This is the lightly revised text of my commentary/response to David Carr’s keynote address, “Phenomenology of Crisis,” at the 2024 meeting of the Husserl Circle.

Philosophers' reflections on history have been dominated for decades by two themes: representation and memory. On both of these accounts, historical inquiry is divided by a certain gap from what it seeks to find or wants to know, and its activity is seen by philosophers as that of bridging this gap. Against this background, the concept of experience, in spite of its apparent rootedness in the present, can be revived as a means of thinking about our connection to the past. (...) After examining variants on the concept of experience, with special attention to its temporality, I argue in this essay that experience can be said to furnish a connection to the past that underlies both memory and representation. (shrink)

Time is a necessary element in understanding AI art. Firstly, time reveals the historical process by which art-theoretical predicates move from the unmarked to the marked, which can thus be utilized as a defense for arguing the legitimacy of AI art as art. Furthermore, AI art should be seen as a “new” art that is temporally ahead of the descriptive forms of art theory. Secondly, time provides a unique interpretation of AI artworks’ characteristics and aesthetic experience. The absence of experience, (...) the de-depth of AI artworks, and the “short experience/short memory” aesthetic mode of the masses are closely linked to the scarcity of time in an age of acceleration. Finally, time reflects the loss of “aura” and the new end of art that AI art may bring about. Time provides a defense and explanation of AI art, as well as a perspective for reflecting on the development of art in contemporary times. (shrink)

I present some aspects of Sein und Zeit’s phenomenology of possibility as a key feature of Heidegger’s theoretical confrontation with the crisis of European culture. I draw from paragraphs 73-74 for an inquiry into the relation between possibility and historicity within the structure of the Dasein. Specifically, I consider the concept of repetition in light of Heidegger’s idea that authentic historicity is to be grounded in temporality. Many interpreters found the concept of repetition to be the mark of a (...) conservative conception of history. However, I argue that this is not the case. The concrete act of repetition involves all moments of the temporal horizon – even the future. If we can find our concrete possibilities of action only within our contingent historical situation, the act of repetition is always also a decision for a certain contingent future. This future is radically unpredictable. It is neither identical to the (repeated) possibility of the past, nor definable through rigid normative laws or dogmatic political positions. I then examine the concept of being-towards-death as a heuristic instrument for the task of historical decision. I argue that this ontological structure allows for a critical use of Sein und Zeit’s fundamental ontology. By deciding towards our death, we decide towards the entirety of our existence. This decision is a possible response to the crisis of culture: in front of the rationalization, the atomization and disenchantment of our experience of the world, we can react by perpetually trying to invent new possible forms of reconciliation between the values of our historical Gemeinschaft and the essential novelty of the future. I conclude by presenting Richir’s Phénoménologie et Institution symbolique as an elaboration of this suggestion and as a path for a possible renewal of Heidegger’s critical phenomenology of possibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Three Moments in the Crisis of Exemplarity: Boccaccio-Petrarch, Montaigne, and CervantesKarlheinz StierleIn his recent book History as Topic Peter von Moos denies that there was any crisis for the exemplum in the Renaissance. 1 He strongly argues against my essay on “History as exemplum,” where I pointed out that in Montaigne, as earlier in Boccaccio, the pragmatic form of exemplum is put into question. 2 My main interest in (...) this essay, however, was not to mark a break between Middle Ages and Renaissance but to understand the way in which the correlation between sententia and exemplum was transformed into a more complex relation between moral reflection and particular case. Undoubtedly, since Valerius Maximus and his Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri, there has always been, as in John of Salisbury’s Policratius, the possibility of questioning the exemplary truth of the exemplum by opposing it to a never-ending wealth of counter-examples. This, however, never puts into question the idea of exemplarity itself. The validity of the exemplum as a rhetorical form of narration that tends towards its own conceptual or ideological structure has an anthropological basis. It presupposes that over time, there is more analogy in human experience than diversity, or that in all situations of civil and political life the pole of equality is stronger than that of difference.Boccaccio’s novella is precisely the narrative form that puts this anthropological basis into question. Each novella in the Decameron is essentially a [End Page 581] particular variant of a more general conceptual scheme. The stress of narration, however, is not on the scheme itself but on the autonomy of the variant. Basically the novella is a form of rewriting in the mode of retelling, thus bringing an elementary narration to higher complexity. 3 Each of the “vari casi,” mostly of love-affairs, is a confrontation of exemplarity and contingency. It is the power of contingency or fortuna that brings forth the specific particularity of each novella. The art of the writer Boccaccio, whose primary fiction is oral story-telling, consists in giving aesthetic evidence to this particularity. Reading, not listening, is the form of reception that corresponds to this structure. That Boccaccio adds the other title “Il Prencipe Galeotto” to the Decameron is an allusion to Dante’s Divine Commedy where in the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca (Inf. V), Galeotto becomes the personification of the allegory of reading and its seduction.Contingency, or, in Boccaccio’s own medieval terms, fortuna, is the real poet of the novella. That is why the most important scenes of the novellas are those where the power of contingency comes to light: at the sea and in the city. The particular shape of novella, which results from a balance between contingency and significant configuration, emerges from contingency itself. Its configuration is a particular case of contingency, one that by its immanent structural elegance is aesthetically gratifying. It nevertheless leaves open the question whether there might not be a power of a superior kind behind contingency. Because there is an ambiguity between contingency and sense, the exemplary status of each story is, ironically, placed in question. Contingency overcomes exemplarity; however, it never triumphs definitely. The impact on the exemplum by contingency not only gives to each narrative case its difference or even autonomy, it also opens up a new temporal dimension. The exemplum seems to move in an essential time where all time-aspects are controlled and functionalized by a dominating conceptual structure. In the novella time becomes a primary structure. “Or avviene che” is the narrative formula for this new quality of narrative time, becoming a time of disruption and instability where things and situations may change in a moment for the better or for the worse.I would like to illustrate the structure of the Boccaccian novella by at least one exemplary case. Almost in the middle of the book—which means in the middle of its temporal space of ten days—we find the novella of Federigo degli Alberighi, considered to be one of Boccaccio’s finest (V, 9). Federigo, in a world of merchants and trade, is the perfect nobleman who ruins himself by his... (shrink)

IT IS COMMON for critics of Kant's ethical theory to point out that he presents a distinctly ahistorical conception of the structure of moral experience and to conclude that this evident lack of historical understanding seriously vitiates his attempt to grasp the "universal" principles of morality. This objection is generally supported by an appeal to the evidence supplied by the study of anthropology and history. Both of these disciplines attest to the wide variety of moral codes and beliefs that characterize (...) different societies at different periods in their history; moreover, they confirm the possibility of significant innovation and development in the conceptual schemes that are embodied in respective moralities. In light of this diversity the Kantian program of analyzing the invariant presuppositions contained in the "moral knowledge of ordinary human reason" may be considered misguided, because it neglects the internal connection between historically specific cultural practices and "ordinary" moral convictions. (shrink)

Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma by Sarah Clift explores alternatives to the linear temporality of modern historiography through an examination of canonical philosophies of history, memory and identity. Close readings of John Locke and G.W.F. Hegel are set alongside explorations of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Maurice Blanchot, in order to set the book's exploration of philosophical modernity in the context of contemporary interest in finitude, identity and the temporalities of trauma.

In the early decades of the twentieth century the experience of time as crisis became the catalyst for a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between historical materialism and idealism, leading to the rejection of simplistic mechanical concepts of historical time. This reorientation represents a turning point in the history of European ideas, clearly evident in the work of two major thinkers of this period, usually associated with opposing political ideologies: the Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin and the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. (...) Based on a conceptual framework borrowed partly from Reinhart Koselleck, this article explains how the experience of acute crisis led both thinkers to develop a new understanding of historical time, which shows surprising parallels. Both authors used the reorientation in the relationship between idealism and materialism to criticize positivist approaches to the analysis of historical change and to reject deterministic accounts of the future. (shrink)

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second (...) part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. The third section (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time - characterized by the pervasiveness of AI - the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action. (shrink)

This article explores the Foucauldian analysis of the linkage between temporality and politics, addressing mainly two loci of Foucault’s production: the assessment of the post-WWII ordoliberal experience in The Birth of Biopoliticsand the Iran reportage for “Corriere Della Sera”. The article emphasizes the relevance of Foucault’s assessment of ordoliberal Germany for contemporary studies on neoliberalism and inscribes Foucault in a wider tradition of thought on the relevance of history and temporality for the comprehension of political dynamics. In TBoB, (...) Foucault offered a prescient analysis of neoliberal temporality and its de-politicizing effects. In his view, ordoliberal theorists and politicians sought to ground political legitimacy in the economy itself, giving birth to a political-economic “double circuit” which did away with history and made political consensus “permanent” and automatic. The connection between neoliberalism, the re-structuring of state sovereignty, and temporality will be highlighted. Furthermore, by analyzingthe almost-coeval Iranian reportages and the eulogy for Clavel, the article further investigates Fou-cault’s reflection on the link between temporality, politics,and subjectivation processes. If the anal-ysis of ordoliberal temporality in TBoB describes a linkage between de-temporalization and de-politicization, the reportages will be highlighted as a possible “pars construens” –as a way to reinstate the possibility of political action through the appeal to different ways to experience tem-porality. The article concludes that Foucault’s sparse comments on temporality can be read as an attempt, albeit not fully developed, not only to envision the de-politicizing effects of marketization but also to envisage new, re-politicizing modes of experiencing temporality and history. (shrink)

El concepto de experiencia es central en la obra de Benjamin, como atestigua la multiplicidad de trabajos académicos que intenta esclarecerlo. Así, la crítica benjaminiana al concepto kantiano de experiencia, la posibilidad de hacer una experiencia con el pasado que interrumpa el curso de la historia, la potencialidad de la experiencia estética en el marco de la crisis de sus soportes tradicionales y el reconocimiento de la experiencia religiosa son algunos de los ámbitos problemáticos en los que la apelación al (...) concepto de experiencia resulta ineludible. En este marco, la crisis o el empobrecimiento de la experiencia en el siglo XX es uno de los problemas centrales de los que es necesario dar cuenta para intentar esclarecer qué entiende Benjamin por experiencia. Este trabajo, por lo tanto, se centró en este diagnóstico trabajando, en primer lugar, con aquellos textos en los que Benjamin se ha referido más explícitamente a este fenómeno y evaluando, asimismo, algunas interpretaciones actuales, deteniéndose en el debate acerca de si la crisis diagnosticada por Benjamin permite vislumbrar una cierta reconfiguración de la experiencia o nos condena a pensar en su absoluta imposibilidad. Sostenemos, de la mano de las lecturas de Didi-Huberman y Déotte, que en su propuesta late la posibilidad de aprovechar la pobreza de experiencias para alojar y explorar las experiencias que nuestro tiempo histórico hace posibles. (shrink)

This text analyses how generative AI systems are being employed in current artistic practice to question certain historical visual narratives, creating representations that challenge some conventional perceptions of the past and thus opening up new perspectives on the experience of temporality. In this regard, special emphasis will be placed on some artistic projects based on generative historical photography practices. These are works that develop new ways around ‘archival aesthetics’ (Sekula in October 39:3–64 1986; Buchloh in Deep storage. collecting, storing (...) and archiving in art [Exhibition catalog]. P.S.1, Nueva York, 1999; Guasch in Arte y archivo, 1920-2010. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades. Akal, Madrid, 2015, etc.) by producing visual archives that do not exist or are alternatives to others. We will therefore analyse works that critically examine how these generative systems can contribute to a revision and re-evaluation of the past, as well as to the problematisation of the ways in which photography has been used for the historical record. These poetics invite subtle reflections on the role of the visual archive in the processes of shaping subjectivity and personal and communal identity. In the final part of the text, we will deal with the study of some artists who, through appropriationist strategies and remakes assisted by generative AI models, revise artistic works from the past, specifically from the photoconceptualism of the 1970s. In these strategies, the thematisation of the relations between photographic register and temporality also plays a leading role. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought that time should be taken seriously in one way or another. George P. Adams (1882-1961) argued that the past, present and future are all real but only the present is actual. I call this theory ‘actualist eternalism’. In this paper, I articulate his novel brand of eternalism as one piece of his metaphysical system and I explain how he argued for the view in light of the best explanations of temporal (...) experience and the present. I argue that his exploitation of analogies between time and modality offer some lessons for current debates about time such as the importance of providing a temporal epistemology. I also extract what I call the temporal boundary problem and argue that it gives rise to an unaddressed challenge for presentists and growing block theorists. (shrink)

This paper is a study of the origins of Leo Strauss's thought, arguing that its early development must be understood in the context of the philosophy of religion of late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. More specifically, it shows that Strauss's early works were written against the background of Kantian philosophy and post-Kantian accounts of religious experience, and that his turn towards medieval law as a topic and ideal was precipitated by the critique of those accounts by radical Protestant theologians writing (...) in the post-World War I era of crisis. Ironically, then, Strauss's investment in premodern Judaism—and his related rejection of modern philosophy—had important Christian origins. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to offer a reading of Reinhart Koselleck’s work as an ally of critical theory. My contention is that, despite customary accusations of Koselleck being an anti-Enlightenment historian detrimental to social criticism and emancipatory politics, his investigations on the semantic fabric of modern society may actually expand our resources for the critique of domination. In order to make this argument plausible, I reconstruct some antinomies that are at the basis of Koselleck’s work (state/society, language/reality, (...) experience/expectation) and discuss their critical potential. This analysis shows that, rather than a rejection of the spirit of critique, Koselleck contributes to the temporalization of the practice of critique as such: namely, a clarification of the contradictions and potentials of a reflexive practice imbued in the struggle between the need to comprehend the world as it is and the right to experiment with other forms of life. (shrink)

The founding of the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Embryology in 1913, alongside its systematization of embryo staging, contributed to the mechanization of developmental stages of embryo growth in the early 20th century. For a brief period in the middle of the century, attention to the detailed interrelation between embryo development and time made pre-existing ideas about pregnancy ends less determinative of ideas about that developmental course. However, the turn to the genetic scale led to the disappearance of this attention, replaced (...) by a sense of biological life as seamlessly scripted. This study examines the history of what I refer to as temporal attention: attention to the live, unfolding potentialities within vital matter. The reintroduction of temporal attention to discussions of development allows us to more fully consider non-human vitality and the experiences of beings that house or otherwise intimately intersect with that vital tissue, regardless of outcomes. (shrink)

This paper considers recent experiments in art and artificial intelligence that crystallize around training algorithms to generate artworks based on datasets derived from the Western art historical canon. Over the last decade, a shift towards the rejection of canonicity has begun to take shape in art historical discourse. At the same time, algorithmically enabled practices in the US and Europe have emerged that entrench the Western canon as a locus and guarantor of aesthetic value. Operating within the epistemic framework of (...) a “view from nowhere,” this tendency in generative art inherits the coloniality of both art history and artificial intelligence. Producing “art histories from nowhere,” this tendency conflates the conceptual category of visual art with the histories of Western cultural production. It reproduces a set of aesthetic values that entrench the mythology of the artist-genius and his imputed whiteness and masculinity; the extolment of innovation and novelty as self-evident virtues; disembodied Cartesian models of knowing and sensing; and the erasure of contributions that have been occluded from canonical visibility. As we encounter systems trained on particular visions of art history and of the artist, how might we remain attentive to the specific lens through which they are taught to see? This essay addresses that question by bringing the coloniality of recent experiments into view, bridging data feminisms and decolonial studies to formulate alternative visions of encounters between art and AI. (shrink)

This article applies Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology to the field of history. It suggests interpreting historical experience along the lines of the logic of pathos and response. Using Husserl’s introductory chapter of The Crisis of the European Sciences and his autobiographical remarks as a case study, the article outlines a concept of diachronic responsiveness, which provides a phenomenological understanding of historical phenomena such as legacy, inheritance or witnessing. In particular, it analyses the temporal deferment lying at the heart of our notion (...) of legacy, which Waldenfels captures as ‘diastasis’. Assuming that the human being must be understood as the ‘responsive being’ (Waldenfels), the article provides means to grasp the implications of this claim for our understanding of the concept of historical experience in contrast to approaches relying on hermeneutics or narrativity. (shrink)

The crisis of representation and the academic study of religion -- Phenomenology, consciousness, essence : critical surveys of the history of the study of religion -- Individual men in their solitude? : a critique of William James' individualistic approach to religion in the varieties of religious experience -- The concept of essence-and-manifestation in the history of the study of religion -- The concept of development in continental geisteswissenschaft and religionswissenshaft : before and after Darwin -- The transcendental pretense and Eliade's (...) humanist hermeneutics towards a Nietzschean semiotics of religion -- Post-structural (dis)placements : genealogy, religious studies, and the problematics of historical identity -- Religion as the structuring of asymmetrical relations : towards a definition -- Towards a semiotic theory of religion. (shrink)

The Phenomenological Mind, by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, is part of a recent initiative to show that phenomenology, classically conceived as the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and not as mere introspection, contributes something important to cognitive science. (For other examples, see “References” below.) Phenomenology, of course, has been a part of cognitive science for a long time. It implicitly informs the works of Andy Clark (e.g. 1997) and John Haugeland (e.g. 1998), and Hubert Dreyfus explicitly uses it (e.g. (...) 1992). But where the former use phenomenology in the background as broad context and Dreyfus uses it primarily (though not exclusively) as a critique of conventional AI, Gallagher and Zahavi wish to indicate a positive and constructive place for it within cognitive science. They do not recommend that we simply accept pronouncements of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau‐Ponty and apply them to questions of cognition, but that we use revised forms of phenomenology to illuminate dimensions of cognitive experience that are missing in current research. The book is presented as an “introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science” written from a phenomenological perspective. It seeks to justify the use of phenomenology in cognitive science by showing what kinds of questions it asks and answers, the variety of uses to which it has recently been put and the fruitfulness of some of its findings. The catalog of topics, for the most part, matches other introductions to the philosophy of mind, such as questions of method, consciousness, perception, intentionality, embodiment, action, agency and other minds. One issue presented here that is not generally dealt with in existing philosophy of mind and cognitive science texts is temporality, a mainstay of the continental tradition. After an introductory chapter that places phenomenology in the context of other approaches, the book lays out the main tenets of phenomenological method. Here, one encounters expected components of phenomenology: the epoché (described below), phenomenological reduction, eidetic variation, and so on. This traditional fare is soon followed by some potential surprises, namely, attempts to “naturalize” phenomenology, a few attempts to formalize it, and the emergence of ‘neurophenomenology’. Each of these is a bit surprising because Husserl was a vocal critic of naturalism, seeing transcendental phenomenology as an alternative to the empirical study of consciousness. He was also skeptical about the possibilities of mathematizing phenomenology. Gallagher and Zahavi acknowledge these points, but since they are not repeating history or undertaking exegesis, strict adherence to canonical phenomenology is not required. Naturalizing phenomenology means recognizing that “the phenomena it studies are part of nature and are therefore also open to empirical investigation” (p.. (shrink)

Michael Jackson demonstrates the significance of a phenomenology of time through a multifaceted consideration of the gap between our cultural representations of temporality and our experience. Jackson juxtaposes philosophy, history, and ethnography in an attempt to do justice to the bewildering multiplicity of temporal experience.

Phenomenological questions differ from those of metaphysics and epistemology. Regarding history, rather than asking: What is history? Or: How do we know history? a phenomenology of history inquires into history as a phenomenon, and into the experience of the historical. How does history present itself to us, how does it enter our lives, and what are the forms of experience in which it does so? The purpose of this essay is to outline a distinctively phenomenological approach to history. History is (...) usually associated with social existence and its past, and so this essay will ask about the experience of the social world and of its temporality. Experience in this context connotes not just observation but also involvement and interaction. We experience history not just in the social world around us but also in our own engagement with it. Philosophers have asked both metaphysical and epistemological questions about history, and some of the best-known philosophies of history have resulted from this questioning. The phenomenological approach is different, but it is not unrelated to these traditional philosophical questions. The later part of this essay will turn in some detail to how phenomenology, though distinct, may connect to these questions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel by Caroline EdwardsMark SchmittCaroline Edwards. Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 277 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9781108712392.The development of the novel as a literary form is closely linked to the representational mode of realism and how it can convey the human experience of time. That the novel distinguishes itself substantially from earlier forms of literature in how it (...) attempts to capture temporality through means of literary realism has been acknowledged ever since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). As such, the novel form underwent dramatic changes throughout the periods of modernity and postmodernity, with modernist and postmodernist techniques of representation mirroring shifts in the temporal experience. But how can the contemporary novel—a category itself loaded with implication and definitional problems—of the twenty-first century confront the particular representational challenges of its time? This is the question that Caroline Edwards addresses in her study Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Edwards is concerned with the wider repercussions of the post-postmodernist notion of the Fukuyaman thesis of the “end of history” and the profound challenges to this thesis in the face of the post-9/11 unfolding of the twenty-first century. The temporal experience of this century is marked by what Edwards calls “non-contemporaneity,” that is, a “political, and even ontological uncertainty” (9). In the context of contemporary literature, the resulting “temporal disjointedness that marks our experience in the twenty-first century” has “given rise to different expressions of the unevenness of the contemporary, at the level of novelistic structure, prose style, generic sampling and non-mimetic interventions into otherwise realist narratives and juxtaposed timescales” (9). The notion of non-contemporaneity is drawn from Ernst Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit, which Edwards considers to be “productive to thinking about the complexity of [End Page 595] utopian times and the different kinds of pasts and futures that circulate within our own present moment of contemporaneity, which is inescapably non-contemporaneous with itself ” (30). Edwards considers this noncontemporaneity as a prevalent temporal register in contemporary British fiction that speak to the crises of temporality associated with a range of political, social, and economic events and processes that have marked the first decades of the twenty-first century. The seemingly natural unfolding of the “the linear progressive time of neoliberalism” (8), what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” has increasingly been put into question, not least due to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (158). Similarly, Edwards identifies the 2016 Brexit referendum as symptomatic of a nationalism that must, following Michael Gardiner, always appear to be “out of time” (8). Such crises are thus indicative of anachronistic unevenness and conflicting temporalities. Consequently, a literary fiction that wants to adequately represent these struggles with temporality cannot confine itself to the pitfalls of literary realism, but it would be equally ill-suited by resorting to postmodernist metafiction and irony. Rather, as Edwards contends, the twenty-first-century fictions that she discusses attempt to complicate realist modes by using disruptive and experimental narrative techniques that amount to “non-mimetic experiments with narrative voice and structure” and “delinearised” temporalities (4). With this approach, Edwards argues, these texts interrogate the present as unstable.The four main chapters of Edwards’s book proceed by first establishing the dominant philosophical and theoretical concepts underlying her hypothesis. Chapter 2 (“Reading Fictions of the Not Yet”) is a theoretical and methodological chapter and offers an in-depth engagement with theories of temporality and narratology. Edwards’s aim here is to advocate for an updating of conventional narratology to account for the multilayered narrative experiments with time since modernism and especially in contemporary fiction. Her approach to theorization and analysis is inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) in the decision to focus on close readings of a small number of primary texts and read them as texts or aesthetic artifacts that develop “theories of their own” (29). The chapter offers an in-depth engagement with Bloch’s philosophy of utopianism and his concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit.Another cornerstone for Edwards’s theory and method is the work of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guest Editor's Introduction:A Moment for KairosTina SkouenHow does one describe a crucial moment, a moment that calls for action? What kinds of time are opened, disclosed, or foreclosed in such moments? This section explores a concept that has a long history in rhetoric and philosophy, but which is urgently called for now, in a time that many think of as critical, catastrophic, or even apocalyptic. Changes in the economy, (...) climate, and the state of our democracies demand urgent attention, and while people disagree on the course to be taken, there is a sense that—this is it!—now is the time. The concept of kairos (from ancient Greek καιρός) comprises both a critical time and a perfect opportunity; it is the right moment to act, even though the word could also be interpreted in a more general sense as referring to the issue of right timing. Considered as "one of the most untranslatable of Greek words," kairos is perhaps related to the verb kurō, "to meet" or "meet accidentally," as when an arrow meets a target, suggesting that there is a spatial component in the temporal kairos.1 The spatial dimension shines through in the earliest uses of the term discussed in both SeungJung Kim's article on ancient Greek visual arts and Robert Sullivan's article on Isocrates (436–338 BCE). According to Sullivan's survey, Isocrates most often employs the word to refer to a specific situation, occasion, state of affairs, or set of circumstances.How do you recognize, let alone seize, this kind of moment, though? The best-known depiction of this difficulty is a portrait of Kairos personified that dates back to Lysippos in the fourth century BCE, reconstructed visually in three dimensions in Kim's essay. In Greek mythology Kairos is the god of golden opportunities, which (as we all know!) tend to pass by too quickly. The portrait shows a winged figure with a flowing forelock that ideally gives you something to hold on to. I like to imagine that if you [End Page 267] manage to arrest this passing instant, time itself comes to an abrupt halt, which throws Kairos's hair out in front of his face.Of course, people do not necessarily see it as positive when someone appears to have captured the moment. At the kairos symposium hosted by art historian Barbara Baert in Brussels in October 2018, W. J. T. Mitchell held up a picture of President Donald Trump's sculpted forelock to illustrate that it all depends on the perspective. Turning the familiar Greek portrait into an image of the opportunist, Mitchell reminded all of us that had gathered to celebrate the legacy of kairos in iconographic, philosophical, theological, semantic, historical, and anthropological studies, of the ethical issues arising in such moments. The question of moral accountability is bound to come up, whether one takes kairos to refer to the act of seizing the moment, involving some form of decision, or to the moment itself, the kairos, which some might claim just seized upon them and carried them away.As Debra Hawhee and Erik Charles White before her have argued, kairos does not seem to be confined by the subjective reason operating in a "rhetorical situation," but it depends on "the forces pushing on the encounter," in addition to instinct and intuition, and possibly on habitual impulses springing from experience (Hawhee 2002, 24–25; White 1987; reconsidered by Brod 2021). Audiences may also have a significant role to play, as Kermit Campbell underscores in his discussion of the symbiosis of call and response in African American churches and his reflection on how Martin Luther King's speech at the 1963 March on Washington replied to a call: "Tell them about the dream, Martin."The moment of kairos may appear spontaneous and deliberate, both at the same time. The classical rhetoricians in fact insisted on the value of preparing for the unexpected, as we try to do in our current crisis management plans. In his essay, Sullivan documents the incredibly nuanced instructions Isocrates gave on how to exploit a prospective opening in all sorts of civic settings. From a rhetorical viewpoint, kairos can appear both as... (shrink)

The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the 19th century. Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, (...) especially through the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term. (shrink)

A common approach in the Philosophy of Time, particularly in enquiry into the metaphysical nature of time, has been to examine various aspects of the nature of human temporal experience, and ask what, if anything, can be discerned from this about the nature of time itself. Many human traits have explanations that reside in facts about our evolutionary history. We ask whether features of human temporal experience might admit of such evolutionary explanations. We then consider the implications of any proposed (...) evolutionary explanations for the veridicality of these experiences, and for the truth-value of folk beliefs about time that are based on them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Crisis of AuthorityBuddhist History for Buddhist PractitionersRita M. GrossAs a Buddhist scholar-practitioner who is also a feminist, I have multiple loyalties. The potential for conflict between different standards could be great, and I have often been asked whether my fundamental loyalty is to Buddhist standards and Buddhist teachers, to the values of feminism, or to standards of academic scholarship. This is a question I always refuse to answer (...) because I myself do not experience any irreconcilable conflicts among these loyalties. Nor is this lack of conflict due to my keeping these three interests separate in my thinking or my work. Clearly, I have been more than explicit in the way that I have brought feminist concerns into my writings on Buddhism, my work as a Buddhist dharma teacher, and other issues I have taken up as an academic scholar. Though most scholars would be much less familiar with how I teach when I function as a Buddhist teacher at a meditation center, I am well known in those circles as someone who brings nonsectarian, feminist, and academic perspectives to Buddhists teachings. Finally, I was “out” as a Buddhist practitioner in academia long before the current younger generation of Buddhist studies scholars who do not hide their Buddhist identities came to the fore. I was also explicit about the fact that I was using Buddhist ideas as tools with which to think about various contemporary issues long before the new movement to regard Buddhist critical and constructive thought as academically respectable emerged.The fact that it seemed natural to me to combine these various concerns in my work does not mean that others approved of these unorthodox combinations. I suspect that in worldly terms, I could have been far more successful had I not insisted on blending these concerns in my work. Certainly in my generation, feminists did not do well in the academy, as is witnessed by the fact that almost none of those pioneering feminists ever secured a prestigious position from which they could influence the next generation of scholars. Nor is there a place in the academy for Buddhist critical and constructive thinkers; neither theological schools nor departments of Buddhist studies want to hire us. I have also faced frequent marginalization in the Buddhist world, both for being an academic and for being a feminist—though what success I have in [End Page 59] that world is also due to the unique perspectives I bring to Buddhist teaching as an academic and a feminist. Finally, as one of the very few Buddhists among the feminist theologians, I have frequently been extremely frustrated by an establishment that is far more conventional, Western, and Christian than it thinks it is.In this paper, I have been asked to focus on issues of authority in Buddhism, and I will focus specifically on issues and experiences related to working within Buddhist systems as a Buddhist thinker and teacher. This paper will consist almost entirely of an “insider’s” perspective on Buddhism and authority, rather than a paper looking at Buddhism from the outside, though this insider is a scholar-practitioner, not a practitioner who gets all her information about Buddhism only from Buddhist sources and Buddhist teachers. Needless to say, as a Buddhist critical-constructive thinker who has taken on several nontraditional issues, I have my own tales of brushes with Buddhist authority. One of the themes I wish to follow in this paper is a discussion of how I have managed to say what I want to say, even when it contradicts traditional Buddhist understandings, while also managing to do a great deal of dharma teaching and attain status as a relatively senior teacher in two Tibetan Buddhist organizations in North America. In fact, very few Westerners who practice in a Tibetan lineage have a higher title than the title “Lopon,” which is much better known to Westerners by its Sanskrit equivalent, ācārya. This title was given to me by Her Eminence Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche. (Westerners practicing other forms of Buddhism have far more teaching authority than is generally the case for Westerners practicing a Tibetan form of Buddhism.) Nor have I survived as a... (shrink)

Art creates a specific relation to time and especially to the present moment. It opens the experience of the present towards its indeterminacy and emergence. On the contrary, AI does not know the present. It recognizes only the past and future. We could even say that artificial neural networks do not “know” time at all. Instead, they know only logical functions which process patterns of information. Yet, what makes time “time” is genuine transformation, which happens outside of the abstract realm (...) of logic. I support these observations by analysing two works of art: Bill Viola’s The Raft (2004) and Hito Steyerl’s This Is the Future (2019). While artistic creation opens up the intervals “in-between seconds” for an unpredictable and transformative event to occur (The Raft), AI closes these intervals and fastens the future into predictability calculated on the basis of past data (This Is the Future). Although this machinic operation makes the present even more unpredictable and prone to catastrophes, its potential for transformation seems to be withdrawn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:François H. Lapointe PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC SURVEY ThL· survey is limited to articles written in English that have appeared in journals published between 1 January 1974 and 31 December 1976. Abbott, Don. "Marxist Influences on the Rhetorical Theory of Kenneth Burke." Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 217-33. Abel, Lionel. "Jacques Derrida: His 'Difference' With Metaphysics." Salmagundi no. 25 (1974): 3-21. Adamowski, T. H. "Character and Consciousness: D. (...) H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, and Jean-Paul Sartre." University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 31 1-34. Adams, D. J. "Style and Social Ideas in Jacques le fataliste." Studies in Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century 124 (1974): 231-48. Adams, Hazard. "Contemporary Ideas of Literature: Terrible Beauty or Rough Beast?" Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 349-77. Adorno, Theodor W. "Lyric Poetry and Society." Telos no. 20 (1974): 56-71. Ages, Arnold. "Bonald and the Jews." Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa 44 (1974): 32-43. Allen, Diogenes. "The Experience of Existence: Jean-Paul Sartre and Iris Murdoch." International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974): 181-87. Allen, Marcus. "Character Development in the Oreste of Voltaire and Les Mouches of Jean-Paul Sartre." CLA Journal 18 (1974): 1-21. Alter, Jean. "A (Terrorist) System of the Novel." Diacritics 6 (1976): 10-15. Altieri, Charles. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." MLN 91 (1976): 1397-1423. Altieri,Charles. "Wordsworth's 'Preface' as Literary Theory." Criticism 18 (1976): 122-146. [On Wordworth and Wittgenstein.] Ames, Van Meter. "Art for Art's Sake Again?" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1975): 303-307. Appleman, Philip. "The Dread Factor: Eliot, Tennyson, and the Shaping of Science." Columbia Forum, N. S. 3 (1974): 32-38. Armstrong, Paul B. " E. M. Forster's Howard's End: The Existential Crisis of the Liberal Imagination." Mosaic 8 (1974): 183-99. Arnold, A. James. "La Condition humaine as Nietzschean Tragedy." Mélanges Malraux Miscellany 6 (1974): 15-24. 366 François H. Lapointe367 Aronson, Ronald. "L'Idiot de la famille: The Ultimate Sartre?" Telos no. 20 (1974): 90-107. Arthos, John. "Du Bartas, Petrarch and the Poetry of Deism." Rice University Studies 60 (1974): 1-17. Artz, Johannes. "Newman as Philosopher." International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976): 263-88. Ausmus, Harry J. "Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Language." The Midwest Quarterly 18 (1977): 169-86. Ayala, Francisco. "Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic." Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 395-414. Bakalar, H. Nicholas. "The Cartesian Legacy to the Eighteenth-century Grammarians." MLN 91 (1976): 698-721. Barnes, Hazel. "Apotheosis and Deification in Plato, Nietzsche and Huxley." Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976): 3-24. Baron, Dennis E. "Role Structure and the Language of Literature." Journal of Literary Semantics 4 (1975): 43-52. Barooskian, Vahan D. "The Aesthetics of the Russian Revolutionary Theatre 1917-1921." British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (1975): 99-117. Bart, B. F. "Hypercreativity in Stendhal and Balzac." Nineteenth Century French Studies 3 (1974-75): 18-39. Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6 (1975): 237-72. Bashford, Bruce. "The Rhetorical Method in Literary Criticism." Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 133-46. Bass, Alan. "Time and the Witch: Femininity, Metapsychology and the Temporality of the Unconscious." MLN 91 (1976): 871-912. Bassett, Sharon. "Towards a Critique of Romanticism: Wordsworth, Pater and the 'Anima Mundi'." Criticism 17 (1975): 262-75. Batchelor, R. "Literature, Society and the Concept of Revolt." European Studies Review 5 (1975): 395-427. Battin, M. Pabst. "Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics, Part 1." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974): 155-70, and Part II in Ibid. 33 (1975): 293-302. Bauer, George. "Sartre and the 'Sugars' of History." L'Esprit Créateur 15 (1975): 377-86. Baumgarten, Murray. "The Historical Novel: Some Postulates." Clio 4 (1975): 173-82. Beauchamp, Gorman. "Gulliver's Return to the Cave: Plato's Republic and Book IV of Gulliver's Travels." The Michigan Academician 7 (1974): 201-10. Bennett, Jonathan. "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn." Philosophy 48 (1974): 123-34. Benzon, William. "Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics." MLN 91 (1976): 952-82. Bergonzi, Bernard. "A Grid of Codes: Views of Structuralism." Encounter 45 (1975): 52-58. Berry, Wanda Warren. "The... (shrink)

The paper describes a highly specific Italian action research experience, connected with the trade unions, going through different phases from the 1970s to the present day. The journey is not only a journey through time but also through different approaches. It ranges from the initial experience focusing on health and safety problems at the workplace involving the workers as co-designers of new working environments to today’s search conference experience. For each phase there is a full description and comment on the (...) methods utilised by the research group. The main methodological shift described in the paper is the one from discussion groups, based on Bion’s thinking, to the search conferences, based on Emery’s line of thinking. Both are oriented to the subjectivity of the people involved, although in the discussion group experience the research groups considered the subjectivity of the people involved as the subject of the observation. The researchers’ aim of was to acquire a reliable knowledge of what was at stake and to pass it on to the union that organised the research in order to promote actions. Hence, the action-research circuit is based upon different actors and the process is integrated only from the point of view of the union. In the search conference experience the researchers are involved in a co-design process and so the action-research circuit is really integrated from the researchers’ perspective; there are, of course, multiple perspectives in this case and this opens up epistemological problems that are not discussed in the paper. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study to provide a structured interpretation of the significance of Michael Oakeshott's critique of the Enlightenment. By seeing the thinker as a 'sceptical idealist’ posing a serious challenge to the intellectual positions informed by the Enlightenment, this book attempts to resolve some of the issues debated by Oakeshott scholars. The author argues that Oakeshott’s famous critique of philosophisme and Rationalism in fact expresses a sense of the crisis of philosophical modernity. Moreover, notwithstanding some recent interpretations, (...) throughout his intellectual career Oakeshott has never altered his analysis of these two themes: philosophy as the persistent re-establishment of completeness by transcending abstractness, and the modes of experience as self-consistent worlds of discourse. To apply this philosophy in his moral and political writings, Oakeshott has redressed an imbalance in favour of the Enlightenment ethical position — ‘the sovereignty of technique’, ‘demonstrative moral truth’, ’the politics of faith’ and ‘enterprise association’ — by revitalising the importance of ‘traditional knowledge’, ‘conversation’, ‘intimation’, ‘the politics of scepticism’ and ‘civil association’. Oakeshott is neither a doctrinal liberal nor a dogmatic conservative, but a philosophical sceptic. Moreover, Oakeshott’s contribution to history not only lies in his effort to transcend the Enlightenment historiographical position — by separating the historical from the naturalised conception of History on which so-called ‘scientific history’ rests — but also in his idealistic solution for the ‘temporal dilemma’ and the ‘epistemic tension’ in history that have long bothered philosophers. (shrink)

In discussing the cultural history of the 19th century, Walter Benjamin diagnosed the emergence of the modern novel and its form of narration as the sign of a fracturing experience. The split in experience is related to the scattering of a homogeneous idea of space and time, constituted especially during the Enlightenment and in the German historicism. Benjamin's claim reflected the fracturing temporality of modern communities as well as the transformations in the understanding of the meaning of tradition. Here, (...) I begin by discussing Benjamin's conceptions of experience and memory in detail. Secondly, I consider his ideas on history in the framework of challenging the new forms of narration. In the end, I consider the loss of a unified community, especially by indicating ways in which the after-modern community reflects the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Jean-François Lyotard's thought. Key Words: Benjamin • community • experience • history • Lyotard • memory • narrative • remembrance • time. (shrink)

« Sous les masques, il n’y a pas de visages, l’homme historique n’a jamais été homme, et pourtant nul homme n’est seul » : notre article s’interroge sur le sens et les enjeux éthiques de cette affirmation merleau-pontyenne énoncée dans la préface de Signes. Partant du caractère énigmatique et très inquiétant de cette thèse et constatant sa résonance avec l’affirmations deleuzienne, dans Différence et répétition, « Les masques ne recouvrent rien, sauf d’autres masques », nous avons voulu explorer la possibilité (...) de prendre pleinement au sérieux la formule merleau-pontyenne et de lui donner l’envergure d’une théorie des simulacres rendue éthiquement féconde. Le contexte, un dialogue avec Sartre et Nizan entre désenchantement, découragement et nouvelles perspectives éthiques et politiques, nous projette d’emblée dans un pensée de l’adversité et des apories indissociables de la rencontre d’autrui. Il permet également d’entrer avec Merleau-Ponty dans la quête d’une théorie éthique et politique de la communauté non exclusive de l’altérité radicale. A partir d’une analyse de la notion de masques et de ses occurrences dans les travaux de Merleau-Ponty, nous montrons que toute image est essentiellement un masque ontologiquement premier, c’est-à-dire qui ne copie ni ne recouvre une réalité plus authentique. La formulation de Signes qui nous intéresse fait d’emblée apparaître la dimension éthiquement dramatique de cette ontologie. Ce qui est en cause est une hyper-crise, une pensée de l’abîme et des ruptures de sens. Comment agir quand tout être est évasif et autre que soi? Nous aimerions montrer que surgit, dans l’oeuvre merleau-pontyenne, une tension entre une première solution pratique centrée sur la foi et une seconde voie « centrée », si l’on peut dire, sur la temporalité tourbillonnaire de l’institution. Ces deux issues pratiques, qui ne sont pas si nettement circonscrites explicitement par Merleau-Ponty, mais se déploient plutôt de texte en texte sous des formes parfois entremêlées, parfois incompatibles, doivent être, selon nous, soigneusement distinguées. La première, la solution de la foi, fait trop peu de cas du caractère trompeur de l’Urdoxa et des dangers d’une action qui ne s’inquiète pas de la mystification et des biais sur lesquels, peut-être, elle repose. La seconde, la voie de l’institution ne prétend plus surmonter le vertige, mais parvient à en faire un atout. Les masques, compris comme essentiellement instituants – en même temps qu’ils éclairent sur le sens de la notion merleau-pontyenne d’institution – peuvent retrouver un rôle éthique : passer de masque en masque sans jamais trouver de visage, autrement dit répondre à côté, c’est répondre tout de même et cela peut même être la meilleure réponse et compréhension possibles puisque les masques euxmêmes, comme institutions, sont des « visées à côté » qui réclament indéfiniment de nouvelles reprises et ont le pouvoir de relier entre elles, dans une structure de dialogue sans fin, des réinstitutions pourtant minées par une opacité à soi et aux autres. Les simulacres peuvent ainsi devenir en tant que tels notre plus grande chance : véhicules d’altérité radicale et de communication pourtant ininterrompue. Cette théorie élaborée à partir des thèses et analyses merleau-pontyennes fait place aux expériences commotionnantes, mais a, en même temps et sans contradiction, le mérite d’insister davantage, sans attendrissement, sur l’heureuse nature de l’être au lieu de déboucher sur la misosophie que développera Deleuze.“Under the masks, there are no faces: historical man has never been man, and yet, no man is alone.” This article questions the meaning and the ethical stakes of this Merleau-Pontian affirmation articulated in the preface of Signs. Beginning with the enigmatic and very worrisome character of this thesis, and while noticing its resonance with Deleuzian affirmations in Difference and Repetition—“masks recover nothing apart from other masks”—we wanted to explore the possibility of taking seriously the Merleau-Pontian formula and to give it meaning as a theory of ethically productive simulacra. The context, a dialogue between Sartre and Nizan regarding disenchantment, despondency and new ethical as well as political perspectives, immediately projects us toward the thought of adversity and the inseparable aporias in the encounter with the Other. Equally, it permits us to enter with Merleau-Ponty into a search for a political and ethical theory of the community that is not exclusive to radical alterity. Starting from an analysis of the concept of masks and its occurrences in the works of Merleau-Ponty, we show that all image is essentially first an ontological mask; that is to say, one that does not copy nor recovers a more authentic reality. The formulation in Signs which interests us immediately reveals the dramatic ethical dimension of this ontology. That which is a cause is a hyper-crisis, a thought of the damage and the rupture of meaning. How does one act when all being is evasive and other than oneself? We would like to show that what surfaces in Merleau-Ponty’s work is a tension between a primary practical solution centered on faith and a second path “centered,” if we can say this, on the turbulent temporality of the institution. These two practical issues, which are not so explicitly circumscribed by Merleau-Ponty, but which rather reveal themselves from text to text in somewhat intermingled and sometimes incompatible forms must be carefully distinguished. The first, the solution of faith, makes too little of the falsifying character of the Urdoxa and the dangers of an action that is not concerned with the mystification and biases on which, perhaps, it rests. The second, the path of the institution, does not attempt to surmount the vertigo, but nevertheless manages to hold the advantage. The masks, understood essentially as “instituted,” which at the same time clarify the meaning of the Merleau-Pontian notion of the institution, are able to rediscover an ethical role: passing from mask to mask without ever uncovering a face or, stated otherwise, responding side by side, is nevertheless a response. Moreover, this might provide an even better response and possible understanding since the masks themselves, as institutions, are proximate viewfinders which indefinitely reclaim new recoveries and which have the ability to link up with each other in a never-ending structure of dialogue regarding “reinstitutions” despite being undermined by the opacity of self and other. The simulacra can also become as they are in themselves a greatest chance: vehicles of radical alterity and communication, but uninterrupted. This theory, elaborated from the theses and analyses of Merleau-Ponty, gives way to experiences of shock, but, at the same time and without contradiction, to the right to insist further, without tenderness, on the happy nature of being instead of opening itself up to the misosophie that Deleuze will develop.“Dietro le maschere non ci sono volti, l’uomo storico non è mai stato uomo, e tuttavia nessun uomo è solo”: il nostro articolo si interroga sul senso e sulla posta in gioco etica di questa affermazione merleau-pontyana che troviamo nella Prefazione a Segni. Partendo dal tratto enigmatico e inquietante di questa tesi, e dalla constatazione della sua risonanza con l’affermazione deleuziana secondo cui “le maschere non ricoprono nulla, se non altre maschere”, abbiamo voluto esplorare la possibilità di prendere sul serio la formula merleau-pontyana ricavandone una teoria dei simulacri eticamente feconda. Il contesto, quello di un dialogo con Sartre e Nizan intorno ai temi del disincanto e delle nuove prospettive etiche e politiche, ci proietta direttamente nello spazio di un pensiero dell’avversità e delle aporie indissociabili dall’incontro con l’altro, e consente parimenti di farci strada con Merleau-Ponty in direzione di un’etica e di una politica della comunità non esclusiva della dimensione dell’alterità radicale. A partire da un’analisi della nozione di maschera e delle sue occorrenze nei testi merleau-pontyani mostriamo che ogni immagine è una maschera ontologicamente prima, che non copia e non ricopre affatto una realtà più autentica. La formulazione richiamata da Segni introduce immediatamente alla dimensione eticamente drammatica di tale ontologia. La sua posta in gioco è quella di un ipercriticismo, di un pensiero dell’abisso e dell’interruzione del senso. Come agire quando ogni essere è evasivo ed è altro rispetto a se stesso? Vorremmo mostrare che a quest’altezza si fa strada nell’opera merleau-pontyana una tensione tra una prima soluzione pratica, affidata alla dimensione della fede, e una seconda via d’uscita “incentrata”, se così si può dire, sulla temporalità spiraliforme dell’istituzione. Questi due esiti pratici, che in Merleau-Ponty non risultano nettamente ed esplicitamente circoscritti, ma si dispiegano di testo in testo dando luogo a sovrapposizioni e al limite a contraddizioni, vanno invece, a nostro avviso, accuratamente distinte. La prima, la soluzione della fede, fa troppo poco spazio al carattere ingannevole dell’Urdoxa e ai pericoli di un’azione che non si preoccupa di farsi carico delle mistificazioni e delle deformazioni su cui essa forse si fonda. La seconda, la soluzione dell’istituzione, non pretende più di oltrepassare la vertigine ma arriva a farne una risorsa. Le maschere, intese come essenzialmente istitutive, facendo luce sulla nozione merleau-pontyana di istituzione vengono a giocare un ruolo etico: passare di maschera in maschera senza mai trovare volti, in altri termini rispondere “a lato”, significa rispondere comunque e forse rispondere nel modo migliore, secondo la migliore comprensione possibile. Poiché le maschere stesse in quanto istituzioni sono delle “visées à côté” che chiamano indefinitiamente a nuove riprese e hanno il potere di legare tra loro in un dialogo senza fine una serie di re-istituzioni inevitabilmente opache a sé e agli altri. I simulacri possono così diventare, proprio in quanto simulacri, la nostra più grande chance: veicoli di alterità radicale e di comunicazione ininterrotta. Questa teoria, elaborata a partire dalle tesi e dalle analisi merleau-pontyane, consente di fare spazio a esperienze di grande momento emotivo, e allo stesso tempo, senza contraddizione, di insistere senza sentimentalismi sulla felice natura dell’essere, evitando infine la “misosophia” a cui approda Deleuze. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Music’s power to express and arouse feelings has been one of its principal attributes from antiquity. While the topic remains prevalent in contemporary discourse, relatively little attention had been given to specifically melancholic expressions in European music. The article examines various stages in western music history vis-à-vis the changing formulations and receptions of melancholy as a cultural phenomenon, from the time it was perceived as a sign of either a physical or a moral problem to later historical periods, when (...) positive and negative views on melancholy intertwined. In this article, I point at an interesting connection between melancholic representations in music works and music’s unique relationship with time. As I show, prevalent conventions of pre-modern music, which manifest cyclical (or ‘theological’) structures of time, keep the listener’s experience simultaneously rooted in the present and floating in eternity. Alternatively, the linear (or ‘teleological’) sense of temporality found in early-modern and modern music works allows for the possibility of ‘looking back’ and experiencing longings. Various diachronic and synchronic temporal sensitivities, which manifest explicit (via titles or texts) or implicit melancholic feelings, are explored. Music’s linearity is shown to provide it a lost past to mourn. (shrink)

People have experienced many forms of temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 crisis. For this study, we collected a rich corpus of reports on the multifaceted experiences of disorientation during the pandemic. In this paper, we study the resulting corpus using a descriptive approach. We identify six emerging themes: temporal rift; temporal vertigo; impoverished time; tunnel vision; spatial and social scaffolding of time; suspended time. We offer a phenomenological analysis of each of the themes. Based on the phenomenological analysis, we draw (...) a key distinction between episodic and existential forms of temporal disorientation, and we argue that the Covid-19 crisis is best conceptualised as a period of suspended time. (shrink)

Concern over the nature of AI is, for the tastes many AI scientists, probably overdone. In this they are like all other scientists. Working scientists worry about experiments, data, and theories, not foundational issues such as what their work is really about or whether their discipline is methodologically healthy. However, most scientists aren’t in a field that is approximately fifty years old. Even relatively new fields such as nonlinear dynamics or branches of biochemistry are in fact advances in older established (...) sciences and are therefore much more settled. Of course, by stretching things, AI can be said to have a history reaching back t o Charles Babbage, and possibly back beyond that to Leibnitz. However, all of that is best viewed as prelude. AI’s history is punctuated with the invention of the computer (and, if one wants t o stretch our history back to the 1930s, the development of the notion of computation by Turing, Church, and others). Hence, AI really began (or began in earnest) sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s (some mark the conference a t Dartmouth in the summer of 1957 as the moment of our birth). And since those years we simply have not had time to settle into a routine science attacking reasonably well understood questions (for example, many of the questions some of us regard as supreme are regarded by others as inconsequential or mere excursions). (shrink)

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. -/- In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of (...) never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. -/- Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human. (shrink)

Two extremely detailed accounts of temporal experience can be found in the work of C. D. Broad. These accounts have been subject to considerable criticism. I argue that, when we look more carefully at Broad’s work, we find that much of this criticism fails to find its target. I show that the objection that ultimately proves troubling for Broad stems from his commitment to two principles: i) the Thin-PSA, and ii) the ‘Overlap’ claim. I use this result to demonstrate that (...) we can learn two extremely important lessons from Broad’s work on temporal experience. -/- The first lesson is that there is a structural problem facing any account that commits to these two principles. This is significant given that a number of recent accounts of temporal experience are so committed. The second lesson is that the problem facing these accounts stems only from commitment to the Thin-PSA and ‘Overlap’, rather than to commitment to a particular conception of how experiences are to be individuated. This, I argue, gives us reason to reject Tye’s recent claim that the problems facing accounts of temporal experience can be dissolved simply by making stipulations about how experiences are to be individuated. (shrink)

The present work proposes reflecting on the historical fact as a determinant of present life and, therefore, of the destiny of men, peoples, and civilizations. Considering what Nietzsche raised in the Second Untimely Consideration, history can be narrated in a monumental, antiquarian, or critical way. These constitute ways of living the present and one’s destiny. It seeks to understand each of these possible attitudes towards the past while investigating the meaning of this interpretation for today’s man, immersed in his unique (...) experience of temporality. (shrink)

In “Sense-Certainty” Hegel establishes “the now that is many nows” as the form of experience. This has implications for the interpretation of later figures within the Phenomenology of Spirit: specifically, the thing (from chapter 2), the living body (from chapter 4), and the ethical community (from chapter 6) are each significantly different forms of such a “now” in which the way that past and future are held within the present differs. Comparing these changing “temporalities” allows us to defend Hegel’s distinction (...) between nature and spirit, and his claim that only spirit has a history. This comparison also allows us to see how it is that phenomenological philosophy, and the “end of history” that it announces, is a stance of openness to the future. (shrink)

Some of the important conceptual debates between different approaches to class analysis can be interpreted as reflecting different ways of linking temporality to class structure. In particular, processual concepts of class can be viewed as linking class to the past whereas structural concepts link class to the future. This contrast in the temporality of class concepts in turn is grounded in distinct intuitions about why class is explanatory of social conflict and social change. Processural approaches to class see (...) its explanatory power as deriving from the way meanings and identities are linked to class via a history of experiences; structural approaches, in contrast, emphasize the linkage between class and perceived interests via the objective possibilities facing people in different class locations. This paper tries to integrate these two temporalities by exploring the ways in which trajectories of class experience intersect structures of objective possibility in shaping different dimensions of class consciousness. (shrink)

I argue that the semantic content of thoughts and the linguistic meaning of expressions are things with a history in the sense that they can be made fully intelligible only from the point of view of the future. I defend this position by articulating a version of a view known in the philosophy of language as temporal externalism. Temporal externalism about content is the view that the content of a subject’s thoughts and utterances at a time t depends on features (...) of the linguistic practices of her community after t. There are two different ways in which temporal externalism can be developed. First, one can take it to be the view according to which the meaning of an expression is given by the whole pattern of use, including future ones, of that expression. Alternatively, one can interpret temporal externalism as the view that the meaning of a speaker’s utterance is determined by the norms that govern or constrain her linguistic behaviour. These norms, which may be instituted at a later date, place their authoritative stamp upon prior conduct. I show that the first version of temporal externalism faces severe objections from which the second version is immune. I also provide a defence of this second position through an extensive discussion of some thought experiments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Temporal Registers in the Realist NovelIlya BernsteinIThere are two ways of thinking about time: in terms of sequences of events, and in terms of time-scales. In the first case, each event is conceived of as having a "before" and an "after": it is categorized as part of a sequence and distinguished from other events by its position in that sequence. In the second case, there is no "before" and (...) "after": events are conceived of as occupying different time-scales and distinguished from one another by being associated with durations of greater or lesser magnitude.1 Thus, the same situation may be categorized alternatively as an unfolding succession of events (event 1, event 2, event 3...) or as a progression of overlapping events on expanding time-scales (the second-event, the minute-event, the hour-event...). In what follows, I will argue that this distinction can shed light on narrative structure—as well as musical form—and that it has particularly interesting implications for literary realism.It may be claimed that this distinction between two ways of approaching time has been an explicit theme in the arts over the course of their history. Different musical forms, for instance, may be seen as being oriented toward one paradigm or the other. Thus, melody aesthetically suggests a sequential conception of time. Melodic forms are supposed to take listeners on a journey from point A to point B, by way of a succession of points in between. By contrast, a form such as the fugue addresses itself to discovering different degrees of density and intensity within the [End Page 173] same event, as it were. It adds layer upon layer, aesthetically dilating the event without moving away from it. The ideology of melody, we might say, thus leans toward a conception of time as a sequence, while the ideology of the fugue suggests a scaling notion of time.Echoes of the distinction between these two aesthetic alternatives may also be found in literature, as embodied in different approaches to narrative. Narrative, conceived of as a succession of episodes, suggests a sequential conception of time, oriented around a "before" and an "after." Yet within these parameters, a spectrum of tendencies may be identified. In some literary forms, the succession of episodes is organized to suggest the idea of a passage from one event to the next (Shakespearean drama, the realist novel), as the notions of "before" and "after" are projected onto ideas of past and future. In others, the succession of episodes represents the layer-by-layer assembly of some larger imaginative or conceptual construct (as is true, in different ways, of such texts as Plato's dialogues, the Divine Comedy, and any number of religious, philosophical, or allegorical narratives): "before" and "after" are interpreted not so much in terms of a past and a future, as in terms of premises and conclusions.Within this spectrum, the novel—and perhaps the realist novel in particular—would appear to be the literary form par excellence that embodies a sequential conception of time. It thematizes and dramatizes time's passage—the unknowability of the future and the irretrievability of the past—more exhaustively than any other narrative genre. Yet as I hope to show below, while the explicit themes of literary realism treat fictional events as a sequence (event 1, event 2, event 3...), its implicit organization is grounded in time-scales and directs readers' attention to differentiations among events taking place at different temporal registers (the sentence-event, the chapter-event, the novel-event...).III would like to begin exploring the theoretical distinction laid out above by going back to music and focusing on an empirical observation that has been made about a variety of musical forms. It has been pointed out that when people listen to a piece of music, they retain in their memory, at greater or lesser degrees of awareness, a certain segment of what they have just heard; this memory serves as a background for their perception of incoming sounds and as a frame of reference for their experience of them. Consequently, musical forms may be characterized, [End Page 174] compared, and distinguished from one another based... (shrink)

This article explores the crisis of narrative in contemporary culture. It begins by examining the challenge represented by the mass media for the continuing art of storytelling. Taking up Walter Benjamin’s warning that we are moving from an age of narrative experience to an age of instant information, it analyses the implications of the post‐modern ‘cult of simulation’ for education, historiography and ethics. The paper concludes by advocating a critical hermeneutic approach as the most apt response to this contemporary dilemma. (...) Only by means of such hermeneutic retrieval, inspired by the work of Ricoeur and Gadamer, can we avoid the current reduction of temporal experience to a ‘depthless present’ without past or future, thereby reaffirming the crucial narrative dimensions of historical memory and hope. (shrink)

The inquiry into the moral status of artificial intelligence (AI) is leading to prolific theoretical discussions. A new entity that does not share the material substrate of human beings begins to show signs of a number of properties that are nuclear to the understanding of moral agency. It makes us wonder whether the properties we associate with moral status need to be revised or whether the new artificial entities deserve to enter within the circle of moral consideration. This raises the (...) foreboding that we are at the gates of an anthropological crisis: the properties bound to moral agency have been exclusively possessed in the past by human beings and have shaped the very definition of being human. In this article, I will argue that AI does not lead us to an anthropological crisis and that, if we adhere to the history and philosophy of technology, we will notice that the debate on the moral status of AI uncritically starts from an anthropology of properties and loses sight of the relational dimension of technology. First, I will articulate three criteria for analyzing different anthropological views in philosophy of technology. Second, I will propose six anthropological models: traditional, industrial, phenomenological, postphenomenological, symmetrical, and cyborg. Third, I will show how the emergence of AI breaks with the dynamics of increased relationality in the history and philosophy of technology. I will argue that this aspect is central to debates about the moral status of AI, since it sheds light on an aspect of moral consideration that has been obscured. Finally, I will reject entirely relational approaches to moral status and propose two hybrid possibilities for rethinking it. (shrink)

This article explores Gadamer’s description of time(s) and situates it within his aesthetic account and hermeneutics. Bringing together all of Gadamer’s major discussions on time, I develop a consistent account which I then challenge. Whereas Heidegger famously describes transcendental temporality with an emphasis on futurity, Gadamer accentuates a historical temporal awareness and itsdiscontinuous nature. Gadamer’s notion of time is best understood, paradoxically, as a timeless temporality, when time is defined as the sequential movement along discrete points. I argue (...) that Gadamer’s unique description of temporality, which has been largely ignored by scholars, is essential to his understanding of experience and, therefore, to our understanding of his philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin AmericaElías José PaltiLatin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of debates naturally (...) emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin AmericaMany scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic that struck New York City in the spring of 2020 was a natural experiment for the clinical ethics services of NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP). Two distinct teams at NYP’s flagship academic medical centers—at NYP/ Columbia University Medical Center (Columbia) and NYP/ Weill Cornell Medical Center (Weill Cornell)—were faced with the same pandemic and operated under the same institutional rules. Each campus used time as an heuristic to analyze our collective response. The Columbia team compares consults during the pandemic with (...) the same period during the year prior. The Weill Cornell service describes the phases of the pandemic to depict its temporal evolution and subsequent ethical challenges. Both sites report that the predominant ethical challenges centered around end-of-life decision making, setting goals of care, and medical futility, all complicated by resource allocation questions and the ambiguity of state law under crisis standards of care. The Columbia campus saw a statistically significant increase in ethics consultations provided to Hispanic patients, perhaps reflective of the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 suffered by this demographic. While Weill Cornell and Columbia saw a surge in clinical ethics consultations, the two services assumed a more expansive role than one normally played in institutional life. Serving as intermediaries between frontline clinicians and senior hospital administrators, consultants provided critical intelligence to hospital leadership about the evolution of the pandemic, disseminated information to clinicians, and attended to the moral distress of colleagues who were asked to provide care under truly extraordinary circumstances. The COVID-19 surge in New York City revealed latent capabilities in ethics consultation that may prove useful to the broader clinical ethics community as it responds to the current pandemic and reconceptualizes its potential for future service. (shrink)

This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated (...) for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time. (shrink)