Jean-Luc Marion is one of the world’s foremost philosophers of religion as well as one of the leading Catholic thinkers of modern times. In _God Without Being_, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of traditional philosophy, theology, and metaphysics: that God, before all else, must be. Taking a characteristically postmodern stance and engaging in passionate dialogue with Heidegger, he locates a “God without Being” in the realm of _agape_, or Christian charity and love. If God is love, Marion contends, then God (...) loves before he actually is. First translated into English in 1991, _God Without Being_ continues to be a key book for discussions of the nature of God. This second edition contains a new preface by Marion as well as his 2003 essay on Thomas Aquinas. Offering a controversial, contemporary perspective, _God Without Being_ will remain essential reading for scholars and students of philosophy and religion. “Daring and profound.... In matters most central to his thesis, [Marion]’s control is admirable, and his attunement to the nuances of other major postmodern thinkers is impressive.”—_Theological Studies_ “A truly remarkable work.”—_First Things_ “Very rewarding reading.”—_Religious Studies Review_. (shrink)

En explorant plus avant le projet des ouvrages théologiques précédents, Au lieu de soi ne distingue pas simplement la pensée de la création de l’onto-théologie mais la sépare aussi de son dépassement heideggérien, qui demeure pour Marion aussi idolâtrique que la métaphysique elle-même. L’ouvrage se concentre ici autour de l’interprétation de l’adonné comme créature par excellence, ou créature iconique – dont le privilège tient à sa temporalité et à sa mutabilité. Indispensable à l’interprétation de saint Augustin comme penseur non métaphysique, (...) l’analyse de la temporalité de l’homme iconique, en démontrant la manière dont la pensée de la création reste hors de l’ontothéologie et de la causa et de l’ego, suggère en même temps que saint Augustin n’affirme le devenir de l’homme qu’en lui enlevant toute innocence et, corrélativement, ne trouve pas de bonheur véritable dans l’amour du mortel comme tel. (shrink)

En discrepancia con la afirmación de Jean-Luc Marion de que la fenomenología existencial de Martin Heidegger carece de un pensamiento del amor, este artículo sostiene que un pensamiento del amor —el cual es directamente deudor de San Agustín— es de hecho fundamental para la crítica de Heidegger a la metafísica moderna y su culminación en el dominio de la tecnología. La diferencia entre Marion y Heidegger en la cuestión del amor, según el artículo, reside en otra parte: para Marion, la (...) intencionalidad extra-mundana del amor aspira a lo eterno, mientras que para Heidegger la intencionalidad del amor atiende en el fondo a nuestro ineludiblemente temporal y mortal estar-en-el-mundo. (shrink)

Examines the relationship between the question of God and the destiny of metaphysics. Concept of the end of metaphysics; Ambiguous relation between phenomenology and metaphysics; Return of special metaphysics in phenomenology; Phenomenological figure of God. Examines the relationship between the question of God and the destiny of metaphysics. Concept of the end of metaphysics; Ambiguous relation between phenomenology and metaphysics; Return of special metaphysics in phenomenology; Phenomenological figure of God.

The Genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy. By Thomas J.J. Altizer. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. pp.200.

Humanity’s creative capacity has never been more unsettling than it is at our current moment, when it has ushered us into new technological worlds that challenge the very definition of “the human.” Those anxious to safeguard the human against techno-scientific threats often appeal to religious traditions to protect the place and dignity of the human. But how well do we understand both theological tradition and today’s technological culture? In _The Indiscrete Image, _Thomas A. Carlson challenges our common ideas about (...) both, arguing instead that it may be humanity’s final lack of definition that first enables, and calls for, human creativity and its correlates—including technology, tradition, and their inextricable interplay within religious existence. Framed in response to Martin Heidegger’s influential account of the relation between technological modernity and theological tradition, _The Indiscrete Image_ builds an understanding of creativity as conditioned by insurmountable unknowing and incalculable possibility through alternative readings of Christian theological tradition and technological culture—and the surprising resonance between these two. Carlson concludes that the always ongoing work of world creation, tied essentially to human self-creation, implies neither an idol’s closure nor an icon’s transcendence, but the “indiscrete image” whose love makes possible—by keeping open—both the human and its world. (shrink)

When we love a place: world's end with Cormac McCarthy -- Mourning places and time in Augustine -- The conversion of time to the time of conversion: Augustine with Marion -- The time of his syllables: dying together with Derrida and Augustine -- Thinking love and mortality with Heidegger -- World loss or heart failure: pedagogies of estrangement in Harrison and Nancy -- Ages of learning . . . the secular today with Emerson and Nietzsche.

Jean-Luc Marion advances a controversial argument for a God free of all categories of Being. Taking a characteristically postmodern stance, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of both metaphysics and neo-Thomist theology: that God, before all else, must be. Rather, he locates a "God without Being" in the realm of agape, of Christian charity or love. This volume, the first translation into English of the work of this leading Catholic philosopher, offers a contemporary perspective on the nature of God. "An immensely (...) thoughtful book.... It promises a rich harvest. Marion's highly original treatment of the idol and the icon, the Eucharist, boredom and vanity, conversion and prayer takes theological and philosophical discussions to a new level."—Norman Wirzba, _Christian Century_. (shrink)

The Islamization of Syria, a multi-faceted social and cultural process not limited to demography, was slow and highly variable across different locales. This article analyzes geographical works—ten in Arabic, one in Persian, and one in Hebrew— as well as the earliest Ottoman defters of the province to outline the process of Islamization in Syria from the Islamic conquest in the seventh century to the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth. Geographical texts cannot be mined as databases, but when interpreted as literature (...) they provide often detailed information regarding the foundation of mosques, the slow conversion of multi-religious shrines, and areas within Syria known for particular religious affiliations. (shrink)

What are the primary characteristics that define what it means to be human? And what happens to those characteristics in the face of technology past, present, and future? The three essays in Image, by leading philosophers of religion Mark Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas Carlson, play at this intersection of the human and the technological, building out from Heidegger's notion that humans master the world by picturing or representing the real.Taylor's essay traces a history of capitalism, dwelling on (...) the lack of humility, particularly in the face of our own mortality, that is the persistent failure of humans, before turning to art as a possible way to bring us back to earth and recover humility before it is too late. Rubenstein zeroes in on the delusions of imaginative conquest associated with space travel. Through a genealogy of the modern "view from space" from the iconic Earth rise photo of 1968 up to the new privatized American space race, Rubenstein provides an analysis of the perils of the one-world and the false unity it projects. In his essay, Carlson takes as his starting point the surveillance capitalism of facial recognition technology. He dives deep into Heidegger to meditate on the elimination of individuals through totalizing gestures and the relationship between such elimination and our encounters with mortality. Each of these essays, in its own way, reflects on the nature of imagination, the character of technological vision in contemporary culture, and the implications of these for the kinds of sociality and love that condition our human experience. (shrink)

Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation, but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis ofinvention as a mental or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with objects, or what we call mental (...) models and mechanical representations. The strategies by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius. (shrink)

Everyday aesthetics is a new sub-discipline of aesthetic theory that has only been actively discussed since the 1980s. This paper addresses what many consider the central issue of the field, called “the dilemma of everyday aesthetics.” I discuss three authors who address this issue: Yuriko Saito, Allen Carlson, and Paisley Livingston. Drawing on Dewey’s anti-dualist stance, I argued for a continuity between the aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art. In course of my discussion, I question such (...) dichotomies as that between the practical and the aesthetic, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and disinterestedness vs. engagement. In my view, the dilemma is only real for those who wish to maintain relatively rigid distinctions within these dichotomies. The dilemma is only a dilemma if you think there is something disturbing about the thought that low-level aesthetic experiences are enhanced when attended to and when understood or appreciated differently by way of the arts. (shrink)

In a pluralist and pragmatist view of aesthetic appreciation of nature, nature is validly appreciated through various cultural media including science, technology, mythology, and, in particular, the arts. Those who attack arts-based appreciation mainly think about the arts of the nineteenth century: traditional landscape painting and sculptures on pedestals. When we turn to art since the 1970s, for example, earth art, this picture changes. Allen Carlson’s attack on postmodernist and pluralist models of aesthetic appreciation does not pose significant problems (...) for an arts-based approach, for he makes a major concession to non-scientific culture-based approaches when he allows mythological descriptions. If mythology can be taken into consideration when appreciating the natural environment, then the arts should be as well. The aesthetic object in environmental aesthetics is emergent from, and upon, the interaction of the experiencing subject(s) and the appreciated environment, the limits of which are set by the experiencing subject(s). These limits need not be narrowly science-based. (shrink)

Clive Bell’s Art, published in 1913, is widely seen as a founding document in contemporary aesthetics. Yet his formalism and his attendant definition of art as “significant form” is widely rejected in contemporary art discourse and in the philosophy of art. In this paper I argue for a reconsideration of his thought in connection with current discussions of “the aesthetics of everyday life.” Although some, notably Allen Carlson, have argued against application of Bell’s formalism to the aesthetics of everyday (...) life, I claim that this is based on an interpretation of the concept that is overly narrow. First, Li Zehou offers an interpretation of “significant form” that allows in sedimented social meaning. Second, Bell himself offers a more complex theory of significant form by way of his “metaphysical hypothesis,” one that stresses perception of significant form outside the realm of art. Bell’s idea that the artist can perceive significant form in nature allows for significant form to not just be the surface-level formal properties of things. It stresses depth, although a different kind than the cognitive scientific depth Carlson wants. This is a depth that is consistent with the anti-dualism of Spinoza, Marx and Dewey. Reinterpreting Bell in this direction, we can say we are moved by certain relations of lines and colors because they direct our minds to the hidden aspect of things, the spiritual side of the material world referred to by Spinoza and developed by Dewey in his concept of experience. Bell hardly “reduces the everyday to a shadow of itself,” as Carlson puts it, since the everyday, as experienced by the artist or the aesthetically astute observer, has, or potentially has, deep meaning. If we reject Bell’s dualism and his downgrading of sensuous experience, we can rework his idea of pure form to refer to an aspect of things detached, yes, from practical use, but not from particularity or sedimented meaning, not purified of all associations. (shrink)

The ‘non-identity problem’ raises a well-known challenge to the person-affecting view, according to which an action can be wrong only if it affects someone for the worse. In a recent article, however, Thomas D. Bontly proposes a novel way to solve the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms. Bontly's argument is based on a contrastive causal account of harm. In this response, we argue that Bontly's argument fails even assuming that the contrastive causal account is correct.

The well‐known “Consequence Argument” for the incompatibility of freedom and determinism relies on a certain rule of inference; “Principle Beta”. Thomas Crisp and Ted Warfield have recently argued that all hitherto suggested counterexamples to Beta can be easily circumvented by proponents of the Consequence Argument. I present a new counterexample which, I argue, is free from the flaws Crisp and Warfield detect in earlier examples.

The technological breakthroughs and entrepreneurial adventures of Frank J. Sprague during the transformative years of the early electrical industry. Over the course of a little less than twenty years, inventor Frank J. Sprague achieved an astonishing series of technological breakthroughs--from pioneering work in self-governing motors to developing the first full-scale operational electric railway system--all while commercializing his inventions and promoting them to financial backers and the public. In Engineering Invention, Frederick Dalzell tells Sprague's story, setting it against the backdrop of (...) one of the most dynamic periods in the history of technology. In a burst of innovation during these years, Sprague and his contemporaries--Thomas Edison, Nicolas Tesla, Elmer Sperry, George Westinghouse, and others--transformed the technologies of electricity and reshaped modern life. After working briefly for Edison, Sprague started the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company; designed and built an electric railroad system for Richmond, Virginia; sold his company to Edison and went into the field of electric elevators; almost accidentally discovered a multiple-control system that could equip electric train systems for mass transit; started a third company to commercialize this; then sold this company to Edison and retired. Throughout his career, Dalzell tells us, Sprague framed technology as invention, cast himself as hero, and staged his technologies as dramas. He toiled against the odds, scraped together resources to found companies, bet those companies on technical feats--and pulled it off, multiple times. The idea of the "heroic inventor" is not, of course, the only way to frame the history of technology. Nevertheless, as Dalzell shows, Sprague, Edison, and others crafted the role consciously and actively, using it to generate vital impetus behind the process of innovation. (shrink)

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) is surely one of the more remarkable figures in the story of global electrification. Rivalling Thomas Edison for the title of chief Wizard, both in his own time and ours, almost every invention of modern life has at some point been attributed to Tesla: from the communications media of telephone, fax, radio, and television, through the military utilities of radar and remote-control weapons, and (most plausibly) the systems of alternate current generation and transmission that power our (...) world. And yet Tesla died impoverished and alone in a New York hotel room with his greatest plans for wireless power transmission abandoned and derided, if they were remembered at all. Tesla’s image as something of a martyr to an ungrateful world has indeed generated a cult following in recent decades, doubtless fired in part by the Serbian nationalism that has justly helped raise the profile of Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić (e.g. M. Popović, In Albert’s Shadow: The L .. (shrink)

Discussion of the posthuman has emerged in a wide set of fields through a diverse set of thinkers including Donna Haraway, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, N. Katherine Hayles, and Francis Fukuyama, just to name a few. Despite his extensive critique of technology, commentators have not explored the fruitfulness of Heidegger's work for deciphering the various strands of posthumanism recently formulated in response to contemporary technological developments. Here, I employ Heidegger's critique of technology to trace opposing visions of the posthuman, visions (...) that are both tied intimately to new information technologies. For those seeking to extend humanist ideals, information technologies are employed to extend the vision of an ultra-humanist view of a ‘scientific posthuman’ that dangerously understands the body to be a forfeitable nuisance, rather than an inherent aspect of being human. Along Heideggerian lines, thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Thomas Carlson have developed an alternative trajectory related to Dasein's Being-in-the-world. This trajectory posits the self as constituted by a lack or abyss, enabling the formulation of a ‘mystical posthuman,’ celebrating, rather than forfeiting, humanity's embodied existence. (shrink)

"At once rigorous, insightful, and accessible.... the most thorough study yet available on the phenomenological treatment of God as gift in Marion and Derrida. Invaluable reading for those concerned with the theological promise of contemporary Continental philosophy."-Thomas A. Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara.

In Consequentialism Reconsidered, Carlson strives to find a plausible formulation of the structural part of consequentialism. Key notions are analyzed, such as outcomes, alternatives and performability. Carlson argues that consequentialism should be understood as a maximizing rather than a satisficing theory, and as temporally neutral rather than future oriented. He also shows that certain moral theories cannot be reformulated as consequentialist theories. The relevant alternatives for an agent in a situation are taken to comprise all actions that they (...) can perform in the situation. The defense of this idea necessitates certain modifications to the standard consequentialist criteria of obligatoriness, rightness and wrongness. The problem of whether agents should adapt their actions to their own future actions is also addressed. Further, a conditional analysis of performability is suggested, and it is argued that particular actions should in this connection be regarded as `abstract' rather than `concrete'. The final chapter sketches a consequentialist theory for collective agents. (shrink)

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the (...) current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena. (shrink)

Books reviewed in this article:Peter Kivy, The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical GeniusKirk Pillow, Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and HegelWilliam Irwin, Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and DefenseAllen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art, and ArchitectureElizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the OutsideDavid Leatherbarrow, Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and TopographyCaroline Joan S. Picart, Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche: Eroticism, Death, Music, and LaughterCaroline Joan S. Picart, Resentment and (...) the “Feminine” in Nietzsche's Politico–Aesthetics. (shrink)

Traditional aesthetics is often associated with the appreciation of art, Allen Carlson shows how much of our aesthetic experience does not encompass art but nature. He argues that knowledge of what it is we are appreciating is essential to having an appropriate aesthetic experience and that scientific understanding of nature can enhance our appreciation of it, rather than denigrate it.

A popular view of harming is the causal account (CA), on which harming is causing harm. CA has several attractive features. In particular, it appears well equipped to deal with the most important problems for its main competitor, the counterfactual comparative account (CCA). However, we argue that, despite its advantages, CA is ultimately an unacceptable theory of harming. Indeed, while CA avoids several counterexamples to CCA, it is vulnerable to close variants of some of the problems that beset CCA.

It is argued that the English bare plural (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the generic use of the bare plural (as in Dogs bark) and its existential or indefinite plural use (as in He threw oranges at Alice). The difference between these uses is not to be accounted (...) for by an ambiguity in the NP itself, but rather by explicating how the context of the sentence acts on the bare plural to give rise to this distinction. A brief analysis is sketched in which bare plurals are treated in all instances as proper names of kinds of things. A subsidiary argument is that the null determiner is not to be regarded as the plural of the indefinite article a. (shrink)

John Broome has argued that alleged cases of value incomparability are really examples of vagueness in the betterness relation. The main premiss of his argument is ‘the collapsing principle’. I argue that this principle is dubious, and that Broome's argument is therefore unconvincing. Correspondence:c1 Erik.Carlson@filosofi.uu.se.

In a challenge to current thinking about cognitive impairment, this book explores what it means to treat people with intellectual disabilities in an ethical manner.

The counterfactual comparative account of harm faces problems in cases that involve overdetermination and preemption. An influential strategy for dealing with these problems, drawing on a suggestion made by Derek Parfit, is to appeal to _plural harm_—several events _together_ harming someone. We argue that the most well-known version of this strategy, due to Neil Feit, as well as Magnus Jedenheim Edling’s more recent version, is fatally flawed. We also present some general reasons for doubting that the overdetermination and preemption problems (...) for the counterfactual comparative account can be satisfactorily solved by appealing to plural harm. (shrink)