The risky investment game of Gneezy and Potters :631–645, 1997) has been proposed as a simple tool to measure risk aversion in applied settings, especially attractive in settings where participants may have limited education. However, this game can produce a significant endowment effect, so that analysis of the behavior in this game should not be done in the Expected Utility Theory framework. The paper illustrates this point, by showing that risk tolerance can be much higher when the initial endowment concerns (...) a risky lottery. (shrink)

The growth of esports as a recognized, organized, competitive activity in North America and Europe has evolved steadily from one of the most prominent sport industries in several Asian countries. Esports, which is still pursuing a widely accepted governance structure, has struggled to control the factors that typically act as a breeding ground for sport corruption. Within the esports industry, there is alleged widespread use of both prescription and off-label use of stimulants, such as modafinil, methylphenidate, and dextroamphetamine. Anti-doping policy (...) implementation in this environment may result in either the abuse of the Therapeutic Use Exemptions system or excluding too many competitors who have a legitimate need for these medications. In this paper, we contextualize esports and substance use within this emerging industry. Subsequently, we outline the specific challenges faced by esports organizations in crafting policies to address PEDs—one of the industry’s most pressing issues. Furt... (shrink)

Human neural and behavioral activities have been reported to exhibit fractal dynamics known as 1/f noise, which is more aptly named 1/f scaling. Some argue that 1/f scaling is a general and pervasive property of the dynamical substrate from which cognitive functions are formed. Others argue that it is an idiosyncratic property of domain‐specific processes. An experiment was conducted to investigate whether 1/f scaling pervades the intrinsic fluctuations of a spoken word. Ten participants each repeated the word bucket over 1,000 (...) times, and fluctuations in acoustic measurements across repetitions generally followed the 1/f scaling relation, including numerous parallel yet distinct series of 1/f fluctuations. On the basis of work showing that 1/f scaling is a universal earmark of metastability, it is proposed that the observed pervasiveness of 1/f fluctuations in speech reflects the fact that cognitive functions are formed as metastable patterns of activity in brain, body, and environment. (shrink)

In the TV series, Joe Miller is the stop‐cap which keeps James Holden occupied so he does not have time to send constant broadcasts out to the world. When we think about Holden helping others, why he's always in the midst of things, it's helpful to think about what distinguishes Holden from other characters in the series and what makes him unique—that he grew up on a farm. Holden is the exact opposite of Dresden, Strickland, Mao, (...) and Marco. And that's what Naomi loves about him. The Expanse is dark science fiction whose references are to a war of all against all (Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan), to the massacre of American Indians, and to a dark intelligence that maybe intended the ultimate domination of nature. And one of their protagonists is a guy who thinks he's a knight tilting at windmills. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn. 1985. Garrett, Don. Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Gaskin, J.C. A. Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Holden, T.The Architecture ...

This article is focused on the audience and the transcripts of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theological and philosophical lectures at the universities of Halle and Berlin between 1804/05 and 1834. It gives a summary and a characterization of the attached list, which contains in alphabetical order the known audience members and their transcripts of Schleiermacher’s lectures. The aim of this article is to advance the theological and philosophical research into the history of ideas in the early nineteenth century, esp. of Schleiermacher’s academic (...) work, with respect to his lecture style, the (academic) biography of his audience, the relation between the spoken (lecture) and the written word (transcript), as well as the relationship of the students amongst themselves. (shrink)

Intensely loyal, practical, straightforward, almost fearless, with a wry sense of humor, Amos is also analytical, a quick thinker, and exceedingly aware of his surroundings. Amos wasn't always fond of Holden. After spending tough and adventurous times together, Amos changes his attitude toward Holden and regards him as a good person. Amos embodies Friedrich Nietzsche's famous slogan, “live dangerously!” Nietzsche traced the beginning of slave morality to a creative reversal of values fueled by ressentiment. According to Nietzsche, our (...) fundamental drive is the desire to gain and express power. Looking at Amos through a Nietzschean lens makes us reluctant to judge the character as good or evil. Amos has not channeled or sublimated his will to power. He has not overcome himself and humanity. Ultimately, he is far from becoming Nietzsche's ideal figure, the Ubermensch. (shrink)

The Expanse is propelled into action when James Holden does what is morally right. In our everyday world, the prospect of spending time in jail short circuits the need for moral reflection. Not so in the anarchic world of The Expanse. This chapter uses just war theory to explore the moral obligations that exist when the political order breaks down. Philosophy helps us develop a moral language for making choices and evaluating actions. Michael Walzer accounts for the compassionate behavior (...) by arguing that soldiers, through reflection, come to recognize the basic moral obligations that humans have toward one another. He discerns five philosophical principles that govern our judgments about “how to fight”—all of which suggest that, deep down, we don't really believe the old canard that “all's fair in love and war.”. (shrink)

Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these -- and the press of subtler questions (...) hidden in their amibiguities -- deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the program of the geometrization of nature on the other. (shrink)

Spectres of False Divinity presents a historical and critical interpretation of Hume's rejection of the existence of a deity with moral attributes. In Hume's view, no first cause or designer responsible for the ordered universe could possibly have moral attributes; nor could the existence of such a being have any real implications for human practice or conduct. Hume's case for this 'moral atheism' is a central plank of both his naturalistic agenda in metaphysics and his secularizing program in moral theory. (...) It complements his wider critique of traditional theism, and threatens to rule out any religion that would make claims on moral practice. Thomas Holden situates Hume's commitment to moral atheism in its historical and philosophical context, offers a systematic interpretation of his case for divine amorality, and shows how Hume can endorse moral atheism while maintaining his skeptical attitude toward traditional forms of cosmological and theological speculation. (shrink)

Contrary to a popular reading of his modal epistemology, Berkeley does not hold that inconceivability entails impossibility, and he cannot therefore argue the impossibility of mind-independent matter by appealing to facts about what we cannot conceive. Berkeley is explicit about this constraint on his metaphysical argumentation, and, I argue, does respect it in practice. Popular mythology about the ‘master argument’ notwithstanding, the only passages in which he might plausibly seem to employ the principle that inconceivability entails impossibility are those that (...) argue for the inseparability of primary from secondary qualities. However, an alternative reading of these texts is available that is both consistent with Berkeley's express modal epistemology and credible in its own right. (shrink)

Hume regards the ‘absolute’ necessity attending demonstrable propositions as an expression of the limitations of human imagination. When we register our modal commitments in ordinary descriptive language, affirming that there are such-and-such absolute necessities, possibilities, and impossibilities, we are projecting our sense of what the human mind can and cannot conceive. In some ways the account parallels Hume’s famous treatment of the necessity of causes, and in some respects it anticipates recent expressivist theories of absolute modality. I marshal the evidence (...) for this interpretation, show how it can explain a number of otherwise puzzling features of Hume’s modal epistemology and metaphysics, and situate this account of our modal discourse in Hume’s wider programme for a science of human nature. (shrink)

This book presents a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy of religion. I argue that the key to Hobbes’s treatment of religion is his theory of religious language. On that theory, the proper function of religious speech is not to affirm truths, state facts, or describe anything, but only to express non-descriptive attitudes of honor, reverence, and humility before God, the incomprehensible great cause of nature. The traditional vocabulary of theism, natural religion, and even scriptural religion is (...) preserved intact, but only as a system of natural and conventional signs of honor, as we laud the ‘infinite,’ ‘wise,’ and ‘good’ cause of nature, and speak of it in conventionally-approved scriptural terms—not in an attempt to describe it, but only as a way of expressing our veneration. The proposed reading undercuts the most influential alternative interpretations, revealing that Hobbes is neither an atheist, nor a literal-minded theist with a realist conception of the traditional divine attributes. At the same time, understanding Hobbes’s non-descriptivist approach to religious discourse helps us to see why so many have found either an atheistic or a realist-minded theistic interpretation attractive. The book advances a comprehensive analysis of Hobbes’s highly original philosophy of religion, including both his treatment of natural religion and his treatment of revealed religion and scripture. It also connects his philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and theory of human nature to his engagé religious politics, including his views on religious toleration, sectarianism, religious education, ecclesiology, and the religious function of the civil state. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:There are two ways of hearing Philo's unexpected endorsement of a version of the design hypothesis in the final part of Hume's Dialogues. We might register it in accordance with Cleanthes's descriptivist approach to religious speech, taking Philo to be reasoning with Cleanthes in Cleanthes's own way. Or we might hear Philo's words in accordance with his own expressivist account of religious speech, an account that Philo appears to have borrowed from Hobbes. I argue that Hume intended this double layering (...) of meanings, presenting us with two distinct ways we might understand Philo's closing remarks. Each possible reading reveals a distinct Humean lesson about the limitations of natural theology. (shrink)

Various early modern philosophers contested the nature, dignity, and powers of the oyster, including Montaigne, Cavendish, Locke, Hume, Reid, and Lichtenberg. This paper presents a conspectus of the debate. The author—who sometimes seems to get the wrong end of the stick—documents the major texts and advances an interpretation of the main lines of controversy.

According to a standard interpretation of Hume’s argument against infinite divisibility, Hume is raising a purely formal problem for mathematical constructions of infinite divisibility, divorced from all thought of the stuffing or filling of actual physical continua. I resist this. Hume’s argument must be understood in the context of a popular early modern account of the metaphysical status of the parts of physical quantities. This interpretation disarms the standard mathematical objections to Hume’s reasoning; I also defend it on textual and (...) contextual grounds. (shrink)

Commercialisation and consumerism have had lasting and profound effects upon the nature of oral health and how dental services are provided. The stigma of a spoiled dental appearance, along with the attraction of the smile as a symbol of status and prestige, places the mouth and teeth as an object and product to be bought and sold. How the dental profession interacts with this acquired status of the mouth has direct implications for the professional status of dentistry and the relationship (...) between the profession and society. This essay examines the mouth’s developing position as a symbol of status and prestige and how the dental profession’s interaction and response to this may have important effects on the nature of dentistry’s social contract with society. As rates of dental disease reduce in higher socioeconomic groups, dentistry is experiencing a reorientation from being positioned within a therapeutic context, to be increasingly viewed as body work. This is not in of itself problematic; as a discipline dentistry places a very high value upon the provision of enhanced or improved aesthetics. This position changes when the symbolic exchange value of an aesthetic smile becomes the main motivation for treatment, encouraging a shift towards a commercialised model of practice that attenuates professional altruism. The dental profession should not welcome the association of the mouth as a status and prestige symbol lightly; this article examines how this paradigm shift might impact upon the social contract and dentistry’s professional status. (shrink)

I explore some of the challenges involved in establishing the intersubjective dynamic as the foundation for a normatively charged philosophy of history. I seek in addition to highlight the value of Levinas’ work for the field of recognition studies. Levinas in effect offers a transitional model of recognition between Kojeve and Honneth, and as such his work harbors the potential for addressing some of the difficulties which beset the work of both when it comes to formulating an understanding of recognition (...) which is capable of explaining historical transformation and of serving as a standard for the critique of historical practices. (shrink)

can natural human reason establish the existence of a first cause of all things? Hobbes tells us quite plainly that it can. Yet on other occasions he also tells us that our natural reason cannot rule out an eternal chain of causes with no beginning at all. The plot thickens when we consider his ambidextrous treatment of the only proof to which he gives any serious attention. On the one hand, Hobbes seems to endorse a fairly conventional version of the (...) cosmological argument in The Elements of Law and Leviathan, reasoning without apparent irony from the inadmissibility of an infinite regress of causes to the existence of a first cause of all. On the other hand, he systematically attacks this sort of cosmological.. (shrink)

The rise and persistence of a commercial model of healthcare and the potential shift towards the commodification of dental services, provided to consumers, should provoke thought about the nature and purpose of dentistry and whether this paradigm is cause for concern. Within this article, whether dentistry is a commodity and the legitimacy of dentistry as a business is explored and assessed. Dentistry is perceived to be a commodity, dependent upon the context of how services are to be provided and the (...) interpretation of the patient–professional relationship. Commercially-focused practices threaten the fiduciary nature of the interaction between consumer and provider. The solution to managing commercial elements within dentistry is not through rejection of the new paradigm of the consumer of dental services, but in the rejection of competitive practices, coercive advertising and the erosion of professional values and duty. Consumerism may bring empowerment to those accessing dental services. However, if the patient–practitioner relationship is reduced to a mere transaction in the name of enhanced consumer participation, this empowerment is but a myth. (shrink)

Cosmetic dentistry is a divisive discipline. Within discourses that raise questions of the purpose of the dental profession, cosmetic dentistry is frequently criticised on the basis of it being classified as a non‐therapeutic intervention. This article re‐evaluates this assertion through examination of ethics of care of the self, healthcare definitions and the social purpose of dentistry, finding the traditional position to be wanting in its conclusions. The slide of dentistry from a healthcare vocation towards being a predominantly business‐focused interaction between (...) clinician and consumer conflicts with traditional notions of dentistry as a profession. Whilst it is undeniable that cosmetic dental treatment particularly lends itself to the commercial paradigm, this is not exclusive to this area of professional practice. The cultural basis of dental appearance and the potential of the dental profession to exert coercive pressure upon the public to undergo treatment that is based upon social norms is discussed. This essay concludes that cosmetic dentistry is undeniably part of the professional purpose of 21st Century dentistry. However, the caveat that may be placed upon this, is that this status is conditional upon the professional conduct of dental practitioners remaining resilient to commercial practices not compatible with professional obligations. (shrink)

There is no greater testament to Emmanuel Levinas' reputation as an enigmatic thinker than in his meditations on eschatology and its relevance for contemporary thought. Levinas has come to be seen as a principal representative in Continental philosophy - alongside the likes of Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno and Zizek - of a certain philosophical messianism, differing from its religious counterpart in being formulated apparently without appeal to any dogmatic content. To date, however, Levinas' messianism has not received the same detailed attention (...) as other aspects of his wide ranging ethical vision. Terence Holden attempts to redress this imbalance, tracing the evolution of the messianic idea across Levinas' career, emphasising the transformations or indeed displacements which this idea undergoes in taking on philosophical intelligibility. He suggests that, in order to crack the enigma which this idea represents, we must consider not only the Jewish tradition from which Levinas draws inspiration, but also Nietzsche, who ostensibly would represent the greatest rival to the messianic idea in the history of philosophy, with his notion of the ‘parody' of messianism. >. (shrink)

Hobbes’s interpreters have struggled to find a plausible semantics for evaluative language in his writings. I argue that this search is misguided. Hobbes offers neither an account of the reference of evaluative terms nor a theory of the truth-conditions for evaluative statements. Rather, he sees evaluative language simply as having the non-representational function of prescribing actions and practical attitudes, its superficially representational appearance notwithstanding. I marshal the evidence for this prescriptivist reading of Hobbes on evaluative language and show how it (...) sidesteps various textual and philosophical problems that bedevil the traditional interpretations. (shrink)

Memory for spatial location is typically biased, with errors trending toward the center of a surrounding region. According to the category adjustment model, this bias reflects the optimal, Bayesian combination of fine-grained and categorical representations of a location. However, there is disagreement about whether categories are malleable. For instance, can categories be redefined based on expert-level conceptual knowledge? Furthermore, if expert knowledge is used, does it dominate other information sources, or is it used adaptively so as to minimize overall error, (...) as predicted by a Bayesian framework? We address these questions using images of geological interest. The participants were experts in structural geology, organic chemistry, or English literature. Our data indicate that expertise-based categories influence estimates of location memory—particularly when these categories better constrain errors than alternative categories. Results are discussed with respect to the CAM. (shrink)

To understand Hobbes’s handling of Christian scripture in Part 3 of Leviathan we need to see it in the light of his own radical account of the norms controlling public religious speech and practice as set out in Part 2 and in other works such as De Cive and De Corpore. As these texts make clear, Hobbes holds that we ought rationally to venerate the first cause of all, and that the proper way to venerate this awesome and incomprehensible being (...) is to publicly adopt the local culture’s religious practices, however arbitrary or conventional those practices might be. For the seventeenth-century English subject, the Anglo-Protestant scriptural religion provides the appropriate vehicle to express this rationally mandated religious piety, and thus provides a form of devotion that Hobbes embraces in a spirit of genuine religious reverence. At the same time, he also regards this religion, like all scriptural religions, as a conventional human artifact that, given the ear of the sovereign, he might hope to shape in favor of Hobbesian ideals such as civil obedience, the separation of philosophy from religion, and the extirpation of belief in an immaterial spirit-world. The proposed interpretation dissolves systematic problems facing irreligious readings on the one hand, and more straightforwardly Christian readings on the other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Materialism from Hobbes to Locke by Stewart DuncanThomas HoldenStewart Duncan. Materialism from Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 248. Hardback, $80.00.Stewart Duncan’s Materialism from Hobbes to Locke presents a tightly focused study of the seventeenth-century English debate over materialism in the philosophy of mind, from Hobbes’s uncompromising rejection of incorporeal substance as a contradiction in terms through to Locke’s cautious calibrations around the metaphysics of (...) mind and body. Along the way, Duncan considers Hobbes’s exchange with Descartes and examines the contributions of a handful of mid- and late seventeenth-century figures, including those of the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth writing in scandalized reaction to Hobbes, and that of the more bohemian figure Margaret Cavendish, with her own panpsychist variation of materialism. An epilogue considers some of Locke’s more radical self-described followers in the early eighteenth century, with their own iteration of materialist-inclined pseudo-Lockean speculations.Duncan’s book will take its place as an essential study of the debate over materialism and the metaphysics of mind in early modern England. It is particularly illuminating when examining the ways in which Locke’s own treatment of materialism is shaped both positively and negatively by the intervening responses to Hobbes. Locke himself is not always terribly scrupulous about registering his own influences, and—at least when read from our distance—can seem to present his monumental Essay Concerning Human Understanding more as an achievement of epic psychological introspection and experimental self-examination than a series of moves in a complex dialogue with other contemporary figures. Duncan brings significant parts of that subtextual dialogue back into view, shedding light on Locke’s cautious agnosticism about materialism through plausible treatment of his likeliest sources. In attending closely to Locke’s own influences, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke makes a substantial contribution to the project of naturalizing Locke that one also sees advanced in recent scholarship by Hannah Dawson, Nicholas Jolley, and Antonia LoLordo. And Duncan’s approach yields striking results, as when he intervenes compellingly in the well-known debate between Jonathan Bennett and Michael Ayers over whether Locke’s theory of substance commits him to a pure propertyless substratum or merely a material microstructure that is responsible for the empirically observable properties of objects. Ayers had rejected the pure substratum view as absurd and unthinkable for Locke. But Duncan shows that More had explicitly endorsed just such a theory and was very plausibly one of Locke’s sources. The hypothesis of a pure propertyless substratum was then at least a thinkable option for Locke, and it is arguable that his own view of substance was in part inspired by More.Throughout the book, Duncan’s spotlight is on the question of the metaphysical basis of the human mind, consciousness, and thought, together with the analogous question for other minds, whether animal, angelic, or divine. Most of the time, this focus on the metaphysics of mind tracks well with the leading concerns and arguments of the figures under discussion, and it helps give Duncan’s history an engaging narrative course. But it is arguable that for Hobbes, at least, materialism was as much a research program and methodological manifesto for what we would now call the natural sciences as it was an answer to a question about the nature of the conscious mind. Questions about the explanatory reach of materialism in natural philosophy—including questions about the nature of space and time, cohesion, elasticity, the existence of a vacuum, and the nature of active forces and materially penetrable fields—arise here only obliquely, if at all, as and when they inform the central question of mind.Duncan’s discussion is circumscribed in one other way as well. The “from Hobbes to Locke” of his title should not be taken as simply declaring the book’s chronological framework—as specifying the time period to be examined, bookended by each of these important figures. It should also be read causally, developmentally, genealogically: from Hobbes to Locke. Duncan’s book “is about the reactions to Hobbes’s materialism” (5, emphasis added), particularly the reactions in England (and... (shrink)

Various early modern philosophers affirm the traditional distinction between ‘things above reason’ and ‘things contrary to reason.’ However, it is Robert Boyle who goes furthest to rework and defend the division, and to explore its ramifications in detail. My aim here is to examine the logical structure of Boyle’s version of the distinction, and his concomitant account of the sphere of truths beyond human understanding. I also weigh the philosophical merits of the account and clarify the relationship between Boyle’s characterization (...) of things above reason and his alleged dialethism. (shrink)

The point of departure for this article is a comparative study of Adorno and Arendt on the question of evil and modernity. To be precise, I observe how Adorno and Arendt present us with very different ways of understanding radical evil as an expression of the modern project of acceleration. This divergence presents us with a problematic which does not fit easily into the framework of the contemporary post-metaphysical engagement with evil. The latter projects a relational, non-substantive concept of evil (...) addressed under the order of collective memory and against the background of a normatively neutralized order of history. Yet I show, by tracing the continuities and discontinuities which exist between Arendt and Adorno’s conceptualizing of radical evil, on the one hand, and the different elements of this contemporary engagement, on the other, how the initial problematic is symptomatic of a continuing investment in history and can only be addressed in terms of such an investment. This investment is the product of a dynamic between history and memory, informing the work of both thinkers, which partially intersects with the Hegelian strategy of theodicy. I thus conclude with a consideration of whether certain aspects of the latter should be rehabilitated. (shrink)

Normative reconstruction is a form of immanent critique which judges society in terms of values which are already institutionalized and implicitly expressed across everyday forms of interaction. Honneth, for his part, reads the value of social freedom into the normative grammar of modern institutions and anticipates further advances towards its institutionalization. Many have voiced doubts over the extent to which the model of normative reconstruction which Honneth proposes is solidly anchored in social reality: at worst, it is argued, this reality (...) is resistant to reconstruction in terms of the value of social freedom; at best, it is too susceptible to multiple readings to allow for such a reconstruction. I seek to respond to these charges, while also testing the reach of Ricoeur’s understanding of the philosophical anthropological idea of indebtedness to the past, by following up on Honneth’s appeal to a horizon of social memory in response to his own uncertainties over the viability of normative reconstruction. More generally, I seek to arrive at a better understanding of the capacity of memory to orientate social critique within a shifting historical landscape. (shrink)

I seek to draw out the unique character of Levinas’ theory of recognition by highlighting its transitional character in a double sense. It is transitional, firstly, in that it stands between two models of recognition: the earlier agonistic model of Kojeve and the later model of Honneth which takes as its point of departure a primordial relation of mutual affirmation between individuals. It is transitional secondly in the sense that, while Levinas initially employs the concept of recognition, he is later (...) explicit in his rejection of it. The interest of Levinas’ transitional model of recognition for the philosophy of religion is that Levinas negotiates both transitions by calling on archetypes borrowed from the Jewish tradition. An exploration of this model thus provides us with a fresh vantage point from which to address anew the question of the articulation of social philosophy and the philosophy of religion in his work. (shrink)

Modernity has imposed on many of us, and perhaps especially on academics, a habit of silence with regard to what John Rawls called deeply held ‘comprehensive’ moral beliefs. According to Rawls and his many disciples, the survival of liberalism depends upon the bracketing of comprehensive beliefs whenever we step into the public sphere. And in the field of higher education, that would have to include the classroom, the lab, the library carrel, the hotel conference suites where we confer and exchange (...) ideas, as well as the vast academic publishing apparatus. I would like to call attention to the way that the supposed requirement of the Rawlsian silence is being challenged, not just by conservative critics but even by such a staunch defender of conventional liberalism as Jürgen Habermas. Second, if Habermas and the other critics are right, then a fortiori, the public university—perhaps the most representative and exemplary of all the institutions of civil society—ought to welcome the infusion of relevant but closely held beliefs, including religious ones, in carrying out its research and teaching responsibilities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI extract a problematic from Levinas’ shifting attitude towards the idea of recognition. An underappreciated aspect of Levinas’ work is that at an early stage he appeals to a recognition-based model of intersubjectivity, which characteristically plots a relation of mutual affirmation between individuals. However, he later explicitly rejects this paradigm in favour of an intensified heterological orientation which invests in otherness as a value in itself. Levinas’ rejection of recognition raises the question of how we are to interpret the relation (...) between the latter and heterology as rival models for reading into intersubjectivity an immanent and dynamic source of normativity. (shrink)

In a series of presentations at Sainte-Anne Hospital, published in English under the title _Talking to Brick Walls_, Lacan offers one of the few explicit references to Bataille in his _œuvre_. He interposes a stark disagreement between himself and Bataille on the status of possible knowledge regarding ontological questions. Lacan reads Bataille as a mystic who proposes that the pursuit of knowledge is a futile task and that knowledge of being is _only _possible _per viam negativam_. In order to advance (...) this reading, Lacan emphasises Bataille’s fixation with “nonknowledge.” At first glance, one can understand why Lacan identifies him as a mystic, and many commentators on Bataille’s writings offer similar reading; however, this ignores subtle nuances of Bataille’s arguments regarding what he calls “inner experience.” More crucially, it ignores his explicit rejection of mysticism on the very basis of the knowledge that results from nonknowledge. This comparison frames a problem for fundamental ontology, of which I hope to elaborate only one aspect: The incompleteness of thought implies a non-relation between thought and being, and we can have a knowledge about this non-relation through an analysis of the limit as phantasmatic and structural rather than as real. (shrink)