This chapter contains sections titled: Epicureans and Pleasure Freedom from Anxiety and Types of Desires Sex, Shoes, and the Needs of College Students The Dangers of Sex Sex and Sensibility Romance, Beautiful Illusions, and Sound Minds Skip the Sex and Keep the Friend.

Logic in Action/Doron Avital Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide (Napoleon Bonaparte) Introduction -/- This book was born on the battlefield and in nights of secretive special operations all around the Middle East, as well as in the corridors and lecture halls of Western Academia best schools. As a young boy, I was always mesmerized by stories of great men and women of action at fateful cross-roads of decision-making. Then, like as today, (...) I felt the full weight of the moment of truth as it confronts the individual, the man or woman of action, with the imminent necessity to decide. Alongside, as I was climbing up the ladder of education, I found myself just as well captivated by the great intellectual stories of our times, in particular 20th century analytic philosophy and, at its core, the machinery of modern logic. How do then the cool contemplative modes of the philosophical and analytic outlooks, that are better fitting of the philosopher's armchair at the fireplace, hang together with the heat of the battlefield or the angst of the ticking clock of time left to the completion of a daring special operation? Growing up I was pondering exactly that. Not accidently, and in fact as consequence, I have chosen a course in life that challenged me to visit the poles of both theory and practice. I set myself on a mission to unravel the tension between the contemplative inquiry, supposedly theoretical, aiming at the logical structure of things, and the uncompromising test of life and action. The puzzle of the gap between theory and practice has become ever since the guiding question of my life. -/- Not long ago, I met two friends, Avner Shor, a veteran combat soldier of the special forces unit I eventually commanded, and Aviram Halevi, a fellow officer with whom I served. Why will we not put into writing the ideas that guided us during our years of military action, we wondered. At that time, I used to deliver the keynote lectures to the senior officers' course of Israel central intelligence organization, the Mossad. For this I already had to put some of these ideas in writing. Avner was quick to introduce me with a notable publisher and even helped me write the first chapter. With Aviram I sat to many meetings, where he would challenge me with key questions, and we followed them with memories of operations and battles, aiming to draw the required lessons. This served me well when I finally sat down to write the first draft of the book. The result was more extensive than me and my friends had expected. I had to add a particularly long chapter dealing with the story of modern philosophy and logic. This was required, I felt, as no decision-making process lives in an intellectual vacuum. Knowingly or subconsciously, the intellectual climate of the time guides us for better or worse with the decisions we finally take. The initial draft was naturally cumbersome and inaccessible. But here I had the privilege of meeting a particularly talented editor, Rami Rothholtz. I found in Rami both an editor and a critical reader. As an infantry combat soldier at youth and now a senior journalist and editor, Rami insisted on simplifying and refining my ideas. Had it not been for his work, this book would have been literally unreadable. *** I opened my book with a brief description of a single night of a special operation deep at the Lebanon Bekaa valley, far away from Israel northern border. The mission was to kidnap a senior terror leader known to be holding in captivity an Israeli pilot. This was also the last special operation I commanded in my military career. A single special operation night, but what had to precede it? For sure, many months of intense and skillful preparations. What is Planning? This is the question with which I open up chapter (2) of the book. I confront in this chapter two approaches to planning. The first is the one I saw as a mission to myself to cultivate in my many years of military service. The second is the one I saw as representing a deep-rooted fallacy that holds a firm grip on today's conventional wisdom about planning. To further examine the logic of the competing models, I was required in chapter (3) to analyze the concept of "The Standard". I argue that the false model of planning has its roots in an attitude of an uncompromising adherence to the power of literal obedience to standards and rules. The standard, or what is outlined by a rule as prescribing a future course of action, is seen as an answer to the fundamental tension between theory (planning) and practice (execution). I argue in contrast that the standard does not produce an answer but rather what I call: "A Well-Defined Question". In essence, it is a meticulously-well-planned invitation to exercise a fresh judgment. A judgement that has as an anchor the default answer that the standard produces but is open to extension as it confronts the new frame of reference of the test of reality. In chapter (4), I present a new tool for planning and execution: "The Polygon of Risks" or "The Polygon of Execution". The Polygon is a geometric illustration of the underlying tension that exists between all dimensions of the operational project. The construction and conceptualization of the trade-offs that exist between the various dimensions - segments of the polygon - is the first topic on the planner's agenda. I position the concepts of "Daring" and "Taking Proactive and Well-Informed Risks" as necessary logical constituents of the polygon and show how in contrast the false model of planning is responsible for an operational culture that is risk-averse. It encourages, in fact, the piling up of false securities at the segments' level that eventually lead to the collapse of the polygon. The necessary trade-offs relationships that exist between the segments of the polygon express the fundamental tension between partnership and competition: partnership in a joint goal and competition over resources, both material and abstract. When this tension is not managed well, that is, when the players' local optimizations overshadow the global optimization required for the success of the project, the execution polygon collapses. In this scenario, we may find the setting of the bar of "High Standards" in a players' spheres of responsibility to conceal a hidden agenda of personal insurances taken against a possible failure. Once the overall risk is not mitigated by way of collaborative joint executional dialogue, the process that leads to a collapse of the polygon is literally unstoppable. *** In chapter (5), I discuss "(Fateful) Decisions". I examine the way in which we should translate the polygon into sequential critical decisions on the timeline. The execution polygon is not a rigid scaffolding but a dynamic conceptual illustration of the -/- project. It will need now to be converted into successive decision junctions. We will find the content of a decision and its timing on the timeline to be inseparable. The right decision is the one that is taken at the right time. The moment of decision is in fact the last moment of deliberation, the first moment available for action, i.e. the first possible "Can" is also the latest possible "Must". Deciding too soon is analog to the "Jumping of the Gun". The decision maker is forcing a pre-conceived answer to a state of affairs not ripe for an answer, e.g. the target in the shooting range is not yet erected. Late to decide and the decision maker may envision what he or she should have done but reality is no longer available for them to harness it right, e.g. consider a tennis player's frustration when reviewing a too-late-to-react move in the video replay. I review in this chapter many fateful decisions, both historical, from Napoleon's Waterloo, to a Bridge Too Far of WWII, to the failed rescue attempt of American hostages at the time of the Iranian Revolution, as well as fateful decisions I had to take in the course of my military life, both in combat and in special operations, and show the sense in which they all answer to our analysis. The theme of chapter (6) is "The Moment of Truth". This is the moment when everything is on the line and from which there is no turning back. I discuss the formative repetitive structure of the schooling and simulation phase and contrast it with the "One Shot, One Opportunity" nature of the moment of truth. This is extremely helpful when we analyze the logical structure of failures as unwarranted repetitions of past lessons. The schooling curriculum indeed consists of important abstractions drawn from lessons of the past. However, it is when we project them in a fashion that is literal or mechanical that we cross path with the possibility of a failure. The paradox of education is that what we must repeat in school and simulation must be extended and not repeated in real life. What is required of us so we do not fall into the fallacy of repetition in face of the moment of truth is the core subject of the discussion of this chapter. In chapter (7), I took a lengthy philosophical detour surveying the intellectual drama of modern logic, and in general, the story of 20th century analytic philosophy. Readers who choose to bypass the somehow demanding narrative of this drama can do so and still keep the argumentative thread of the book. However, even by way of skipping the more technical parts, I would still urge the readers to delve into the discussion in this chapter as I believe this would grant them a deeper understanding of the overall conceptual framework. I explore here the work of two key figures: the logician Kurt Gödel and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, both were crowned in 2000 by TIME Magazine, as the leading Logician and Philosopher, respectively, of the 20th Century. I review the fascinating logical result of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and examine its relevance as setting a theoretical limit to the power of formalization. This amazing logical result - a result that shakes the logical foundations of 20th century thought in as much as the discovery of irrational numbers shook the foundations of the Pythagorean program of the ancient Greeks - bears significantly on the question of action and the blind trust we place in the power of formalization in the form of protocols and rules. It is here that Wittgenstein's philosophy enters in full force. We follow Wittgenstein as he dismantles our conception of rules as if there were "Railroads to Infinite", i.e. as prescribing for us in-advance their proper employments in all possible -/- future eventualities. Instead we propose that the dilemma of action demands of us an extension of rules rather than a mechanical or blind repetition of their literal imperative. In turn, this extension can serve as a new lesson added to the curriculum of school and simulation. The theme of chapter (8), the concluding chapter, is Strategy, Logic, and Ethics. The chapter comes to place the ethical dilemma in the conceptual map we presented in the book. I discuss here the tension between strategy as a process of setting goals and deriving backward as it were the steps that are necessary for achieving these goals, to the inescapable dictation of the ethical imperative. This unavoidable tension is particularly important against the backdrop of contemporary culture that is guided by a vision of personal success and achievement that may threaten our ability to do what is right. Most of all, I am troubled in this chapter, with the role logic may play, first as a liberating force enabling a change that is tuned to the ethical imperative, and second, as a force designed to justify on logical grounds, as it were, the existing power structure. It is in this junction that brave individuals will be called to challenge the governing logic of the zeitgeist - logic that operates now as an oppressive force that serves the vested interest of beneficials of the existing order. When success is favored over doing what is right, as we must admit is the prevailing cultural mood of our times, that the words of Emanuel Kant carry their full weight: "Do the Right thing and leave the Consequences to God". For this we need heroes and heroines that challenge the time by bearing the full weight of responsibility that comes with the doing of what is Right. *** This book was written more than anything from the perspective of the heroes and heroines of action. Sometimes they may be missing the exact words or the full insight into the solid logical complexity that stands between them and the doing of what is right. They feel what is right to do on the battlefield of life, whether in real battle, in political or economic life or whether in the life of creativity and the quest of the intellect. They do need, in analogy, proper logical and intellectual artillery. I hope they will find the logical cannons they require as they travel through the pages of this book. The rest is in their hands at the Moment of Truth. -/- Doron Avital, Tel Aviv 2011 -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AN EARLY ACCOUNT OF DAVID HUME In New Letters of David Hume, Professor Klibansky and Mossner lamented the "dearth of information on Hume's early development". Though some new facts and documents have emerged since 1954, the early period of Hume's life, to 1740, remains the most obscure. The account of Hume in 1740 presented below adds nothing to our knowledge of the evolution of Hume's philosophy, but it (...) does give us an interesting picture of the young philosopher in society, and it suggests that those traits of character which later earned him the title of "le bon David" were already in evidence. The sketch below stresses, as many of his friends and adversaries were later to do, the divergence between the detached scepticism of his writings and his amiable engagement in the social life of a company. And if we take seriously the report that Hume was left in charge of the domestic "oeconomy" in the family he was visiting at Richmond, we might see this as foreshadowing his solicitude over, and constant interest in, the management of his own household and financial affairs in later years. The account printed here is an extract from a letter by William Mure of Caldwell to his sister Agnes, 2 dated "Richmond June 5th 1740". Mure has long been recognized as one of Hume's most intimate friends: Hume himself summed up the relationship when he wrote, on Mure' s death in 1776, "The Baron was among the oldest and best Friends I had 3 in the World." The document published here constitutes the earliest concrete evidence of their friendship yet recovered, ante-dating Hume's first published letter to Mure by more than two years. It appears that the two men were spending the summer of 17 40 in or near London, and possibly both staying at the house of some mutual friend. Mure had at this time just finished his study of law at Edinburgh University, and would probably have been vacationing in 79 London eri route to Leyden, where he was to complete his legal training. Hume may have been in the capital preparing to see Book III of his A Treatise of Human Nature, "Of Morals", through the press: it was published in November 1740. This, and the first two books of the Treatise, which had been published in 1739, were presumably the writings which he discussed with the company at Richmond. We have been here now these ten days, and pass our time in a very agreeable way, we have our aountrey man Mr. Hume the author of the Metaphysical books 7 that you heard so much of last summer as a party in our retirement, he is a very sensible young fellow and extreamly curious in most parts of learning and how much soever he has shown himself a Sceptick upon subjects of speculation and enquiry, he is as far from it as any man with regard to the qualities of a well natured friendly disposition, and an honest heart which are no doubt of greater consequence to the intrinsick worth of a character than any abstract opinions whatever. As he is very communicative of all his knowledge we have a great deal from him in the way of dispute and argument, and not a little too in the way of plain information we reason upon every point with the greatest freedom, even his own books, (which we are working at at present) we canvass with ease, and attack him boldly whereever we can get the least hold of him, and question or contradict his most favourite notions; all this goes on with thè greatest good humour, and affords us entertainment both within doors, and in the feilds at our walks in this delightful country, which is the finest that one can possibly imagine, and has the preference by people that has travel'd throw most of Europe, to any they ever saw. We make use of our Philosopher too in another way less becoming the dignity of his Character, as- we 80 keep family within ourselves, he provides the necessaries of household (¡economy and manages all the affairs of house keeping. From these... (shrink)

The ubiquitous schema ‘All Fs are Gs’ dominates much philosophical discussion on laws but rarely is it shown how actual laws mentioned and used in science are supposed to fit it. After consideration of a variety of laws, including those obviously conditional and those superficially not conditional, I argue that we have good reason to support the traditional interpretation of laws as conditionals of some quantified form with a single object variable. I show how this conclusion impacts on the status (...) of ‘system laws’ and the significance of having only one object variable with regard to the relationship between laws and causal relations. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it will (...) give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

The unusual occurrence and developmental diversity of asexual eukaryotes remain a puzzle. De novo formation of a functioning asexual genome requires a unique assembly of sets of genes or gene states to disrupt cellular mechanisms of meiosis and gametogenesis, and to affect discrete components of sexuality and produce clonal or hemiclonal offspring. We highlight two usually overlooked but essential conditions to understand the molecular nature of clonal organisms, that is, a nonrecombinant genomic assemblage retaining modifiers of the sexual program, and (...) a complementation between altered reproductive components. These subtle conditions are the basis for physiologically viable and genetically balanced transitions between generations. Genomic and developmental evidence from asexual animals and plants indicates the lack of complementation of molecular changes in the sexual reproductive program is likely the main cause of asexuals' rarity, and can provide an explanatory frame for the developmental diversity and lability of developmental patterns in some asexuals as well as for the discordant time to extinction estimations. (shrink)

I argue that Aristotle's approach to the proper type of acquisition, use-value, want, and accumulation/storage of wealth is oriented less to excluding commercial activity, such as that of Aristotle's Athens, than to forestalling misordered concupiscence – the taking of an inherendy limited good for the unlimited, or highest, good. That is, his moral aversion to taking a means for an end lies behind his rendering of the sort of wealth that is natural. By stressing the limited nature of (...) class='Hi'>natural wealth, Aristode distinguishes such wealth qua limited from an artificial unlimited desire for profit in order to drive home his point that wealth ought not be taken as an objective good. (shrink)

In the literature, there have been several methods and definitions for working out whether two theories are “equivalent” or not. In this article, we do something subtler. We provide a means to measure distances between formal theories. We introduce two natural notions for such distances. The first one is that of axiomatic distance, but we argue that it might be of limited interest. The more interesting and widely applicable notion is that of conceptual distance which measures the minimum number (...) of concepts that distinguish two theories. For instance, we use conceptual distance to show that relativistic and classical kinematics are distinguished by one concept only. (shrink)

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it will (...) give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

A popular way for irrealists to explain co-identification—thinking and talking ‘about the same thing’ when there is no such thing—is by appeal to causal, historical or informational chains, networks or practices. Recently, however, this approach has come under attack by philosophers who contend that it cannot provide necessary and/or sufficient conditions for co-identification. In this paper I defend the approach against these objections. My claim is not that the appeal to such practices can provide necessary and sufficient conditions (...) for co-identification, but rather that it is a mistake to seek these in the first place. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross:Buddhist-Christian Dialogue about DialoguePaul F. KnitterThe following brief—all too brief—assessment of Rita Gross's contribution to our understanding and practice of interreligious dialogue is both professional and personal.It is professional in that ever since I first heard her speak at a meeting of our Society in Hawai'i in 1983, I have tried to read everything she is written that has to do with religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue (especially (...) with Buddhist-Christian dialogue). That is an impossible task; I cannot keep up with her; she is always coming up with something new—most recently her partially completed book manuscript Others, Identity, and Integrity: Surviving Religious Diversity (on which I am basing many of the following remarks).It is personal in that, as is the case with so many of us in the SBCS, Rita and I have been both colleagues and friends. And we've "done dialogue" together, a lot of it—in projects such as the Myth of Religious Superiority conference and book,1 the religious pluralism seminars for seminary professors that we taught at Auburn Seminary in New York City for two summers, and, most recently, in inviting her to Union Theological Seminary for our Religions in the City course.So, from what I have read and especially from what I have heard and felt as we engaged in conversations in the classroom or across a restaurant table, I, as a Christian theologian, have come to regard Rita as an invaluable partner in our Buddhist-Christian dialogue about dialogue. She keeps raising questions that, for a Christian theologian like myself, probe, stimulate, and sometimes sting, but keep me moving.Let me first describe where she has challenged Christian theologians, and then how we Christians can both engage and learn from her.The Danger and Impossibility of Exclusive (or Final) Truth ClaimsRita asks Christians (and Muslims) whether they are being self-contradictory—or maybe hypocritical, even imperialistic—when out of one side of their mouths they call for interreligious dialogue and out of the other insist that they have the God-given exclusive or final word on truth and human well-being. In this regard, she [End Page 79] makes three very clear and sobering claims that all religious persons committed to dialogue have to face.First, claims of superiority, whether in their exclusivist or inclusivist or particularist forms, end up strangling diversity. In the opening chapter of her book manuscript, she states with her usual crispness and clarity: "Exclusive truth claims and religious diversity are mutually exclusive... To say it again, religious diversity and exclusive truth claims are incompatible and do not mutually survive or thrive."2 In making such announcements, she is very clear that she is not questioning truth claims in themselves; only claims that hold themselves up as superior or final over all others: "I am criticizing only the exclusive truth claims attributed to a religious belief, not the belief itself.... I don't even find it problematic when someone says, 'Jesus is my only savior.' Only when their belief somehow mutates into the claim 'only Jesus saves you and you must believe that' do I raise objections and become frightened."3In this regard, she points out the discomforting contradiction between what religious people say about multiculturalism as citizens and what they say about multi-religionism as believers: "In our society now, there is at least a polite and superficial consensus that cultural diversity is here to stay and may enrich life. Minimally, people realize that cultural, ethnic, and class chauvinism create problems and are inappropriate, though they may be difficult to overcome. Regarding religious diversity, quite a different evaluation is often employed. Many people value the feeling that their religion is indeed superior to others and regard such religious chauvinism as a necessary component of religious commitment, or even a virtue to be cultivated among the faithful."4Second, the monotheistic religions seem to be the biggest sinners. Among the religions that squelch diversity and dialogue under the weight of exclusive or final truth claims, Rita argues, the monotheistic faiths are the biggest offenders. "Historically, such claims [to absolute truth] are much more... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

Most scientific theories are globally inconsistent. Chunk and Permeate is a method of rational reconstruction that can be used to separate, and identify, locally consistent chunks of reasoning or explanation. This then allows us to justify reasoning in a globally inconsistent theory. We extend chunk and permeate by adding a visually transparent way of guiding the individuation of chunks and deciding on what information permeates from one chunk to the next. The visual representation is in the form of bundle diagrams. (...) We then extend the bundle diagrams to include not only reasoning in the presence of inconsistent information or reasoning in the logical sense of deriving a conclusion from premises, but more generally reasoning in the sense of trying to understand a phenomenon in science. This extends the use of the bundle diagrams in terms of the base space and the fibres. We then apply this to a case in physics, that of understanding binding energies in the nucleus of an atom using together inconsistent models: the liquid drop model and the shell model. We draw some philosophical conclusions concerning scientific reasoning, paraconsistent reasoning, the role of logic in science and the unity of science. (shrink)

We are told that there are standards of rigour in proof, and we are told that the standards have increased over the centuries. This is fairly clear. But rigour has also changed its nature. In this paper we as-sess where these changes leave us today.1 To motivate making the new assessment, we give two illustra-tions of changes in our conception of rigour. One, concerns the shift from geometry to arithmetic as setting the standard for rig-our. The other, concerns the notion (...) of effective proof or compu-tations. To make the assessment, we look at one motivation for increasing the rigour of a mathematical argument: explicitness and honesty. We then present a standard of rigour by means of a characterisation developed with reference to what we call ‘an account-proof’. We evaluate the standard with reference to the motivation. With the analysis we discover that, regardless of the motivations for rigour, the standard is almost never met, and that the motivations are not all satisfied. It follows that, in some sense, the motivations have misfired. The misfiring suggests to us that we re-assess our notion of rigour. We think of rigour as a relative term. Moreover, the standard for rigour depends on philosophical underpinnings. The strength of the argument of this paper rests on the plausibility of our selection of motivations and on the plausibility of our standard. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we (...) made. It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Restoring our biological cycles to heal ourselves, our culture, and our planet Shows how, just like the tides and the moon phases, both women and men have biological cycles of growth and renewal necessary for healthy bodies and minds. Explains how the seclusion of women during menstruation and of men during vision quests offers a cleansing process for body and mind to awaken innate creativity and sensitivity, re-attune us with the deeper rhythms of the body and nature, and restore (...) harmony between the divine feminine and divine masculine. Reveals how the need for sacred retreat was forgotten when the divine feminine was suppressed by patriarchal culture. All of life is interwoven into a living system of cycles, from Earth's seasons to the enzymatic pathways that provide energy to a cell. Waxing and waning from times of growth to times of rest, renewal, and healing, cycles map the most auspicious time for everything in life. Both women and men have biological cycles of active growth and quiet renewal, led by our hormones. By understanding how everything in life moves in cycles, you can become more aware of and comfortable with your own cyclic nature, something that has been forgotten by the modern world's linear views of time. Drawing on the wisdom of ancient cultures, the natural cycles of life, and her own groundbreaking research, Pia Orleane, Ph.D., offers a template for how we can restore balance to our emotions and health, ease tensions between the sexes, and heal our fractured culture by honoring divine feminine consciousness and re-embracing natural cycles, including our innate need for rest and retreat. She explains the biology of how our bodies operate by hormones released in cycles and shows how balanced hormones help eliminate anger, depression, insomnia, anxiety, and fatigue. Exploring ancient traditions and rituals surrounding blood and sacred retreat, she explains how the seclusion of women during menstruation and of men during vision quests offered a cleansing process for body and mind, alone time to clear suppressed emotions, awaken our innate creativity and sensitivity, re-attune us with the deeper rhythms of the body and nature, and restore harmony between the genders and balance between the divine feminine and masculine. Outlining the sacred retreat process, the author explores dream cycles, divine sexuality, and practices for reconnecting to nature, increasing creativity and intuition, and clearing suppressed emotions. She also looks at the benefits for women and men of separate sleeping during menstruation. Through this wisdom, we can restore our natural cycles, allow the divine feminine to once again blossom alongside the divine masculine, and, with the return of balance, heal our world and our hearts. (shrink)

Engagement with fiction often inspires emotional responses. We may pity Sethe while feeling ambivalent about her actions (in Beloved), fear for Ellen Ripley as she battles monstrous creatures (in Alien), get angry at Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna (in Things Fall Apart), and hope that Kiyoaki and Satoko find love (in Spring Snow). Familiar as they are, these reactions are puzzling. Why do I respond emotionally if I do not believe that these individuals exist or that the events occurred? If I (...) merely imagine that my best friend has betrayed me, I do not become angry with him; if I did, I would be considered irrational. Yet although beliefs seem to be necessary for emotions in other contexts, we respond to fiction without the relevant beliefs. These observations prompt two questions about our emotional responses to fiction (henceforth: fictional emotions). The first is descriptive: Should fictional emotions be classified as the same kind of emotions we experience in other contexts? The second is normative: Are fictional emotions irrational or otherwise inappropriate? I take each of these debates in turn. (shrink)

This article is premised on the assumption that in order for us adequately to protect our environment, significant adjustments need to be made to the ways we pursue and think about development – adjustments not merely to technologies but also to life-styles. In this respect the emphasis in much recent development literature on human development is to be welcomed as a useful corrective to definitions of development in terms of economic growth, though there is still a danger of anthropocentric (...) assumptions. It is argued that, given suitable interpretations or conceptions of development and environment, environmental care can be, and should be, integrated into authentic human development. Proposals for such conceptual alignment stem both from seeing the relevant community in which development qua desirable change is to take place as the biotic community, and from seeing development as desirable change in the total environment, both natural and artificial, regarded as a social field of significance. Such conceptual adjustments are a significant part, but of course only a part, of what needs to be done to bring public policy more into line with proper care for the environment. (shrink)

There are three elements in this paper. One is what we shall call ‘the Hungarian project’. This is the collected work of Andréka, Madarász, Németi, Székely and others. The second is Molinini’s philosophical work on the nature of mathematical explanations in science. The third is my pluralist approach to mathematics. The theses of this paper are that the Hungarian project gives genuine mathematical explanations for physical phenomena. A pluralist account of mathematical explanation can help us with appreciating the significance of (...) the Hungarian project. The significance consists in the fruitfulness and spread of the project. The spread is wide because the explanations are written in the very familiar language of first-order logic with identity. For this reason, the explanation is understandable to many mathematicians. Because of the methodology adopted in the Hungarian project, the explanations are fruitful in another sense. In the Hungarian project certain questions are asked that would not be asked with a more usual methodology. The Hungarians are distinguished from other scientists in asking logical and mathematical questions, and these both deepen our understanding of the physical theories and induce further spread to mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

Natural selection is commonly seen not just as an explanation for adaptive evolution, but as the inevitable consequence of “heritable variation in fitness among individuals”. Although it remains embedded in biological concepts, such a formalisation makes it tempting to explore whether this precondition may be met not only in life as we know it, but also in other physical systems. This would imply that these systems are subject to natural selection and may perhaps be investigated in a (...) biological framework, where properties are typically examined in light of their putative functions. Here we relate the major questions that were debated during a three-day workshop devoted to discussing whether natural selection may take place in non-living physical systems. We start this report with a brief overview of research fields dealing with “life-like” or “proto-biotic” systems, where mimicking evolution by natural selection in test tubes stands as a major objective. We contend the challenge may be as much conceptual as technical. Taking the problem from a physical angle, we then discuss the framework of dissipative structures. Although life is viewed in this context as a particular case within a larger ensemble of physical phenomena, this approach does not provide general principles from which natural selection can be derived. Turning back to evolutionary biology, we ask to what extent the most general formulations of the necessary conditions or signatures of natural selection may be applicable beyond biology. In our view, such a cross-disciplinary jump is impeded by reliance on individuality as a central yet implicit and loosely defined concept. Overall, these discussions thus lead us to conjecture that understanding, in physico-chemical terms, how individuality emerges and how it can be recognised, will be essential in the search for instances of evolution by natural selection outside of living systems. (shrink)

Through listening to the voices of students, educators and community members can begin to reconstruct the culture of urban schools that are often full of stories about student deficits, genetic explanations about achievement, and cultural mismatch theories that may be traced to historical and sociological ideologies. The purpose of this heuristic qualitative investigation was to explore the ways in which student voice can contribute to reculturing high schools in urban settings. Data sources for this study included videotaped interviews and observations (...) in two Midwestern urban high schools to explore the stories of 28 culturally and linguistically diverse students in grades 10 through 12. Findings suggested that the teens in these urban high schools want caring teachers who listen attentively, provide engaging learning opportunities, and who demonstrate high expectations for achievement. They did not want teachers who, in essence, perpetuate hegemonic discourses via pedagogical practices, and school environments that resemble prisons. At the same time, students wanted more structure to ?avoid chaos? and asked teachers to give attention to the paradigm of the personal within the school curriculum. We extend the meaning of the study to include student voice as a critical stance for reconstructing the cultural context of urban schools, which entails listening to students to identify complex and sensitive topics for dialogue and inquiry. (shrink)

As mounting evidence highlights the human-driven extinction of avian species, reconnecting people with nature—particularly these feathered creatures—has become essential for engaging the public in conservation and the preservation of avian biodiversity. Paradoxically, heightened awareness of the benefits birds bring has fueled the rise of aviary bird-keeping for entertainment in Vietnam. This paper seeks to unravel the absurdity of bird keepers who claim to love nature and support conservation while engaging in practices that exploit and commodify birds for (...) human interests. By contrasting the values generated by birds in aviaries with those in their natural habitats, it underscores the role of an eco-deficit culture—or, more fundamentally, humanity's insatiable greed—in fostering this absurd form of "nature love.". (shrink)

“Busyness” like many concepts trades on contrast. The most obvious contrast is with “real work” and ‘really working.” “Busy work” is usually pretend work; we try to look as though we are achieving something but all we are doing is shuffling the paper on our desks, polishing the inlet manifold rather than diagnosing the fault about to destroy the engine, marching our soldiers up to the top of the hill and marching them down again rather than engaging the enemy. (...) All the same, being “busy” is often said to be a good thing: the Puritan hymn writer Isaac Watts celebrated “the little busy bee” for improving the shining hour. For creatures other than the bee, busy may be a good thing to be but not usually the best thing: a midfield soccer player who is “busy” is useful, but a player of equal skill who is “economical” is better. My theme is that our attitude to “real work” is deeply ambiguous; on the one side, work is a curse, the labour to which we are doomed as a result of the Fall; its side-effect of enforcing upon us a necessary discipline and self-discipline is small consolation. On the other side, work is the expression of distinctive human powers and aspirations; work brings imagination into the world as well as drudgery. We imagine a world that does not exist but might, and then we set about creating it. The Fall was a happy Fall, and the need to labour was the first step in teaching the human species how to make the most of its potentialities. (shrink)

Trust is morally basic. It makes cooperation between persons, to whatever degree, possible. In Chapter One, I define trust as being the relation between people bound by genuine goodwill, competency and vulnerability to each other. ;In Chapter Two, I criticize Thomas Hobbes's understanding of society as founded upon a social contract which exclusively self-interested persons have reason to make in order to escape from the state of nature. I argue that on Hobbes's assumptions about the nature of persons, such a (...) contract cannot be viable. Without the assumption that, prior to the contract, persons have some reason to trust one another, no contract can be expected to be made or survive. ;David Gauthier, who presents a contemporary version of Hobbesian social contract theory in his Morals by Agreement, is vulnerable to a similar argument. In Chapter Three, I argue that given Gauthier's description of persons there does not exist the trust necessary to construct, even hypothetically, the social contract. ;Chapter Four examines the very basic role which trust plays in both personal and civic friendship. I argue that trust is what distinguishes "end friendship" from the instrumental friendships in which we are "used" or taken advantage of by others. I discuss civic friendship and argue that the trust which is basic to it, namely social trust, is a form of trust which can exist between people who are otherwise strangers to one another. ;In Chapter Five I go on to prescribe trust. I argue first, that we should never be untrustworthy, as this implies treating people instrumentally, and hence violates Kant's Categorical Imperative. I argue, however, that we should not always trust, maintaining that trust, for normative purposes, is best understood as an Aristotelian mean, and can be described by the extremes of naivete and cynicism and that we should trust in a way which avoids both these extremes. (shrink)

There is longstanding interpretive dispute between commentators over Spinoza’s commitment to necessitarianism, the doctrine that all things are metaphysically necessary and none are contingent. Those who affirm Spinoza’s commitment to the doctrine adhere to the necessitarian interpretation whereas those who deny it adhere to what I call the semi-necessitarian interpretation. As things stand, the disagreement between commentators appears to have reached an impasse. Notwithstanding, there seems to be no disagreement among commentators on the question of necessitarianism’s philosophical plausibility as (...) a metaphysical view: the doctrine is wildly untenable. This consensus view is more relevant to the interpretive debate than few have recognized, since leading semi-necessitarian commentators take the doctrine’s alleged absurdity to be one of the most compelling reasons (if not the most compelling reason) to prefer their reading over the necessitarian interpretation: for, as a matter of methodological principle, great philosophers like Spinoza should not be ascribed ridiculous views in the absence of better evidence. -/- This dissertation seeks to defend Spinoza’s commitment to necessitarianism on both the interpretive and philosophical fronts. I argue not only that the necessitarian interpretation of Spinoza is more plausible than the semi-necessitarian interpretation on textual grounds, but that Spinoza’s necessitarianism is a serviceable philosophical view whose tenability has been almost entirely overlooked and perfunctorily rejected. The principal basis upon which I build this defense is Spinoza’s rich and fascinating view of essences—what I simply refer to as his essentialism. Spinoza’s essentialism forms the bedrock of his metaphysics and is significant not least because it underlies and informs doctrines like his necessitarianism. Spinoza’s essentialism supplies resources to answer not just interpretive problems associated with necessitarianism, but philosophical challenges to the plausibility of the doctrine. My defense of Spinoza’s necessitarianism on philosophical grounds also offers a novel way of getting past much of the current interpretive impasse among commentators by effectively undercutting the methodological motivation for the semi-necessitarian reading. In addition to my defense on the interpretive front, then, my defense on the philosophical front provides supplementary reason to a fortiori favor the necessitarian reading of Spinoza. (shrink)

A splendid new translation of one of the greatest books on friendship ever written In a world where social media, online relationships, and relentless self-absorption threaten the very idea of deep and lasting friendships, the search for true friends is more important than ever. In this short book, which is one of the greatest ever written on the subject, the famous Roman politician and philosopher Cicero offers a compelling guide to finding, keeping, and appreciating friends. With wit (...) and wisdom, Cicero shows us not only how to build friendships but also why they must be a key part of our lives. For, as Cicero says, life without friends is not worth living. Filled with timeless advice and insights, Cicero’s heartfelt and moving classic—written in 44 BC and originally titled De Amicitia—has inspired readers for more than two thousand years, from St. Augustine and Dante to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Presented here in a lively new translation with the original Latin on facing pages and an inviting introduction, How to Be a Friend explores how to choose the right friends, how to avoid the pitfalls of friendship, and how to live with friends in good times and bad. Cicero also praises what he sees as the deepest kind of friendship—one in which two people find in each other “another self” or a kindred soul. An honest and eloquent guide to finding and treasuring true friends, How to Be a Friend speaks as powerfully today as when it was first written. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinical CommentaryChua Hong Choon, Adjunct Associate ProfessorThe case for commentary describes a difficult, and yet not uncommon, clinical situation faced by clinicians at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) in the course of their work. Based on the information provided on the case, the patient is likely to be suffering from the paranoid subtype of schizophrenia, and his illness is characterised by hostile and aggressive behaviour during episodes of (...) relapse.Although aggressive behaviour is known to be associated with young, male patients with paranoid delusions, auditory hallucinations and lack of insight,1 it is still necessary to exclude other causes of aggressive behaviour in this young man. Two causes of aggressive behaviour that are sometimes misattributed to schizophrenia are antisocial personality disorder and substance abuse. However, Mr. T did not have a history of conduct or behavioural problems prior to the onset of his psychotic illness, and he was also not reported to be violent or disruptive during the periods when he was on regular medication. There was also no history of illicit drug use.The initial onset of Mr. T’s illness while he was serving his National Service is a fairly common presentation of the first episode of schizophrenia in Singaporean males. While traits apparent prior to National Service such as his academic difficulties and inability to make friends are associated with the development of schizophrenia,2 the stress of regimented life and military drills might be more closely associated with his initial full-blown psychotic episode with prominent paranoid (and persecutory) delusions.The systematised nature of Mr. T’s delusions and the prominent threatening auditory hallucinations significantly increase his risk of [End Page 217] dangerousness,3 and when his wife became “incorporated” into his delusional beliefs, he began to threaten her physically during episodes of relapse. Despite being only 28 years old, Mr. T has already been hospitalised numerous times for inpatient treatment, due to frequent relapses of his illness. While relapses in schizophrenia may be attributed to various factors, including lack of social support, substance abuse, poor (or partial) response to medication and psychosocial stressors, Mr. T’s multiple relapses were primarily due to the stopping of his medication and his refusal to continue with any form of psychiatric treatment.The key problem to be addressed in this case is therefore the patient’s severe lack of insight which leads to recurrent episodes of treatment non-adherence and subsequent relapses.Mr. T’s wife has come to the clinic to ask for medication to secretly put into his food. Although the patient is apparently in remission of his condition (having just been treated and discharged from hospital), he has again stopped his medication, and she is justifiably afraid that he will become unwell again. Recognising that the patient’s lack of insight is the main (and possibly only) reason for his refusal to take medication, it would be prudent to first consider if all possible actions had been taken to create an awareness and to help the patient gain insight into his illness and the need to take medication. This may yet be possible in the window of opportunity that exists when the patient is in remission of his illness (and is therefore not disturbed by the symptoms of his psychotic disorder).Recent studies have demonstrated that psycho-education is able to reduce self-stigmatisation in individuals with schizophrenia, and also significantly improve insight 4 (as measured by the Birchwood’s Psychosis Insight Scale). A 2011 Cochrane Review 5 also concluded psycho-education does seem to reduce relapse, readmission and encourage medication compliance, as well as reduce the length of hospital stays in patients with schizophrenia. In this case, psycho-education could be given to Mr. T even after he has been discharged from hospital; he might not want to continue with medication, but he might consider seeing a trained clinician (case manager, nurse or medical social worker) to make sense of his life experiences. Engaging Mr. T through psycho-education may result in sufficient insight for him to consider resuming medication voluntarily, at least in the short term.Although there is a paucity of studies examining specific psycho-therapies (including cognitive behavioural therapy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought IIDavid Cunning and Seth JonesMichael Moriarty. Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 430. Cloth, $125.00.This book is the second of two volumes on a myriad of issues surrounding the early modern distinction between the embodied self and the immaterial self that is one of its components. One of (...) the theses of the book is that, although canonical philosophers like Descartes and Malebranche hold that it is in some sense the latter that is our true self, and although they expend a significant amount of their corpus trying to help us to touch base with it, they also offer well-developed and insightful views about our embodiment and about what we are to do as embodied beings. Another thesis of the book is that, even if early modern philosophers tend to think that we have unimpeded and transparent access to our psychological states after we have done enough reflection to keep our embodiment from restricting the view, a concomitant position in the period is that we otherwise have very little self-knowledge. A related thesis is that important elements of the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud and Lacan can be traced back to philosophers like Descartes and Malebranche and to the investigations that they inspire in their contemporaries and successors. The book is ambitious and is an extremely interesting and important contribution.Descartes holds that as a result of the bad habits of childhood we come to misrepresent external bodies as having qualities like color, smell, taste, and sound. Building on the work of volume one, Moriarty (5, 335–36, 372–73, 243–44) reminds us that Descartes also holds that we come to misrepresent our minds as in part tangible and corporeal (the Second Meditation, Second Replies) and that the Cartesian project of clarifying ideas is not restricted to the ideas of natural science. Indeed, Moriarty could also cite Descartes’s remark that there are circumstances in which we might report that we are thinking of our selves when in fact we are only thinking of our bodies (Principles of Philosophy I:12). Descartes seems to allow that if we are not sufficiently reflective and observant, our thinking is not transparent to us, and if so he is leaving open the view that we can mischaracterize our own psychological states. Descartes does not speak explicitly to this kind of mischaracterization, but in later writings (especially Passions of the Soul and the letters to Princess Elizabeth) he does speak to the importance of clearly defining the passions and distinguishing them, and to the importance of knowing the relationships between brain traces and particular passions so that we can understand our motivations and get a better handle on them (315). Moriarty then brings to the table a number of figures who develop these positions. In Nicole, we find the view that, from the first-person perspective, it can be very difficult to distinguish acting from charity and acting from self-love, and that we have a considerable interest in identifying ourselves as acting from the former (219–24). In La Rochefoucauld, we find the view that friendship is often a matter of wanting to see a certain image of ourselves reflected in and confirmed by others and that true friendship is very rare (243). We might focus on figures like Nicole insofar as they engage the more traditional questions of metaphysics and epistemology, but issues of embodiment and self-knowledge were also front and center in the early modern period, and the contributions of Nicole, Lamy, La Rochefoucauld, and Senault (just to name just a few) are enormous.Another strength of the book is that it highlights the systematic nature of early modern work on self-knowledge. For example, Moriarty not only considers the empirical psychology of thinkers like Nicole and Lamy, but also shows how their results are grounded in fully articulated views of habit, language, and imagination (361–63, 371–74). Of course, these views are Cartesian as well.The book also has some potential problems. Some philosophers might worry that it is a stretch... (shrink)

The questioning of Western civilization is today a commonplace exercise, and the condemnation of science constitutes a necessary chapter. But is this condemnation of science or of technology, or of the uses that modern society makes of one or the other? We do not want to examine here the value or the means of a political control of technology nor do we want to distinguish between “pure” science and its blameworthy applications. The ties are too tight and historically too (...) evident between Western civilization and the development of science. It is science itself which is in question, and one more commonly blames it for ignoring the quality of things and for not recognizing anything but the measurable. Around this central criticism are rather confusedly expressed secondary themes, ranging from “the quality of life” up to the ineffable modes of special communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Yet Life Keeps ComingPatricia Romanowski BasheWhile the guidance offered to authors of commentary articles suggests they not write about their personal experiences, the fact is, I would not be here were it not for my personal experience as the mother of a young man with autism spectrum disorder and other diagnoses. Though I left a successful writing career to become a special education teacher and then a Board (...) Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), it was not, strictly speaking, a career decision. It was a mom decision. When asked how I came to where I am today, I say, “Well, one day, I looked across the table at an individualized education program (IEP) meeting and asked myself, ‘Could I do as good a job as the people sitting across from me?’ And the answer was, yes.” Some people believe I am joking. I am not.To parent a child with autism is to be confronted daily with a dream of his future and the realization that you probably cannot achieve that alone. Instead, you will rely on a world of professionals, institutions, and systems to make it happen. How well that works out for you depends on a number of factors that should not matter but ultimately do: where you live, how well funded and law abiding your local school district is, how much access you have to qualified professionals, and how well your state agencies charged to care for individuals with disabilities after they leave school does its job. Though essential, love, dedication, and hope may not be enough to hoist your child over the hurdles, whether they are set by immovable bureaucracy or mercurial brain chemistry. We each strive to clear the track, to level the road, and I chose to do that by “going pro” and becoming a small part of the system that will serve my son and countless others with ASDs throughout their lives. Even so, I find myself as daunted by the transition to adulthood and the prospect of preparing him for a life without me as anyone writing here. Anonymous Three, who recounts her son’s struggle for independence, captures the questions that most of us might never get to answer but can’t stop asking: “What happens when we can no longer care for him?”When a pediatric psychiatrist diagnosed my own son with Asperger disorder in 1997, I wished to be one day free of the obligation to explain his diagnosis to people who had never heard of it. Today, thanks to major campaigns to promote autism awareness and the public recognition of a handful of celebrities with autism, there is less explaining required. It seems that everyone knows someone who has a child with autism, and everyone knows Temple Grandin’s story. Contrast this to the world of 1993, shortly after my friend and coauthor Barbara L. Kirby (Romanowski Bashe and Kirby 2001, 2005) turned to the internet to make sense of her son’s Asperger diagnosis. There was no Google, no Bing. It would be months before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), which included Asperger’s for the first time, was published. Local doctors and teachers had never heard of it; parents and professionals were still gathering facts, trying to put the pieces together to form a coherent picture of what it meant to have autism. [End Page 183]Some things are different now, nearly twenty years later. Professionals, parents, and individuals with autism have developed a culture of autism, complete with opposing views on everything from applied behavior analysis and classroom inclusion to medication and guardianship. As a number of narratives illustrate, parents often find themselves making tough choices around these issues, and the best option in the abstract is not always the best option or even a possibility in the real world, on the ground. These narratives depict how the parents of individuals with ASDs struggle, sometimes mightily, to bridge the gap between what should be in terms of reliability of diagnosis and prognosis, access to effective, affordable, evidence–based education, treatment, and intervention, and—perhaps most important—meaningful, practical, realistic planning and programming for successful transition to adulthood. And... (shrink)

The history of human culture records diverse notions about possible forms of existence of the soul or analogous substances after the disintegration of the corporeal shell. Even where investigators of primitive cultures conclude that some community is at such a low level of development that it has elaborated no ideas concerning the existence of gods, demons, spirits, and so forth—even there, a cautious attitude toward such evidence is necessary. Actually, the conviction that "savages" do not have such beliefs may (...) be less a reflection of the real state of affairs than, let us say, the reluctance of members of that community to familiarize Europeans with elements of their culture that bear on spheres of life activity that are most meaningful for the tribe. Thus the anthropologist W.R. Trevathan mentions particular difficulties arising from attempts to study the actions and rituals associated with the birth of a child . Even where there is a friendly attitude toward the investigator, there still remain spheres of life to which representatives of the tribe were reluctant to allow Europeans access. For example, there is the well-known case where one anthropologist, who had lost hope of "officially" learning about the character of the rituals accompanying the birth of an infant, attempted to sneak a look at what was happening in the hut. This curiosity almost cost him his life, despite the recent goodwill of his host. (shrink)

There is a continued need to consider ways to prevent early adolescent engagement in a variety of harmful risk-taking behaviours for example, violence, road-related risks and alcohol use. The current prospective study examined adolescents? reports of intervening to try and stop friends? engagement in such behaviours among 207 early adolescents (mean age?=?13.51?years, 50.1% females). Findings showed that intervening behaviour after three months was predicted by the confidence to intervene which in turn was predicted by student and teacher support although (...) not parental support. The findings suggest that the benefits of positive relationship experiences might extend to the safety of early adolescent friendship groups particularly through the development of confidence to try and stop friends? risky and dangerous behaviours. Findings from the study support the important role of the school in creating a culture of positive adolescent behaviour whereby young people take social responsibility. (shrink)

Most of us have had the experience of running into a friend of a friend far away from home - and feeling that the world is somehow smaller than it should be. We usually write off such unlikely encounters as coincidence, even though it seems to happen with uncanny frequency. According to a handful of physicists at Los Alamos and other cutting-edge research labs around the world, it turns out that this 'small-world' phenomenon is no coincidence at all. Rather, it (...) is a manifestation of a hidden and powerful design that binds the world together. In SMALL WORLD, Mark Buchanan tells the story of how a stunning discovery in complexity science is revolutionising the way we understand networks. The Internet, the brain, power-grids and the global economy are all networks that seem to have evolved a 'small-world' geometry - with properties independent of the nature of the things themselves. SMALL WORLD argues that this underlying pattern may be one of nature's greatest design tricks, and the book shows us - concisely and engagingly - how scientists are putting this new insight to work. The discovery promises to change the way we see the web of relationships that weaves our lives together. What's more, it may well provide the foundation for a new kind of physics that searches for the laws not of substance, but of pure form. (shrink)

Recent policy developments in the area of livestock husbandry have suggested that, from the perspective of optimizing animal welfare, new animal husbandry systems should be developed that provide opportunities for livestock animals to be raised in environments where they are permitted to engage in “natural behavior.” It is not known whether consumers regard animal husbandry issues as important, and whether they differentiate between animal husbandry and other animal welfare issues. The responsibility for the development of such systems is allocated (...) jointly between farmers, regulators, different actors in the food chain, and consumers. This research focuses on understanding consumer attitudes and preferences regarding the development and introduction of such systems, to ensure that they are acceptable to consumers as well as producers, regulators, and scientists. Consumer perceptions of animal welfare and animal husbandry practices were evaluated using quantitative consumer survey, which focused on two animal husbandry issues – farmed pigs and farmed fish. Following pilot work, 1000 representative Dutch consumers were sampled about their attitudes to either pig or fish husbandry. The results indicated that consumers think about animal welfare in terms of two broad categories related to their health and living environment, but do not think about welfare issues at a more detailed level. Greater concern was expressed about the welfare of pigs compared to fish. Consumer trust in labeling also emerged as an important issue, since consumers need to trust different food chain actors with responsibility for promoting animal welfare, and are reluctant to consider the details of animal husbandry systems. As a consequence, a transparent, enforceable, and traceable monitoring system for animal welfare friendly products is likely to be important for consumers. (shrink)

The notion of "relevance" in philosophy is ultimately determined by a notion of "utility" that has been present in American culture from very early on. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville stated that "Democratic nations... prefer the useful to the beautiful, and... require that the beautiful should be useful". Today, the issues of utility and relevance are motivations for a congress which threatens to drastically cut funding for humanities programs around the country. At a time when employment in the academy is (...) sporadic at best, how might one respond philosophically in light of the current congressional threat? John Lachs responds by criticizing what he calls, "the professionalization of philosophy". Rather than focusing inquiries on the problems and concerns of everyday life, philosophers "linger over abstract details of technique". Ultimately, Lachs' concern is that such hyperspecialization will only alienate the practice of philosophy from the rest of society: "so long as philosophers talk about philosophical texts to other philosophers in a mysterious philosophical language, they cannot keep faith with their mission. Isolated and irrelevant, we will become the butt of jokes, and our departments will be marked... for eradication". In contrast to such "professionalization," Lachs provides us with a book of essays that are "united by the belief that philosophical reflection can yield results and by the desire to harness them to the service of improving life". Lest the reader too quickly assume the facile distinction between "history of philosophy" and "original philosophy," it must be noted that Lachs brings a wealth of knowledge regarding historical figures to bear on the problems which he addresses. One finds Aristotle, Hegel, Mill, James, Peirce, Santayana, Dewey and others, all being invoked in the interest of elucidating and understanding issues such as dogmatism, violence, alienation, technology, education, law, and euthanasia Lachs' overriding concern, however, is that of "mediating relations" "in which individuals perform actions on behalf of others". While such relations may be necessary in order to allow people to perform specialized societal roles more efficiently, they also separate people from the other specialized roles in which they do not take part. The unfortunate consequence is that most people do not have "even an elementary understanding of social life, economic reality, the interplay of activity and happiness, or the structure and needs of our bodies," because "the mediated world denies them the opportunity to learn by direct experience". Relevant philosophy must clear away the abstract and specialized language, which alienates the normal reader and draws philosophers away from learning by direct experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lachs' prose is extremely clear and accessible. Such prose works exceptionally well in "Life And Death", where Lachs engages the difficult questions regarding the constitution of a human life, the viewing of death as "a natural and appropriate end to a satisfying life", and the termination of the "lives" of beings who--like the hydroencephalic child --cannot develop into actual human beings, but remain only as "human forms". Whether one agrees with Lachs' positions on these issues or not, his straightforward and unmediated prose bespeaks a courage which is admirable. (shrink)

Recent obituaries for traditional non-naturalistic approaches to rationality are not just premature but demonstrably self-defeating. One such prominent obituary appears in the writings of W. V. Quine, whose pessimism about traditional epistemology stems from his scientism, the view that the natural sciences have a monopoly on legitimate theoretical explanation. Quine also offers an obituary for the a priori constraints on rationality found in “first philosophy”, resting on his rejection of the “pernicious mentalism” of semantic theories of meaning. Quine’s pronouncements (...) of the death of traditional conceptions of rationality in epistemology and in the theory of meaning are, we contend, but misguided wishes for their death, wishes that face severe problems of self-defeat. In addition, Quine’s naturalistic epistemology is subject to damaging skeptical worries, the force of which one cannot escape by ignoring them. A non-naturalistic approach to rationality is here to stay, whether friends of Quine’s naturalism like it or not. Any sweeping claim that non-naturalistic accounts of rationality are dead will face insurmountable obstacles from unavoidable questions about its own rational justification. Such questions will keep non-naturalistic epistemology and first philosophy alive forever, or at least as long as philosophers endure. (shrink)

Brains are information processing systems whose operational principles ultimately cannot be understood without resource to information theory. We suggest that understanding how external signals are represented in the brain is a necessary step towards employing further engineering tools to understand the information processing performed by brain circuits during behaviour.

Two continents. Three countries. Mountains, archipelago, a little red dot & more to come. BERIT SOLI-HOLT (Editor): When I think of introductory material, I think of that Derrida documentary when he is asked about what he would like to know about other philosophers. He simply states: their love life. APRIL VANNINI (Editor): And as far as introductions go, I think Derrida brought forth a fruitful discussion on philosophy and thinking with this statement. First, he allows philosophy to open up (...) the personal and second, the ability to conjure the notion of thinking in relation. After all, love lives are spawned from relations, and such are philosophical encounters—the co-emergence of thought and affect. This brings us to discuss the concept of the special issue of continent. called drift . From the Statement of Intent : The discussion that has become drift , a special issue of continent. began in the glow of a bonfire beside a lake near the Thousand Islands of Ontario when co-founders April and Berit came across a conception of a journal that would decline to follow traditional models of invitation and editorship, instead following a generated discourse through relational means. Shedding preemptive articulation of expected outcome and cohesion, we hope to light a fuse of chain interactions with each contributor active in authorial, editorial, and curatorial roles. drift seeks to allow the framing mechanism to choose itself, to find where something can flow or emerge in relation to a series of participants. By setting out a thread of thought to work its own way through writers and artists of various locations, drift operates through links, breaks, pauses, new directions, unintended consequences, twists, holes, bridges. We are attempting to give the scene for an emergence and what can become conceivable when given the opportunity to create chains of thought—linking, welding, fusing, looping, stitching. We hope to explore what is attainable when scholarly/artistic relationships transverse on their own terms instead of articulated by an institutional environment. JEREMY FERNANDO (Guest Editor): I think he was actually more interested in their sex lives. Though at the same time completely refusing to discuss, disclose, his own: I found it rather touching that he blushes whenever speaking of his life with Marguerite. So perhaps in this sense it is very apt to speak of it in terms of love; and the secret that is in each love: that even though it is a relationality between, there are parts of it that remain hidden, not just from everyone else, but even those in that relation itself. What the editors intend to ^do^ to impart this conceptualization is to provide a framework through the choice of a theme and by minimal standardization of form and content guidelines. As initial instigator, each editor will send their contribution to the issue to a fellow colleague, thinker, artist, friend with the invitation to send (via post) the accruing materials to another possible contributor. In this, we hope to engage with many individuals on ideas surrounding a specific theme determined but not limited by the editors of the drift . The end result will take the form of whatever is at hand (as materials can only stay with each contributor for two weeks) and whomever is at hand (the availability of interested and capable parties) through a course of five months. We are curious. What are the ways in which thought can emerge between individuals and places? What occurs when our fundamental mode of inquiry is between each other? How are ethical, social, spacious, political, aesthetic practices created between a chain of contributors. BSH: To introduce what to look forward to in June with the publication of drift isn't quite possible yet. It is in the stages of preparation, barely started, but already begun. I have been thinking about drift as an insect that goes through life cycles, chrysalises, pupas, larva. Each moment of the production and publication of this issue of continent. is its own life. A bug under a pin is not as interesting as one in flight or crawling up your leg. JF: Though the one crawling up your leg is also more likely to bite you. There is always already a danger in letting be, thinking …. Then again, there is also a potential rupture in attempting to seize, pin down, capture. BSH: I think a word we haven't thought about enough yet is capture. I think we are perhaps trying to capture something, or to allow for the moments of this capture along the way, the resulting material being the ripples left in the sand when the water waves away. AV: This question comes to mind when speaking about captures, waves, ripples: How can we activate a ripple? What I find interesting about a wave is the difference in frequencies, movements, forms, style that are activated in between intervals. What is interesting about a wave is that it is activated in relation to what came before. What remains in the sand is a ripple that forms in relation between multiple intervals of stylistic waves. As Deleuze and Parnet have taught us, "We were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being 'author'. And these 'between-the-twos' referred back to other people, who were different on one side from the other. The desert expanded, but in so doing became more populous." 1 Drift is activation for thinking-with and possibly much more—who knows? There is the intent to subvert the relational qualities between people in journal publishing, but also important to the editors is the subversion of materials. The editors do not shy away from use of contemporary technology and, in fact, have relied and will continue to rely on the wonders of internet connectivity to midwife the drift. The connective infrastructure chosen to relay the developing issue is simply one of bodies, of postal workers and the varying postal systems. Some may find it to be merely be a call of an already dying form, but the editors believe that the conversation exchanged from hand to hand is of explicit difference in quality of engagement due to the complexity of peripheral information transported by physical matter. Different hospitalities and responsibilities are at play in keeping hold of one-of-a-kind materials for a time and entrusting various postal systems to bear the message forward. To have work physically transported through space and time through this kind of infrastructure that is reliant on individuals to literally carry a message is crucial in incorporating traces of bodily presence. AV: Thought is contingent and emergent process that folds, twists, pulls, shifts in multiple directions and we are interested in these multiple directions. JF: And even as thought is contingent on, hinged around, its place, time, venue—on its continents, as it were (we still tend to speak of gestures of thinking as Continental, British, American, European, Asian, etc.)—we might also attempt to respond to the landscape within each thought: its folds, unfoldings, rolls, manoeuvres, geography. BSH: How different is this than Morelli's screw that Julio Cortazar or Horacio Oliveira recounts in Hopscotch? The fable recalls a man who regarded a screw everyday on his stoop. When he perishes, the screw disappears, perhaps into a fellow neighbor's pocket for secret contemplation. Whoever is writing the passage remarks that "Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw." JF: Perhaps even more intriguing is the notion that we do not quite know who is inscribing these remarks on Morelli. That even as someone says that it is a screw, perhaps because it is shaped like a screw, the one who names it “screw”—the one whom we are in a relation with in relation to the screw—remains veiled from us. But even as this is so, the notion of the object as “screw” is marked, etched, onto us. BSH: A periodical, marking a period of time, but where? An issue, a magazine, a storehouse of information. To show the remainders of thinkers connecting and surfing. With all this stated, we, as editors of the drift are aware of the active fault, quaking potential, and ethical catastrophe of such a proposed project — the inheritance or the gifting of a project without consent. We are certain that there may be possible oversight on the process of such a project. If such is the case, we hope that oversight and misdirection will not leave this project dormant but rather open up promising new directions, questions, and potential considerations. We are very excited about the accidental propositions that can occur in between. In sum, we'll see what happens. JF: Perhaps, all we can know of the screw is that we are screwed ... NOTE Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet. Dialogues II . Revised edition. (New York: Columbia University Press). 2007: 17. (shrink)

Shoot straight from the hip. Tell it like it is. Keep it real. We love these commands, especially in America, because they invoke what we love to believe: that there is an authentic self to which we can be true. But while we mock Tricky Dick and Slick Willie, we are inventing identities on Facebook, paying thousands for plastic surgeries, tuning into news that simply verifies our opinions. This is frontier forthrightness gone dreamy: reality bites, after all, and faith-based initiatives (...) trump reality-based ones, and becoming disillusioned is a downer. In his new book, part memoir, part cultural analysis, Keep It Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life, Eric G. Wilson clarifies this confusion. He draws on neuroscience, psychology, sociology, philosophy, art, film, literature, and his own life to explore the possibility that there's no such thing as unwavering reality. Whether our left brains are shaping the raw data of our right into fabulous stories, or we are so saturated by society's conventions that we're always acting out prefab scripts, we can't help but be phony. But are some fakes more real than others? Are certain lies true? In lively prose—honest, provocative, erudite, witty, wide-ranging (as likely to riff on Bill Murray as to contemplate Plato)—Keep It Fakeanswers these questions, uncovering bracing truths about what it means to be human and helping us turn our necessary lying into artful living. (shrink)

The “new natural lawyers” (NNLs) are a prolific group of philosophers, theologians, and political theorists that includes John Finnis, Robert George, Patrick Lee, Gerard Bradley, and Germain Grisez, among others. These thinkers have devoted themselves to developing and defending a traditional sexual ethic according to which homosexual sexual acts are immoral per se and marriage ought to remain an exclusively heterosexual institution. The sterility objection holds that the NNLs are guilty of making an arbitrary and irrational distinction between same-sex (...) couples and sterile heterosexual couples. The NNLs believe that it is a necessary condition for two people’s being morally and legally entitled to get married that they be able to perform sexual acts that are “suited to procreating.” But sterile heterosexual couples are incapable of performing such acts. Therefore, it should follow from the NNLs’ own premises that sterile heterosexual couples are not entitled to marry. But the NNLs do not draw this conclusion. Instead, they maintain that sterile heterosexuals can marry while denying that the same is true of same-sex couples. The sterility objection claims the NNLs are being inconsistent in treating the two kinds of couples differently. Although the sterility objection has been endorsed by recent critics, I don’t think it has yet been adequately defended. The NNLs have responded by arguing that there is a sense in which the sex acts of sterile heterosexual couples are as suited to reproduction as those of fertile heterosexuals. Thus they maintain that the distinction they draw between the two kinds of couple has a rational basis. A successful defense of the sterility objection must show that this response on the part of the NNLs fails. Such is the task I undertake in this paper. I argue that the NNLs’ response fails because acts of penile-vaginal intercourse between sterile heterosexuals lack the actual causal power to produce conception that sexual acts need to be considered truly reproductive, and because their assumption that penile-vaginal intercourse always functions reproductively is bad biology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Engaging Nature Aesthetically Joseph H. Kupfer Acting in Nature For the most part, most of us appreciate nature as spectators. Some portion of a natural scene is viewed as if it were a painting or photograph. We look for the picturesque in experiencing the real thing because our aesthetic approach toward nature has been filtered (...) through pictures — a canyon's spacious contours, a spectacular waterfall, a weeping willow swaying and billowing in the breeze. And there is certainly nothing wrong with this approach. I like a splendid sunset or majestic peak as much as the next person. However, thinking of nature solely or chiefly as an aesthetic scene to be observed is unnecessarily limiting. Regarding natural phenomena as material for detached, pictorial observation overlooks the aesthetic features revealed only through our active intercourse with nature.In what follows, I outline an active aesthetic of nature appreciation in particular, a series of physical responses to nature which yield a spectrum of aesthetic possibilities. Our active relationship toward nature is expressible by the relevant prepositions, as action can be in or into nature, against or with nature. Of course there will be overlap among these modes of dealing with nature aesthetically, but they are nevertheless fairly distinct and distinguishable. Moreover, the types of activity are arranged so that each succeeding way of addressing nature encompasses the aesthetic virtues of the preceding types of activity. As we move from acting in nature to acting with nature, therefore, our aesthetic experience becomes richer and more inclusive. 1The first active departure from the role of mere observer is found in acting in nature. When we act in or within nature, natural phenomena are the medium of our movement. Whether, hiking up the valley or swimming in the lake, we participate in the natural environment. And that participation [End Page 77] uncovers aesthetic features of nature not available to the mere spectator or observer. Walking through the valley, the prospect of wildflowers shifts from a distant, cascading carpet to a direct encounter with individual shapes, colors, fragrances, and textures. Our aesthetic experience includes appreciation of the shift in perspective itself, from long-range floral vista to more intimate perception.When we swim in the lake, it is no longer simply a thing viewed — a shifting montage of patterns of light playing on its surface. Instead, the lake is experienced as a translucent medium which alternately resists and yields to our arm, leg, and torso movement. Immersed in the water, we feel warm and cool patches, and hear sounds muffled and transmuted by the lake. The sound of our breathing is also modified by the watery medium, as well as by our physical labors.Acting in nature provides two aesthetic opportunities absent from mere spectating. First, the fact that we are active in the natural environment brings home a sense of ourselves as causal agents. Instead of change merely taking place in the natural environment, we are directly bringing about the change. Because we walk through the valley or swim in the lake, otherwise unavailable sensory experiences are enjoyed. Our movement, moreover, enables these experiences to develop from one moment to the next, at best, in an integrated sequence. In addition, there are the specific aesthetic features created for us by our physical activity — our bodily involvement beyond the more typical visual panorama. For example, tension and relaxation in our muscles, the feel and sound of our breathing and heartbeat correspond to change in our natural surroundings. Our bodies furnish us with responses to the natural environment because we are moving in it, not simply observing it.A more homey example of acting in nature is the case of standing or climbing "inside" a tree. Most of us enjoy the aesthetic experience of walking in the woods, among clusters of trees and other wildlife. But the individual tree also offers an opportunity for acting in or within nature. Enclosed within its branches and leaves, whether on the ground or alight a limb, we gain a new aesthetic perspective. The... (shrink)

Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...) to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters. (shrink)

Strong evidence shows that exposure and engagement with the natural world not only improve human wellbeing but can also help promote environmentally friendly behaviors. Human-nature relationships are at the heart of global agendas promoted by international organizations including the World Health Organization’s “One Health” and the United Nations “Ocean Decade.” These agendas demand collaborative multisector interdisciplinary efforts at local, national, and global levels. However, while global agendas highlight global goals for a sustainable world, developing science that directly addresses these (...) agendas from design through to delivery and outputs does not come without its challenges. In this article, we present the outcomes of international meetings between researchers, stakeholders, and policymakers from the United Kingdom and Brazil. We propose a model for interdisciplinary work under such global agendas, particularly the interface between One Health and the UN Ocean Decade and identify three priority research areas closely linked to each other: human-nature connection, conservation-human behavior, and implementation strategies. We also discuss a number of recommendations for moving forward. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical dimensions of aesthetic engagement, the central theme of Arnold Berleant’s aesthetics. His recent works on social aesthetics and negative aesthetics explicitly argue for the inseparability of aesthetics from the rest of life, in particular ethical concerns. Aesthetic engagement requires overcoming the subject-object divide and adopting an attitude of open-mindedness, responsiveness, reciprocity, and collaboration, as well as the willingness and readiness to expose negative aesthetics for what it is. These requirements characterize not only the nature (...) of aesthetic experience but also, perhaps more fundamentally, our mode of being in the world and the accompanying ethical responsibility. Among the present paper’s principal aims is to show how this view of aesthetic and ethical stance is also shared by the important aspects of the Japanese worldview, aesthetics, and artistic practices. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that psychological states can be literally ascribed only to living creatures and not to nonliving machines, such as sophisticated robots. Defenders of machine consciousness do not sufficiently appreciate the importance of the biological nature of a subject for the psychological significance of its behavior. Simulations of a computer-controlled, nonliving autonomous robot cannot carry the same psychological meaning as animate behavior. Being a living creature is an essential link between genuinely expressive behavior and justified psychological ascriptions.

The aim of this paper is to present a version of the principle of alternate possibilities which is not susceptible to the Frankfurt-style counter-example. I argue that PAP does not need to be endorsed as a necessary condition for moral responsibility and, in fact, presenting PAP as a sufficient condition maintains its usefulness as a maxim for moral accountability whilst avoiding Frankfurt-style counter-examples. In addition, I provide a further sufficient condition for moral responsibility – the twin world condition – (...) and argue that this provides a means of justifying why the protagonist in Frankfurt-style scenarios is still felt to be morally responsible. I conclude with the claim that neither the amended PAP nor the twin world condition is necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility; rather, what is necessary is simply that one of these conditions is satisfied. (shrink)

The Church is a sexed body, in both carnal and symbolic terms. The Church has sex, but being the Church it does so in a radically creative way. This article explores the contrast between sex as imagined by the Church and as imagined by evolutionary psychology (Darwinism). It argues that the latter reduces sex to reproduction (repetition) and makes this a metaphysical principle, whereas the Church transforms sex into a means for final beatitude. (Christian sex is not about self-perpetuation, but (...) about welcoming strangers; not about children as possessions, but as God's most precious gifts.) Darwinism strangely repeats a debased (neoscholastic) form of the natural law, whereas the Church looks to follow a law that is the dispossessive desire of God for God. Sex after this law orders us towards the infinite joy of our consummation with and in God, in the fellowship of Christ and the holy saints. (shrink)

RESUMO É certamente hegemônica na recepção do pensamento político rousseauniano, de seus primeiros momentos à exegese contemporânea, a tese segundo a qual o contrato social seria incompatível com a negação do direito natural. A convicção comum a esses intérpretes, herdada da tradição jusnaturalista moderna, é a de que, na ausência de uma obrigação moral prévia - a lei natural - e, portanto, de uma sanção que confira força vinculante à promessa daqueles que se engajam no ato de contratar, (...) o pacto fundamental não passaria de um formulário vão, cujos termos seus celebrantes dificilmente cumpririam. As teorias contratualistas da origem do corpo político encontrar-se-iam, assim, necessariamente atreladas ao jusnaturalismo. Na contramão desse viés de leitura, pretendemos neste artigo desenvolver e sustentar a hipótese de que o contrato social concebido por Jean-Jacques Rousseau, distinto da forma contratual clássica em aspectos cruciais, dispensa a sanção da lei de natureza. Será o caso, para tanto, de esmiuçar a estrutura sui generis do pacto rousseauniano, revelando, finalmente, de onde emana seu poder coercitivo. ABSTRACT The conception according to which the social contract would not be compatible with the refusal of natural right is widely hegemonic in the reception of the Rousseaunian political thought, from its beginnings to the present day exegesis. The common contention of these interpreters, inherited from the modern jusnaturalistic tradition, is that, in the absence of a previous moral obligation - the natural law - and therefore of a sanction able to procure binding force to the promise of those who engage in the act of contracting, the fundamental pact would be but a vain form, whose terms its celebrants would hardly keep. Thusly, the contratualist theories of the origin of the political body would necessarily find themselves linked to jusnaturalism. As a counterpoint to this interpretative bias, we intend in the present article to develop and sustain the hypothesis that the social contract conceived by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, distinct from the classical contractual form in some crucial aspects, dismisses the sanction from the law of nature. To that end, it will be relevant to unravel the sui generis structure of the Rousseaunian pact, elucidating, lastly, the source of its coercive power. (shrink)

Against Davidson's criticism of the usual notion of a natural language, Dummett and most philosophers of language have argued that such a notion is necessary to account for the normativity of meaning and to avoid declaring meaningless much of our everyday talk on languages. This paper tries to show that both worries are unjustified by arguing that: 1) It is possible to talk of linguistic mistakes without commitment to natural languages in the usual sense; 2) The rejection (...) of natural languages in the usual sense does not entail the possibility of non-trivially private languages; 3) The rejection of natural languages in the usual sense does not entail that conventionalized languages do not exist, but only that their existence is not necessary for linguistic communication. /// Frente a la crítica de Davidson a la noción usual de lenguaje natural, Dummett y, con él, la mayoría de los filósofos del lenguaje sostienen que dicha noción es imprescindible para dar cuenta de la normatividad del significado y para evitar declarar carente de sentido buena parte de nuestro discurso ordinario sobre los lenguajes. El trabajo trata de mostrar que ambas objeciones son injustificadas argumentando que: 1) Puede hablarse de errores lingüísticos sin necesidad de aceptar la existencia de lenguajes en el sentido usual; 2) La crítica de los lenguajes naturales en el sentido usual no implica la posibilidad de lenguajes no trivialmente privados; 3) La crítica de los lenguajes naturales en el sentido usual no implica que no haya lenguajes convencionalizados, sólo que la existencia de éstos no es una conditíon de posibilidad de la comunicación lingüística. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to and advertisement of Erwin Schrödinger’s little-known real-valued wave equation, the first published time dependent Schrödinger equation. I argue that this equation is not merely a historical curiosity. Not only does it show that quantum mechanics need not be viewed as essentially complex-valued, but the real formalism also provides a deep insight into the puzzling nature of time reversal in a quantum world. It is hoped that this observation will stimulate the discovery of other areas (...) where ‘keeping it real’ will prove pedagogically or foundationally useful. (shrink)