“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of discourse is All (...) or Nothing does not matter: the struggle of speech to name the unnameable is the same. This ambitious two-volume undertaking demonstrates a preoccupation as old as Western civilization itself: the limits of language and the virtue of being at a loss for words. How long we have been raiding the Inarticulate!” —Peter S. Hawkins, Boston University “Developments in critical theory during the past two decades have led to renewed interest in negative theology. Books like _Languages of the Unsayable_, _Negation and Theology_, _Derrida and Negative Theology _, and _The Otherness of God _ have signaled the resurgence of this ancient tradition. William Franke’s distinctive contribution is to provide the background and texts from which these recent developments have emerged.” —Mark Taylor, Williams College Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This monumental two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. The first volume, _Classic Formulations_, offers excerpts from Plato, Plotinus, Damascius, the Bible, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, Dante, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and more. (shrink)

"Paradox drives a good deal of philosophy in every tradition. In the Indian and Western traditions, there is a tendency among many philosophers to run from contradiction and paradox. If and when a contradiction appears in a theory, it is regarded as a sure sign that something has gone amiss. This aversion to paradox commits them, knowingly or not, to the view that reality must be consistent. In East Asia, however, philosophers have reacted to paradox differently. Many East Asian philosophers-both (...) in the Daoist and the Buddhist traditions-have openly embraced paradox. They have taken compelling arguments for contradictory positions to suggest that the world is-at least in some respects, and often in very deep respects-inconsistent, and that our best theories of the world will therefore be inconsistent. This book is an initial survey of the writings of some influential East Asian thinkers who were committed to paradox, and for good reason. Their acceptance of contradiction allowed them to develop important insights that evaded those who consider paradox out of bounds"--. (shrink)

The responses to my critics are as various as their criticisms, focusing successively on the distinctive character of modern moral disagreements, on the nature of common goods and their relationship to the virtues, on how the inequalities generated by advanced capitalist economies and by the contemporary state prevent the achievement of common goods, on issues concerning the nature of the self, on what it is that Marx’s theory enables us to understand and on how some Marxists have failed to understand, (...) on the differences between my philosophical stances and those both of John McDowell and of the physicalists, on the nature of human rights and of productive work, on the ancient Greek polis, and on the metaphysical commitments presupposed by my theorizing. (shrink)

The legacy of Nisbett and Wilson’s classic article, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes , is mixed. It is perhaps the most cited article in the recent history of consciousness studies, yet no empirical research program currently exists that continues the work presented in the article. To remedy this, we have introduced an experimental paradigm we call choice blindness [Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. . Failure to detect mismatches between intention and (...) outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116–119.]. In the choice blindness paradigm participants fail to notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. In this article, we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to investigate a corpus of introspective reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. We contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated vs. manipulated trials, but find very few differences between these two groups of reports. (shrink)

“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of discourse is All (...) or Nothing does not matter: the struggle of speech to name the unnameable is the same. This ambitious two-volume undertaking demonstrates a preoccupation as old as Western civilization itself: the limits of language and the virtue of being at a loss for words. How long we have been raiding the Inarticulate!” —Peter S. Hawkins, Boston University “Developments in critical theory during the past two decades have led to renewed interest in negative theology. Books like _Languages of the Unsayable_, _Negation and Theology_, _Derrida and Negative Theology _, and _The Otherness of God _ have signaled the resurgence of this ancient tradition. William Franke’s distinctive contribution is to provide the background and texts from which these recent developments have emerged.” —Mark Taylor, Williams College Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This monumental two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. The second volume, _Modern and Contemporary Transformations_, contains texts by Hölderlin, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Rilke, Kafka, Rosenzweig, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Weil, Schoenberg, Adorno, Beckett, Celan, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, and more. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Can (and Cannot) Be Said About the Distinction Between Religious Experience and PsychopathologyMohammed Abouelleil Rashed, MD, PhDThe distinction between religious experience and psychopathology as a puzzle to be pondered, debated, clarified, and analyzed is an example of a thoroughly modern problem. It is modern in that the distinction can only make sense if our starting assumption is the existence of unique and separate types of experience that (...) might overlap phenomenologically but are ultimately different entities that should be distinguished from each other. And it can only have this sort of sense in a secular worldview where the possibility of a fully areligious type of psychological suffering is on the table and widely accepted. By framing the matter in this way, the debate presupposes, rather than argues for, the existence of unique and separate types of experience. This is a major presupposition, and its coherence cannot be assumed, nor can we ignore the impact of our standpoint in the debate on whether or not we can actually make that distinction let alone resolve it. In the original paper (Rashed, 2024), I deconstruct the distinction by examining what can, and cannot, be said about it given the standpoint that we adopt. In what follows, I respond to Awais Aftab’s and Warren Kinghorn’s thoughtful commentaries on my paper and in the process clarify my thesis further.What We Believe and the limits of What We Can ArgueAwais Aftab (2024) perceptively points out that the way I define the terms renders the distinction between religious experience and psychopathology an instance of the broader distinction between the religious worldview and the scientific worldview. Accordingly, my approach deviates from the usual [End Page 219] approach in these debates, which tend to focus on specific areas of phenomenology (delusion, hallucinations, low mood, etc.). This focus then directs the debate toward distinguishing these states from each other, and not toward asking if there is a distinction that needs to made at all, and, if there is, what the distinction is really about. In order to overcome this potential blind spot, we need to step back and examine our assumptions about the possibility and the nature of the allegedly competing conceptions of religious experience and psychopathology. And to do so, we need to apprehend the distinction in the broadest possible sense, as it is there that we can identify our assumptions about those ‘things’ we are trying to distinguish from each other.The first step in deconstructing this debate is to identify our stance towards the categories of religious experience and mental disorder, and what this stance enables us to say and prohibits us from saying. On an ontological stance, we would be dealing with two distinct categories of experience out there in the world for us to identify, study, and differentiate; there is a truth of the matter as to the origin of the experience, a truth that we can get hold of if we can get to the essence of the respective phenomena. On a constructivist stance, there is no sense to this claim, and what we have are two possible interpretations of experience that cannot be differentiated from each other from a natural or a supernatural standpoint; they do not reflect distinct types of experience, merely the attribution of meaning, which can always go the other way depending on the social situation and the cultural context. And so, our initial stance as to an ontological or constructivist understanding will constrain from the outset what can and cannot be said about the distinction between religious experience and psychopathology. The issue is further complicated by the fact that we can hold a range of positions: we can, at the same time, adopt an ontological view of religious experience and a constructivist view of mental disorder, or vice versa, and in each case we might end up in a different place.For philosophers, theologians, and others writing from a religious standpoint, we can assume that they are adopting an ontological reading of religious experience. In other words, they take it to be true that some experiences have a divine origin, connect the person to non... (shrink)

Bhartṛhari claims that certain things cannot be signified--for example, the signification relation itself. Hans and Radhika Herzberger assert that Bhartṛhari's claim about signification can be validated by an appeal to twentieth-century results in set theory. This appeal is unpersuasive in establishing this view, but arguments akin to the semantic paradoxes (such as the "liar" paradox) come much closer. Unfortunately, these arguments are equally telling against another of his views: that the thatness of the signification relation can be signified. Bhartṛhari also (...) claims that the relation of inherence cannot be signified--a quite different view that is not borne out by twentieth-century results. Finally, further research is needed to investigate what Bhartṛhari's own reasons might have been for these views. (shrink)

Although Wittgenstein's philosophy long went untranslated in France, he was not entirely unread. Yet the relatively minor impact of Wittgenstein in mid-century French-language philosophy stands in marked contrast to the centrality of Wittgenstinian themes in Anglo-American thinking. Early French writings on Wittgenstein, as well a colloquium on analytic philosophy held at Royaumont in 1958, are discussed, and explanations proposed for Wittgenstein's limited reception in France in the five decades following the publication of the Tractatus in 1921/22. Possible effects of Wittgenstein's (...) quasi-absence from French discussion in the period on more recent theoretical reflection are briefly examined. It is suggested that Oxford philosophers of the 1950s, and in particular J.L. Austin, had a more immediate impact on French readers. (shrink)

The core of this special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education emerged from the Broken Narratives and the Lived Body conference held in 2016. The ‘Broken Narrative’ essays included in this issue open up a critical space for understanding and theorising illness narratives that defy a conventional cognitive ordering of the self as a bounded spatial and temporal entity. Here, we discuss how narratives might be ‘broken’ by discourse, trauma, ‘ill’ lived bodies and experiences that exceed linguistic representation. (...) We trouble distinctions between coherent and incoherent narratives, attending to what gaps, silences and ‘nonsenses’ can convey about embodied illness experiences. Ultimately, we suggest that ‘breaks’ are in fact a continuation of embodied narration. This is shown in the ‘Art and Trauma’ forum of essays, which reveal how narrative silences can ‘infect’ other embodied subjects and be transformed, achieving musical or visual representation that allow us to apprehend the ‘constitutive outside’ of narratives of illness or trauma. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In contemporary U.S. public discourse, calls for achieving equity abound. Many metrics now measure equity being achieved. I inquire into whether equity can be said to be achieved and still be equity. Inquiring as such leads me to excavating the menacing and actual cultural violence of developing such achievement. Simultaneously, this excavation shows the rhetoric of equity qua equity as a means of abolishing the conditions for that violence to take hold. I put forward that equity cannot (...) be said to be achieved without the conditions of possibility equity offers being colonized. If a commitment to antiviolence speaks, it cannot say, “Equity achieved.”. (shrink)

This essay examines St Augustine’s various references to Pythagoras and his teachings. The young Augustine presents Pythagoras as an ideal philosopher. Late in life, he regrets this praise he then considers exaggerated, mostly on account of Pythagoras’ polytheism. As can been seen from works written in between, Augustine’s appreciation for Pythagoras rests on more than one column: Pythagoras is the representative of contemplative philosophy, and Augustine credits him with a philosophical understanding of numbers and with key insights into philosophical theology. (...) Pythagoras’ traditional association with divination or theurgy is played down. In Augustine’s eyes, no pagan philosopher has much authority in comparison to Christ, whose humility is the only way to God. Yet, this very argument opens the gate to the most interesting comment Augustine makes on Pythagoras: he ascribes to Pythagoras having coined the term philosopher and defined it as lover of God. Moreover, Pythagoras preferred himself to be called a philosopher, i.e. a lover and student of wisdom, rather than wise, which would be a presumptuous claim. In Augustine’s consistently respectful treatment, therefore, Pythagoras, implicitly, gives an example of humility, seems to belong to those pagans who were at least looking for a mediator, and may in fact have received a certain revelation of him – about them, therefore, “nothing rash must be said”. (shrink)

What cannot be said? The question presses, as there are no words, or no fitting words, or no words that make sense let alone do justice, all perhaps in the face of demands to speak. And, as voice collapses in the midst of the violence that confounds reference, degrades language, imposes silence, and enforces repression—what cannot be said may turn on privation, the grounds, incentives, and intentions of expression that are banished, disappeared, and colonized, often in the name (...) of deterring and containing the "dangerous" word, the word assumed to be violent, perhaps intrinsically and perhaps as it's held to contravene the homologeō with so much "barbarism." In this way, what cannot be said may also be a... (shrink)

In this article, I consider the moment where speech becomes violent because it wants to name at any price - something that can be felt as a desire in speech, a tension of creation and destruction. I discuss Habermas' theory of communicative action and the propositional conception of truth that underpins it. That conception of truth can be contrasted to the theory of truth as event, as it has been developed by Alain Badiou. A similarity between Badiou's theory of truth (...) and the latent utopianism of Adorno's negative dialectics shows that, for contemporary philosophy, the first phase of Frankfurt School theorising remains important. A philosophy that is able to 'motivate and guide the will' (Habermas) needs to include a non-propositional conception of truth; only with a non-propositional conception of truth can we articulate what is involved in communicative violence and come to understand what the place of what cannot be said is, in thought as well as in private, social and political life. (shrink)

One of the most significant ways in which much late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and philosophy may be distinguished from their predecessors is in their reliance upon the notion of ‘inexpressibility’ and the limits of the sayable. In this article, I seek not only to chart the history of this tradition, but also to reflect critically upon the use it makes of the concept of ‘the nothing’. For all their differences, in both Wittgenstein and Heidegger one encounters deployments of this (...) concept in ways that determine these thinkers’ conceptions of language and literature. My aim here is to initiate a new critical reflection upon the fate of the concept of ‘the nothing’ in modern philosophy and literary theory. (shrink)

To say that a person has been enjoying digging is not to say that he has been both digging and doing or experiencing something else as a concomitant or effect of the digging; it is to say that he dug with his whole heart in his task, i.e. that he dug, wanting to dig and not wanting to do anything else (or nothing) instead. His digging was a propensityfulfilment. His digging was his pleasure, and not a vehicle of his pleasure.1.

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

This chapter sketches an argument for moral non‐naturalism. The argument begins by noting that naturalist positions must be reductionist. It then canvasses two prominent defenses of reductionist naturalism: Frank Jackson's and Mark Schroeder's. Both defenses suffer from serious problems. Because they do, we have good reason to carefully consider rival realist positions, such as non‐naturalism. When we do, we find that some moral facts, such as the fundamental moral standards, do not bear the marks of the natural. This provides prima (...) facie reason to hold that they are as non‐naturalists believe. (shrink)

전기 비트겐슈타인은 사고를 논리적으로 명료화하기 위해 사고의 한계, 언어의 한계를 긋고 말할 수 있는 것과 말할 수 없는 것을 나눈다. 말할 수 없는 것은 가치와 관련되며 삶의 문제를 다루기 때문에 중요하지만 말할 수 없는 것에 대해 말하는 것은 무의미를 발 생하기 때문에 말할 수 없는 것에 대해서는 침묵해야 한다. 말할 수 없는 것은 스스로 드 러난다. 본 연구는 말할 수 없는 것이 어떻게 드러나며, 그 특징이 어떠한지에 대한 연구 이다. 삶의 의미와 관련되는 말할 수 없는 것들은 ‘삶’으로 드러난다. 삶의 의미를 (...) 깨달은 이 들은 삶의 의미를 말이 아니라 삶으로 보여준다. 삶의 의미를 깨달은 이들의 삶은 행복한 삶이다. 비트겐슈타인은 행복한 자의 삶의 특징을 알려준다. 행복한 삶은 영원 속에 사는 삶이다. 영원은 무시간적 현재로, 영원 속에 사는 삶이란 ‘지금 여기서’ 사는 삶이다. 또 행복한 삶은 소망 없는 삶이다. 소망 없음은 어떤 의욕도 없는 무기력한 삶이 아니라 해야 할 일에 최선을 다하되 결과에 연연하지 않고 결과를 저항 없이 받아들이는 것이다. 그래 서 행복한 삶은 세계와 일치하는 삶이다. 행복한 삶의 특징들을 밝힌 것이 말할 수 없는 것들에 원리나 규범을 제공한 것이 아니 다. 행복한 자의 특징은 규칙을 진술할 수 없는 ‘문법 없는 언어’이다. 행복한 삶은 당사자 만 알 수 있는 것으로 1인칭으로만 성립한다. 절대적 가치를 경험한 이들은 행복한 삶을 살고 있는지 아닌지 스스로 알 수 있다. (shrink)

Setting up a dialectic between knowing and being poses an uncomfortable challenge to our usual way of doing science. As a modest contribution to the new collective culture we need, this commentary shares a few Zen koans, and three Taoist stories.

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I (...) think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument.A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign , uncharacterizable as a whole and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried–out of sheer critical obstinacy–is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–"insiders," people who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , pp. 180-85 and 212-6. (shrink)

Imam Abü Hamid al-Ghazalı is perhaps the most celebrated Muslim theologian of medieval Islam yet little attention has been paid to his personal theology. This book sets out to investigate the relationship between law and politics in the writings of Ghazalı and aims to establish the extent to which this relationship explains Ghazalı’s political theology. Articles concerned with Ghazalı’s political thought have invariably paid little attention to his theology and his thinking about God, neglecting to ask what role these have (...) contributed to his definition of politics and political ethics. Here, the question of Ghazalı’s politics takes into account his thinking on God, knowledge, law, and the Koran, in addition to political systems and ethics. _Yazeed Said_ puts forward the convincing argument that if Ghazalı’s legal and political epistemology provide a polemic analogous to his writings on philosophy, for which he is more famed, they would reveal to us a manifesto for an alternative order, concerned with a coherent definition of the community, or _Ummah_. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the Middle East, political theology and Islamic studies. (shrink)

At one point Fish says that a profession produces no “real” commodity but offers only a service. But surely the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of Fish’s position on professionalism is not that it is something done or lived but something produced and reproduced, albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are, Fish doesn’t say. Then again he makes the rather telling remarks that he (...) is “turning everything into professionalism” —an instance of overstating and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn “everything” into professionalism is to strip professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define professionalism—and the particular values associated with it—there is very little value in going on about the incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable to antiprofessionalism.On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed, that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete, put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that professions are not natural objects but concrete, political, economic, and social formations playing very defined, although sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary professionals “exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors” is because of their damaging antiprofessionalism , he is making an observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor specifies “machinery” and “labors” with any precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish’s important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities, and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary profession is concerned, “the profession” is the context to which “everything” can be related. Edward W. Said’s most recent work is The World, the Text, and the Critic. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions” and “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”. (shrink)

I argue that it is only on the condition of a preconceptual understanding that Zhuangzi's metaphors can be cognitive. Kim-chong Chong holds that the choice between metaphors as noncognitive and cognitive is a choice between Allinson and Davidson. Chong's view of metaphors possessing multivalence is reducible to Davidson's choice, because there is no built-in parameter between multivalence and limitless valence. If Zhuangzi's metaphors were multivalent, the text would be subject to infinite interpretive viewpoints and the logical consequence of relativism. It (...) is only if metaphors are cognitive that the text of the Zhuangzi can convey the message of transcendent freedom. (shrink)

I take it that A. W. Moore is right when he said that ‘Wittgenstein was right: some things cannot be put into words. Moreover, some things that cannot be put into words are of the utmost philosophical importance’. There is, however, a constant threat of self-stultification whenever an attempt is made to put the ineffable into words. As Pamela Sue Anderson notes in Re-visioning gender in philosophy of religion: reason, love, and epistemic locatedness, certain recent approaches to ineffability—including Moore’s (...) approach—attempt to find a ‘third way’ of engaging with it, which displaces the traditional dichotomy between the effable and the ineffable, that is, between what can be said and what cannot be said. In this way, they seek to overcome the threat of self-stultification mentioned above. Still, one important challenge to this kind of approach, which Moore addresses, is, as he puts it, ‘to show how it is possible’ to talk about the ineffable ‘without belying its very ineffability’. His solution to the problem of the ineffable takes the notion of ‘knowing how’ to play a central role, and is formulated in accordance with his commitments to truth and objectivity. A further important challenge to the kind of approach to the ineffable Moore proposes concerns the issue of objectivity. In Re-visioning gender in philosophy of religion, Anderson draws attention to our epistemic locatedness, which brings in questions concerning, for example, gender and culture. Pursuing this view, the challenge is to show ineffable insight without ignoring our epistemic locatedness and, in particular, the role of gender in the conceptualisation and imagery through which we seek to come to terms with the ineffable. My paper deals with these challenges. By engaging with Moore’s and Anderson’s discussions of the ineffable, I examine how it is possible to talk philosophically about the ineffable, without breaking a commitment to enlarged or objective thinking, and without ignoring the epistemic locatedness of thinking. (shrink)

In this chapter, Said argues that in the case of the Palestinians and Israelis, histories and cultures are inextricably linked ‘contrapuntally’ in symbiotic rather than mutually exclusive terms. When this understanding of circumstances occurs, it no longer seems viable to eliminate the opposition because there will always be a tomorrow in which retribution will be demanded by those who feel that an injustice had been forced upon family members or previous generations. Said emphasizes the need to think about (...) and resolve two histories that have become interwoven, despite the fact that many have tried to define the other in contradictory terms. Part of arriving at a Just Peace entails recognizing a shared identity and common history even if this approach highlights differences. This might be a monumental task considering the trials and tribulations that have often come to pass in a conflict, but for Said, an ‘abridged memory’ is not an option that will lead to Just Peace. (shrink)

The article focuses on the ontological foundations of lifeworld as Being taken for granted and viewed as a communication phenomenon par excellence, conceptualized as signifying in the presence of others. It is argued that, because there is always a wider horizon of experience against which anything can appear, lifeworld as something continuous can only be thematized in discrete scientific forms. In the article, lifeworld is discussed through the perspectives of four different sciences. From the natural science perspective, lifeworld is (...) conceptualized as an arrangement contingent on the interconnections of human and nonhuman beings. It takes the form of conversation and can be best examined by Conversation Analysis. From the social science perspective, lifeworld is conceptualized as an order that is constituted by symbolic interactions and guided by relevant types and rules that structure our experience. It takes the form of intersubjective action as a meaningful back and forth and can be best examined by Discourse Analysis. From the cultural sciences perspective, lifeworld is the realm of spirit passed from generation to generation that gives human culture its meaning. It takes the form of significant expressions and can be best examined by Textual Hermeneutic Analysis. And, from the philosophical perspective, lifeworld is constituted by phenomena that appear, or monstrate themselves, to consciousness. This lifeworld is of absolute reversibility and immediacy and can be best examined by Critical Analysis, i.e., by postulating our relation to any object through contemplation. Thus, as Being, lifeworld is said in many ways, each lifeworld being relevant in its own way by providing a valuable resource – physico-biological, normative, significational, and transcendental. (shrink)

This article proposes a new problem which is called the Stochastic Travelling Advisor Problem in network optimization, and it is defined for an advisory group who wants to choose a subset of candidate workplaces comprising the most profitable route within the time limit of day working hours. A nonlinear binary mathematical model is formulated and a real application case study in the occupational health and safety field is presented. The problem has a stochastic nature in travelling and advising times since (...) the deterministic models are not appropriate for such real-life problems. The STAP is handled by proposing suitable probability distributions for the time parameters and simulating the problem under such conditions. Many application problems like this one are formulated as nonlinear binary programming models which are hard to be solved using exact algorithms especially in large dimensions. A novel binary version of the recently developed gaining-sharing knowledge-based optimization algorithm to solve binary optimization problems is given. GSK algorithm is based on the concept of how humans acquire and share knowledge during their life span. The binary version of GSK depends mainly on two stages that enable BGSK for exploring and exploitation of the search space efficiently and effectively to solve problems in binary space. The generated simulation runs of the example are solved using the BGSK, and the output histograms and the best-fitted distributions for the total profit and for the route length are obtained. (shrink)

As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmodern theory both reacted to and helped create the forces that eroded reason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of a postmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form was inscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, the reality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discourse in such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronic platforms, all (...) radical, all working class or under class voices are pre vetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financialized kitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators, following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the lost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesia about the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination. The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imagination of the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by its 'otherness', by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories, all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness. And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose can the artwork posit the direction to which society must look to create an 'other' or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promise that is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. The Utopian promise is not kept. (shrink)

The distinction between saying and showing in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is not self-refuting, unbelievable or nonsensical. It makes good sense given Wittgenstein's equation of saying with communicable information and showing with necessarily true thought. The key to understanding his thinking is his claim in the Preface that unassailable and definitive truths are expressed in the book, and the subsidiary assumption that asserting empty truths is nonsensical. His conception of pictures, propositions, logic, mathematics, mathematical physics, mysticism, the inexpressible and solipsism as showing (...) is of a piece with his conception of necessary/a priori truths as tautologies broadly understood. (shrink)

The practitioner of the shamanic system among the Bugis-Makassar people in Indonesia is known as dukun or sanro, a person believed has a supranatural power, using their power either to help others or bringing harm, such as disease”. This is an interpretative-descriptive anthropological research. We made observations by directly observing, listening, and recording events related to the problem. We also conducted in-depth interviews with dukun and customers using interview guides and other tools such as recorders. We found that there are (...) several types and characteristics of dukun in Makassar, such as dukun penolong (helpers), traditional healers, and dukun using black magic. In Bugis-Makassar social structure, dukun does not have a clear position even with some of the stigma. However, dukun nowadays is becoming more open and increasingly strengthening their position in society, especially in the political arena. Dukun, along with several people believing them cannot be assessed from the rational point of view since they have their own reasoning and logic (rationality behind irrationality). They still function in the socio-political life of Indonesian society. The mysticism practiced by politicians in Indonesia, especially in Makassar, is shown when politicians such as several regional head candidates used the services of dukun to boost their success in winning the regional election. For example, dukun can help candidates to create an aura of authority, protect the candidates from black magic, create illusions to the voters, influence the voters, and other supranatural things. The customers, such as politicians, tend to have their own motivation based on rationality when deciding to have a relationship with a dukun. Motivation for seeking spiritual and political supports by utilizing the network of dukun for political purposes has a reciprocal effect which benefits both parties. (shrink)

We know the history of philosophy as Arabian, English, American, Greece, Indian, Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, French, Japanese… But it is surprisingly that we do not use more common concept as "national philosophy", which may be included in notions "regional" and "world" philosophy. The other words common to all mankind. As the President of Independent Republic of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov emphasized, "It is important to understand the life giving, deep sources of national culture, East philosophy which serve at vigorous stimulus (...) of rapid progress and renovation". We suppose that the main part of philosophy is human life, man's coming to be and evolution as a subject of interaction with the world. Any philosophy is the philosophy of a man, His life. A man belongs tosome nationality, nation and mankind. The nature is definite geographic midst for a man. Each nationality, nation has its own history and specific outlines – style of life, way of life, traditions, nation interests, psychology, ideas, values, culture. It is common and typical for all nations and it imposes an imprint at all sides of realityas well as philosophy. (shrink)

Resumo: A partir de um raciocínio equivocado acerca do significado dos teoremas de completude e incompletude de Gödel, apresentamos alguns importantes conceitos de lógica matemática e, com base em uma análise dos teoremas acima, concluímos mencionando a existência de modelos não standard da Aritmética de Peano.Palavras-chave: Completude. Incompletude. Teoremas de Gödel: From a mistaken reasoning about the completeness and incompleteness Gödel's theorems, we show important concepts of mathematical logic and, based on above theorems, we conclude showing the existence of non (...) standard models for Peano's Arithmetic.Keywords: Completeness. Incompleteness. Gödel's theorems. (shrink)

Resumo: O pensamento de Walter Benjamin ocupa uma posição particular e, pode-se até dizer, especial na história do pensamento crítico moderno. Sua obra, fragmentada, inacabada, hermética, atual, anacrônica e complexa, possibilita um passeio sobre uma diversidade de temáticas que vão desde a literatura, passando pela sociologia, filosofia, arte, história, entre outras. O objetivo principal deste artigo consiste, assim, em estabelecer mais um olhar em direção a esse pensador. Trata-se, sobretudo, de compreender como as temáticas do fetichismo da mercadoria e da (...) fantasmagoria podem ser vistas em uma de suas principais obras semificcionais (“Infânc[1]ia Berlinense: 1900”). Foram selecionados, para fins deste trabalho, oito excertos. São eles: “O telefone” “Rua de Steglitz, esquina com a rua de Genthin”, “Mercado”, “Krumme Straβe”, “Um fantasma”, “O anãozinho corcunda”, “Blumeshof 12” e “Desgraças e Crimes”. Após a análise dos excertos, pôde-se observar que o conceito de fetichismo da mercadoria, cunhado por Marx no Capital e ampliado por Benjamin como um elemento de interpretação da realidade burguesa alemã da época de sua infância (fantasmagoria), pode ser visualizado na maioria dos excertos escritos pelo autor na obra “Infância Berlinense: 1900”. Palavras-chave: Fetichismo; Fantasmagoria; Infância Berlinense: 1900; Walter Benjamin. Fetishism and Phantasmagoria in the Work “Berliner Childhood: 1900”, by Walter Benjamin Abstract: Walter Benjamin's thought occupies a particular and, one might even say, special position in the history of modern critical thought. His work, fragmented, unfinished, hermetic, current, anachronistic and complex, allows a tour of a diversity of themes ranging from literature, through sociology, philosophy, art, history, among others. The main objective of this article is, therefore, to establish another look towards this thinker. It is, above all, to understand how the themes of commodity fetishism and phantasmagoria can be seen in one of his main semi-fictional works (“Berlin Childhood: 1900”). Eight excerpts were selected for the purposes of this work. They are: “The Telephone”, “Steglitz Street, Corner with Genthin Street”, “Market”, “Krumme Straβe”, “A Ghost”, “The Humpbacked Little Dwarf”, “Blumeshof 12” and “Misfortunes and Crimes”. After analyzing the excerpts, it was possible to observe that the concept of commodity fetishism, coined by Marx in Capital and expanded by Benjamin as an element of interpretation of the German bourgeois reality of his childhood (phantasmagoria), can be visualized in most excerpts written by the author in the work “Berlin Childhood: 1900”. Keywords: Fetishism; Fantasmagoria; Berlin Childhood: 1900; Walter Benjamin. Fetichismo y Fantasmagoría en la Obra “Infancia Berlinesa: 1900”, de Walter Benjamin Resumen: El pensamiento de Walter Benjamin ocupa un lugar particular y, hasta se podría decir, especial en la historia del pensamiento crítico moderno. Su obra, fragmentada, inconclusa, hermética, actual, anacrónica y compleja, permite un recorrido por una diversidad de temáticas que van desde la literatura, pasando por la sociología, la filosofía, el arte, la historia, entre otras. El objetivo principal de este artículo es, por tanto, establecer otra mirada hacia este pensador. Se trata, sobre todo, de entender cómo los temas del fetichismo de la mercancía y la fantasmagoría pueden verse en una de sus principales obras semificcionales ("Infancia berlinesa: 1900"). Se seleccionaron ocho extractos para los propósitos de este trabajo. Ellos son: "El teléfono", "Calle Steglitz, esquina con calle Genthin", "Mercado", "Krumme Straβe", "Un fantasma", "El enanito jorobado", "Blumeshof 12" y "Desgracias y crímenes". Tras el análisis de los extractos, fue posible observar que el concepto de fetichismo de la mercancía, acuñado por Marx en El Capital y ampliado por Benjamin como elemento de interpretación de la realidad burguesa alemana de su infancia (fantasmagoría), puede visualizarse en la mayoría de los extractos escritos del autor en la obra "Infancia berlinesa: 1900". Palabras clave: Fetichismo; Fantasmagoría; Infancia Berlinesa: 1900; Walter Benjamin. Data de registro: 04/03/2022 Data de aceite: 01/12/2022. (shrink)

Cognitive science is currently a rapidly expanding area of research. Much is being written on it, but this collection is notable for its contributors who are extremely eminent and distinguished in the subject . The collection is well-balanced, since it includes the work of both philosophers and scientists . It will therefore appeal to all academics interested in the subject, irrespective of whether they have approached the subject from a philosophical or from a scientific point of view.

Contributing to the fast growing new field of neutrosophy, this book provides a significant collection of unedited articles covering the latest ongoing research area. Neutrosopy is above all a new view on modelling, tailored to effectively address the uncertainties inherent of the real world. In short, Neutrosophy supersedes in logics the binary approach of true or false by introducing a third state: neutral, which can be also interpreted as indeterminate, uncertain, inconsistent.

Some fashionable leftist movements and populist intellectuals habitually blame the sources of information for public ignorance about the miserable state of the world. It could be argued, however, that the masses are ignorant because they prefer ignorance. A mass individual is politically apathetic and intellectually lazy. As a result, even when huge amounts of information are available, which is the case in this epoch, the masses insist on choosing ignorance. It is true that there is not enough information about what (...) has happened in a place such as Darfur, but the masses choose not to access even the amount of information that is available. The great majority of people in China, Iran, and America, despite the fact that they have varying amounts of access to various types of “knowledge,” still tend to be misinformed. It seems that a mass individual is curious only about what directly affects his/her own personal life. I will explore the connection between mass mentality and the culture industry in order to capture the essential role of the former in the latter. I will also argue that a mass individual is the source of fascism although fascism as a phenomenon needs a mass culture in which to flourish. (shrink)

This collection by a distinguished group of philosophers, psychologists, and physiologists reflects an interdisciplinary approach to the central question of cognitive science: how do we model the mind? Among the topics explored are the relationships (theoretical, reductive, and explanatory) between philosophy, psychology, computer science, and physiology; what should be asked of models in science generally, and in cognitive science in particular; whether theoretical models must make essential reference to objects in the environment; whether there are human competences that are resistant, (...) in principle, to modelling; whether simulated thinking and intentionality are really thinking and intentionality; how semantics can be generated from syntactics; the meaning of the terms "representations" and "modelling;" whether the nature of the "hardware" matters; and whether computer models of humans are "dehumanizing." Contributors include Donald Davidson, Daniel C. Dennett, Margaret A. Boden, Adam Morton, Dennis Noble, T. Poggio, Colin Blakemore, K.V. Wilkes, P.N. Johnson-Laird, and Jonathan St. B.T. Evans. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 170 - 193 Boethius identifies beings that _are in_ a subject with what the Scholastics called predicamental accident, and predication by accident with the predication of what _is in_ a subject. The first of these questionable assimilations went on to become terminology commonly accepted by Scholastics of all eras. On the other hand, the second, which seems quite consistent with the thinking of Aristotle, was only admitted with many reservations, probably because of the (...) bewildering claims of Aristotle in _Cat._ 5, 2a27-34 about the predication of what _is in_ the subject. In what follows I will try to show how these phrases, properly understood, are consistent with the idea that what _is in_ the subject is said by accident of the substance, although they implicate a difficulty poorly resolved by Boethius himself and those who followed him on this point, of whom I will only mention by way of example some Scholastics from the 16th century. (shrink)

In spite of accruing concerted scholarly and managerial interest since the 1950s in corporate social responsibility (CSR), its implementation is still a growing topic as most of it remains academically unexplored. As CSR continues to establish a stronger foothold in organizational strategies, understanding its implementation is needed for both academia and industry. In an attempt to respond to this need, we carry out a systematic review of 122 empirical studies on CSR implementation to provide a status quo of the literature (...) and inform future scholars. We develop a research agenda in the form of an integrated framework of CSR implementation that pronounces its multi-dimensional and multi-level nature and provides a snapshot of the current literature status of CSR implementation. Future research avenues relating to multi-level studies, theoretically supported research models, developing economy settings, and more are recommended. Practitioners can also benefit through utilizing the holistic framework to attain a bird’s eye view and proactively formulate and implement CSR strategies that can be facilitated by collaborations with CSR scholars and experts. (shrink)

It is well known that the unpredictable speech production brought on by stress from the task at hand has a significant negative impact on the performance of speech processing algorithms. Speech therapy benefits from being able to detect stress in speech. Speech processing performance suffers noticeably when perceptually produced stress causes variations in speech production. Using the acoustic speech signal to objectively characterize speaker stress is one method for assessing production variances brought on by stress. Real-world complexity and ambiguity (...) make it difficult for decision-makers to express their conclusions with clarity in their speech. In particular, the Neutrosophic speech algorithm is used to encode the language variables because they cannot be computed directly. Neutrosophic sets are used to manage indeterminacy in a practical situation. Existing algorithms are used except for stress on Neutrosophic speech recognition. The creation of algorithms that calculate, categorize, or differentiate between different stress circumstances. Understanding stress and developing strategies to combat its effects on speech recognition and human-computer interaction system are the goals of this recognition. (shrink)

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, "that which is said to exist through any nature is called a suppositum or subject of that nature. For example, that which has the nature of horse is said to be a subject or suppositum of equine nature." Subjects or supposita, moreover, occupy all the room there is in the Thomistic universe, since existence belongs properly only to individual subjects. These may be simple, as in the case of separate intelligences or composite as (...) in the case of inanimate and animate substances: "existence belongs properly to subsisting things, whether they be simple, as in the case of separate substances, or composite, as in the case of material substances. For the act of existing belongs properly to that which has existence: that is, to that which subsists in its own existence.". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Looking Back Looking Forward Namaste From the Individual to the Universal Yoga in Schools Furthering the Case for Yoga in Schools Specific, Additional Options Worth Considering Conclusion.