Husserl has often stood accused of Eurocentrism given his disquieting coupling of philosophy as universal science with Europe. And yet, however much this accusation has clouded the appeal of transcendental phenomenology, the nature of this charge remains obscure: whether Husserl’s chauvinism is merely a personal opinion punctuating his writing or is instead closely connected to the methods of phenomenology has been left unexplored. This paper offers itself as a corrective, looking to get a clearer picture of how precisely Eurocentrism afflicts (...) transcendental phenomenology. The overarching aim of doing so is to chart the possibilities for the development of a non-Eurocentric, decolonial phenomenological thinking which exploits the enduring appeal of Husserl’s commitment to presuppositionlessness. The first part of the paper considers the relationship between the phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation, showing that, by Husserl’s own lights, phenomenological science seeks to expel all forms of prejudice. Part two, however, shows that the entrance of Eurocentrism into phenomenology is not simply accidental, in two distinct senses. The first, which takes off from Merleau-Ponty’s (implicit) critique of Husserl, argues that Husserl in his late work is insufficiently attentive to the empirical dimension: Eurocentrism thus stems from the overly transcendental emphases of this project and its inability to engage with concrete human diversity. The second draws on Derrida’s (explicit) critique of Husserl, arguing that it is precisely the admission of concrete historico-cultural facts into phenomenology that compromises the universal by identifying it with the particularities of Europe. I thus show that Eurocentrism does indeed insinuate itself in Husserl’s methods—_not_, however, in a manner that renders transcendental phenomenology irredeemable. Given the opposition between these two insightful criticisms, however, I argue that the challenge for a decolonial vision of phenomenology is formidable. (shrink)

In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, author Mark Evan Bonds examines how writers have struggled to isolate the essence of music in ways that account for its profound effects on the human spirit. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to twentieth-century America, Bonds provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept, and provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how this essence explains music's (...) effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field. (shrink)

Absolute needs (as against instrumental needs) are independent of the ends, goals and purposes of personal agents. Against the view that the only needs are instrumental needs, David Wiggins and Garrett Thomson have defended absolute needs on the grounds that the verb ‘need’ has instrumental and absolute senses. While remaining neutral about it, this article does not adopt that approach. Instead, it suggests that there are absolute biological needs. The absolute nature of these needs is (...) defended by appeal to: their objectivity (as against mind-dependence); the universality of the phenomenon of needing across the plant and animal kingdoms; the impossibility that biological needs depend wholly upon the exercise of the abilities characteristic of personal agency; the contention that the possession of biological needs is prior to the possession of the abilities characteristic of personal agency. Finally, three philosophical usages of ‘normative’ are distinguished. On two of these, to describe a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ is to describe it as value-dependent. A description of a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ in the third sense does not entail such value-dependency, though it leaves open the possibility that value depends upon the phenomenon or upon the truth of the claim. It is argued that while survival needs (or claims about them) may well be normative in this third sense, they are normative in neither of the first two. Thus, the idea of absolute need is not inherently normative in either of the first two senses. (shrink)

With a characteristically broad and provocative treatment, Dahlhaus examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical viewpoints. "Essential reading for anyone interested in the larger intellectual framework in which Romantic music found its place, a framework that to a remarkable degree has continued to shape our image of music."--Robert P. Morgan, Yale University Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989) is the author of a highly influential body of works on the foundations of music history and aesthetics.

Although contemporary powers metaphysics largely understands itself as a metaphysical realist undertaking, recently powers have come to the surface also within an idealist context. This paper aims to characterize and motivate an absolute idealist conception of powers. I compare realist and idealist powers metaphysics in their respective responses to Humean scepticism concerning powers, thereby motivating the claim that the very idea of a power is actually best understood as an idealist idea. I continue to characterize the (...) class='Hi'>absolute idealist’s understanding of power, for which it is necessary to see that the content of her power notion is inseparable from the way in which she arrives at that notion. I close with a brief reflection on the absolute idealist’s understanding of the power of thought, which is where idealist and realist powers metaphysics diverge most radically. (shrink)

This paper will consider the ideas of absolute equality and absolute difference that are part of Gandhi’s vision on the plurality of religions. It will fall into three sections. The first section is entitled “Thinking samadarshana through samabhava-Gandhi on “equimindedness” and religious ‘others’”. It will seek to bring out the central ideas in Gandhi’s thoughts on the plurality of religions. In this context the paper will briefly examine the difference between Gandhi’s arguments for absolute equality and the (...) liberal position on religious toleration. The second section will elaborate Gandhi’s reasons for thinking the absolute equality of all religions and will be entitled “The Religion at the heart of all religions- Truth or God”. The third section will be entitled “The truth-untruths of religious others and the duty of resistance: Difficulties with a relativist reading of Gandhi”. It will recapitulate the different strands of the argument in the paper and bring out the implications of ahimsa as love as it transforms resistance to what one thinks of as the truth-untruths of religious ‘others’ in a plural context. It will also take issue with an important contemporary reading of Gandhi, that of Professor Akeel Bilgrami, who reads Gandhi’s position along the lines of a “thorough going relativism about Truth”. In the course of the paper it is hoped to unpack the absolute equality in absolute difference that constituted Gandhi’s vision on the plurality of religions. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical review and discussion of three recent major theories of epistemic scepticism. Odegard and Rescher both agree that real knowledge entails certain beliefs. But they both fail to see how beliefs could be absolutely certain. Klein’s book, Certainty: A Refutationof Scepticism, presents the strongest possible view in favor of absolute certainty. I pay attention to its technical details and development by Klein. My conclusion is that Klein’s theory rests on some presupposed ideas that are either (...) counterintuitive or then make the theory trivial: one’s certainty of truth becomes the same as the truth itself. (shrink)

In this paper (a sequel to [4]) I put forward a "local" interpretation of mathematical concepts based on notions derived from category theory. The fundamental idea is to abandon the unique absolute universe of sets central to the orthodox set-theoretic account of the foundations of mathematics, replacing it by a plurality of local mathematical frameworks - elementary toposes - defined in category-theoretic terms.

The resurrection axioms are forcing axioms introduced recently by Hamkins and Johnstone, developing on ideas of Chalons and Veličković. We introduce a stronger form of resurrection axioms for a class of forcings Γ and a given ordinal α), and show that RAω implies generic absoluteness for the first-order theory of Hγ+ with respect to forcings in Γ preserving the axiom, where γ = γΓ is a cardinal which depends on Γ. We also prove that the consistency strength of these axioms (...) is below that of a Mahlo cardinal for most forcing classes, and below that of a stationary limit of supercompact cardinals for the class of stationary set preserving posets. Moreover, we outline that simultaneous generic absoluteness for Hγ0+ with respect to Γ0 and for Hγ1+ with respect to Γ1 with γ0 = γΓ0≠γΓ1 = γ1 is in principle possible, and we present several natural models o... (shrink)

In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds presents a magisterial history of absolute music—a term Richard Wagner first coined in 1846, and yet which Bonds believes existed as an ‘idea’ going all the way back to Ancient Greece. Drawing primarily on the work of new musicologists in the United States in the 1980s as his point of departure, Bonds defines absolute music as a ‘regulative concept’ that allows him to discuss the (...) ‘relationship between music’s perceived essence and its effect’.1 1 The ‘essence-effect’ binarism provides a unique angle for his history, yet also locks his discussion into a conceptual framework that leads to either/or conclusions about absolute music’s moral, social, and aesthetic value. (shrink)

The idea of absolute goodness and the idea of an absolute requitement tend nowadays to be viewed with suspicion in the world of English-speaking philosophy. The tendency is well rooted and has not just arisen by osmosis from the temper of the times. There are various lines of thought, all of them attractive, by which a recent or contemporary academic practitioner of the subject could have been induced into scepticism about an ethics of absolute conceptions.

The significance of absolute space and absolute motion in the Critical philosophy is clarified by analysis of relevant passages in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Newton's absolute space is rejected in favor of absolute space conceived of as an idea of reason serving to unify the infinity of possible relative kinematic spaces. On the other hand, something like newton's concept of absolute motion (e.g., in the case of rotation) is accepted by Kant under (...) the heading of real - as opposed to illusory - motion. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single-term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second-order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea (...) in his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object. (shrink)

By the absolute Good, I understand the Idea of the Good; by the human goods, I understand pleasure and reason, which have been disqualified in Plato's "Republic" as candidates for the absolute Good (cf.R.505b-d). Concerning the Idea of the Good, we can distinguish a maximal and a minimal interpretation. After the minimal interpretation, the Idea of the Good is the absolute Good because there is no final cause beyond the Idea of the Good. (...) After the maximal interpretation, the Idea of the Good is the One. The maximal and the minimal interpretation go beyond the textual evidence. I will defend two theses: (1) Since the platonic Socrates deliberately gives no more information, it seems wise to stop with Socrates and to give only a formal, not a substantive, interpretation: The absolute good is the third item between and above knowledge and the known. (2) To mediate between the absolute Good and the human goods, Plato’s Eleatic Stranger introduced in the "Politicus" and "Philebus" an intermediate principle: "the appropriate" (to metrion). For more information concerning "the appropriate" cf. Ferber, Rafael (2010). Plato's Side Suns: Beauty, Symmetry and Truth. Comments concerning semantic monism and pluralism of the "Good" in the Philebus (65A 1-5). Elenchos, 31, p. 51-76, esp. 64-67. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century TheologyFrancis Oakley[W]e must cautiously abandon [that more specious opinion of the Platonist and Stoick]... in this, that it... blasphemously invades the cardinal Prerogative of Divinity, Omnipotence, by denying him a reserved power, of infringing, or altering any one of those Laws which [He] Himself ordained, and enacted, and chaining up his armes in the adamantine fetters of (...) Destiny.Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature : A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London, 1652)Of the various attributes characteristically ascribed to God in the Christian tradition—goodness, wisdom, omniscience, omnipotence, and the like—it is omnipotence which of recent years has most persistently been the object of focused attention among philosophers and historians alike. That that should be the case with philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition is not altogether surprising. While it is doubtless a development few would have predicted half a century ago, the years since then have seen something of a recrudescence of interest in a legislative or divine-command ethic. 1 Had that [End Page 437] not itself conspired to make omnipotence an obvious focus of philosophic attention, the deepening contemporaneous preoccupation with modal logic or the logic of possibility would surely have succeeded in so doing. Understood classically as affirming of God the ability to do all things and connoting a virtual capacity for action (as opposed to a power exercised in actuality), omnipotence has proven to be something of a troublesome notion, inviting unrestrained speculation about hypothetical divine action and generating a veritable cat’s cradle of philosophical conundrums concerning the relationship of God’s power to his will, wisdom, goodness, and justice.Medieval theologians and philosophers alike were forced to grapple with these taxing problems, 2 and philosophers of our own era have found them no less directly pertinent to their own logical and ethical concerns. 3 In 1955 Mackie inaugurated what was destined to become an ongoing discussion of omnipotence in the philosophical journals, 4 and such philosophers as Kenny and Keane, Cowan and Wolfe, Dummett, Plantinga, Swinburne, and Geach have been drawn into the fray. Since then, as a result, the pages of Mind, Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and even The Listener have been punctuated by their efforts to grapple with those venerable questions concerning the divine power that had exercised St. Peter Damiani in the mid-eleventh century, brought Abelard to grief a half-century later, and subsequently led Peter Lombard to devote to them a crucial and influential section of his Sentences—whether God of his omnipotence could undo the past, whether he could have made things other than he had, or created a world better than he did, and so on. 5 [End Page 438]While no medievalist can be expected to be anything but gratified by this unexpected testimony to the enduring significance and power of medieval scholastic concerns, those of us interested especially in the intellectual developments of the later-medieval centuries have particular reason to be energized by it. The years since Mackie launched this contemporary philosophical debate have also seen an intensification of interest on the part of historians in the ways in which, during these particular centuries, medieval thinkers themselves came to terms with the implications of the divine omnipotence and dealt with the theological and philosophical puzzles characteristically generated by that notion. Unlike the philosophers, whose concerns have been somewhat more broad-ranging, the historians have focused in particular on a quintessentially scholastic distinction that was developed, it has been said, “as a ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether God is able to do or arrange things other than he did in creating the orders of nature and grace.” 6 The distinction in question is that between God’s power understood as absolute and as ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata), which the theologians and philosophers of the period deployed as part of their great effort of accommodation between Greek philosophical and biblical notions of the divine, and the historical significance of which the scholarship of the past forty years has served increasingly to vindicate. 7 But while that distinction has been... (shrink)

The term “moral absolute” refers to many different ideas. In contemporary moral philosophy, it most commonly refers to the idea of a moral prohibition or rule that holds without exception. Less commonly, it refers to the idea of a moral rule or standard that applies to all moral agents, rather than only to members of a particular society or culture or only to particular individuals (e.g., those who accept it). The present topic is moral absolutes in the (...) first of these two senses (hereinafter, “moral absolutes”). Notable philosophers who have maintained that there are such absolutes include Immanuel Kant and Elizabeth Anscombe. And the debate over the existence of moral absolutes has implications not only for general moral theory, but also for many topics in applied ethics and just war theory. For example, the question of whether the prohibition on deliberately killing the innocent is absolute has important implications for abortion, euthanasia, and noncombatant immunity. (shrink)

Kant's theory of space includes the idea that straight lines and planes can be defined in Euclidean geometry by a concept which nowadays has been revived in the field of fractal geometry: the concept of self-similarity. Absolute self-similarity of straight lines and planes distinguishes Euclidean space from any other geometrical space. Einstein missed this fact in his attempt to refute Kant's theory of space in his article ‘Geometrie und Erfahrung’. Following Hilbert and Schlick he took it for granted, (...) mistakenly, that purely geometrical definitions of the concepts of straight line and plane are not feasible, except as “implicit definitions”. Therefore Einstein's criticism is not persuasive. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Hegel's Absolute must be understood to be transcendent in the sense of being both immanent within the world and exceeding it. This account of transcendence invariably turns on Hegel's inheritance of the Christian tradition and, in particular, the metaphysics espoused through Christian Platonism. To support my argument I will examine the methodological immanentism of Hegel's phenomenology to show that such immanentism, while demanded by any phenomenology, is not necessarily imported into his metaphysics. I (...) will then examine Hegel's Logic to show that the dialectic which his thought relies upon compels the finite subject to recognise that all finite things, including themselves, are grounded within the Absolute Idea. I will then examine whether we must understand the Absolute Idea as immanent or whether there is room to conceive of it as transcendent. I conclude the essay by showing that the sense of transcendence as found within Nicene Christianity provides an understanding of transcendence that is not only compatible with Hegel's thought but actually allows us to make better sense of his system than the immanentist interpretation of it. (shrink)

The debate about the relation between science and truth is manifestly epistemological, but latently and fundamentally metaphysical. Popper's theory of verisimilitude provides us with a striking example. According to Popper, science aims at bringing us nearer to 'absolute, objective truth'; the growth of scientific knowledge is seen as a never ending realisation of that ultimate aim. This thesis of verisimilitude can be interpreted in two ways. In the first interpretation the thesis appears as a correct, but formal and even (...) trivial statement. Here the thesis that science aims at bringing us nearer to truth is as unilluminating as the thesis that moral endeavor aims at bringing us nearer to the Moral Good or that artistic endeavor aims at bringing us nearer to Aesthetic Beauty. According to the second interpretation, however, the thesis has a more substantial and metaphysical meaning. Here it consists of three different claims : 1. scientific endeavor points to something which is beyond and actual or humanly possible scientific achievement; 2. it is in this relation with something transcendent that the ultimate purpose of science is to be sought; 3. the relation between actual science and its transcendent should be seen as a part-whole relation, i.e. the transcendent goal should be represented as the ideal of total intelligibility. In this article the first and second claim are accepted; the third is rejected. One should accept the idea (put forward by Einstein ) that science points to a mystery beyond science. One should beware, however, of equating the sense of mystery with an anticipation for yet hidden information, inaccessible to us, but 'quoad se' accessible to reason. Science's transcendent mystery should be viewed in a more radical way. That is to say, the relation between actual science and its transcendent mystery is analogous to the relation between, on the one hand, the information contained in and derivable from a (good) poem and, on the other hand something else which is poetically suggested, yet does not consist in hidden information. What is evoked by poetry and science, is not even in principle translatable in terms of an informative content. Therefore the ultimate goal of science is not the ideal of knowing everything with the clarity and precision of science ; it is rather the awareness of a mystery which does not even exist as the sort of intelligible content scientific theories attempt to mirror. (shrink)

Moral absolutes were perceived, by Solov'ëv, in a dual manner: a) from the side of content, of psychology, as when we speak of feelings, emotions, etc.; and b) under a formal aspect, as “ideas,” i.e. logically. Neither of these can be treated without relating to moral absolutes astrue, and without a rationalbelief in their truth, a truth that cannot be logically proved. In my opinion, our time has become keenly aware of the universally human value of Vladimir Solov'ëv's ethics, of (...) its humanist nature, oriented towards the everyday and the ideal tasks of man, and of the concrete direction of his philosophy of “practical idealism”. (shrink)

As an important corollary of this interpretation of absolute knowledge, the dissertation concludes with the suggestion that Hegelian philosophy need not be regarded merely as an interesting curiosity in the history of ideas, but rather that it can serve as a vital and potentially rewarding source of fresh theoretical insights. ;Instead, the concrete completeness of speculative philosophy can only consist in the activity of a dynamical, ceaselessly self-examining and self-regulating intellectual community. In one sense, of course, no finite system (...) can ever be complete, insofar as it will inevitably be guilty of errors and misconceptions. Yet at the same time, the infinite System is perfect and complete, insofar as it contains within itself the means whereby its own unavoidable flaws will be discovered, corrected, and "forgiven"--i.e. aufgehoben into vanishing moments of a universal totality. ;In opposition to most traditional interpretations of Hegel, the position is maintained that Hegel himself deliberately faced this problem, and that a true understanding of his proposed solution requires a radical Aufhebung of the concept of cognition as such. Relying primarily on the penultimate chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the dissertation argues that absolute knowledge can neither be a finalized system of fully explicit content, nor an endless movement toward such an ideal state. ;This dissertation undertakes a critical examination of one central problem in Hegelian philosophy: viz., whether the final realization of "absolute knowledge" is logically consistent with significant epistemic progress in the system's continuing development. Serious consideration of the concept of systematic completeness, as interpreted on Hegel's terms, uncovers the existence of a profound paradox. On the one hand, if the Truth is the Whole, then the truth of any finite part or aspect of that Whole depends upon its place within the system as a totality. In order to grasp the part and comprehend it correctly, one must already have a systematically ordered knowledge of the universe in its entirety. Yet the methodological open-endedness of dialectical thinking precludes the acceptance of any particular theoretical formulation as final or complete in itself. Hegel interprets the history of philosophy as a progression of successive formulations of the Truth, each of which improves on its predecessors by reconciling their internal contradictions, but no one of which is adequate in itself. Hence, no theoretical world view, including Hegel's own, can rest content within its limits, for the inevitable advance of thought must in the end throw it down. (shrink)

Philosophical debate about the problem of evil derives, in part, from differing definitions of almighty power or omnipotence. Modern atheists such as John McTaggart, J. L. Mackie, Earl Condee, and Danny Goldstick maintain that an omnipotent God must be able to accomplish anything, even if it entails a contradiction. On this account, the Christian God cannot be omnipotent and benevolent, for a benevolent, omnipotent God would have forced free agents to desist from evil and this prevented the introduction of suffering (...) into the world. It does not matter if the idea of creating free agents that were forced to be good entails a contradiction. On this account, a God who is truly omnipotent can perform contradictory feats.In this paper, I argue that the atheistic tradition is mistaken. In the first place, even an absolutely omnipotent God could, as an act of benevolence, create a world in which there is suffering. In the second place, I argue that the concept of absolute omnipotence is fatally flawed. An absolutely omnipotent God would lack, in a decisive sense, power. He would be weak rather than strong. So the atheist's argument fails when it is evaluated in light of a more rational account of omnipotence and when it is carefully considered on its own terms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Philosophy, Science, Politics, and LawFrancis OakleyThe quintessentially scholastic distinction between God’s power understood as absolute and ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata) has been described “as a ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether God is able to do or arrange things other than he did in creating the orders of (...) nature and grace.” 1 The importance of that distinction the historical scholarship of the past forty years has served increasingly to indicate. 2 The idea that it expressed had emerged already in the twelfth century, and in the standard form familiar to us from later years we now know it to have surfaced among the theologians of Paris in the opening years of the thirteenth. We also know that long before the end of the thirteenth century it had come to be understood in the two distinct ways that were to persist on through the late medieval and early modern centuries and to be acknowledged in the neo-scholastic manuals of the late nineteenth century.According to the first of these understandings, embedded in the classical formulations given to the distinction by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and many other later thinkers, the term potentia absoluta was used simply to denote God’s power in itself, taken in abstracto and without reference to the orders of nature and grace he has actually willed de potentia ordinata to establish. There was no question, that is, of the absolute power’s [End Page 669] being understood as a presently-active power by means of which God intervenes in the world to act apart from or set aside the order established by the ordained power. It refers instead to God’s ability to do many things he does not choose to do. Or put in the temporal terms that William Courtenay favors, it refers to “the total possibilities initially open to God, some of which were realized by creating the established order,” the “unrealized possibilities” being “now only hypothetically possible.” 3Side by side with this “classical” usage, however, there had emerged already in the thirteenth century what has been called a “juristic” or “opera-tionalized” understanding of the potentia dei absoluta as a presently-active power of potential interposition in the established order. Thus Duns Scotus, who gave a most influential expression to this alternative understanding, drawing an analogy not only with kings but with any free agent within whose power the law falls, distinguished between the ordained power by which God acts de jure in accordance with the rightful law he has established and the absolute power whereby de facto he can act apart from or against the law. In such a formulation the absolute power clearly exceeds the ordained. Rather than referring simply to the realm of logical possibility prior to God’s ordination of things, that absolute power is now construed as a presently-active and extraordinary power capable of acting apart from the order established de potentia ordinata and prevailing in the ordinary course of things. This “juristic” understanding of the distinction was clearly affiliated closely with the cognate distinction that medieval canonists invoked as early as the thirteenth century in an attempt to elucidate what the pope, in the absoluteness of his plenitudo potestatis, or absolute power, could do that was not open for him to do when acting in accordance with his merely ordained or “ordinary” power.Philosophy and ScienceIn an earlier and complementary article, I traced the career of the power distinction, as well as the persistence of the two distinct ways of understanding it, across the fifteenth century and on into the thinking of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians, Lutheran and Reformed as well as Catholic. 4 It remains now to go on to demonstrate that the currency of the distinction in these later centuries was no more confined to strictly theological circles or settings than it had been during the Middle Ages. The Coimbran commentators and Suárez certainly deployed it for more generally philosophical purposes, 5 [End Page 670] and in the seventeenth century they were by no means... (shrink)

In Leopardi’s writings the idea of the monster/monstrous means a deviation from nature or a consequence of something that is considered monstrous because it belongs to, or reflects a taste or a set of criteria of evaluation belonging to another time or place. There is therefore both an absolute and a relative meaning of monster/monstrous, according to whether it refers to the real history of mankind, which progressively diverged from nature, or to the imaginary foundation of taste and (...) judgement. Nonetheless, these two moments are intertwined and refer one to the other reciprocally. In fact, the real difference between humanity and nature is the source of every imagination about monstrosity. One might even say that the notion of the monster/monstrous is the chain that links the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ because it is the result of a miscalculation that makes a mere partial viewpoint absolute. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Timaeus, Plato explicitly defines time as “the moving image of eternity”. This proposition affirms actually that time reflects the eternal that embodies the rational and lawful principle – namely the logos of proportionality – in the motion and change of visible objects in the universe. In other words,time determines the principle that every mutable being must follow to participate in the rational and nomological order of existence; the absolute logos which is given by God is hence intrinsic (...) to time. This idea of time is echoed by the theories of Augustine and Husserl. Both philosophers inherited some of Plato’s metaphysical views, and each of them developed a distinctive theory of the relations between Being, time, and the absolute logos. This paper attempts to compare their theories and to defend the following claim: Augustine fo-cuses on the immutable representation of time which is regarded as the image or reflection of God’s absolute logos, and explains temporal phenome... (shrink)

In one form or another the concept of the Absolute has played a prominent role in Western philosophy from Plato to Hegel and beyond. The present paper addresses in particular the idea of the Absolute as the completion or perfection of the cognitive project of inquiry into the nature of the real. The discussion first traces the historical development of this conception, and then addresses the question of what sort of constructive role such a concept of cognitive (...) absoluteness can continue to play in philosophical deliberation, arguing that it does indeed afford an instrumentality able to accomplish useful work. (shrink)

Suárez's discussion of time in the Metaphysical Disputations is one of the earliest long treatises on time (extending over sixty pages), and includes detailed arguments supporting the view that physical actions take place within an absolute temporal reference frame. Whereas some previous thinkers, such as John Duns Scotus and Peter Aureole, had made tantalising suggestions that time exists independently of physical changes, their ideas were primarily negative theses in response to perceived problems with the dominant view that time was (...) caused by the celestial motion. Suárez, in contrast, provides a positive thesis based on his revision of traditional, Scholastic metaphysics. He argues that the ordering of earlier and later events can only be understood by conceiving events as existing within the embrace of a ?flowing and successive space? which he refers to as ?entirely necessary and immutable in its own flux? (omnino necessarium et immutabile in suo fluxu) - something at least very like an absolute temporal reference frame. Yet it would be simplistic to describe Suárez's work on time only in terms of its nascent absolutism, since for him there is a second kind of time, a more properly ?real? time, which is an accident of material being. This kind of time is ontologically tied to the most intimate existence of objects, creating a plurality of individual continua of time - one for each distinct being. He calls this kind of time ?intrinsic time? (tempus intrinsecum). Suárez's dualistic account of time, in which he proposes an ?intrinsic time?, linked to being, which exists within a second order absolute temporal reference frame, or ?imaginary succession?, forms a bridge between scholasticism and early modern philosophy providing a foundation for the work of later absolutists like Gassendi and Newton. (shrink)

There are various permutations of theism: henotheism, pantheism, panentheism, a/theism, and nontheistic divinity. There is debate whether the idea of OmniGod was ever achieved in India. R. C. Zaehner argued that an evolutionary transition from pratenaturalism of the Vedas to Upaniṣad’s monism, culminated in monotheism with Purāṇas and the _Bhagavad Gītā._ I argue differently, beginning with ancient ritualistic polytheism, followed by unifying One Brahman, toward monistic panentheism and later non-dualism of _advaita_ Vedānta. Under the influence of Asaṅga, Buddhism elevated (...) the Buddha as the Great Divine Replacement. As a response or reaction, Brāhmaṇism forged Īśvara as God with the World as his Body. By 13th century, theistic dualism separated Īśvara from his _creatio._ Even Nyāya rational philosophy was persuaded by monotheism as demonstrated in their teleo-cosmological argument for the existence of Īśvara. I attribute all this to sectarian and doctrinal shifts rather than to any evolutionary teleology and/or predestined historicist movement. (shrink)

Kant’s concept of autonomy promises to solve the problem of the actuality of freedom. The latter has actuality as a practical capacity insofar as the will is objectively determined through the form of law. In later writings, however, Kant situates the actuality of freedom in the “absolute spontaneity” of choice, and connects the reality of autonomy itself to the condition of a “radical” act of free choice. The reason for this resides in the fact that his first solution is (...) marked by a certain defect: it does not contain a sufficient concept of the actuality of a practical capacity. This essay elaborates a revised account of Kant’s concept of freedom in light of this insight. The argument is that we need to distinguish force and faculty in order to understand the actuality of a capacity. Only on this basis can we introduce the idea of imagination as a pre-reflexive force of practical reason and the idea of reflective judgment as a power of practical judgment in order to realize how free choice is capable of generating a maxim that has the form of a law spontaneously and of its own accord. In this way, we see that the actuality of freedom necessarily includes the spontaneity of choice, and that human freedom manifests a certain paradoxicality: the university of the will is bound to a subjective ground of determination, to a pre-reflexive act of "radical" choice. (shrink)

When Newton articulated the concept of absolute time in his treatise, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), along with its correlate, absolute space, he did not present it as anything controversial. Whereas his references to attraction are accompanied by the self- protective caveats that typically signal an expectation of censure, the Scholium following Principia’s definitions is free of such remarks, instead elaborating his ideas as clarifications of concepts that, in some manner, we already possess. This (...) is not surprising. The germ of the concept emerged naturally from astronomers’ findings, and variants of it had already been formulated by other seventeenth century thinkers. Thus the novelty of Newton’s absolute time lay mainly in the use to which he put it. (shrink)

Robert R. Williams, in Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God, offers an important examination of the notion of absolute spirit, a central but under-examined notion in Hegel’s thought. Williams argues that absolute spirit, along with Hegel’s other core notions such as the concept and the absolute idea, is best conceived as an organic whole. This approach, he claims, best captures the self-determination and dynamism of the whole. What absolute spirit seeks to describe (...) is how spirit can both produce itself and legitimate itself. I argue that the model of the organism, and any onto-theological claim for absolute spirit, misses the post-critical aspiration of this notion. (shrink)

It is often supposed that, unlike typical axioms of mathematics, the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) is indeterminate. This position is normally defended on the ground that the CH is undecidable in a way that typical axioms are not. Call this kind of undecidability “absolute undecidability”. In this paper, I seek to understand what absolute undecidability could be such that one might hope to establish that (a) CH is absolutely undecidable, (b) typical axioms are not absolutely undecidable, and (c) if (...) a mathematical hypothesis is absolutely undecidable, then it is indeterminate. I shall argue that on no understanding of absolute undecidability could one hope to establish all of (a)–(c). However, I will identify one understanding of absolute undecidability on which one might hope to establish both (a) and (c) to the exclusion of (b). This suggests that a new style of mathematical antirealism deserves attention—one that does not depend on familiar epistemological or ontological concerns. The key idea behind this view is that typical mathematical hypotheses are indeterminate because they are relevantly similar to CH. (shrink)

Talk of metaphysical modality as “absolute” is ambiguous, as it appears to convey multiple ideas. Metaphysical possibility is supposedly completely unrestricted or unqualified; metaphysical necessity is unconditional and exceptionless. Moreover, metaphysical modality is thought to be absolute in the sense that it’s real or genuine and the most objective modality: metaphysical possibility and necessity capture ways things could and must have really been. As we disentangle these ideas, certain talk of metaphysical modality qua “absolute” turns out to (...) be misguided. Metaphysical possibility isn't completely unrestricted or most inclusive compared to the other modalities; metaphysical necessity, like all kinds of necessities, is relative to or conditional upon a specific framework of reference. Still, metaphysical modality captures how things could and must have really been most generally because it deals with reality and the nature of things or their essence. That’s the chief interest of metaphysics. Arguments against the alleged absoluteness of metaphysical modality may not thereby undermine its philosophical significance. (shrink)

The thesis of this book, first published in 1972, is that Kant's notions of 'absolute worth', the 'unconditioned' and 'unconditioned worth' are rationalistic and confused, and that they spoil his ontology of personal value and tend to subvert his splendid idea of the person as an End in himself.

In “Desire as Belief” and “Desire as Belief II,” David Lewis ( 1988 , 1996 ) considers the anti-Humean position that beliefs about the good require corresponding desires, which is his way of understanding the idea that beliefs about the good are capable of motivating behavior. He translates this anti-Humean claim into decision theoretic terms and demonstrates that it leads to absurdity and contradiction. As Ruth Weintraub ( 2007 ) has shown, Lewis’ argument goes awry at the outset. His (...) decision theoretic formulation of anti-Humeanism is one that no sensible anti-Humean would endorse. My aim is to demonstrate that Lewis’ infelicitous rendering of anti-Humeanism really does undermine the force of his arguments. To accomplish this, I begin by developing a more adequate decision theoretic rendering of the anti-Humean position. After showing that my formulation of anti-Humeanism constitutes a plausible interpretation of the anti-Humean thesis, I go on to demonstrate that if we adopt this more accurate rendition of anti-Humeanism, the view is no longer susceptible to arguments like the ones Lewis has devised. I thereby provide a more robust response to Lewis’ arguments than has yet been offered, and in the process I develop a formulation of anti-Humeanism that creates the possibility for future decision theoretic arguments that, unlike Lewis’, speak directly to the plausibility of anti-Humeanism. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitalityãeepresents a comprehensive account and understanding of Derridaâe(tm)s approach to law and justice. Through a detailed reading of Derridaâe(tm)s texts, Jacques de Ville contends that it is only by way of Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, and specifically in relation to the texts of Husserl, Levinas, Freud and Heidegger - that the reasoning behind his elusive works on law and justice can be grasped. Through detailed readings of texts such as To speculate (...) âe" on Freud, Adieu, Declarations of Independence, Before the Law, Cogito and the history of madness, Given Time, Force of Law and Specters of Marx, De Ville contends that there is a continuity in Derridaâe(tm)s thinking, and rejects the idea of an âe~ethical turnâe(tm). Derrida is shown to be neither a postmodernist nor a political liberal, but a radical revolutionary. De Ville also controversially contends that justice in Derridaâe(tm)s thinking must be radically distinguished from Levinasâe(tm)s reflections on âe~the otherâe(tm). It is the notion of absolute hospitality - which Derrida derives from Levinas, but radically transforms - that provides the basis of this argument. Justice must on De Villeâe(tm)s reading be understood in terms of a demand of absolute hospitality which is imposed on both the individual and the collective subject. A much needed account of Derrida's influential approach to law,ãeeJacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitalityãeewill be an invaluable resource for those with an interest in legal theory, and for those with an interest in the ethics and politics of deconstruction. (shrink)

State sovereignty is often thought to be absolute, unlimited. This paper argues that there is no such a thing as absolute State sovereignty. Indeed, absolute sovereignty is impossible because all sovereignty is necessarily underpinned by its conditions of possibility—i.e. limited sovereignty is the norm, though the nature of the limitations varies. The article consists of two main sections: the concept of sovereignty: this section is focused on some of the limitations the concept of sovereignty itself presents; and (...) a historical account of the notion of sovereignty as it was used in the Ancient Times. The particular focus on early notions of a modern concept such as sovereignty has to do with the fact that this early notion has been anthropomorphised with societal evolution. Therein, the current concept of State sovereignty embraces the same limitations it had in its ancient form as a non-fully developed conceptual idea. The implications of understanding State sovereignty as limited rather than absolute are several, both directly and indirectly. A main immediate consequence is that sovereign States can cooperate together, limit their sovereignty and still be considered sovereign. (shrink)

PurposeA significant volume of philosophical literature produced by Indian academic philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century can be placed under the rubric of ‘Śaṁkara and X’, where X is Hegel, or a German or a British philosopher who had commented on, elaborated or critiqued the Hegelian system. We will explore in this essay the philosophical significance of Hegel-influenced systems as an intellectual conduit for these Indo-European conceptual encounters, and highlight how for some Indian philosophers the British variations (...) on Hegelian systems were both a point of entry into debates over ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ in contemporary European philosophy and an occasion for defending Advaita against the charge of propounding a doctrine of world illusionism.MethodologyOur study of the philosophical enquiries of A.C. Mukerji, P.T. Raju, and S.N.L. Shrivastava indicates that they developed distinctive styles of engaging with Hegelian idealisms as they reconfigured certain aspects of the classical Advaita of Śaṁkara through contemporary vocabulary.Result and ConclusionThese appropriations of Hegelian idioms can be placed under three overlapping styles: Mukerji was partly involved in locating Advaita in an intermediate conceptual space between, on the one hand, Kantian agnosticism and, on the other hand, Hegelian absolutism; Raju and Shrivastava presented Advaitic thought as the fulfilment of certain insights of Hegel and F.H. Bradley; and the interrogations of Hegel’s ‘idealism’ provided several Indian academic philosophers with a hermeneutic opportunity to revisit the vexed question of whether the ‘idealism’ of Śaṁkara reduces the phenomenal world, structured by māyā, to a bundle of ideas. (shrink)

There are two conspicuous and inescapable features of this world in which time is real. One experiences a world in flux, a transient world in which things constantly come into existence, change and cease to be. One also experiences a stable world, one in which how things are at any given moment is permanent, unchangeable. Thus, there is transience and permanence. Yet these two features of the world seem incompatible. The primary purpose of this paper is to sketch a metaphysics (...) of time that embraces both features. Crucial to this undertaking is the notion of becoming, that is, coming into existence. I distinguish three distinct phenomena of becoming: temporal, absolute and atemporal. The last is the least familiar of these; it is the phenomenon of coming into existence outside of time. Although the idea that there are things that do not exist in time is not unfamiliar, it is largely taken for granted that if anything comes into existence, it must do so in time. (Indeed, I suspect many think that the idea of a thing coming to be outside of time is simply incoherent.) In this paper, I articulate and defend the notion of atemporal becoming. It is by means of this notion that one can develop a fully satisfactory metaphysics of time, one that honors both transience and permanence and finds for each its proper domain within the world. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss several questions related to the manner in which concepts generally, and religious concepts in particular, are formed. Are some concepts necessary in the sense that, considering the physical makeup of the natural world and our own bio-chemical, perceptual, and cognitive nature, these concepts had to emerge by necessity? If we put considerations of divine revelations aside, I ask regarding religious concepts, what would be the proper way of looking at how they came to be formed? (...) What role does causality play in the formation of empirical and religious concepts, if at all? One of my aims in discussing these and other related questions is to revisit Hilary Putnam’s justificatory basis for rejecting the intelligibility of speaking of absolute conceptions of the world. Although I support his position on this issue, I show some of the hermeneutical problems in his reliance on Wittgenstein’s views concerning language games and worldviews. I also revisit Wittgenstein’s own views about concept formation to discuss the similarities and differences between how religious concepts and empirical concepts are formed. My aim here is to show that the idea of an absolute conception of the world rests on confusing the regulative role that concepts play in our lives for a causative role. (shrink)