness is the self-gift of freedom in response to this invitation, and truth is the consummation of our relation to the real in knowledge. The book culminates in an argument for why love is ultimately a matter of being, and why metaphysical reason in indispensable in faith. ""Philosopher D. C. Schindler defies the dragon of modernity, whose dominant thought patterns induce a life- and culture-threatening loss of reality and self. He offers life-giving proposals regarding love, being, and the transcendentals to restore us profoundly to the world and to ourselves as humans. Buy the book--you may divest yourself of others. Digest it, and revel in your already-involvement with a responsive reality--an involvement of intimate encounter and communion; a reality that is love, fraught with beauty, goodness, and truth."" --Esther Lightcap Meek, Geneva College ""Love and the Postmodern Predicament is a treasure trove of philosophical riches. Schindler does not merely indicate the need to return to metaphysics to wrestle successfully with what he carefully and accurately describes as our postmodern predicament, but in fact leads us out of that predicament. His profound and original reflections on love, grounded in the transcendental properties of being, are a radical refashioning of traditional metaphysical principles."" --Jonathan J. Sanford, University of Dallas ""In this rewarding little text, Schindler accomplishes something too rare among works of philosophy: he accommodates a wide audience and yet deftly draws the reader into deep metaphysical waters, into a consideration of some of the most profound and perennial philosophical concerns. Throughout, the timeliness of his reflections on love, beauty, God, and the good remains in clear view. This is a highly recommended work by an author of capacious intellect and generous spirit."" --Lee M. Cole, Hillsdale College D. C. Schindler is Associate Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at The John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America. He is the author of The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns (2013). (shrink)

In what arrived belatedly as an announced, but delayed, preface to Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Jacques Lacan interrogates the relations Sade could be said to have had with, on the one hand, Sigmund Freud, and, on the other, Immanuel Kant.1 Despite the presuppositions at the time of its writing, the text was first published as “Kant avec Sade” in the journal Critique in 1963 and only later reappeared as the preface it had been conceived as: announcing the (...) dogma of de Sade as an introduction to one of his key works. What had happened in the meantime, Lacan cryptically suggests, is that his – Lacan’s – collection of lectures and essays, Écrits, had arrived with a certain acclaim on the French cultural scene, and what had at first appeared to the publisher as inconsequential ravings had morphed into a profound and potentially significant enframing of de Sade’s “philosophy.” -/- What is it we find here? It is stupid, says Lacan, to pronounce – as too many “literary types” do – that de Sade’s perversions prefigured Freud’s interrogation of sexual mores. True, they both have the appearance of schooling, and so serve to prepare, Lacan informs us, the way for a new science. To understand the difference between them we need to arrive at some conception of Freud’s ethics of pleasure. -/- With what is known as the pleasure principle – announced in 1911 – Freud ordained a mechanism whereby pleasure is maintained at the lowest possible level.2 Lacan elsewhere referred to this principle as a homeostatic device, since it seeks to secure the functioning of the organism with as little excitement as possible. -/- Freud’s principle is different from traditional ethics in that it doesn’t disallow some sexual practices that had hitherto been condemned as wrong. However, such a realization doesn’t relieve us from approaching the principle as ethical. To Lacan, Freud’s homeostatic device is what “preordains the creature to its good.” In other words, it is by indulging in just enough pleasure to avoid unpleasure, either by becoming abstinent or consumptive, that we maintain our experience of goodwill. -/- What is remarkable, Lacan notes in his foreword to de Sade, is that Freud did not find it necessary to explicitly refer to this principle as an ethical prerogative. The only reason we can find for this, Lacan claims, is the 19th century obsession with the theme of “happiness in evil.” -/- The “happiness in evil” – or, as we should say, happiness in the will – has its precursor in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which was published eight years prior to de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.3 To Lacan, de Sade subverts the Enlightenment directive inaugurated by Kant, and it is as such that it is possible to say that de Sade offers the truth of Kant’s Critique. -/- This “happiness in evil” becomes de Sade’s Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness. Recall that this is quite a different notion of perversion – of which the Marquis figures as the first and predominant example in Lacan – from that which reigned in the “literary” epoch, i.e., prior to Freud, as well as from Freud’s own inflection of the term. Perversion is no longer reducible to a catalogue of abominations – whipping, homosexuality, you name it – such as was the case prior to Freud, nor to a more select line of such – Freud famously excluded homosexual love from the list, while retaining sadomasochism. Lacan would draw the conclusion of Freud’s tentative first step by positing that perversion is a position, and specifically a location in relation to the phallus. -/- The novelty and force of this perspective should become clear to those who study the present volume. It is not a clinical attempt, nor the final word on a philosophy of mind without psychoanalysis. Rather, it should be regarded as situated in between these two domains, and with eyes to both. (shrink)

Contextualist scholars working on the rhetoric of corporeal presence in seventeenth-century English religious lyrics have naturally focused their attention on sacramental discourse of the Reformation era. As part of the Common Knowledge symposium on the future of contextualism, this full-length monograph, serialized in installments, argues that the contextualist focus on a single and time-limited “epistemic field” has resulted in a less than adequately ramified understanding of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. What the contextualist (...) approach misses is that even the religious discourses of the period were tied to a long and in no way local epistemological debate about signs and their meaning, whose roots are to be found in Greek and Latin rhetorical theory. This first installment of “Tokens of Love” commences a discussion of the role of classical pagan sign-theory in the development of Reformation sacramental discourse. (shrink)

The article develops an Ignatian perspective, from within which it then interprets and amplifies Bernard Lonergan's intellectual project. Exploiting recent analyses of medieval memorial culture and the rhetorical dynamicsof monastic spiritual practice, the article highlights the performative quality of key Ignatian texts, paying particular attention to the categories of ornamentation and ordering . Appreciating the vantage afforded by heightened self-presence, reflexive knowledge and intentional praxis, the article then explores Lonergan's project, employing the rubric of ornamentation and ordering to investigate the (...) interaction between cognitional activity and the matrix of desire informed by unbounded wonder, specific desires and distorting bias. Formative self-appropriation is then considered as a religious process, in which the self gathers the resources of Scripture and tradition to compose a creative faith response to the divine initiative of transforming love, a response that unfolds more fully in the co-development of personal, social and cultural activity. (shrink)

Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a French philosopher who is also a prominent figure in the tradition of Christian mysticism. In her early philosophical writings and lectures, she describes her understanding of the aim of philosophy as “the Search for the Good”. Very much influenced by Plato, Descartes and Kant, Weil states that God as the absolute Good is beyond known truths and can only be reached through Love. This treatment of love as a destructive power whereby the Self effaces itself (...) in order to get closer to God, echoes a somewhat mystical scheme. Weil believes that the only way to reach such knowledge and therefore God, which in her view is the sole purpose of life and should also be the purpose of philosophy. This dissertation focuses on the grounds that bring her to such conclusions as well as providing an analysis of whether Weil’s philosophical approach as an alternative to metaphysical and ethical problems in philosophy is able to stand firm on its own. (shrink)

Very few studies to date have explored the couplehood relationship in blended families with young children created after widowhood. This study sought to add to our knowledge of this issue by examining the couplehood experience of women who started a family with a widower with young children, with no children of their own. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 Israeli women aged 32–78 years. The findings indicate that many participants feel that the deceased wife continues to be present in their (...) partner’s life and that she is an integral part of their couplehood relationship. The participants described two subsystems existing alongside the couple subsystem with their partner, namely, the partner’s spousal subsystem with his first wife; and a triadic subsystem consisting of the woman, her partner, and his deceased wife. The perceived presence of the first wife raised poignant questions concerning the place of the two women in the partner’s life. Participants’ narratives revealed the dissonance between understanding and acknowledging their partner’s continuing bond with and affection for his deceased wife on the one hand, and recognition of his love for them on the other hand. The findings shed light on the complexity inherent in a couple relationship with a widower and may assist professionals who provide support to blended families in understanding the unique challenges faced by these women. This would enable them to tailor their counseling and the therapeutic process to the particular needs of these women. (shrink)

CATEGORY: Philosophy play; historical fiction; comedy; social criticism. STORYLINE: Katherine, a slightly neurotic American lawyer, has tried very hard to find personal happiness in the form of friends and lovers. But she has not succeeded, and is therefore very unhappy. So she travels to London, hoping that Christianus — a well-known satisfactionist — may be able to help her. TOPICS: In the course of the play, Katherine and Christianus converse about many philosophical issues: the modern American military presence in Iraq; (...) the meaning of life; the ethics of abortion; assessing WHO death statistics; the potential personhood of foetuses; ancient Egyptian moustaches and beards; defining criteria for progress in human society; objectivity and subjectivity; Chicago futures trading developments; the virtues of cryonics technology; a U.S. Supreme Court case; important and unimportant knowledge; and spiritualist dualism vs. scientific materialism . NOTES: This work features elaborate footnotes and comments by the author, to enhance the reader's experience of the play and its philosophizing characters. (shrink)

Now this is disastrous, not only because the richest and most profound aspect of being is lost, but also because such an approach cannot avoid falsifying our understanding of the real. For only in the concrete experience of self--not a knowledge of a certain object that might be so designated, but as the absolutely incom- municable presence of the I --can the significance of being as an absolute and unconditioned value, which at the same time founds a radical plurality whose (...) unique terms resist absorption into a common denominator, be properly grasped. The idea of being envelopes the value of what is most intimate in the subject; the I who thinks being, and the act by which I think it, and my liberty which takes its stand in its presence, and whatever is most interior and most singular in my personal attitude--all this is being, and in being. And instead of relegating the subject to the investigations of some other branch of study, the self, we must insist, occupies a privileged place in metaphysics. It is the manifestation par excellence in which being presents itself to us as an absolute value and first reveals what it means really to exist. (shrink)

PREFACE WORD -/- Hilmi Ziya Ülken was born and educated in Istanbul during the last period of the Ottoman Empire and worked in many fields of the intellectual life of the newly established Republic. Although he was interested in many fields of social sciences, he gained fame in the fields of Turkish thought and Islamic philosophy, and undertook important tasks in revealing and introducing medieval Islamic thinkers and post-Tanzimat Turkish thought. Again, due to his deep knowledge of Eastern and Western (...) philosophies, he was a thinker who made comparative studies and revealed the similarities and differences in both cultures. Apart from philosophy, which is his main field of interest, he also wrote works in the fields of sociology, anthropology, logic, history, novels, poetry, painting, miniature painting and even calligraphy. Ülken served as a bridge to the disconnect in our culture due to the Alphabet Revolution through the works he wrote and the students he trained. He made great contributions to Turkish-Islamic thought with his maturity period works, especially when he was a faculty member in the field of systematic philosophy at Ankara University Faculty of Theology. The philosophy of being, which constitutes the main axis of our study, is intertwined with metaphysics and ontology. Metaphysics, which deals with the question of "what being is", and ontology, which seeks to answer the question of "what kind of the same things exist in essence", are closely related; in fact, it is almost impossible to separate these two fields. Metaphysics, or the philosophy of being, is the most important and yet the most problematic field of philosophy. This is because throughout the history of philosophy there are many philosophers who do not see metaphysics as a field of philosophy. Especially in the Enlightenment period, metaphysics was seen as unobservable and incapable of meaningful discourse because it included topics such as God, the soul and universals. Some positivist thinkers even saw metaphysics as a continuation of animist discourse, the biggest obstacle to progress and Enlightenment, and criticized it severely. As a continuation of this understanding, metaphysics has been viewed negatively in our country since the early years of the Republic, and some philosophers have ignored an important field of philosophy by saying, "Metaphysics is not philosophy; philosophy is not metaphysics." In fact, in contemporary Western philosophy, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger. In fact, in contemporary Western philosophy, philosophers such as Heidegger (1889-1976), Sartre (1905-1980) and Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) attempted to demolish metaphysics in order to solve the problem of existence, but in doing so they themselves had to do metaphysics. When we ignore metaphysics, we ignore an important field of philosophy and an important function of the philosopher. Because in the pithy words of Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), "Man is a being who does metaphysics." Again, according to the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bâjce (1077-1139), a virtuous society is one that emphasizes the metaphysical dimension of human beings. Although Ülken grew up in a period when metaphysics was viewed negatively, he wrote many works in this field and attached great importance to metaphysics. In fact, one of his first works was Metaphysics (1928), which is important in this respect. In addition, one of his mature works, Being and Becoming (1968), which is a summary of his philosophy, also shows the importance he attached to metaphysics. Ülken attached great importance to the philosophy of being (ontology) in his philosophical studies. He even wrote on this subject in his Felsefe Dersleri: Bilgi ve Vücûd Nazariyeleri (Metafizik) (Philosophy Lectures: Knowledge and Body Theory -Metaphysics) (1928), Aşk Ahlâkı (Love Ethics) (1931), İnsanî Vatanperverlik (Humanitarian Patriotism) (1933), and Varlık ve Oluş (Being and Becoming) (1968). These works on ontology are among the first publications in his field in Turkish. According to him, the basic subject of philosophy is existence. Other fields should be built on this philosophy. During our study, the most important problem was the change in Ülken's thought between his works. We also encountered difficulties such as the scattered nature of his works, the lack of a systematic system, the lack of methodological sensitivity in footnotes and citations, and the use of some terms in their original form instead of their Turkish equivalents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How I Learned to Keep Worrying and Love Teaching the CanonAndrew DiltsFollowing the late Iris Marion Young’s usage of the term, I take pedagogical questions to be essentially pragmatic questions. As she puts it, “By being pragmatic I mean categorizing, explaining, developing accounts and arguments that are tied to specific practical and political problems, where the purpose of this theoretical activity is clearly related to these problems” (Young 1994, (...) 717–18). When thinking about the importance of feminist and continental pedagogical questions, I want to therefore locate my thoughts in specific political and practical problems faced by teachers.The specific political problem that I am concerned with here is the notion of the canon as it shapes the courses many of us teach. The specific practical manifestation of the problem of the canon is the question of how to teach such courses when one is assigned a syllabus, or constrained by the requirements of set curricula. My immediate concern is to focus on the position of the graduate instructor, adjunct lecturer, teaching assistant, and junior faculty member who lacks the institutional power and employment security to challenge the notion of the canon whether wholesale or only in part. I want to insist that teaching the canon as a practical and political problem, turns out to be an exemplary way to practice feminist, continental, radical, queer, and transgressive pedagogies. Teaching a canon is potentially radical because its (re)production is always also dangerous.I turn to feminist and continental approaches to teaching in particular because they are especially well suited to this practical and political problem. First, feminist philosophy has demonstrated the omission of women from the [End Page 78] canon while also emphasizing that women are central and crucial figures within canonical texts. Second, if continental philosophy distinguishes itself from those strains of the analytic tradition that conceive of themselves as timeless, ahistorical, and geographically universal, it does so in part by pointing to a historical and geographical referent: the “continent.” By taking the canon as an object of analysis, both perspectives can ground a pedagogical approach to a canonical course that provisionally embraces the canon precisely as a question, reflecting rather than refusing its contingency. Feminist and continental commitments to close reading, critical analysis, and sympathetic interpretation can promote a self-conscious and repeated practice of grappling over foundations. Such a practice would not be for the sake of preserving disciplines and normalizing canons, but rather for the sake of understanding the disciplined and normalized subjects that we are as teachers and student. A contingent and self-conscious stance toward canonical teaching, one that attends especially to the danger of pedagogical power, might moreover help us to situate our classrooms as spaces in which we, teachers and students, exercise something like collective agency.Let me make this more concrete with a symposium of two practices and one organizing principle. First, canonical courses must confront the question of the canon itself. The persistent questions of any survey, “classics,” or “foundations” course should be to ask what exactly makes the subject surveyable? What makes a classic a classic? What is built on a foundation and what makes something foundational? I first pose these questions by taking the course title itself as our first shared “text” for analysis, and by asking students what they think the class will be about and how exactly they have came to think that. It is usually striking to see just how confident many students are in what they’ve signed up for, and how sure they are in their knowledge of what counts as “classical” thought. Yet they have seldom thought about where this knowledge comes from. Such first questions of the course are thus self-reflective and critical questions: How did they know that Plato or Aristotle would be on the syllabus? This is the very first step in helping the students to recognize themselves as being active participants in the canon themselves, right along with me at the front of the room, actively investing their time in the production and reproduction of the canon.Our course will necessarily maintain some notions of classics, foundations, and canons. We... (shrink)

The human being is a multi-faceted entity, and within the spiritual realm, two primary centers govern: the center of reason (ʿaql) and the center of love (ʿishq). Human beings possess the faculty of thought, which, through reason, discerns truth from falsehood in the domain of theoretical and epistemic inquiry and fulfills practical functions in the domain of action. Love, however, arises from the human inclination toward ultimate perfection. According to ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī, love constitutes an existential connection between the lover and (...) the beloved, manifesting as an attraction between the perfect cause (ʿillat kāmilah) and the perfected effect (maʿlūl mustakmil). Through ḥarakat al-jawhariyyah (substantial motion), humans ascend from the level of potential intellect (ʿaql hayūlānī) to the level of acquired intellect (ʿaql mustafād), thereby attaining the boundless joy of Divine knowledge. Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī identifies two aspects of reason: first, as a faculty of logical reasoning and deduction, and second, as an instrument for apprehending intuitive truths (ḥaqāʾiq shuhūdiyyah). While the former is prone to error in logical structures or deductive reasoning, the latter is neither constrained by limitation nor subject to error. Qūnawī considers the human essence to be the qalb (heart), characterized by its intermediary (barzakhiyyah) and unitive (aḥadiyyah jamʿiyyah) nature, which allows it to apprehend all truths-universal and particular alike. The highest attainment of the intellect is ʿaql mustafād (acquired intellect). Yet, through the heart’s love, the human being transcends the realm of intellect and enters the Divine Presence (ṣuqʿ rabbūbī). When the heart receives truths from higher realms, it transforms ordinary intellect into sacred intellect (ʿaql qudsī). This sacred intellect, being an illuminated intellect (ʿaql munawwar), not only comprehends divine truths but also retains the ability to engage in logical and philosophical reasoning. ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī identifies three paths to the knowledge of God: sensory perception (ḥiss), rational intellect (ʿaql), and the innate or heartfelt path (ṭarīq qalbī wa-fiṭrī). The innate path corresponds to the human heart’s natural inclination toward the Ultimate Source (mabdaʾ al-mabādī). For ʿAllāmah, sharīʿah (divine law), grounded in illuminated and sacred intellect as well as divine revelation, aligns with human nature (fiṭrah) and facilitates human happiness through the harmonious integration of reason, love, and divine guidance. In Qūnawī’s thought, divine love (ʿishq ilāhī) refers to the primordial divine longing resulting from the unity of the divine names (asmāʾ). This love signifies a metaphysical movement and inclination inherent to the divine names themselves, independent of external causation. Qūnawī devoted significant effort to providing a rational framework for unveiling (kashf) and mystical intuition (shuhūd), asserting that the limitations of reason in comparison to intuition do not signify its absolute inefficacy. He critiques reason confined to Aristotelian rationality (ʿaql mashāʾī), emphasizing its dependence on theoretical reasoning, its susceptibility to imagination (wahm), and its limitations when devoid of intuitive insight. Consequently, before reason is elevated to sacred intellect through the heart, it may find itself in conflict with certain stages of love. (shrink)

The presence of parents or other guardians (commonly termed ‘supervision’) and parental knowledge are factors that are both robustly negatively associated with a range of anti-social and risky behavioural outcomes such as adolescent crime. However, parental presence/supervision and parental knowledge are both (i) regularly used inaccurately as proxies for parental monitoring, (ii) poorly defined and operationalised, and (iii) rarely linked to negative behavioural outcomes with plausible mechanisms that adequately explain their association. These problematic aspects of the parental monitoring literature are (...) a barrier to research into adolescent outcomes and the varied role of parents. This theoretical paper facilitates solutions these problems by clarifying the concepts of parental presence, supervision and knowledge. This discussion delineates presence from supervision and knowledge from monitoring. It specifies how presence and knowledge are not parenting actions, and neither constitute parental monitoring. These concepts are clarified within the parameters of a recent framework of goal-directed parental action and parental monitoring. Doing so constitutes under-labouring that facilitates future discovery of their distinct and yet inter-related mechanisms of influence on adolescent action and development. These structured conceptual developments are also of benefit for our better future understanding of parenting and parental monitoring by providing a framework within which to re-situate existing empirical research findings. (shrink)

I love books for many things, but I despise them for introducing a physical limit to the free circulation of knowledge (compared to the Internet). At least, that's what I had always thought. continent. is an online journal aiming at, among other things, breaking with the established paradigms of how academic work has to be published in order to be respected among relevant peers. I'm the engineer behind the current version of continent. , making it work and keeping it running (...) since began in 2010. We provide an online platform for knowledge to circulate, beyond the limitations of institutional attachment or distribution of physical volumes. And regardless of not having a physical publication ourselves, and being a trans-national endeavour with core members spread across three continents, we had the honour to join the Publish Or Be Damned fair and conference of Northern European independent book publishers at Index Art Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. The place was bursting with exceptional volumes made by some of the most interesting publishers in the European north. The encounter changed the way I think about such books: these editions are designed, engineered and crafted to a level of sophistication that they begin to hold more than just their informational value printed. They convey and communicate a form of tactile knowledge and pleasure, and this completely changed my perspective on the matter. Because continent. had not materialised yet and only appeared in the form of social events (such as those in Basel, Boston, New York, or Zürich), we could not offer any such tactile pleasures to those visiting our booth. Given this, my solution was to turn continent. 's participation into a spectacle of simulation. With so many important figures of the independent publishing world present, we staged a series of imaginary book-launch moments for the camera. Presenting a first quasi-materialisation of continent. in the form of a book, or rather, the hypothetical extrapolation of our red square shape from our logo into a red 30x30 cm slate. Thanks to all those that participated. Your presences allowed continent. to visualise what it would be like if we had a book, and had been published within the honorable circle of these fine publishers. Soon the day will come where this will become reality. Thanks to all who joined the fun and didn't mind me showing these to the rest of the world. I'll publish them here, for them not to perish, even if I shall be damned. Ida Marie Hede Bertelsen ( Pork Salad Press ) Abdul Dube ( sideprojects ) René Sørensen ( sideprojects ) Anders ( OEI Editör ) Brett Bloom ( Half Letter Press ) Anni Puolakkaby ( OK Do ) Kit Hammonds, Kate Phillimore, Louise O'Hare ( Publish and Be Damned ) Ingvar Högni ( Útúrdúr ) Fredrik Ehlin, Andjeas Ejksson, Oscar Mangione ( Geist Magazine ) Klara Källström, Thobias Fäldt ( B-B-B Books ) Laura Hatfield ( Witnas editors ) Chris Johnsen ( WITNAS editors ) Matthew Rana ( Witnas editors ) Ola Ståhl & Carl Lindh ( In Edit Mode Press ) Staffan Lundgren ( Axl Books ) Tuuka Kaila ( NAPA Books ) Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg + Ingrid Forlang ( Kuk et Parfyme ) Diana Baldon, Joanna Nowotny and Egle Kulbokaite ( Index Foundation ). (shrink)

English/French/Latin contributions.00Written 'Principia' on the Sentences of Peter Lombard constitute a largely unexplored but exciting genre that corresponds to a complex exercise imposed by the statutes of medieval universities throughout Europe during the 14th and 15th centuries. Although almost completely neglected by modern scholarship, the academic practice of 'Principia' was successful, long-lived, and widespread in the late Middle Ages. It required candidates for the title of doctor to begin their defense with a public debate in which they had to reveal (...) their scientific interests, display their erudition, and demonstrate their intellectual prowess in the presence of a large audience. Before and during their 'Principia' lectures, each candidate for the doctoral degree chose a topic that would exhibit his knowledge and innovation. Through debate with his colleagues in front of the staff and students of the faculty of theology and other members of the university or reputable persons (in Vienna the chancellor and the duke could participate in the debate and in Heidelberg the stuff of all the faculties from the body of the university), the candidate was expected to employ new methods and explore new paths. In most cases the discussion exceeded the confines of theology strictly speaking and allowed the candidates to indulge their interdisciplinary interests, since the debaters (the authors) combined science, mathematics, ethics, politics, astrology, literature, and so on in their polemics. Thus 'Principia' or principial debates represent the cutting edge method to promote research in late-medieval universities. This volume aims to open a vast and advanced area of investigation by focusing on the 'principia' practice that linked together medieval universities from different geographical and cultural contexts: Bologna, Cracow, Florence, Heidelberg, Oxford, Paris, Prague, Vienna. (shrink)

In Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, R. Zachary Manis examines in detail the several facets of the problem of hell, considers the reasons why the usual responses to the problem are unsatisfying, and suggests how an adequate solution to the problem can be constructed.

This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The Presence (...) of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Hegel, Derrida, and Restricted Economy: The Case of Mechanical Memory STEPHEN HOULGA'FE A GLANCE AT THE TEXTS OF Jacques Derrida and at the texts and lectures of G. W. F. Hegel indicates that Hegel and Derrida are extraordi- narily different thinkers. Hegel is clearly what Derrida would regard as a philosopher of presence, working toward the point "where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself," where con- sciousness is present to itself as it is in (...) itself. 1 Derrida, on the other hand, suggests that everything that is present, here, now, at this moment, bears within it, as constitutive features of itself, the marks or traces of what is irredeemably past, and that, consequently, we can never talk of entities such as ourselves being simply or wholly present to themselves. ~ Derrida claims in Positions that he tries hard to distinguish "diff6rance" from tlegelian "differ- ence," indeed that "diff~rance" might well be defined precisely as "the inter- ruption, the destruction of Hegelian sublation [relive] wherever it operates"; and, to judge at least from the look of his texts, he would seem to have G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwamag B~inden, edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, 20 vols. and Index , Ill [Phi~nomenologie des Geistes], 74. For the English translation, see Hegel, Phenomenolog) of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, with analysis of the.. (shrink)

Performing Madness: The Clinic as Stage. In the second half of the nineteenth century, clinical demonstrations became the dominant teaching method in psychiatry, playing a key role in medical‐professional disputes, as well. This paper traces this widely used though historiographically neglected practice of knowledge implementation and mediation, as demonstrated in the psychiatric clinic of the Berlin Charité (Psychiatrische und Nervenklinik der Berliner Charité) from 1881 to 1927. Documentation of this practice, found within individual medical records, forms the basis of this (...) research. The concept of ‘theatricality’ assists in uncovering the dramatic quality of the clinical demonstration: Psychiatric knowledge was not simply disseminated through such a practice; rather, such knowledge was first performatively created through the very logic of its presentation of exemplary patient histories, as well as through the examination and diagnostic positioning of its patients. The ‘success’ of such presentations depended on many variables, related to staff, time, place, and other situational factors. These include the presence of appropriate lecture halls, the availability and calculated selection of patients, and the employment of specific performative techniques by doctors for the sake of producing desired results. As one effect, clinical demonstrations also encouraged patients to both learn and rehearse behavior considered relevant to the particular diagnosis that was to be demonstrated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Wittgensteinian Approach to Discerning the Meaning of Works of Art in the Practice of Critical and Contextual Studies in Secondary Art EducationLeslie Cunliffe (bio)In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living.Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief1Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from (...) another side and no longer know your way about.Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations2IntroductionThis article explores a Wittgensteinian approach for dealing with the meaning of works of art in the practice of critical and contextual studies in art education. The article is aimed at developing a methodology for eleven to nineteen year olds, known in the UK as the secondary phase of education, but the approach could be generalized to other educational phases.Henry Finch3 interprets four references to meaning found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language as a quadrant that combines the horizontal axis of meaning as physiognomies (the experiential and visual) and meaning as constructions (concepts, uses, science, and mathematics), with a vertical axis of meaning as imperatives (rule following, obligations, and law) and meaning as custom (ceremonies, myths, and ritual).4 The quadrant represents Finch's understanding of Wittgenstein's views about how language serves a different but complementary role in the way human beings engage [End Page 65] with meaning in the world and their place in it.5 Such meanings are embedded in social practices, including first-person responses to a physiognomy, although these start off as biologically primed reactions.Michael Luntley argues that Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and the related remarks on perception should be understood as setting conditions for the possibilities of judgment in "seeing the world aright, in taking the right attitude to the world"6 rather than simply mapping the possibilities of meaning, as the former underscores the role of will7 in the way meaning is actively witnessed and ethically processed by an agent. Having the right view is still only a view, but for Wittgenstein this amounted to an immense ethical and philosophical project to see things accurately and in correct relationship to each other. Such perspectival stances result from an agent's capacity to selectively engage with meaning, with a more unitary understanding resulting from criss-crossing the same territory from different points of view. Wittgenstein's four references to meaning can be thought of as forming four different points on a compass that direct the "self-as-will engaged with that which is independent of will "8 in a quest to see things aright. By extension, such an approach could be used in art education to enable students to develop the dispositions to see works of art aright.Marcia Eaton describes the tension between epistemic and interpretative approaches to the meaning of works of art in this way: "In which direction should one go? In other words, how can judgments which seem so personal (relative, subjective, etc.) also play a role in interpersonal (absolute, objective, etc.) language games?"9 Michael Podro gives a similar description of the apparent tension between a context-bound analysis of works of art and their irreducible and autonomous qualities as like "constantly treading a tightrope."10 Ralph Smith highlights the difference "between having knowledge about art and personally experiencing its presence and power."11Ben Tilghman12 advocates a Wittgensteinian way of going beyond these twofold approaches for understanding and interpreting art by focusing on the role that ponderable and imponderable evidence play in achieving the right stance when attempting to condense the meaning of works of art. Following Wittgenstein, Tilghman argues that a judgment based on imponderable evidence can often be supported by ponderable evidence, a process that is always linked to the relative experience, knowledge, and wisdom of the person making the judgment. Wittgenstein's four references to meaning could be thought of as points on a compass for directing the will in fittingness when endeavoring to understand the role and relationship of ponderable and imponderable evidence in any attempt to see works of art aright. But before these ideas can be... (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

According to Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, our being-in-the-world is to be conceived of as an existential dialogue. Elsewhere, I have conceptualized the teacher–student-relation accordingly (see Jons 2008), as a matter of calling and responding. The conceptualization rests on a secularised notion of vocation, paving way for discovering, articulating and discerning pedagogical relations in a new way. In the present article, I take this conceptualization one step further, applying the concept of calling and responding to the pedagogical relation between a (...) learner—might it be a student or a scholar—and the subject studied. The aim of the study is to afford a new way of conceiving the process as well as the outcome of learning. Thinking learning within the framework of calling and responding means understanding the learner and the subject as addressing and responding to each other. This means that predicaments of the subject—such as the truths that the subject holds and the anomalies it suffers from—address the learner in e g lectures, readings, theories, assignments, challenging the knowledge of the learner and in responding to this address, the learner in turn challenges the truths of the subject. By paying heed to, responding responsibly and challenging each other, the outcome of learning becomes a twofold phenomenon, namely both the learner and the subject reconstituting themselves, enlarged by the contribution of each other’s mode of coming-into-presence. (shrink)

This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The Presence (...) of Past Science." An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. -/- Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Timothy Clark HEIDEGGER, DERRIDA, AND THE GREEK LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY The question "What is philosophy?" is not simply one question among others. Its status involves the questioner at once in a series of peculiar problems. The question "What is chemistry?" (for instance) would surely seem to admit of an answer. Even if there were a dispute about the wording of a definition, the general region to which the question (...) directs us seems relatively secure. "What is chemistry?" asks about the essence of a physical science and, as a consequence, the questioner will be situated in the realm of the philosophy of science. "What is philosophy?" however, can make no such leap. A "philosophy of philosophy " is simply tantamount to more philosophy. The question of philosophy 's essence can only be posed within philosophy. Moreover, would not this very question of an essence ofphilosophy be determined in advance by an understanding of "essence" by philosophy, which thus seems remorselessly to encompass the borders of that which might try to enclose it? The mode of questioning on the (impossible?) borders of philosophical discourse is the site of Martin Heidegger's so-called overcoming of Western Metaphysics. More recently, Jacques Derrida has intensified the mode of borderline questioning, engaging himself in both a radicalization and displacement of Heideggerian questions. Derrida writes, in "Violence and Metaphysics" (1964), "The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. As is well known, this amounts neither to an occidentalism, nor a historicism. It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium."1 Derrida continues to discuss Husserlian phenomenology and the thought of Heidegger in terms of their insistence on 75 76Philosophy and Literature conceiving philosophy according to its Greek impetus. If something is to transpire in the traditions of philosophy, its origin "will have to be summoned forth and adhered to as rigorously as possible" (p. 81). The specific "event" to be attended to will be what Derrida, after Heidegger, describes as the determination ofbeing as presence. This, it is argued, is constitutive in respect of philosophy and all the regional disciplines it governs. Needless to say "the determination of being as presence" demands considerable explication. The Greek nature of philosophy is discussed by Heidegger in the lecture, "What is Philosophy?"2 The question raises the problem of philosophy 's relation to its limits. Tb ask the question "What is Philosophy?" is not to step outside thought to some "metaphilosophical" realm. It is to be already standing in Greece. What is specifically Greek and decisive, in fact, is the very mode of the question ''What is XT' itself: "But not only what is in question —philosophy— is Greek in origin, but how we question, the manner in which we question even today, is Greek. We ask, "what is that—" (p. 35). The Greek mode of questioning something as to its whatness {ti estin?, "what is it?") has now become thoroughly familiar. Its novelty and Greek source have become obscured: "It is this form of questioning which Socrates, Plato, and Aristode developed. They ask, for example, What is the beautiful? What is knowledge?'..." (p. 37). Heidegger's characterization of the question, ti estin?, as decisively Greek must be distinguished from Edmund Husserl's apparently similar description of the fundamentally Greek nature of philosophy. Husserl characterized the theoretical relation to the world as a legacy which has largely determined Western Europe and, indeed, the modern world itself, a determination most palpable in the proliferation of the various sciences. The theoretical attitude is one of pure curiosity towards entities : "man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher."3 Moreover, the devotion to pure theoria builds up a body of disinterested knowledge in which others may participate and to which they may add. A universal culture, a project traversing individual and national difference, comes into being. The Greek philosopher embodied, for the first time, a type ofhumanity and culture to which the European world still belongs. Husserl thus underlines the huge stakes in so little a question as the "What is it?"//i estin... (shrink)

1施莱尔玛赫 contribution to the development施莱尔玛赫for hermeneutics in the development of Historically hermeneutics In order to make a decisive turn when he made ​​the future "general hermeneutics" , hermeneutics will be applied to all text interpretation. When the traditional hermeneutics contains In order to understand, description and application,施莱尔玛赫the attention is hermeneutics as "the art of understanding." 施莱尔玛赫also introduced the interpretation of psychology, can penetrate the text by means of its author's individuality and flexibility soul. He wanted to become a systematic hermeneutics, (...) and criticism of previous hermeneutics is "the rules of the merger," and the lack of coherence. Wu Ning speaking, they deal with different issues is a combination of methods. 施莱尔玛赫hermeneutics points to avoid misunderstanding of the text. This part is up to the final discussion of施莱尔玛赫criticism of the United States. 2. Dilthey contribution to the philosophical hermeneutics of Dilthey on施莱尔玛赫In order to write the thesis, including In order to Protestant hermeneutics history, from the Reformation to the future as a second reference books. He was a learned scholar and has been on many topics regardless above. For our purposes, Dilthey is a philosopher with a passion for life, he was placed In order to humanities and social sciences and natural sciences in an established full equality of points, by the foundation on the hermeneutics In order to develop a basic methodology. But in the science competition, he was seeking "Allgemeingultigkeit", a universal validity, to do so In order to give him too much towards the foundation to the scientific methods of thought. He is still a major development of the character of philosophical hermeneutics. 3 Heidegger before and on philosophical hermeneutics, "and there is time" contribution to the development of philosophical hermeneutics is the decisive shift in Heidegger, born with the future, there are original philosopher The early works. He Freiburg Hu plugs Seoul assistant, and in the phenomenological Hu stopper Seoul In order to create a useful set up beyond the traditional methods of philosophy, but he is still too dependent on science Hu stopper Marco effectiveness. Part I: description of the evolution of the early Heidegger: "ontology - the fact of hermeneutics," the book published after the death of Heidegger was published in 1999, English translation, Heidegger in this series by the fact that the ontology of hermeneutics In order to give us a hermeneutic understanding of his meaning. In order to avoid the traditional hermeneutics of his meaning, In order to return to the ancient hope臘hermeneueinc and hermeneia idiom. He attempts to go beyond the limits of contemporary objects, through the period of return to the ancient hope臘general language idioms. Hermeneutic encounter with the interpretation of Homer's description of the mouth, publish, translate and interpret. His description of historical hermeneutics in the pull-down maps and sub ​​Lane Park after a groundbreaking Aristotle hope臘idioms in the loss of richness and decline. But the hermeneutics of Heidegger speaking the method is close to something, such as early speech hermeneutics In order to approach closer to the truth of it is understandable the former interpretation of this domain as there face life. For this last hermeneutics as the method of self-understanding, but in a letter to his students Engelbert Kerbs letter, Heidegger also emphasizes the history In order to recognize the character. Us from our understanding of historical context, our understanding of the structure is formed by shaping the concept of history and even our language. In Dilthey's hermeneutics, he also stressed that understanding the historical basis. From Dilthey to Heidegger this view. Heidegger in his speech defines hermeneutics as "the fact of participation, close, and descriptions of the same interrogation methods." Hermeneutics is the interpretation of not only understanding knowledge as a negative process, but active participation, interrogation and close. Fact of itself is interpreted, it is through understanding the questions and answers something. Heidegger back to the necessary conditions for our understanding of factors, understanding of "the former structure." He describes some part of the former, is awareness and understanding of nature, we understand something "to" something, and we understand it in a specific historical context. Further more, we expect to understand it in the presence of a sight, not a determining sexual arousal by the sight, by the basic problems of the future horizon, it is "the possibility of there," the sight, for there is a special special possible time horizon. These early works of Heidegger has been found there the possibility of meaning. We all都leadership to a new concept of the humanities. In addition, as a rational animal, as Aristotle said sub-Lane, who is of a future there may not be included, including the timing of there. People are looking to understand their own there. Instructions to Heidegger, hermeneutics offers a new concept for the person's point of view. Part II: there and time hermeneutics is first mentioned in the "there and the time," Section VII, Heidegger phenomenology has been interpreted as if it is. In order that he found "the meaning of phenomenological description as a way to rely on hermeneutics, phenomenology of this and some of the logos have hermeneuein the characteristics of this phenomenology is to use some basic meaning of the word hermeneutics, it indicates the work In order to interpret . "In the second sense, Heidegger found in hermeneutics裡are there for the meaning of this method of exposing the shield. The third meaning is the interpretation of this promising continuous manner so that its future is possible, it's future there. Section 31 of hermeneutics is important, because there is some understanding that is. Understanding the process is the center of human existence, in Section 32 entitled "interpretation and understanding," understanding the interpretation built on. Visit the world around it and understand things as this or that, always never as pure consciousness. As Heidegger said, "always had to watch as the ability to understand and interpret", in other words, there is no precedence in the interpretation of pure consciousness, there is always ask questions and interpretation of the visual field. Section 44, regardless Heidegger also true about management, in its modern form as a true statement, is always carried a deeper understanding and interpretation of the export process. But the really right is defined as the management there has been an associate of knot, so it access to basic ontology of sight. It is obvious that there's open, this hole is to guide him toward the police point of view of the artistic part of the next lecture will be discussed. This lecture primarily presents the two early works of Heidegger in which hermeneutics plays a definitive role. As background, the contributions of Schleiermacher and Dilthey are presented briefly before going into Heidegger's contribution. Ⅰ. Schleiermacher's Contribution to the Development of a Philosophical Hermeneutics Schleiermacher made a decisive turn in the history of hermeneutics when he proposed a "Universal Hermeneutics," a hermeneutics that would apply to all kinds of text interpretation. While traditional hermeneutics included moments of understanding, explication and application, Schleiermacher focused on hermeneutics as the "art of understanding . "Schleiermacher also introduced psychological interpretation whereby one tried to penetrate the individuality and soul of the author of a text. He wanted hermeneutics to be systematic, and he criticized previous hermeneutics for being only an" amalgam of rules "and lacking systematic coherence. Rather , they were methods for dealing with an array of different kinds of problems. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics was directed at avoiding misunderstanding of the text. At the end of this section Gadamer's criticisms of Schleiermacher will be discussed. Ⅱ. Dilthey's Contribution to Philosophical Hermeneutics Dilthey wrote his dissertation on Schleiermacher and included a history of Protestant hermeneutics since the Reformation as a second companion volume. He was a broadly educated professor and wrote on many topics. For our purposes, Dilthey was a life-philosopher with a passion for placing the Humanities and Social Sciences on an equal footing with the Natural Sciences by developing a basic methodology for them based on hermeneutics. But in competing with the sciences, he sought an "Allgemeingultigkeit," a universal validity, and in doing so he tended to give too much ground to the way of thinking in the sciences. Still, he is a major figure in the development of philosophical hermeneutics. Ⅲ. The Contribution of Martin Heidegger to Philosophical Hermeneutics before and in Being and Time The decisive turn in the development of a philosophical hermeneutics came in the early writings of Martin Heidegger, a radical and original philosopher. He was in Freiburg an assistant to Husserl and found in Husserl's phenomenology a useful way of overcoming traditional philosophy, but he still found Husserl too preoccupied with scientific validity. Part Ⅰ: Heidegger's Early Lectures: Ontology-the Hermeneutics of Facticity A posthumously published and translated set of Heidegger's lectures on ontology in terms of a hermeneutics of facticity gives us a sense of his understanding of hermeneutics. He bypassed the traditional sense of hermeneutics and went back to the Greek usage of hermeneuein and hermeneia. He attempted to overcome the limitations of modern objectivity by returning to the usages current in ordinary language in ancient Greece. There hermeneutics meant orally interpreting Homer, announcing, translating, and explaining. His account of the history of hermeneutics after Plato and Aristotle is a history of decline and loss of the richness found in Greek usage. But hermeneutics for Heidegger meant a means of access to something, and in these early lectures hermeneutics became an interpretive means of access to facticity, to the realm of pre-interpretive understanding as Dasein faces life. Ultimately hermeneutics became a means for the self-understanding for Dasein. But in a letter to his student, Engelbert Krebs, Heidegger also emphasizes the historical character of cognition. We understand from our situation in history, and our understanding is structured by historically shaped concepts and even our language. Dilthey, too, emphasized the historical matrix for understanding in his hermeneutics, and Heidegger took this up from Dilthey. Heidegger defined hermeneutics in the opening lines of the lectures as "the unified manner of the engaging, approaching, accessing, interrogating, and explication of facticity." Hermeneutics as interpretation is not just understanding as a passive process of cognition but an active engaging, interrogating, and accessing. Facticity itself is interpretive in that it sees what something is through question and answer. Heidegger is stepping back into the factors that precondition our understanding, the "forestructure" of understanding. This forehaving, he says, belongs to the very nature of knowing and understanding. We see something "as "something, and we see it in a specific historical situation. Furthermore, we see it in an existential horizon of expectation, a horizon haunted by uncertainty, by the" fundamental questionability of the future, that is of "possible being," of what is possible for this particular being at this particular time and place. Already in these early works Heidegger finds in the sense of what is possible being, a sense of "ontic questionability, care, restlessness, anxiety, temporality." All of this leads to a new conception of humanity. Instead of being an animal endowed with reason, as in Aristotle, a human being is a being with a possible future, a being with temporality. Humans are beings seeking to know themselves. Hermeneutics, Heidegger says, offers the standpoint for a new conception of the human being. Part Ⅱ: Being and Time The first mention of hermeneutics is in section 7 of Being and Time, where Heidegger is already interpreting phenomenology as letting what is show itself. He finds that " the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation. The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermēneúein. The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the original signification of the word, where it designates the work of interpreting. "In a second sense, Heidegger finds in hermeneutics a means of uncovering the meaning of being for Dasein. And the third sense is the interpretation Dasein as continually making its future possibilities, its future being. Section 31 is important to hermeneutics because there the being of Dasein is said to be understanding. Understanding is the central process of an existing human being. In section 32, titled "Understanding and Interpretation," interpretation builds on understanding. It looks around at the surrounding world and sees things as this or that, always already , never as pure perception. As Heidegger puts it, "The seeing of this sight is always already understanding and interpreting." In other words, there is no pure perception prior to interpretation; there is always the horizon of questioning and interpreting. In section 44, Heidegger argues that truth, too, in its modern forms as statements which are true, is derivative from the deeper processes of understanding and interpreting that are always already going on. But when truth is rightfully defined in connection with being, then it moves into the horizon of fundamental ontology. It is the disclosure of being. This insight is part of what leads him to his view of art, which we will discuss in the next lectur. (shrink)

When I was invited by Yale University to deliver the Cassirer lectures, I hesitated for a topic. I wanted something new. I proposed the emotions, and at that time my knowledge of the topic was so slight that I didn't know whether it was something that I had already written on or not.I mention this fact because one thing that I have since learnt about the emotions is that such ignorance is in order. For it is one of those topics (...) where grasping the extension of the term is inseparable from having some theory of the matter, however primitive. One way to explain this fact is to invoke the novelty of the term, for, in the sense in which it is used in this lecture, it is only about 300 years old. Another way, probably related, is to point to the fact that, not only are there belief and particular beliefs, desire and particular desires, but, when we refer to particular beliefs and to particular desires, we call them ‘the belief that this’ or ‘the desire that that’. However there is no locution ‘the emotion that this’, or ‘the emotion that that’, which would indicate the presence of an emotion. It seems that ordinary language is an intermittent guide to the circumscription of the emotions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Legacy of Boston PersonalismJ. Edward Hackett1. IntroductionWhen the question of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophical legacy arises in the academy, so far, the question remains open-ended (though, as I will shortly argue, the question has already been answered by King himself). Beyond his presence in public American consciousness, King left behind speeches, sermons, correspondence, and writings that inspire both philosophical (...) and theological reflection. However, King is also interpreted on the merits of the biases and philosophical traditions that we scholars navigate. Such biases and philosophical traditions mediate our experience of encountering King, and this mediation can impact our understanding of what exactly King’s philosophical legacy is.1Accordingly, we should seek to reconstruct King’s thoughts in the philosophical vocabulary King employed rather than displacing King from his own agency and the contexts that shaped him.2 In doing so, we prevent mistakes and misunderstandings that plague the public knowledge of King’s legacy. And yet, serious misunderstanding occurs every January with light fluff pieces in major newspapers and websites from authors who do not read King’s corpus. What’s more, some scholars are guilty of this lack of reading King widely. Consider Martha Nussbaum and her glaring error and omission in her recent contribution to a recent book that purports to look at King as a philosopher: “Although a religious man, [King] did not advance in his political writings a comprehensive and religious doctrine, as Gandhi did” (Nussbaum 123). In an otherwise interesting article about political emotions, Nussbaum completely neglects any historical consideration or development where King describes himself as a personalist.3 Like others, Nussbaum disregards King’s own self-description. This disregard is tantamount to a silent [End Page 45] and implicit racism that results in scholarly efforts that deprive King of his own intellectual agency when interpreting his work. This tendency prevails in both philosophy and theology departments, and this neglect has also been the larger challenge of African American philosophy gaining more acceptance as a field of philosophical inquiry (McClendon and Ferguson 38). My efforts in this article are to put an end to continual misreadings of King. First and foremost, King is a personalist.While this essay defends the personalist interpretation of King, let me lay out briefly those pieces of evidence. The interpretation of King as a personalist rests on four evidential sources: (1) King’s own words, (2) family background, (3) influence of personalist ideas on his writings, and (4) the tradition of King’s reception by other Boston personalists. First, King describes himself in his own words as a personalist. This is perhaps the biggest piece of evidence for why we should read King as a personalist. Second, King was influenced by personalism before studying Brightman’s philosophy with Gregory Davis at Crozers Theological Seminary.4 Before Morehouse College and Crozers Theological Seminary, according to Rufus Burrow, homespun personalism emerges out of King’s upbringing within the Black Church. For this reason, scholars should not doubt that King synthesizes personalist influences with how he was raised (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 17–31). Moreover, given that King chose to go to Boston University to study with Brightman and to be where Boston personalism was known to be strong, all of these facts indicate that King was a personalist (Burrow, God and Human Dignity 24).Homespun personalism gave King a vocabulary to bring together and synthesize many intellectual forces in his life, and this synthesis is recognized by other personalists. Walter Muelder is one such personalist. Muelder was Dean of Boston University’s School of Theology from 1945–1972 when King attended. Muelder and King exchanged correspondence, and Muelder delivered many lectures, some published and others unpublished, on the personalism of King. The most famous of these lectures is one Muelder gave to Morehouse College in 1983, in which Brightman’s moral law system is read into King’s own words. Taking this historical background and also that, to this day, some teachers at Morehouse College, like Lawrence Carter, make their students learn the personalist moral law system from Muelder and Bright-man, the personalist interpretation... (shrink)

The London Institution, established in the City of London in 1807, was devoted, as its full title proclaimed, to the 'advancement of Literature and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge'. With its extensive lecture programme, splendid reference library, reading rooms, laboratory and other amenities, it provided for its members a scientific and cultural centre, modelled on the highly successful and fashionable Royal Institution in London's West End. Among its scientific activities, chemistry long maintained a leading role, in terms of both the (...) sheer volume and variety of its presentations, and the high standing of its lecturers; they included Faraday, Playfair, Hofmann, Roscoe, Odling, Norman Lockyer, Meldola, and Sir William Ramsay, as well as other visiting lecturers, specially selected for their ability to present their subject in an interesting and attractive fashion to a wider lay public. The laboratory of the Institution, although limited in size and facilities, was the scene of instruction in practical chemistry, and between 1863 and 1884 attained the reputation of a significant centre of chemical research during the successive tenure of the professorship in chemistry by J. A. Wanklyn and H. E. Armstrong. Their publications, appearing under the device 'From the Laboratory of the London Institution', were a frequent feature of the leading chemical periodicals. Thus, within its many-sided activities, the Institution promoted significantly the public appreciation of the function of chemistry, as a contributor both to pure knowledge, and to technical and economic progress. It achieved this in an environment of influential City merchants, manufacturers and financiers and doubtless led to beneficient, if unrecorded, consequences. It was only towards the close of the nineteenth century, when the universities had become increasingly concerned with the systematic study of the discipline, that chemistry lost its direct impact in the London Institution, but continued to maintain a presence within its cultural framework. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of Klee's (...) Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

Based on the author's lectures in Hong Kong, for classes on the philosophy of love, this book defends a theory of love as consisting of four types (two rational, two emotional) that tend to be experienced in three manifestations (sexuality, marriage, and friendship). Like a typical textbook, every chapter ends with a list of questions for further thought and a list of recommended further readings. The first of twelve chapters is shown here as an example.

Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication.

Two kinds of epistemological sceptical paradox are reviewed and a shared assumption, that warrant to accept a proposition has to be the same thing as having evidence for its truth, is noted. 'Entitlement', as used here, denotes a kind of rational warrant that counterexemplifies that identification. The paper pursues the thought that there are various kinds of entitlement and explores the possibility that the sceptical paradoxes might receive a uniform solution if entitlement can be made to reach sufficiently far. Three (...) kinds of entitlement are characterized and given prima facie support, and a fourth is canvassed. Certain foreseeable limitations of the suggested antisceptical strategy are noted. The discussion is grounded, overall, in a conception of the sceptical paradoxes not as directly challenging our having any warrant for large classes of our beliefs but as crises of intellectual conscience for one who wants to claim that we do. (shrink)

As far as I’m concerned, Korean moral education is facing the new challenge and new era. I’m teaching Korean secondary school studens as an Ethic teacher in high school and EBS lecturer as well. I’m worried about Korean education especially in middle and high school. There was missing thinking those parts cause an entrance examination, only for university in Korea. In this a serious worry, I found some exits from significant experience. First, I’d like to mention about P4C (Philosophy for (...) children) Program which was learned from Professor Mattew Lipman of Mont Clair State University in New Jersey, U.S.A. This program is emphasizing upon thinking skill including creative, critical, and caring thinking. The huge shift from knowledge based education to thinking based education inKorea contemporarily. Also Student-based education is new stream of Korean education system. Teachers think students come to school to get knowledge, parents think children can learn judgment at school which was "lost area.”All this things come from philosophy, when we ask for reason it is a philosophical question. For example, "Why is he a hero?”, “He is brave.” "Why is he brave?" Which is philosophical conceptualization? Every day life gives us some questions and concepts like: love, freedom and philosophy gives us answers to those question so without philosophy we cannot have happy life. In reality of Korean education system there is no independent class for philosophy. So philosophy can be taught in Korean language classes or social studies. I started using P4C program from Lipman: I taught students making questions or making stories. These exercising result was remarkable and amazing. So questions are thebeginning of discovering new knowledge. Even if the knowledge is known by other people students can enjoy the process of discovering new knowledge. They could also get thinking skills. (shrink)

Language and Problems of Knowledge is sixteenth in the series Current Studies in Linguistics, edited by Jay Keyser.