This book describes and analyzes the levels of experience that long-distance running produces. It looks at the kinds of experiences caused by long-distance running, the dimensions contained in these experiences, and their effects on the subjective life-world and well-being of an individual. Taking a philosophical approach, the analysis presented in this book is founded on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body and Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Running is a versatile form of physical exercise which does not reveal all of its (...) dimensions at once. These dimensions escape the eye and are not revealed to the runner conceptually, but rather as sensations and emotions. Instead of concentrating on conceptual analysis, this book explores the emotions and experiences and examines the meaning that running has in runners' lives. Using the participative method, in which the author is both the research subject and the researcher, the book contributes to the philosophy of physical exercise. The research made by Koski is exceptional, and not only because of the topic itself, which also is out of the ordinary. Koski has been fortunate to discover a topic which offers immensely great opportunities to explore and present basic human philosophical themes in a new, fascinating conceptual environment. Emeritus Prof. Lauri Routila I don't know of anyone who has done this in English, certainly not to your depth. -- This project in unique, wonderful, and important Amby Burfoot. (shrink)

Th is paper is the second part of a general study on the relationship between Nishida and Chinese philosophy. In the fi rst, I explored the extent to which Nishida’s philosophy was infl uenced, directly and indirectly, explicitly and implicitly, historically and conceptually, by materials coming from the intellectual horizon of Chinese thought. I concentrate here on Nishida’s own position toward what he understood by “Chinese philosophy.” Is this philosophy, so suggestive for Nishida, promoted to a central place in his (...) work or not, and if so, in what sense might we take this idea of “centrality” as specifi cally Chinese? In setting forth several archetypes of Chinese thought present in Nishida’s philosophy, the focus of this article falls on the methodological, logical and metaphysical contrasts we can identify between the Japanese philosopher and Chinese philosophy as his underground intellectual sources. (shrink)

This dissertation is an attempt to defend two founders of quantum theories, Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli, against various anti-realist readings. These readings claim that Bohr's and Pauli's interpretations of quantum mechanics are based on a denial of the reality of the external world, and that their debates with Albert Einstein are over realism. But I argue that the differences between their views and Einstein's are neither about the reality of the external world, nor about the reality of theoretical entities (...) in general. Rather, the differences are about the reality of this or that particular theoretical entity and the viability of this or that particular idea of physics. Although in 1972 Clifford Hooker gave an adequate and then-comprehensive discussion of Bohr's ideas countering anti-realist readings, his work has been forgotten by a new generation of interpreters such as Arthur Fine and Mara Beller who read anti-realism into Bohr's ideas. One aim of this dissertation is to revive Hooker's defense of Bohr and to counter such misreadings. ;A second contribution this dissertation makes consists in an elaboration of Pauli's views. Pauli wrote extensively on many philosophical issues, and made important contributions to the debates between Einstein, Bohr and himself. However, his views are unfairly ignored by most philosophers of quantum mechanics, and when considered, are at best quickly dismissed as anti-realist. In my dissertation, I discuss Pauli's rich ideas on physics and philosophy and show that Pauli is not an anti-realist. In particular, Bohr's and Pauli's views on a problem introduced in a paper by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen are discussed in detail. The close examination of Bohr's and Pauli's views also shows that there are significant differences between them, suggesting the inadequacy of the generic term "the Copenhagen school," often used to refer indiscriminately to their views. Through my studies of Bohr's and Pauli's ideas, I hope to show the inadequacy of using metaphysical doctrines such as realism and anti-realism to gain either a full understanding of general problems in physics, or an understanding of the ideas of these working physicists in particular. (shrink)

When the debate over the value of ideal and nonideal theory crosses from political philosophy into philosophy of education, do the implications of the debate shift, and, if so, how? In this piece, Amy Shuffelton considers the premise that no normative political theory, ideal or nonideal, is of any use to human beings unless it can be affiliated with a credible educational theory that connects human beings as they are to human beings as that theory requires them to become. In (...) her response to the five articles in this symposium, Shuffelton addresses their overlapping yet varied treatments of human subjectivity as developed through education. If one accepts that ideal theory is the appropriate starting place for political philosophy because otherwise we would have no polestar by which to orient ourselves, Shuffelton concludes, a corresponding philosophy of education is required to survey the trajectory between here and wherever one aims to go. To do so, it needs to keep its feet on the ground, even as it looks to the stars. If, on the other hand, ideal theory fails to heed the Yankee truism that you can't get there from here, such that philosophers who attempt to do so inevitably get lost on back roads, philosophy of education is still necessary to chart paths to reachable destinations. (shrink)

Introduction: Adorno and Barthes on the question of the right (di)stance -- The pathos of distances in "a world of banished people" -- George Orwell's critique of sincerity and the obligation of tactlessness -- The inferno of saviors: notes in the margin of Elias Canetti's lifework -- A socialism of distances, or on the difficulties of wise love: Iris Murdoch's secular community -- "The world in me": the distantiality of everyday life -- In search of a whole self: (...) Benjamin's childhood fragments -- Annie Ernaux's diaries of the outside -- Gunter Grass's century -- Damon Galgut on emptying oneself for sleep -- Conclusion. (shrink)

American distance running legend Steve Prefontaine – ‘Pre’ – claimed that he was an artist and that his races were works of art. In this article, I examine and defend Pre’s claims. Using Robert Stecker’s definition of art as a guide, I argue that a race can be a work of art – specifically, performance art. I then argue that Pre’s 3,000 m American record race at the 1972 Bislett Games in Oslo, Norway, and his 5,000 m final at the (...) 1972 Munich Olympics illustrate his view of himself as an artist and are works of art in Stecker’s sense of achieving excellence in fulfilling an artistic function. (shrink)

When a train operator tells us that our train will be late ‘because of delays’, their attempt at explanation fails because there is insufficient distance between the explanans and the explanandum. In this paper, I motivate and defend an account of ‘explanatory distance’, based on the idea that explanations give information about dependence. I show that this account offers useful resources for addressing problem cases, including recent debates about grounding explanation, and the historical case of Molière’s dormitive virtue.

I develop Levinas’s analysis of “proximity” to explain how successful faceless class dialogues are possible despite physical social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. I first examine features of Levinas’s notion of proximity within his idiosyncratic approach to “ethics.” Second, I turn to Levinas’s examination of intentionality and questioning in relation to the hermeneutic priority of questioning. Third, I detail some successes and failures in attempts to embody Levinasian proximity in online or masked discussions with students. I draw out contrasts between (...) experiences at two different institutions as well as between curricular and extracurricular experiences. I do this to expose my own vulnerability in this essay itself. Given pandemic conditions as well as Levinas’s theory of proximity, I found that many masked or virtual class discussions—but especially extracurricular group discussions, such as a philosophy club and the Black Student Union meetings—maintained a closeness of community despite social distancing. (shrink)

The next pandemic will erupt, not from the jungle, but from the disease factories of hospitals, refugee camps and cities. Wendy Orent, How Plagues Really Work,.

The intention of this project is to argue theoretically for, and exemplify through critical and historical analysis, the interrelatedness of discourses on scale, distance, identification and doubling in the cinema. The link between the first two terms (scale and distance) and the latter two (identification and doubling) is implicit in the title, and its unfolding constitutes the project: for instance, the closer one comes, the deeper identification is likely to be, and the greater the likelihood that what is apparently 'there' (...) will impose itself as also 'here', existing both inside and outside the viewing psyche, which becomes double, and whose doubling may either become explicit or remain implicit in the text. Along with its collapsing of interiority/exteriority distinctions, doubling reveals the reversibility and ambiguity of scale, as what is 'there' could just as well have been situated 'here'. The book contains analyses of a wide variety of films, including Citizen Kane, The Double Life of Veronique, The Great Gatsby, Gilda, Vertigo and Wings of Desire. (shrink)

This paper considers the particular ways in which the familiar letter and twenty-first century technologies like the Internet differingly shaped and shape our experience of distance and presence. It follows Heidegger, Dreyfus, and Borgmann in critiquing the kinds of experience and action the Internet makes possible, and—by way of Benjamin’s concept of “aura”—argues that while mediated communication over distance might have never been easier, faster, or cheaper, this increase in our effective power comes at the cost of a diminution of (...) the affective power of the messages carried. (shrink)

Distance is central to both Heidegger’s depiction of being-in-the-world and Derrida’s theorization of the culture of friendship. It is equally fundamental to the structure of language and, I argue, to the concept of the foreign. This essay brings together these theories of distance and demonstrates the ways they act on and through each other, the role that linguistic distance plays in constructing both foreigners and friends, and the permeable semantic boundaries that the concept of distance shares with movement, strangeness, instability, (...) and indefiniteness. It further contends that this semantic seepage has proven threatening to certain species of philosophy and politics and prompted disciplinary efforts – to eradicate distance, regulate foreigners, immobilize meaning, and stabilize friendship – that are remarkably structurally similar and sometimes mutually supportive, but that both Heidegger and Derrida, by contrast, undertake a significant revaluation of distance and the foreignness and indeterminacy associated with it. (shrink)

The metaphor of culture as a space or environment of meaning is widely employed. Going beyond metaphor, we present a model of culture as a 3-dimensional Euclidean space, using data from Brazil on cultural models of life goals. The dimensions of this space are defined by degree of sharing of culture (cultural competence); alternate configurations of that shared meaning (residual agreement); and social practice (cultural consonance). A cultural distance metric calculated within those dimensions identifies an individuals’ proximity to prototypical goals; (...) greater distance from these goals is associated with higher psychological distress. Cultural distance is in turn influenced by one’s sense of personal agency. Finally, in a set of open-ended interviews, the more individuals employ spatial metaphors in talking about culturally defined life goals, the higher their sense of personal agency and cultural consonance. This model moves the discussion of culture as a space of meaning from metaphor to measurement. (shrink)

We perform an experimental investigation using a dictator game in which individuals must make a moral decision —to give or not to give an amount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire in which the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision shows that, at least in this case, moral motivations carry a heavy weight in the decision: the majority of dictators give the money for reasons of a consequentialist nature. Based on the results (...) presented here and of other analogous experiments, we conclude that dicator behavior can be understood in terms of moral distance rather than social distance and that it systematically deviates from the egoism assumption in economic models and game theory. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have disagreed about whether "the folk" are intuitively incompatibilists or compatibilists, and they have disagreed about the role of abstraction in generating such intuitions. New experimental evidence using Construal Level Theory is presented. The experiments support the views that the folk are intuitively both incompatibilists and compatibilists, and that abstract mental representations do shift intuitions, but not in a univocal way.

George Santayana appears emotionally distant and personally uncommitted in many of his writings. In what may have been a related phenomenon, he does not seem to have committed to any school of philosophy, but rather to draw from many of the available schools when it suited him. In this article, we assess his constantly changing use of different philosophies and its implications for both philosophy and politics.

Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Làwith, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Eric Weil... Non sans quelque paradoxe, la philosophie sociale, politique, métaphysique de l'après-guerre a été largement représentée par des penseurs allemands ou formés en Allemagne, qui avaient la particularité d'avoir été des étudiants de Martin Heidegger et d'être en même temps d'origine juive. Ce volume, issu d'un colloque international tenu à Paris en 2012, a voulu les penser ensemble pour la première fois et étudier sur quel (...) fond historique et intellectuel cette double spécificité a été possible. Quelle dette chacun d'entre eux a-t-il pu contracter à l'égard de ce maître commun et quelle distance ont-ils pu prendre (ou ne pas prendre) par rapport à lui après la Seconde Guerre mondiale? Un double questionnement qui permettra d'écrire une nouvelle page de la philosophie allemande, qui pourrait bien être aussi une page de la philosophie juive au XXe siècle. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss Gadamer’s attempt to reach to a deeper dimension of truth, situated beneath the scientific objectivity and independent from methodological criteria. If the truth finds its core in tradition, as Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics says it, and there is no objectivity other than the confirmation given by the historical prejudices, how is it still possible to consider the problem of the correctness of the understanding? Can we assign a critical function to the temporal distance and identify (...) tradition as a source of truth and meaning, as Gadamer does in “Truth and Method”, and consider them viable solutions to this problem? The following paper tries to answer this question by discussing the temporal distance in its transcendental dimension for the hermeneutical experience and by emphasizing its relation to the tradition defined as an “in between” strangeness and familiarity. (shrink)

Gerade in Ausnahmesituationen rücken Menschen zusammen – eigentlich. Das ist in Zeiten des Coronavirus anders, denn hier gilt das Gebot des „Social Distancing“. Ich möchte die Ambivalenz, die nicht nur in dieser paradoxen Wortkombination zum Ausdruck kommt, sondern auch in der Erfahrung von vielen Menschen, mit Hilfe eines leibphänomenologischen Zugangs näher beleuchten. Dabei untersuche ich, wie sich das spannungsreiche Verhältnis von Nähe und Distanz in Zeiten der Corona-Pandemie in Alltagssituationen sowie in Bildungskontexten zeigt. Darüber hinaus gehe ich der Frage nach, (...) was die Erfahrung des „Social Distancing“ für die Philosophie – nicht nur in Ausnahmesituationen – bedeuten kann, und plädiere dafür, sie als eine Übungsmöglichkeit des Philosophierens zwischen Nähe und Distanz, Körper und Geist, Eigenem und Fremdem sowie Natur und Kultur zu sehen, um auf diese Weise problematischen Extremen auf beiden Seiten zu entgehen. (shrink)

This paper develops a programmatic 'theory sketch' of a new theory of humour, pitched at roughly the same level of detail, and intended to have roughly the same level of inclusiveness, as the other available philosophical "theories" of humour. I will call the theory I propose the distance theory. After an appeal to some intuitive illustrations of the distance theory's attractions, I move on to offer an analysis of observational comedy using the distance theory. I conclude the paper with some (...) speculative remarks about the possible connections between the practice of observational comedy and the discipline of philosophy. (shrink)

Non-adjacent or long-distance dependencies (LDDs) are routinely considered to be a distinctive trait of language, which purportedly locates it higher than other sequentially organized signal systems in terms of structural complexity. This paper argues that particular languages display specific resources (e.g. non-interpretive morphological agreement paradigms) that help the brain system responsible for dealing with LDDs to develop the capacity of acquiring and processing expressions with such a human-typical degree of computational complexity. Independently obtained naturalistic data is discussed and put to (...) the service of the idea that the above-mentioned resources exert their developmental role from the outside, but in compliance with other internal resources, ultimately compounding an integrated developmental system. Parallels with other human and nonhuman developmental phenomena are explored, which point to the conclusion that the developmental system of concern can be assimilated to cases currently been conceptualized as ‘cue-response systems’ or ‘developmental hybrids’ within the ecological-developmental paradigm in theoretical biology. Such a conclusion is used to support the idea that both current externalist and internalist concepts fall short of a correct characterization of language. (shrink)

Relations between literature and phenomenology vary greatly from proximity to distance depending on whether writers or philosophers give the definition. Writers in favour of the mission of phenomenology and phenomenologist relying on the visional power of literary examples can equally have a high regard for the other discipline thereby, nonetheless, preserving the demarcation. In the following, I will try to investigate these connections by debating the viewpoints of authors showing visible signs of appreciation on both sides. My examples are meant (...) to be emblematic in as much as they are to represent a general trend in their field and serve as spokespersons of important stances in relation to the other genre. (shrink)

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

This issue of The Monist is devoted to the question of how we should gauge the moral significance of distance. “Moral distance,” by analogy with “aesthetic distance,” may signify degrees of moral indifference, but that is not the theme we are concerned with here. The problem of distance in morality is not the same as that of moral indifference; it is about boundar ies.

Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a "pathos of distance," the notion that certain values cannot originate in a community but are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. The expression of "pathos of distance" impressed would-be modernists like the American James Huneker and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats as they confronted the new in the arts. Later, it helped Deleuze and Barthes make sense of (...) modernity when they tried to tease out all the implications of "distance." Despite Benjamin criticism of Nietzsche's doctrine of the "eternal return of the same" in the Arcades Project, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin envisions a redeemed history that follows Nietzsche's basic intuition about the need to make every moment count for history. By first establishing this unlikely meeting of Nietzsche and Benjamin through their ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté is able then to provide an original genealogy for the ethics of the modern, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, Gide and Genet's ethical impulse to combine erotic liberation with the motivation for political revolution, and Derrida's reading of Joyce's Ulysses and a modern mode of writing that sought to get closer to the senses. The result is a fascinating critique of Nietzsche, Benjamin, affect theory, and the origins of the ethics of modernism. (shrink)

Distance relativism (Williams, 1975, 1985) can be distinguished from other ethical relativisms in two ways. First, moral assessment is appropriate between contemporary societies and those of the recent past. Second, where moral assessment is not appropriate, the distance relativist practices quietism. Fricker (2010) critiques Bernard Williams’s (1975, 1985) distance relativism, claiming it fails to deliver the intended results regarding which societies we can appraise. Here, I address Fricker’s critique and present a novel interpretation of Williams’s idea of ‘outlooks,’ showing that (...) Fricker’s criticisms are not insurmountable. (shrink)

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

© 2017 by the authors. Aristotelian diagrams visualize the logical relations among a finite set of objects. These diagrams originated in philosophy, but recently, they have also been used extensively in artificial intelligence, in order to study various knowledge representation formalisms. In this paper, we develop the idea that Aristotelian diagrams can be fruitfully studied as geometrical entities. In particular, we focus on four polyhedral Aristotelian diagrams for the Boolean algebra B4, viz. the rhombic dodecahedron, the tetrakis hexahedron, the tetraicosahedron (...) and the nested tetrahedron. After an in-depth investigation of the geometrical properties and interrelationships of these polyhedral diagrams, we analyze the correlation between logical and geometrical distance in each of these diagrams. The outcome of this analysis is that the Aristotelian rhombic dodecahedron and tetrakis hexahedron exhibit the strongest degree of correlation between logical and geometrical distance; the tetraicosahedron performs worse; and the nested tetrahedron has the lowest degree of correlation. Finally, these results are used to shed new light on the relative strengths and weaknesses of these polyhedral Aristotelian diagrams, by appealing to the congruence principle from cognitive research on diagram design. (shrink)

Rosemary White 'Television at a Distance: Corner's _Critical Ideas in Television Studies_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 15, July 2003.

현재 코로나19 대유행의 피해를 줄일 수 있는 효과적인 방안으로 사회적 거리두기가 시행되고 있다. 사회적 거리두기는 코로나19의 감염 전파를 막아 인구전체의 리스크를 감소시킨다는 장점이 있는 반면, 필수적인 사회 서비스나 개인의 행동을 제한한다는 단점이 있다. 본 논문은 사회적 거리두기의 영향을 받는 개인 또는 집단과 인구 전체의 리스크 간 대립된 상황 속에서 어떤 정치철학 이론이 사회적 거리두기의 정당성을 합리적으로 설명할 수 있을 지에 관해 살펴본다. 리스크로 표현되는 확률 상의 위험을 해악과 구분한 후, 리스크 부여의 정당성을 판단할 수 있는지 중점적으로 논의한다. 첫째, 사후적 계약주의에는 (...) 리스크를 사후 구체화될 해악과 동등하게 간주하여 사회적 거리두기를 강화하는 것이 미약하게라도 리스크를 감소시킬 수 있다면 그 편익과 상관없이 항상 이를 정당화하는 문제가 있다. 둘째, 사전적 계약주의에는 인구 집단에 속한 개개인이 리스크를 그 편익과 비교평〮가하여 감수할 만하다면 사회적 거리두기를 완화할 수 있겠지만 이 완화조치가 불러올 사후 피해에 대해 민감하지 못하다는 문제가 있다. 셋째, 공리주의는 이 대립 상황에서 개별 선택지의 기대 효용을 계산함으로써 간결하고 구체적인 해답을 내놓을 수 있겠지만 사회적 거리두기가 야기할 이해관계의 대립, 그리고 편익과 리스크의 개인 간 분배의 문제를 간과하고 있다. 필자들은 사회적 거리두기의 도덕적 정당성을 판단할 때, 사전적 계약주의가 강조하는 개개인에게의 정당화 가능성과 더불어 리스크가 해악으로 구체화되는 시점 이후의 사태에 대한 행위자-중립적인 평가가 함께 포함되어야 함을 주장한다. 특히 필자들은 목적론적 평등주의의 관점을 취해, 사회적 거리두기가 야기할 복지, 기회, 능력 등 여러 차원에서의 불평등에 대한 평가를 포함하여 사회적 거리두기의 도덕적 정당성이 논의되어야 함을 주장한다. (shrink)

This article is an exploration of Apple’s iPhone 4 as both a technology and an object of marketing. This analysis looks at the FaceTime app and how its marketing created a visual hand-phone-face Deleuzian assemblage while playing on affective connections of parenthood and long-distance caring labor. This is connected to the ways in which mobile telephony creates divided attention between home and labor and the mobile phone and car while driving. This analysis is especially concerned with technological transparency and how (...) it creates divided attention in the home and in the car. (shrink)

Desire and Distance constitutes an important new departure in contemporary phenomenological thought, a rethinking and critique of basic philosophical positions concerning the concept of perception presented by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, though it departs in significant and original ways from their work. Barbaras’s overall goal is to develop a philosophy of what “life” is—one that would do justice to the question of embodiment and its role in perception and the formation of the human subject. Barbaras posits that desire and distance inform (...) the concept of “life.” Levinas identified a similar structure in Descartes’s notion of the infinite. For Barbaras, desire and distance are anchored not in meaning, but in a rethinking of the philosophy of biology and, in consequence, cosmology. Barbaras elaborates and extends the formal structure of desire and distance by drawing on motifs as yet unexplored in the French phenomenological tradition, especially the notions of “life” and the “life-world,” which are prominent in the later Husserl but also appear in non-phenomenological thinkers such as Bergson. Barbaras then filters these notions (especially “life”) through Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Hegel famously argues that Kant’s account of critical distance depends upon an impoverished conception of freedom. In its place, Hegel introduces a richer conception of freedom, according to which the self who is capable of self-determination is multifaceted: wanting and thinking, social and individual. This richer conception gives rise to an account of critical reflection that emphasizes engagement with our motives and practices rather than radical detachment from them. But what is most distinctive about Hegel’s account is the idea that (...) when we reflect upon motives and practices, we draw upon shared self-understandings that are neither universal nor just particular to individuals. There is, Hegel argues, no presocial identity or self that can be detached from our socially constituted contexts of thought and value. This has important implications for how we conceive of critical reflection. (shrink)

Drawing on Earman’s definition of determinism and Lewis’ best systems account of laws, in What Makes Time Special? Craig Callender develops an account of time as ‘the strongest thing’. The characterisation of this account apparently assumes no action at a temporal distance, an assumption that also underlies Earman’s account of determinism. In this paper I show that there is a way to define determinism that allows worlds with action at a temporal distance to count as deterministic, that action at a (...) temporal distance is possible on a best systems account of laws, and hence that Callender need not make this assumption. (shrink)

The equivalence connective in ukasiewicz logic has its algebraic counterpart which is the distance function d(x,y) =|x–y| of a positive cone of a commutative -group. We make some observations on logically motivated algebraic structures involving the distance function.

The vagaries of evidential reasoning in archaeology are notorious: the material traces that comprise the archaeological record are fragmentary and profoundly enigmatic, and the inferential gap that archaeologists must cross to constitute them as evidence of the cultural past is a peren­nial source of epistemic anxiety. And yet we know a great deal about the cultural past, including vast reaches of the past for which this material record is our only source of evidence. The contents of this record stand as (...) evidence only under interpretation, but however much a construct it is, archaeological evidence has a striking capacity to disrupt settled assump­tions, redirecting inquiry and expanding interpretive horizons in direc­tions no one could have anticipated. It is this capacity for constraining inference and interpretation that I am concerned to understand. I outline a model of evidential reasoning based on archaeological practice that integrates insights drawn from philosophical theories of confirmation, model building and hypothesis testing. Given growing interest in the uses of material evidence in fields that had been resolutely text-based, the archaeological principles of evidential reasoning may have much wider reach than this particular social/historical discipline. (shrink)

:In this essay, I present an account of forgiveness as a process of emotional distancing. The central claim is that, understood in these terms, forgiveness does not require a change in judgment. Rationally forgiving someone, in other words, does not require that one judges the significance of the wrongdoing differently or that one comes to the conclusion that the attitudes behind it have changed in a favorable way. The model shows in what sense forgiving is inherently social, shows why we (...) should be pluralists about it, and provides a basis for arguing against the existence of necessary conditions of forgiving. (shrink)

The intelligibility of a performance of improvised dance does not reside in the rehearsed execution of a pre-existing script, nor does it result from a sustained verbal interaction between the dancers. Many aspects of the speechless performance obviously play an important role in the achieved intelligibility of the dance: a dancer is seen moving on and from a ground, on a stage, in a space delimited by walls, illuminated by spotlights, sounded by music, in front of an audience. And of (...) course with other dancers, whose joint gestures and moves give shape to a choreography by providing pace, rhythm and sequences, thereby constituting a narrative or fragments thereof. This paper addresses the manufacture of this witnessable order, by presenting some results of an ethnographic inquiry. The investigation will be focused on how, in an improvised duet, each dancer interacts with the other, and more specifically how she or he positions her- or himself in relation to the other, from distance to proximity and touch. This work of distance management is the dance, whose choreographic accountability is produced and structured by dancers staying at a distance, getting closer and touching each other. The analysis shows that distance management is oriented to as relevant by the dancers and that it has consequences on their improvised duet. It is also what makes their performance analyzable by distant observers. (shrink)