"A potent source of inspiration for anyone interested in the therapeutic potential of Buddhism. David Brazier writes with clarity and authority about the Zen way."—Mark Epstein, M.D. author of Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. "Comprehensive and readable... should appeal to anyone broadly interested in Buddhism."—Helen Sieroda psychosynthesis psychotherapist. In this book, psychotherapist David Brazier offers readers in the West a fresh perspective on Buddhist psychology and demonstrates how Zen Buddhist techniques are integrated (...) into psychotherapy. Writing from the viewpoint of a Western psychotherapist, Dr. Brazier successfully demystifies Buddhist psychology, explains the conceptual foundations of Buddhist thought, and with the help of vivid case studies, clearly demonstrates how a Buddhist approach can provide a practical path to personal growth. (shrink)

Formulated by Aquinas, commented on by post-Copernican philosophers and theologians, analysed in depth by C.S. Lewis, and deliberated by some contemporary writers, the question of multiple incarnations either within humanity or amongst extra-terrestrial sentient species is all too intermittently examined: ‘Can the Christ be incarnated more than once in our reality, or somewhere else in the universe, or another reality?’ In this paper, we examine the debate and the conclusions: that is, Lewis’s position within his philosophical theology and his analogical (...) narratives; also, some contemporary philosophers of religion and theologians (Karl Rahner, with Christopher L. Fisher and David Fergusson; Sjoerd L. Bonting and William B. Drees; E.L. Mascall and Brian Hebblethwaite; Oliver Crisp and Keith Ward). How do they relate to Aquinas’s handling of the question and how do they compare with Lewis’s approach based on a theology of the imagination (grounded in Augustine and Alice Meynell)? Can Lewis resolve the argument? Could alien species have witnessed wholly different acts, equally unique, costly to God, and necessary to the process of salvation? Any answer or explanation relates to the function and purpose of the incarnation: the Fall, original sin—therefore, how we define the boundaries, limits, of atonement. (shrink)

The Buddhist view of the mind - how it works, how it goes wrong, how to put it right - is increasingly being recognised as profound and highly practical by scientists, counsellors and other professionals. In The Psychology of Awakening, this powerful vision of human nature, and its implications for personal and social life, are for the first time brought to a wider audience by some of those most influential in exploring its potential for the way we live today. These (...) include: David Brazier Jon Kabat Zinn Francisco Varela Joy Manne Geshe Thubten Jinpa Mark Epstein Gay Watson Maura Sills Guy Claxton Stephen Batchelor Deeply relevant, accessible and authoritative, The Psychology of Awakening will be of interest to all those who wish to understand the workings of their minds a little better and who are also seeking new ways of mastering the challenges - personal, professional and cultural with which modern life confronts us all. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Ranson, David Review of: The blessing of mercy: Biblical perspectives and ecological challenges, by Veronica M. Lawson, Northcote, VIC: Morning Star, 2015, pp. 86, $19.95.

Tribe, David Review of: On the nature being: A personal exploration into the origins of consciousness, by Geoffrey Collins, Geoffrey Collins and Creative Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2012-13. Amazon $US6 online.

In this article I take up a central question posed by the article jointly authored with Bill Winslade in this issue of JCE: What should be the role of clinical ethics consultants (CECs) in (what we call) an unsettled case: that is, a situation in which the range of allowable choices, among which the parties to a bioethical disagreement must select, cannot be clearly or completely specified? I argue here that CECs should, in such cases, guide the parties by presenting (...) their own reasoned conclusions about what the scope of allowable choices should be taken to include. Since this position challenges the received view that CECs must not express their own moral positions or conclusions in their role as ethicists, I try to defend my view of the CEC’s role in unsettled cases against several objections. (shrink)

David Doat | Résumé : Dans un contexte actuel où les questions relevant du domaine de l’éthique monopolisent une grande partie de l’activité philosophique en ce début de xxie siècle, cette étude souhaite démontrer que la thèse de la différence anthropologique et de la valeur inconditionnelle de toute personne humaine — quelles que puissent être ses fragilités — reste éminemment légitime et philosophiquement robuste en contexte évolutionniste. Pour y parvenir par une voie différant, sur le plan de la méthode, (...) d’un raisonnement a priori de type kantien, l’apport épistémologique de la phénoménologie de la vie de Michel Henry et la philosophie de la biologie de Hans Jonas font l’objet d’une réinterprétation associée aux travaux de Dominique Lambert sur l’hylémorphisme aristotélicien. Une fois repensée en régime darwinien et en tenant compte des apports critiques d’Henry et Jonas, une réactualisation contemporaine de la théorie des formes permet de mettre en évidence les raisons pour lesquelles, d’un point de vue anthropologique et ontologique, l’attention existentielle aux membres plus vulnérables de nos sociétés peut être considérée comme un indice majeur de la découverte par l’homme de la dignité de son être spécifiquement inachevé et vulnérable. |: The field of ethics dominates a significant part of the philosophical activity in these early years of the 21st century. In this contemporary context, the goal of the author is to demonstrate that both the thesis of the very essence of humanity and that of the unconditional value of any human being — whatever the degree of human vulnerabilities — remain philosophically robust from an evolutionary perspective. In order to achieve this demonstration, the author resorts to a different methodology as opposed to a Kantian a priori argument. A dialectic articulation is built so that the epistemology of Michel Henry and the phenomenology of biology of Hans Jonas may be critically revisited. Such work is made in the light of the Aristotelian theory of hylemorphism, which is restored within a Darwinian framework by Dominique Lambert in his philosophical works. When it is combined with Henry and Jonas’s insights, a contemporary renewal of the “theory of the forms” sheds light on the reasons why behaviors of care toward vulnerable persons in human societies are so important. Indeed, they may be considered as a major sign of the discovery by humans of the dignity of their specifically unaccomplished and vulnerable being. (shrink)

Deeply original, inspiring to some, abhorrent to others, George Berkeley’s philosophy of immaterialism is still influential three hundred years after the publication of his most widely read book, _Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. _Berkeley published the _Dialogues _because of the unenthusiastic reception of his _Principles of Human Knowledge _in 1710._ _He hoped the use of the_ _dialogue format would win a more favorable hearing, but unfortunately for Berkeley, the response was every bit as scathing as the reception of his (...) previous work. In recent decades, Berkeley’s work has been recognized as an excellent introduction to the English philosophy of the eighteenth century, and to philosophy in general. This edition of the dialogues is accessibly organized by David Hilbert and John Perry. (shrink)

_The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s _Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History _and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, _The Gift of Death_ resonates with (...) much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s _Literature in Secret_. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s _Letter to His Father_ and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—_Booklist_, on the first edition. (shrink)

Tippett is often cast as a composer with a strong visionary streak, but what does that mean for a twentieth-century artist? In this multi-faceted study, David Clarke explores Tippett's complex creative imagination - its dialogue between a romantic's aspirations to the ideal and absolute, and a modernist's sceptical realism. He shows how the musical formations of works such as The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, and The Vision of Saint Augustine resonate with the aesthetic and theoretical ideas of key figures (...) in modern Western culture - some known to have been influential to the composer, others not usually associated with him. Analyses of late works such as the Triple Concerto and Byzantium also speculate on Tippett's sexuality as a critical element in his creative and political consciousness. (shrink)

The Psychoanalytic Century examines and celebrates Freuds extraordinary influence on modern analysis and Western culture as a whole. The book comprehensively covers the evolution of our understanding of hysteria as the diagnostic entity through which Freud invented psychoanalysis; and the assessment of the contribution of Freud and his successors to the theory of love and clinical approaches to love relations, as well as to literature, the visual arts, international diplomacy, and race. In this volume we celebrate Freud's legacy, and explore (...) the scope of his impact on psychoanalysis, society, and culture. The contributions of many distinguished colleagues follow the evolution of analysis as his ideas move beyond historical artifact to become living internal objects, embedded in Western culture. David Scharff, from his introduction. (shrink)

The success of movies like The Artist and Hugo recreated the wonder and magic of silent film for modern audiences, many of whom might never have experienced a movie without sound. But while the American silent movie was one of the most significant popular art forms of the modern age, it is also one that is largely lost to us, as more than eighty percent of silent films have disappeared, the victims of age, disaster, and neglect. We now know about (...) many of these cinematic masterpieces only from the collections of still portraits and production photographs that were originally created for publicity and reference. Capturing the beauty, horror, and moodiness of silent motion pictures, these images are remarkable pieces of art in their own right. In the first history of still camera work generated by the American silent motion picture industry, David S. Shields chronicles the evolution of silent film aesthetics, glamour, and publicity, and provides unparalleled insight into this influential body of popular imagery. Exploring the work of over sixty camera artists, Still recovers the stories of the photographers who descended on early Hollywood and the stars and starlets who sat for them between 1908 and 1928. Focusing on the most culturally influential types of photographs—the performer portrait and the scene still—Shields follows photographers such as Albert Witzel and W. F. Seely as they devised the poses that newspapers and magazines would bring to Americans, who mimicked the sultry stares and dangerous glances of silent stars. He uncovers scene shots of unprecedented splendor—visions that would ignite the popular imagination. And he details how still photographs changed the film industry, whose growing preoccupation with artistry in imagery caused directors and stars to hire celebrated stage photographers and transformed cameramen into bankable names. Reproducing over one hundred and fifty of these gorgeous black-and-white photographs, Still brings to life an entire long-lost visual culture that a century later still has the power to enchant. (shrink)

How do we know when what is happening between two people should be called psychoanalysis? What is a psychoanalytic process and how do we know when one is taking place? _Psychoanalysis Comparable and Incomparable_ describes the rationale and ongoing development of a six year programme of highly original meetings conducted by the European Psychoanalytic Federation Working Party on Comparative Clinical Methods. The project comprises over seventy cases discussed by more than five hundred experienced psychoanalysts over the course of sixty workshops. (...) Authored by a group of leading European psychoanalysts, this book explores ways for psychoanalysts using different approaches to learn from each other when they present their work to fellow psychoanalysts, and provides tools for the individual practitioner to examine and improve his or her own approach. As described in detail in its pages, sticking to the task led to some surprising experiences, raising fundamental questions about the way clinical discussion and supervision are conducted in psychoanalysis. Well known by many in the psychoanalytic community and the object of much interest and debate, this project is described by those who have had the closest contact with it and will satisfy a widely held curiosity in psychoanalysts and psychotherapists throughout the world. David Tuckett is winner of the 2007 Sigourney Award. (shrink)

This chapter argues that ethics plays an extremely important role in decision making and lawmaking in bioethics issues. These decisions are not simple case-by-case judgments; rather, they rest upon deeply considered ethical opinions. It also discusses the implications of this epistemic grounding for bioethics and its use of case law materials as an ethical resource. Finally, since many people base their moral judgments on religious beliefs, the religious implications of this legal-moral relationship are considered.

If L had a finite number of sentences ‘s1’, . . ., ‘sn’, he would have been happy to define s is true as s is ‘s1’ and s1, or ‘s2’ and s2 . . . or . . . or ‘sn’ and sn.

One of the hottest topics in business today is competitive intelligence, the effort by a company to obtain enough information about its competitors to give it a strategic edge over them in the marketplace. During the past decade, a number of books have been written in this country advising business managers on how to mine various sources of public information for this purpose: trade shows, public speeches by company executives, articles in obscure journals, and government agencies like the Food and (...) Drug Administration. Some large companies have even hired former FBI and CIA personnel to help them develop more effective in-house intelligence-gathering capabilities. (shrink)

For centuries, linguists have been examining how languages are put together. This investigation is possible because human languages are overwhelmingly orderly and law-governed. But the investigation is also exciting, because of a remarkable fact emerging from recent work: though languages differ in many ways, they are all cast from a common mold -- a "master plan" rooted in human biology. Linguists interested in this discovery try to determine exactly what this master plan is, and how it is reflected in the (...) individual languages of the world. This work is important for many reasons. One reason is purely intellectual. By discovering the nature of human language, we arrive at a better understanding of ourselves. But another reason, less appreciated by most linguists, is social and political. Accurate understanding of human language is important when society is faced with decisions that have a linguistic basis -- for example: how we should teach reading to young children. (shrink)

Given its clinical significance, horror should occupy a prominent place within emotion theory. However, conceptualizations of horror within psychological science are relatively underdeveloped and conceptually confused. Through conceptual analysis of the disparate literature on the emotion, we seek to establish horror as a qualitatively distinct mode of engagement with the world and to remedy its over-intellectualization, as evident in many prior accounts. Given its etymology, we first address horror's characteristic immobilization—at the level of stereotypical facial configuration and action readiness—before analyzing (...) horror's formal object and appraisal structure. In the process, we critique schema accounts of the emotion and argue for conceptualizing horror pre-reflectively by grounding it in appraised violations of the practical dynamics of social engagement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Space, Place and Capitalism: The Literary Geographies of “The Unknown Industrial Prisoner” by Brett HeinoDavid McLaughlinSpace, Place and Capitalism: The Literary Geographies of “The Unknown Industrial Prisoner” BY BRETT HEINO Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021I would not be the first to describe Brett Heino’s new book as timely. Its publication in 2021 coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (...) (1971). This experimental novel, centered on a “kaleidoscopic vision” of its characters and their lives, tells the story of a group of workers at the Puroil refinery in a fictionalized part of Sydney. In Heino’s own words, this project emerged from a desire to write about industrialization and representation in Australian fiction. Working primarily as a legal scholar and historian, this work represents his first foray into literary geography.At the heart of Heino’s argument is a question: What does literature know about space? In his pursuit of a spatially-directed reading of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, Heino eschews work in literary geography that cultural geographers might recognize— particularly the writings of Sheila Hones, the doyenne of an emerging interdiscipline of literary geography, whose practitioners work at the interstices between literary studies and geography. Heino criticizes this interdisciplinary literary geography as being too focused on establishing the “sovereignty” or “imperialism” of fictional space at the expense of recognizing the [End Page 132] role of literature in the world. Arguably, such a stance is a misreading of the thinking within literary geography that “reading literature is essentially an experimental process in which the categorical distinction between the frames of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ become blurred,”1 and where the “ontological distinction between literary and non- literary spaces” is undermined.2 Neither of these statements supposes that reading literature is a practice by which the world falls away and nothing remains but the book. Instead, following Doreen Massey’s idea that space is a complicated process of events and happenings, literary geographers in this mold argue that fiction is a part of life as it happens, and reading is a constitutive practice in the co- production of space.In its place, Heino emphasizes a form of literary geographical thinking that understands literature’s role as being separate from, but intimately connected to, the actual world. His theoretical framework is multi-layered, borrowing from Marxist literary scholars, including Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, and Marxist geographers, including Henri Lefebvre. In essence, however, it can be expressed neatly in the following quotation from geocritic Bertrand Westphal:Fiction does not reproduce the real, but actualises new virtualities that had remained unformulated, and then goes on to interact with the real according to the hypertextual logic of interfaces... fiction detects possibilities buried in the folds of the real, knowing that these folds have not been temporised.3I think that Heino’s rejection of what he characterizes as poststructural literary geography, of the kind represented in his analysis of Sheila Hones’s work, misses some opportunities. First, there are similarities between his conception of literary geography and those he leaves aside— not least, their shared acceptance of the productive tension that sits between literature as text and world as practical, non- representational, and exceeding narrative. Secondly, the shared aim of both approaches is to understand how “representation ‘takes place’ and precisely how texts are part of what happens.”4 This is particularly powerful in the light of Heino’s aim to understand the development and contents of literary texts in materialist terms. Despite these areas [End Page 133] of convergence, Heino’s argument that literary geography’s potential to analyze class and political structures remains untapped is well founded. This is where Heino’s contribution is at its strongest.Heino’s work is at its most convincing when he discusses the realities of “abstract space” that both permeate the spaces of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and structure the very fabric of latter- twentieth century Australia. Running through both Heino’s critique and Ireland’s novel is an understanding “that the inherent drive of capital is towards the creation of a fragmented, homogenised and hierarchised space within which it can produce and... (shrink)

The chapter focusses on the Scottish natural philosophy of the late eighteenth century represented by John Anderson (1726–1796) and John Robison (1739–1805), which is considered a link between Newton’s natural philosophy and nineteenth-century physics in Britain (Kelvin and Maxwell). Anderson and Robison have to be seen in a tradition of Scottish Newtonians established in the seventeenth century by David Gregory and John Keill and specifically shaped in the Mid-eighteenth century through the chemical-physical work of Joseph Black and the common-sense (...) philosophy of Thomas Reid. These latter Newtonians built on Newton’s theory of matter and short-range forces as indicated in Query 31 of his Opticks (Black) but also on his Rules of Reasoning of the second edition of his Principia (Black and Reid) and in this way created the theoretical framework in which Anderson and Robison developed their natural philosophy. In the center of their natural philosophy, which was oriented on experimental investigations, were the manifold open questions of the Baconian sciences of that time - theories of heat, light, electricity, magnetism as well as the understanding of the phlogiston. The chapter thus provides insight into the specific way in which the Newtonian camp participated in early modern natural philosophical speculations about minute particles of matter, fluids, or the propagation of light and heat. (shrink)

Literary scholarship has paid little serious attention to Habermas' philosophy, and, on the other hand, the reception of Habermas has given little attention to the role that literary practice can play in a broader theory of communicative action. David Colclasure's argument sets out to demonstrate that a specific, literary form of rationality inheres in literary practice and the public reception of literary works which provides a unique contribution to the political public sphere.

Terry Eagleton is the foremost Marxist cultural theorist of our time. In the first book-length study of this highly influential figure, David Alderson provides detailed discussions of Eagleton's Marxism and his engagements with postmodernism, as well as an evaluation of his interventions in Irish Studies. Each of the chapters in this important intervention in current theoretical debates offers accessible contextualization of the key issues and provides detailed analyses of Eagleton's literary criticism. Alderson shows that the complex relations between nature, (...) culture and ideology, body, subjectivity and authority are at the heart of Eagleton's ethical and political concerns. He goes on to demonstrate that these relations inform the theorist's critical examinations of such literary works as Wuthering Heights and The Merchant of Venice, and his treatment of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)

Pádraig Hogan has argued for a powerful conception of education as epiphany that is illuminated by the work of Heidegger and Joyce. But what are we to make of Stephen Dedalus’ intention (pretension?) to ‘Remember your epiphanies’? Developing the phenomenological Erinnerungsversuch or ‘essay in memory’ of David Farrell Krell, I will examine three ‘epiphanic fragments’ from the literature of education. The problem of the temporality of the educational epiphany will be identified and a resolution will be attempted. I hope (...) thus to extend an ontological account of memory into the educational experience, and also to develop the educational significance of the remembered or recollected epiphany. The article concludes with some emerging thoughts on the relation of education, literature and vocation. (shrink)

This commentary recaps a Centre for Central Banking Studies event held at the Bank of England on 2–3 July 2014. The article covers three main points. First, it situates the Centre for Central Banking Studies event within the context of the Bank’s Strategic Plan and initiatives. Second, it summarises and reflects on major themes from the event. Third, the article links central banks’ emerging interest in Big Data approaches with their broader uptake by other economic agents.

This article studies the main actions of the three years of the Catalan government and parliament that culminated in the unilateral declaration of independence on October 27th, 2017. We mainly focus on the following issues: the so-called right to decide; the international and European Union support for the Catalan secessionist project; their economic viability ; the legal, social and democratic framework breakdown in Catalonia and some of the informational battle about the secessionist project.