The doctrine of karma, as elaborated in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious traditions, offers a powerful explanatory account of the human predicament, and in particular of seemingly undeserved human suffering. Whitley R. P. Kaufman is right to point out that on some points, such as the suffering of children, the occurrence of natural disasters, and the possibility of universal salvation, the karma theory appears, initially at least, much more satisfactory than the attempts made to solve the perennial problem of (...) evil by writers working within the mainstream theistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam .1 Kaufman, we think, is also correct to highlight the lack of critical analysis given by contemporary philosophers of religion to the theory of karma, at least in comparison with the voluminous body of work produced in recent years on the theistic problem of evil . Kaufman?s recent article in this journal, therefore, is to be welcomed as a step toward redressing this imbalance in the literature, and in the process helping to remove the Western theistic bias of much contemporary philosophy of religion. On the other hand, we think that Kaufman has unfortunately done little to further the general understanding of the doctrine of karma. (shrink)

The international community has long been affected by the political, philosophical and ethical issues surrounding the practice of tyrannicide, defined as the targeted killing of a tyrant. However, there exists no specific international legal instrument that concerns the practice of tyrannicide, rendering the legitimacy of the practice ambiguous. This paper aims to investigate the issue of tyrannicide and offers a number of speculative arguments concerning its legal-philosophical status. It finds that there are essentially two arms of international legal jurisprudence that (...) may regulate the practice of tyrannicide. The first is largely prohibitive and is based on the derived legal arguments against assassination involving the element ofperfidy, relevant extradition law, provisions in the Hague, Geneva and New York Conventions, and the prohibition on the use of force in the UN Charter. The second position, though far more radical and speculative, is more permissive regarding the moral legitimacy of tyrannicide. This position is based on arguments from the classical international theorists Gentili, Grotius and Vattel, contemporary human rights standards, the principle of humanitarian intervention, the duty to protect, and legal category of hostis hutnani generis. It is argued that though the vast majority of international legal principles are indicative ofthe illegality oftyrannicide, that the practice may nevertheless be philosophically legitimated under humanitarian principles. (shrink)

This is the final part of a series of two papers that have examined the conceptual development of the philosophical justifications for tyrannicide. While Part I focused on the classical, medieval, and liberal justifications for tyrannicide, Part II aims to provide the tentative outlines of a contemporary model of tyrannicide in world politics. It is contended that a reinvigorated conception of self-defence, when coupled with the modern understanding of universal human rights, may provide the foundation for the normative validity of (...) tyrannicide in contemporary world politics. (shrink)

Andrew Tooke's 1691 English translation of Samuel Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis, published as The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, brought Pufendorf's manual fo statist natural law into English politics at a moment of temporary equilibrium in the unfinished contest between Crown and Parliament for the rights and powers of sovereignty. Drawing on the authors' re-edition of The Whole Duty of Man, this article describes and analyses a telling instance of how--by translation--the core political (...) terms and concepts of the German natural jurist's 'absolutist' formulary were reshaped for reception in the different political culture of late seventeenth-century England. (shrink)

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, (...) as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.
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I defend the view that many biological categories are defined by homology against a series of arguments designed to show that all biological categories are defined, at least in part, by selected function. I show that categories of homology are `abnormality inclusive'—something often alleged to be unique to selected function categories. I show that classifications by selected function are logically dependent on classifications by homology, but not vice-versa. Finally, I reject the view that biologists must use considerations of selected function (...) to abstract away from variation and pathology to form a canonical description of a class of biological systems. (shrink)

The author examines Williams' appraisal of Collingwood both in his eponymous essay on Collingwood, in the posthumously published Sense of the Past , and elsewhere in his work. The similarities and differences between their philosophies are explored: in particular, with regard to the relationship between philosophy and history and the relationship between the study of history and our present-day moral attitudes. It is argued that, despite Williams usually being classified as an analytic philosopher and Collingwood being (...) class='Hi'>classified as an idealist, there is substantial common ground between them. Williams was aware of this and made clear his sympathy for Collingwood; but, nonetheless, the relationship between Williams and Collingwood has not previously been explored in any detail. After establishing the common ground between these philosophers, and the areas of disagreement, the author suggests that both may have something to gain from the other. (shrink)

The main question informing this paper is whether it is possible to extend democracy beyond its liberal forms. The paper reflects upon this question with regard to its implications for the individual. For the radicalization of democracy implies a need for self-transformation, if the everyday egoism of contemporary citizens is not to thwart reasonable discussion and participation. Theorists such as Richard Rorty argue that the philosophical resources required to guide such self-transformation can be made available only by sacrificing the political (...) freedom and cultural diversity liberalism has been able to precariously establish. Other theorists insist that the thresholds of pluralism and tolerance that existing liberal democracies are struggling to maintain actually require an extension of democracy. The paper evaluates two different theoretical strategies that aim to identify potentials for democratization without falling prey to the dilemma identified by Rorty: a ‘ deliberative’ strategy explicated with reference to Jürgen Habermas and an ‘existential’ approach represented here by William Connolly. Key Words: Connolly • democracy • existential • Habermas • individual • proceduralism • Rorty. (shrink)

As the subtitle indicates, this book is a bibliography. The author’s purpose was to present the important works of philosophical ethics and those of the social sciences as they relate to ethical problems, especially in economics, law, politics, and sociology. Each of these fields is given a full chapter of roughly 50 pages, while the chapter on ethics itself covers 70 pages. Each chapter begins with a few preliminary remarks which, in one page, sketch the most important philosophic topics in (...) that field. The listings in each chapter are then arranged under the following headings: introductory bibliographies to the field; references to general studies ; references to studies of particular periods; to particular countries; to special questions; and to periodicals. The bibliographical study should be of value to anybody interested in interdisciplinary research. It gives one an immediate clue where to go in pursuing an interdisciplinary problem in the field of social sciences, but unfortunately not in all of them. Linguistics and anthropology are totally absent, and psychology has unfortunately no separate place in the book, although one can find it under special headings. While the study can therefore not be called a bibliography of all the social sciences, it is nonetheless truly remarkable in its scope. (shrink)

The reputation of Rudolf Hermann Lotze was high in the philosophic world, especially the English-speaking philosophic world, during the period 1880–1920. One encyclopedia of the period says that “in the U. S. his influence is stronger in academic philosophy, perhaps, than that of any other author.” In typical histories of philosophy Lotze is counted among the great successors in the tradition of Kant and Hegel. I have elsewhere sought to explain the reasons for his great influence. Writers (...) contemporary to Lotze wanted first to classify him as an Herbartian, and in spite of his protests, he seemed some sort of Kantian or Hegelian. The character of his philosophy remained enigmatic, and he was sometimes called an “eclectic” since his philosophy contained aspects that reminded readers of some predecessor or other. But clearly he resisted the tendency to make all questions problems of knowledge: “The constant whetting of the knife is tedious, if it is not proposed to cut anything with it.” And clearly he is no Hegelian. He considered the rationalistic search for a single principle and a single method to have failed. German philosophy had failed to respect what is given in experience. Even in aesthetics, where surely one might be expected to attend to what the arts present for sensuous enjoyment, German intellectualism, to Lotze’s disgust, tended to use a deductive method. Santayana accused a priori German philosophers of “egotism”; he might have learned this from Lotze who found this same tradition marked by pretension. Only God could satisfy the program of Fichte. The demand of an all-embracing system is that it “make all particular parts of it pass before [us] in the majestic succession of an unbroken development!” Wrote Lotze, “It seemed to me that only a Spirit who stood in the centre of the universe which he himself had made could, with knowledge of the final aim which he had given his creation…” see the whole. Lotze’s kind of philosophy is professedly modest, nondogmatic, fallibilist. (shrink)

In this volume, leading philosophers of psychiatry examine psychiatric classification systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, asking whether current systems are sufficient for effective diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doing so, they take up the question of whether mental disorders are natural kinds, grounded in something in the outside world. Psychiatric categories based on natural kinds should group phenomena in such a way that they are subject to the same type of causal explanations and respond similarly to (...) the same type of causal interventions. When these categories do not evince such groupings, there is reason to revise existing classifications. The contributors all question current psychiatric classifications systems and the assumptions on which they are based. They differ, however, as to why and to what extent the categories are inadequate and how to address the problem. Topics discussed include taxometric methods for identifying natural kinds, the error and bias inherent in DSM categories, and the complexities involved in classifying such specific mental disorders as "oppositional defiance disorder" and pathological gambling. -/- Contributors George Graham, Nick Haslam, Allan Horwitz, Harold Kincaid, Dominic Murphy, Jeffrey Poland, Nancy Nyquist Potter, Don Ross, Dan Stein, Jacqueline Sullivan, Serife Tekin, Peter Zachar. (shrink)

To understand the history of Advaita Vedānta and its rise to prominence, we need to devote more attention to what might be termed “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” or Advaita Vedānta as expressed outside the standard canon of Sanskrit philosophical works. Elsewhere I have examined the works of Niścaldās, whose Hindi-language Vicār-sāgar was once referred to by Swami Vivekananda as the most influential book of its day. In this paper, I look back to one of Niścaldās’s major influences: Sundardās, a well-known (...) Hindi poet and a direct disciple of Dādū Dayāl. Sundardās is typically classified as a bhakti poet rather than an Advaita Vedāntin; certainly he is not included in existing surveys or histories of Vedānta. In his youth, however, he studied Sanskrit and Vedānta in Banaras, and his poems present us with a mind that found no contradiction in claiming Dādū as his master and at the same time embracing the teachings of Advaita Vedānta. I argue that not only should Sundardās be included in histories of Advaita Vedānta, he should be credited for his originality: not only did he “Vedānticize” the Dādū Panth, he “Dādūized” Vedānta. I conclude by comparing Sundardās to two Sanskrit intellectuals from roughly the same period: Mahādeva Sarasvatī Vedāntin and Annambhaṭṭa, both of whom, like Sundardās, had commitments to Advaita Vedānta as well as to other intellectual traditions. (shrink)

This paper examines the controversial governance mechanism of classified boards. Classified board advocates believe that multiple year terms give directors a longer-term horizon. Shareholder activists push for declassifications of boards because they argue that agency problems are likely to arise. In a longitudinal study of six years of KLD, RiskMetrics and Compustat data, we test the influence of classified boards on social performance dimensions. We find that classified boards are negatively associated with social performance strengths in (...) the areas of community and diversity, indicating that they are not proactive in these areas. However, classified boards are negatively associated with social performance concerns on five out of six dimensions, providing evidence that while these boards are not proactive in stakeholder management, neither are they harmful nor neglectful towards stakeholders. The overall findings suggest that classified boards may be associated with a stakeholder management philosophy of “do no harm.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:It is difficult to do justice to a monumental study such as PJDS in a short review: only time will determine its real significance. We can only offer some preliminary comments, and in spite of anything we have to say, the mere fact that the book contains such a wealth of information justifies for it a permanent place on a bookshelf of a student of medieval thought.The title of (...) PJDS deserves special attention. While we have books on Scotus's theology or particular topics of his thought, there has been no comprehensive study of his "philosophy," seemingly for a good reason: Scotus is clearly a "fundamental" and systematic theologian who simply uses some classic tools of ancient philosophers and some of their texts and ideas as material for his own discussions. So first of all one needs to determine what constitutes "philosophy" in such a case. V. devotes considerable attention to this question, but unfortunately only at the very end of the study, in Part III, which constitutes almost a separate monograph on the historiography of the debate about "medieval philosophy" and Scotus's role in it. Dichotomizing medieval thought into "philosophy" and theology in recent debates comes from the post-Enlightenment habit of seeing "philosophy" , as opposed to "theology," as something positive in itself. In Chapter 14 V. makes a good observation that "philosophy" and "theology" in ancient and medieval thought are simply two systems that can be coherent in themselves but differ fundamentally as far as their premises are concerned. Using the terminology of contemporary hermeneutical-postcritical analysis, one could say that both disciplines are intratextual systems, with their own internal logic but with different "starting points," opened to a conversation ad extra to various degrees. The classification "intratextual system" based on a solid theoretical foundation in the hermeneutical-postcritical tradition would eliminate the unnecessary dichotomy in ancient and medieval thought. Indeed, it is difficult to see why some of Plato's, Aristotle's or Stoic texts should be classified as "philosophy," not to mention those of Plotinus and Proclus that are often clearly "theology." As a whole, V.'s verdict is that Scotus has his own coherent system of thought based on contingency, as opposed to the "necessitarianism" of ancient philosophers. As for the role of "philosophy," V.'s analysis of recent scholarship shows that "medieval philosophy" is often understood as the logical tools in the service of theology: the interpretation that explains the recent interest in the fourteenth-century thought where those tools were best developed.The book in general is quite readable, despite occasional infelicities in the English and some typos. V. employs a variety of styles, from purely scholarly, which includes a straightforward exposition of relevant texts, with some analysis of the diachronic development of issues, to more literary, ornate and emotional. Similarly varied is his presentation of issues: from dry exposition to creating prolonged "mystery plots" that lead to "discoveries." Unfortunately there is also some unevenness in the text flow: from very smooth to abrupt transitions from one statement to another .Although the book will definitely benefit a variety of readers, the exact readership is difficult to pinpoint. Some sections, such as the extended discussion of distinctions and relations in the section on logic, presuppose a very basic audience; often much of the material from previous sections is repeated . Yet other sections presuppose a rather sophisticated reader who is familiar with the context of the discussion and is able not only to follow but also anticipate the author's train of thought.PJDS provides an excellent coverage of Scotus's work, with one notable exception: the Reportatio tradition. Even though the Wolter/Bychkov edition-translation of Rep. I-A appeared perhaps.. (shrink)

Proportionality is a central and globally spread argumentation technique in public law. This article provides a conceptual introduction to proportionality and argues that such a domain-specific form of argumentation is particularly interesting for argument mining. As a major contribution of this article, we share a new dataset for which proportionality has been annotated. The dataset consists of 300 German Federal Constitutional Court decisions annotated at the sentence level (54,929 sentences). In addition to separating textual parts, a fine-grained system of proportionality (...) categories was used. Finally, we used these data for a classification task. We built classifiers that predict whether or not proportionality is invoked in a sentence. We employed several models, including neural and deep learning models and transformers. A BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model performed best. (shrink)

The representation and classification of the structure of natural arguments has been one of the most important aspects of Aristotelian and medieval dialectical and rhetorical theories. This traditional approach is represented nowadays in models of argumentation schemes. The purpose of this article is to show how arguments are characterized by a complex combination of two levels of abstraction, namely, semantic relations and types of reasoning, and to provide an effective and comprehensive classification system for this matrix of semantic and quasilogical (...) connections. To this purpose, we propose a dichotomous criterion of classification, transcending both levels of abstraction and representing not what an argument is but how it is understood and interpreted. The schemes are grouped according to an end-means criterion, which is strictly bound to the ontological structure of the conclusion and the premises. On this view, a scheme can be selected according to the intended or reconstructed purpose of an argument and the possible strategies that can be used to achieve it. (shrink)

Along three measurements at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a high energy particle accelerator, we analyze procedures and consequences of exploratory experimentation (EE). While all of these measurements fulfill the requirements of EE: probing new parameter spaces, being void of a target theory and applying a broad range of experimental methods, we identify epistemic differences and suggest a classification of EE. We distinguish classes of EE according to their respective goals: the exploration where an established global theory cannot provide the (...) details of a local phenomenon, exploration of an astonishing discovery and exploration to find a new entity. We find that these classes also differ with respect to the existence of an identifiable target and their impact on the background theory. The characteristics distinguish EE from other kinds of experimentation, even though these different kinds have not yet been systematically studied. The formal rigor and precision of LHC physics facilitates to analyze concept formation in its early state. In particular we emphasize the importance for nil–results for conceptualization and argue that conceptualization can also be achieved from nil–results only. (shrink)

Although the most common understanding of suicide is intentional self-killing, this conception either rules out someone who lacks mental capacity being classed as a suicide or, if acting intentionally is meant to include this sort of case, then what it means to act intentionally is so weak that intention is not a necessary condition of suicide. This has implications in health care, and has a further bearing on issues such as assisted suicide and health insurance. In this paper, I argue (...) that intention is not a necessary condition of suicide at all. Rather, I develop a novel approach that deploys the structure of a homicide taxonomy to classify and characterise suicides to arrive at a conceptually robust understanding of suicide. According to my analysis of suicide, an agent is the proximate cause of his death. Suicide is ‘self-killing,’ rather than ‘intentional self-killing.’ Adopting this understanding of suicide performs several functions: We acquire an external standard to assess diverging analyses on specific cases by appealing to homologous homicides. Following such a taxonomy differentiates types of suicides. This approach has application in addressing negative connotations about suicide. As a robust view, adding intention is an unnecessary complication. It is more consistent with psychological and sociological assessments of suicide than ‘intentional self-killing.’ It has useful applications in informing public policy. This paper’s focus is on classifying types of suicides, rather than on the moral permissibility or on underlying causes of suicidal ideation and behaviour. (shrink)

Abstract: On several occasions (see e.g. Principles I/48) Descartes claims that sensations, emotions, imagination and sensory perceptions belong neither to the mind or to the body alone, but rather to their union. This seems to conflict with Descartes’s definition of “thought” given elsewhere, which classifies the same events as modes of a thinking substance, and hence depending for their existence only on minds. In this paper I offer an interpretation, which, I hope, will restore the coherence of Descartes’s dualist (...) theory. I argue that the ‘special modes’ of thinking are special because they are the immediate effects of the body on the mind. They thus depend for their existence on the body because of the general metaphysical principle that “Nothing comes from nothing”. Understood properly, this principle does not contradict the principle about the distinctness of substances. (shrink)

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

In 2013, following the leaks by Edward Snowden, The Guardian published a number of classified NSA documents. Both leaking and publishing leaks violate the law prohibiting unauthorized disclosures. Accordingly, there are two potential targets for prosecution: the leakers and the press. In practice, however, only the leakers are prosecuted: Snowden is facing a threat of 30 years’ imprisonment; no charges have been made against The Guardian. If both leaking and publishing leaks violate the law, why prosecute only the leakers (...) and not the press? I consider and reject two arguments. The first claims that the press has special moral claims by virtue of its rights or its role. The second argument states that the leakers commit a greater wrong than the press. I conclude that the current prosecution practice is inconsistent: prosecutors should either prosecute both or neither. (shrink)

In this paper a theory relating to the causal factors operative in the origin of living systems is presented.Let us consider living forms as material systems exhibiting, in addition to those properties held in common with all matter, systemic properties of a specific nature. If, then, the matter of the earth is classified from this standpoint, it is found that these systems are distributed only over the surface of the earth or in a shallow upper layer. This fact indicates (...) that the special properties of these systems are related in some manner to factors introduced at the surface and not operative elsewhere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop CultureStefán SnaevarrPhilosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, edited by William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, 297 pp., $29.85 paper.There has been quite a boom lately in the market for philosophical books on popular culture. The young American philosopher William Irwin has led the way by starting the fad of "... and philosophy" (...) books; the first one that Irwin edited was Seinfeld and Philosophy. So it is only fitting that he is one of the editors of this volume on philosophical interpretation of popular culture. In contrast to most of the earlier books of this kind, a sizable number of the contributors to this volume belong to the top brass of America's aestheticians: Noël Carrol, Ted Cohen, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Richard Shusterman, to name but a few. The book is divided into two parts, "Philosophy and Popular Culture" and "Interpretation and Popular Art Forms." These titles are self-explanatory; it might be added that the aforementioned top brass dominates the first part.Irwin provides the book with a witty and well-written introduction, but he operates with a very wide definition of popular culture, classifying movies as such as items of pop culture. However, the medium surely is not the message. The fact that novels can be part of popular culture does not make Joyce's Ulysses a pop cultural object. Irwin's chapter, "Philosophy as/and/of popular culture," is rather two papers in one. One half addresses the concept of popular culture, containing an insightful critical evaluation of, among others, Noël Carroll's concept of mass art. The other half proposes that we can use popular culture to disseminate philosophical ideas to the general public. More so than in the introduction, Irwin is actually rather critical of popular culture in this chapter. He worries about its negative effect on culture in general—no cult of pop culture here. In addition, he rejects the notion of popular culture having the potential of becoming philosophy or its surrogate. He reminds us that Socrates used examples from everyday life and the popular culture of his day to make his philosophical points. In a similar fashion, the popular culture of today can be a stepping stone for philosophers to reach wider audiences. If you cannot beat them, join them! Popular culture could, for instance, be used to warn the public against its own evil aspects. This is an excellent idea, and I could not agree more; I myself often use examples from popular culture in my own lectures with good results. Irwin should expand on this idea and present it in a separate article.Richard Shusterman's chapter does not add much to his earlier writings. It is also somewhat like two articles in one; the first is a criticism of the denigration of pleasure and entertainment as aesthetic values, and the second half is an attempt to bridge the divide between intrinsic value and instrumental value. Both halves [End Page 111] contain some excellent arguments, but popular culture tends to be on the fringe in Shusterman's argument. The focus is on other more traditional, philosophical issues. Perhaps another venue would have been more suitable for this article.In contrast to Shusterman, Caroline Korsmeyer addresses the issues of popular culture in a fairly straightforward manner. Popular culture can be educational, even philosophically so. This claim does not mean that works of popular culture are works of philosophy in the ordinary sense of the word. However, we can "treat philosophy as a success term to refer to works demanding imaginative engagement that results in the recognition... of a philosophical position, such that what is done in philosophy proper that induces a possible conclusion is done in another genre by means appropriate to its appreciation" (31). Given this understanding of philosophy, we can understand works of popular culture as vehicles of philosophy. Korsmeyer maintains that the TV series Angel conveys some of Simone de Beauvoir's ideas from one of her books. Korsmeyer's chapter also contains a delightful discussion of "the probable impossible" and "the possible improbable" in fiction. But... (shrink)

It has been widely discussed whether the existence of other universes than the known universe is a purely metaphysical consideration. This paper argues to the contrary that the existence of other universes is a meaningful hypothesis, which can be tested based on observable data. The paper applies the perspective of observer bias as an approach for assigning probabilities to the mutually excluding hypotheses of universe vs. multiverse, i.e., whether the known universe is the only universe, or just one universe in (...) an ensemble of universes, a so-called multiverse. The basic idea of the paper relies on the following consideration. In a multiverse, the vast majority of observers would live in universes that are more life friendly. Thus, conditional on there being a multiverse, we should expect to find ourselves in a universe with values of the fundamental parameters that provide particularly fertile grounds for life. In contrast, if there is only a single universe, it may well be the case that there is still a few observers even if the parameters are far from ideal for life, and in that case, those observers will find values of the parameters that are not ideal for intelligent life. It may well be the case that, among all parameter configurations that allow life at least somewhere, those that are not ideal for life far outnumber those that are ideal for life. Based on this elementary consideration, the paper proceeds to propose a quantitative framework to determine probabilities for either hypothesis. In particular, it is described how a future ab initio determination of some of the factors in the Drake equation may be used to infer which one of the two hypotheses is the more likely. A quantitative approach to this end is proposed. Expressing these factors of the Drake equation in the context of the two hypotheses, a general likelihood approach is first described. Then, to support intuition, example computations are provided, illustrating how an actual hypothesis test would work in practice. (shrink)

Organisations that design and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly commit themselves to high-level, ethical principles. However, there still exists a gap between principles and practices in AI ethics. One major obstacle organisations face when attempting to operationalise AI Ethics is the lack of a well-defined material scope. Put differently, the question to which systems and processes AI ethics principles ought to apply remains unanswered. Of course, there exists no universally accepted definition of AI, and different systems pose different ethical (...) challenges. Nevertheless, pragmatic problem-solving demands that things should be sorted so that their grouping will promote successful actions for some specific end. In this article, we review and compare previous attempts to classify AI systems for the purpose of implementing AI governance in practice. We find that attempts to classify AI systems proposed in previous literature use one of three mental models: _the Switch_, i.e., a binary approach according to which systems either are or are not considered AI systems depending on their characteristics; _the Ladder_, i.e., a risk-based approach that classifies systems according to the ethical risks they pose; and _the Matrix_, i.e., a multi-dimensional classification of systems that take various aspects into account, such as context, input data, and decision-model. Each of these models for classifying AI systems comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. By conceptualising different ways of classifying AI systems into simple mental models, we hope to provide organisations that design, deploy, or regulate AI systems with the vocabulary needed to demarcate the material scope of their AI governance frameworks. (shrink)

To mitigate the Look Elsewhere Effect in multiple hypothesis testing using _p_-values, the paper suggests an “entropic correction” of the significance level at which the null hypothesis is rejected. The proposed correction uses the entropic uncertainty associated with the probability measure that expresses the prior-to-test probabilities expressing how likely the confirming evidence may occur at values of the parameter. When the prior-to-test probability is uniform (embodying maximal uncertainty) the entropic correction coincides with the Bonferroni correction. When the prior-to-test probability (...) embodies maximal certainty (is concentrated on a single value of the parameter at which the evidence is obtained), the entropic correction overrides the Look Elsewhere Effect completely by not requiring any correction of significance. The intermediate situation is illustrated by a simple hypothetical example. Interpreting the prior-to-test probability subjectively allows a Bayesian spirit enter the frequentist multiple hypothesis testing in a disciplined manner. If the prior-to-test probability is determined objectively, the entropic correction makes possible to take into account in a technically explicit way the background theoretical knowledge relevant for the test. (shrink)

For more than a century scholars both inside and outside of China have undertaken the project of modernizing Confucianism, but few have been as successful or influential as Li Zehou (b. 1930). Since the 1950s, Li's extensive efforts in this regard have in turn exerted a profound influence on Chinese modernization and resulted in his becoming one of China's most prominent social critics. To transform Confucianism into a contemporary resource for positive change in China and elsewhere, Li has reinterpreted (...) major ideas and concepts of classical Confucianism, including a rereading of the entire Analects, replete with his own philosophical speculations derived from other Chinese and Western traditions (most notably, the ideas of Kant and Marx), and developed an aesthetical theory that has proved especially far-reaching. Although the authors of this volume hail from East Asia, North America, and Europe and a wide variety of academic backgrounds and fields of study, they are unanimous in their appreciation of Li's contributions to not only an evolving Confucian philosophy, but also world philosophy. They view Li first and foremost as a sui generis thinker with broad global interests and not one who fits neatly into any one philosophical category, Chinese or Western. This is clearly reflected in the chapters included here, which are organized into three parts: Li Zehou and the Modernization of Confucianism, Li Zehou's Reconception of Confucian Philosophy, and Li Zehou's Aesthetical Theory and Confucianism. Together they form a coherent narrative that reveals how Li has, for more than half a century, creatively studied, absorbed, and reconceptualized the Confucian ideational tradition to integrate it with Western philosophical elements and develop his own philosophical insights and original theories. At the same time, he has transformed and modernized Confucianism for the purpose of both coalescing with and reconstructing a new world cultural order. (shrink)

_Reading Philosophy of Religion_ combines a diverse selection of classical and contemporary texts in philosophy of religion with insightful commentaries. Offers a unique presentation through a combination of text and interactive commentary Provides a mix of classic and contemporary texts, including some not anthologized elsewhere Includes writings from thinkers such as Aquinas, Boethius, Hume, Plantinga and Putnam Divided into sections which examine religious language, the existence of God, reason, argument and belief, divine properties, and religious pluralism.

The discovery of the Higgs particle required a signal of 5σ significance. The rigid application of that condition is a convention that disregards more specific aspects of the given experiment. In particular, it does not account for the characteristics of the look elsewhere effect in the individual experimental context. The paper relates this aspect of data analysis to the question as to what extent theoretical reasoning should be admitted to play a role in the assessment of the significance of (...) empirical data. (shrink)

In two eye-tracking studies we investigated the influence of Mandarin numeral classifiers – a grammatical category in the language – on online overt attention. Mandarin speakers were presented with simple sentences through headphones while their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer screen were monitored. The crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier categories influence Mandarin speakers' general conceptual processing, then on hearing the target noun they should look at objects that (...) are members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not explicitly present. The data show that when participants heard a classifier they shifted overt attention significantly more to classifiermatch objects than to distractor objects, but when the classifier was not explicitly presented in speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects and distractor objects did not differ. This suggests that although classifier distinctions do influence eye-gaze behavior, they do so only during linguistic processing of that distinction and not in moment-to-moment general conceptual processing. (shrink)

Decisions of regulatory government bodies and courts affect many aspects of citizens’ lives. These organizations and courts are expected to provide timely and coherent decisions, although they struggle to keep up with the increasing demand. The ability of machine learning (ML) models to predict such decisions based on past cases under similar circumstances was assessed in some recent works. The dominant conclusion is that the prediction goal is achievable with high accuracy. Nevertheless, most of those works do not consider important (...) aspects for ML models that can impact performance and affect real-world usefulness, such as consistency, out-of-sample applicability, generality, and explainability preservation. To our knowledge, none considered all those aspects, and no previous study addressed the joint use of metadata and text-extracted variables to predict administrative decisions. We propose a predictive model that addresses the abovementioned concerns based on a two-stage cascade classifier. The model employs a first-stage prediction based on textual features extracted from the original documents and a second-stage classifier that includes proceedings’ metadata. The study was conducted using time-based cross-validation, built on data available before the predicted judgment. It provides predictions as soon as the decision date is scheduled and only considers the first document in each proceeding, along with the metadata recorded when the infringement is first registered. Finally, the proposed model provides local explainability by preserving visibility on the textual features and employing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our findings suggest that this cascade approach surpasses the standalone stages and achieves relatively high Precision and Recall when both text and metadata are available while preserving real-world usefulness. With a weighted F1 score of 0.900, the results outperform the text-only baseline by 1.24% and the metadata-only baseline by 5.63%, with better discriminative properties evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves. (shrink)

The Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, the _Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie,_ is distinguished by its particular presentation of philosophical terms, ideas and concepts. Rather than providing mere defintions or descriptive and analytical explanantions the _HWPh_ strictly applies the critical method of history of concepts developed by the eminent German scholar and philosopher Joachim Ritter. By means of precise and detailed references it documents the origin, first occurrence, the historical evolution and the changes of meaning of each concept, from Ancient Greek (...) to contemporary philosophy. For the reader this presentation is of unique value: it makes traceable the importance of terms and concepts at certain periods or for a particular philosopher, as well as its changes and development of meaning. Voulmes 1–12 of the _HWPh_ comprises more than 17.000 text columns on 3.670 philosophical terms. The dictionary does not include articles on persons. Volume 13 includes, besides of a comprehensive introductory essay, three different indexes: - the Subject Index classifies the articles by disciplinary and systematic categories - the Main Index includes all philosophical keywords with more than 30.000 references to their occurrences in other articles and contexts - the Author Index lists all authors and their contributions The included CD-ROM allows full text research of the _HWPh's_ entire content. (shrink)

I believe that the sort of disagreements we encounter in philosophy—disagreements that often take the form that I have elsewhere called system- atic peer disagreements—make it unreasonable to think that there is any knowledge, or even justified belief, when the disagreements themselves are systematic. I readily acknowledge that this skeptical view is quite controversial; I suspect many are unconvinced. However, I will not be defending it here. Rather, I will be exploring a worry, or set of worries, that (...) arise on the assumption that this view is correct. For if it is unreasonable to think that there is justified belief in contexts of systematic philosophical disagreements, by what right do we continue to advance philosophical claims in such contexts? Indeed, by what right do we believe the philosophical claims we advance? And if we don’t believe them, why do we advance them in the first place? An inability to respond to these worries would leave us with the dis- tinct impression that the practice or activity of philosophy is quite suspect: what sort of practice or activity would have us believe unreasonably, assert unwarrantedly, and perhaps exhibit insincerity to boot? (shrink)

The discipline area of physical education has historically struggled for legitimacy, sometimes being seen as a non-serious pursuit in educational terms compared to other subjects within the school curriculum. This book represents the first attempt in nearly 30 years to offer a coherent philosophical defence and conceptualisation of physical education and sport as subjects of educational value, and to provide a philosophically sound justification for their inclusion in the curriculum. The book argues that rather than relegating the body to ‘un-thinking’ (...) learning, a person’s essential being is not confined to their rationality but involves an embodied dimension. It traces the changing conceptions of the body, in philosophy and theology, that have influenced our understanding of physical education and sport, and investigates the important role that embodiment and movement play in learning about, through and in physical education. Physical education is defended as a vital and necessary part of education because the whole person goes to school, not just the mind, but the thinking, feeling and acting facets of a person. It is argued that physical education has the potential to provide a multitude of experiences and opportunities for students’ to become aware of their embodiment, explore alternative modes of awareness and to develop insights into and new modes of being not available elsewhere in the curriculum, and to influence moral character through the support of a moral community that is committed to that practice. Representing a sophisticated and spirited defence of the educational significance and philosophical value of physical education and sport, this book will be fascinating reading for any advanced student or researcher with an interest in physical education, the philosophy of sport, or the philosophy of education. (shrink)

EVEN in Aristotle’s day, there were some problems about the status of the "mixed sciences," mechanics, optics, astronomy, harmonics. They were mathematical in form, and depended on generalizations drawn from repeated and careful observation. In both respects they differed from "physics," as Aristotle saw it; he made them "the most physical part of mathematics," and thus inaugurated a long two-thousand year history of separation between two ways of approach to nature, the philosophical, and the mathematical. Galileo’s central achievement, perhaps, was (...) to end this split; he showed that a single account was possible. Though he claimed the titles both of "Philosopher" and of "Mathematician" to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the "new science" he proposed in 1638 would not need two separate talents. Mechanics for a while to come would still be classified as "natural philosophy," but it would rapidly become evident that philosophers could no longer claim the competence to intervene in it on their own account. True, some of the first great exponents of the new physics, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, were also philosophers. But it was abundantly clear that the new science of nature was mathematical-experimental in form, not "philosophical" as that narrowed term had come to be understood. (shrink)

The elaborated intrusion (EI) theory of desire (Kavanagh, Andrade, & May, 2005) attributes the motivational force of cravings to cognitive elaboration, including imagery, of apparently spontaneous thoughts that intrude into awareness. We report a questionnaire study in which respondents rated a craving for food or drink. Questionnaire items derived from EI theory formed a single factor alongside factors for anticipated reward/relief, resistance, and opportunity. In a multiple regression predicting strength of craving, the first three factors accounted for 36% of the (...) variance. Opportunity did not enter the model. In a second study, the difference between individuals' strong and weak cravings to take part in a sporting activity was shown to be related to visual, auditory, and general imagery, and to anticipated reward or relief from engaging in the activity. Implications for treatment of craving-related disorders are discussed in the light of these results and of other research indicating that interference with imagery can reduce the strength of craving. (shrink)

In the ten years following the end of World War II, Oxford Universitywas a center of extraordinarily fertile philosophical activity. Out of it arose a new and distinctive philosophical movement, variously known as “ordinary language philosophy,” “linguistic analysis,” “conceptual analysis,” or simply “Oxford philosophy.” Although it was centered in Oxford, by the end of the 1950s philosophers based throughout Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other Englishspeaking former British colonies were publishing work debating the philosophical (...) concerns of the movement and reflecting its distinctive style of thinking and writing. By the mid-1960s, however, this way of doing philosophy was already in decline at Oxford, and by the mid-1970s the philosophical climate at Oxford University had become more or less typical of philosophy departments elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Ordinary language philosophy is now a historical movement, rather than an active force in contemporary philosophical discussion. In many respects, it is useful to think of philosophical movements as intellectual fashions, not unlike changing fashions in architecture or clothing. The question of what accounted for the rise and fall of a particular philosophical fashion is of historical and sociological interest, and the methodology developed to answer the question should be of general applicability in the study of other intellectual or academic fashions, such as the current dominance of “Theory” in English studies, or the period of “Behaviorism” in theoretical approaches to experimental psychology. So it should be of fairly widespread interest if we can develop a method of accounting for the relatively rapid spread of Oxford philosophy beyond its home base, and for its eventual decline as a force in philosophical thought. In this paper, then, I shall be pursuing answers to these questions. To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a movement, in the sense that, say, Phenomenology and Logical Positivism were philosophical movements? To the extent that there was a recognizable movement, what factors account for its decline during the 1960s and 70s? (shrink)

Stipulating universal propositions with a ceteris paribus clause is normal practice in science and especially in economics. Yet there are several problems associated with the use of ceteris paribus clauses in theorising and in policy matters. This paper first investigates three questions: how can ceteris paribus clauses be non-vacuous? How can ceteris paribus laws be true? And how can they help in formulating successful policy interventions in a diversity of contexts? It turns out that ceteris paribus clauses are not always (...) used legitimately. They are meant to fence off a theory from disturbing factors, but economists who do not specify the clause well enough tend to fence variables in rather than off. In such cases, it would be better to use theoretical abstraction, which is something very different from the use of ceteris paribus clauses. However, abstract theorising conceptually leads one away from the concrete detail of real world situations in which policies take place. Hence, a fourth question arises: how can policy interventions be properly designed on the basis of abstract laws? To answer this question, I defend interdisciplinarity in concept choice. (shrink)