In this entertaining and provocative introduction, Royle offers lucid explanations of various key ideas, including deconstruction, undecidability, iterability, differance, aporia, the pharmakon, the supplement, a new enlightenment, and the democracy to come. He also gives attention, however, to a range of less obvious key ideas of Derrida, such as earthquakes, animals and animality, ghosts, monstrosity, the poematic, drugs, gifts, secrets, war, and mourning. Derrida is seen as an extraordinarily inventive thinker, as well as a brilliantly imaginative and often very funny (...) writer. Other critical introductions tend to highlight the specifically philosophical nature and genealogy of his work. Royle's book proceeds in a new and different way, in particular by focusing on the crucial but strange place of literature in Derrida's writings. He thus provides an appreciation and understanding based on detailed reference to Derrida's texts, interwoven with close readings of such writers as Shakespeare, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, Poe, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Bowen. In doing so, he explores Derrida's consistent view that deconstruction is "a coming-to-terms with literature". He emphasizes the ways in which "literature", for Derrida, is indissociably bound up with other concerns, such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, politics and ethics, responsibility and justice, law and democracy. (shrink)

Enkrasia and the Fixed Point Thesis are equivalent.

The two leading cognitive accounts of consciousness currently available concern global workspace (a form of working memory) and metacognition. There is relatively little interaction between these two approaches and it has even been suggested that the two accounts are rival and separable alternatives. Here, we argue that the successful function of a global workspace critically requires that the broadcast representations include a metacognitive component.

The other chapters in this volume discuss the important, but neglected, topic of systematicity in metaphysics. In this chapter I begin by taking a step back and asking: why is systematicity important in metaphysics? Assuming that metaphysics should be systematic, why is this the case? I canvas some answers that emerge naturally within contemporary philosophy and argue that none of them adequately explains why metaphysics should be systematic. I then turn to Kant’s account of systematicity for his explanation. I argue (...) that, while Kant’s explanation of the systematicity of metaphysics rests on a host of additional weighty philosophical commitments that many philosophers would rather do without (e.g., transcendental idealism), he is not alone in this. The contemporary answers I earlier found wanting can be transformed into satisfying explanations, I argue, but only at the cost of philosophical commitments at least as weighty as Kant’s. I conclude on a note of agnosticism: it is far from clear whether contemporary philosophy has done, or can do, better than Kant at explaining the role of systematicity in metaphysics. (shrink)

We provide examples of plurals related to ambiguity and anaphora that pose problems or are counterexamples for current approaches to plurals. We then propose a dynamic semantics based on an extension of dynamic predicate logic to handle these examples. On our theory, different readings of sentences or discourses containing plurals don’t arise from a postulated ambiguity of plural terms or predicates applying to plural DPs, but follow rather from different types of dynamic transitions that manipulate inputs and outputs from formulas (...) or discourse constituents. Many aspects of meaning can affect the type dynamic transitions: the lexical semantics of predicates to the left and right of a transition, and number features of DPs and discourse constraints like parallelism. (shrink)

I begin by considering a question that has driven much scholarship on transcendental idealism: are appearances numerically identical to the things in themselves that appear, or numerically distinct? I point out that much of the debate on this question has assumed that this is equivalent to the question of whether they are the same objects, but go on to provide textual, historical, and philosophical evidence that “object” (Gegenstand) and “thing” (Ding) have different meanings for Kant. A thing is a locus (...) of intensively gradable causal force, reality. I argue that appearances and things in themselves are not identical as objects, because the very concept of object-identity is tied, for Kant, to the concept of an intellect that would cognize the numerical identity of the objects in question. Because no intellect can be both discursive and intellectual, no intellect could cognize the numerical identity of objects across the phenomenal/noumenal divide, and thus the claim that they are identical has no content. However, the very same things, the same reality, can be given to our sensible intellects, and to divine intuitive intellect, as two non-overlapping domains of objects. Identity readers are thus shown to be right about the same thing relation, while non-identity readers are vindicated on the numerical identity of objects. (shrink)

This book presents a series of coordinated studies that explain and illustrate how philosophy must be developed systematically with its problems and topics bound together by links of reciprocal interconnection. The book consists of two parts: The first part consists of a series of case studies which illustrate how philosophical issues do not remain in neatly separated compartments but reach out in interrelationship with one another. The second part analyzes the principle resources of philosophical methodology and shows in detail how (...) and why they can only be implemented in a systemically interrelated manner. Overall, the book demonstrates and illustrates the systemic and holistic nature of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

We argue that the generation and enjoyment of imaginary worlds do not necessarily rely on an evolved preference for exploration. Rather, we suggest that culture is shaped by socioecological facts on the ground, and we hypothesize about the role of residential mobility, specifically, as an important factor in the popularity of imagined spaces.

Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically untestable, or metaphysical thesis. It thus lies beyond the scope of science. Only when physics has formulated a testable unified theory of everything which has been amply corroborated empirically will science be in a position to declare that it has established that the cosmos is (...) physically comprehensible. But this argument presupposes a widely accepted but untenable conception of science which I shall call standard empiricism. According to standard empiricism, in science theories are accepted solely on the basis of evidence. Choice of theory may be influenced for a time by considerations of simplicity, unity, or explanatory capacity, but not in such a way that the universe itself is permanently assumed to be simple, unified or physically comprehensible. In science, no thesis about the universe can be accepted permanently as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Granted this view, it is clear that science cannot have established that the universe is physically comprehensible. Standard empiricism is, however, as I have indicated, untenable. Any fundamental physical theory, in order to be accepted as a part of theoretical scientific knowledge, must satisfy two criteria. It must be (1) sufficiently empirically successful, and (2) sufficiently unified. Given any accepted theory of physics, endlessly many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted – disunified because they assert that different dynamical laws govern the diverse phenomena to which the theory applies. These disunified rivals are not considered for a moment in physics, despite their greater empirical success. This persistent rejection of empirically more successful but disunified rival theories means, I argue, that a big, highly problematic, implicit assumption is made by science about the cosmos, to the effect, at least, that the cosmos is such that all seriously disunified theories are false. Once this point is recognized, it becomes clear, I argue, that we need a new conception of science which makes explicit, and so criticizable and improvable the big, influential, and problematic assumption that is at present implicit in physics in the persistent preference for unified theories. This conception of science, which I call aim-oriented empiricism, represents the assumption of physics in the form of a hierarchy of assumptions. As one goes up the hierarchy, the assumptions become less and less substantial, and more and more nearly such that their truth is required for science, or the pursuit of knowledge, to be possible at all. At each level, that assumption is accepted which (a) best accords with the next one up, and (b) has, associated with it the most empirically progressive research programme in physics, or holds out the greatest hope of leading to such an empirically progressive research programme. In this way a framework of relatively insubstantial, unproblematic, fixed assumptions and associated methods is created, high up in the hierarchy, within which much more substantial and problematic assumptions and associated methods, low down in the hierarchy, can be changed, and indeed improved, as scientific knowledge improves. One assumption in this hierarchy of assumptions, I argue, is that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – that is, such that some yet-to-be-discovered unified theory of everything is true. Hence the conclusion: improve our ideas about the nature of science and it becomes apparent that science has already established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – in so far as science can ever establish anything theoretical. (shrink)

Eclipse of Grace offers original insights into the roots of modern theology by introducing systematic theologians and Christian ethicists to Hegel through a focus on three of his seminal texts: Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Presents brilliant and original insights into Hegel’s significance for modern theology Argues that, theologically, Hegel has been misconstrued and that much more can be gained by focusing on the logic that he develops out of an engagement with (...) Christian doctrines Features an original structure organized as a set of commentaries on individual Hegel texts, and not just presenting overviews of his entire corpus Offers detailed engagement with Hegel’s texts rather than relying on generalizations about Hegelian philosophy Provides an illuminating, accessible and lucid account of the thinking of the major figures in modern German philosophy and theology. (shrink)

A Review of Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis , Remembering Socrates: Philosophical Essays, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006.

Hans Jonas’s establishment of an ethics of responsibility entails the simultaneous rejection of the modern notion of progress and the recovery of a form of “metaphysical speculation” that aids man in his search for an objective standard of value. Looking mostly at Jonas’s philosophical biology in The Phenomenon of Life and Mortality and Morality, this paper shows how Jonas’s thought on value judgments rests upon his critique of progress and science. The ethics of perfectibility and progress, Jonas shows, leads to (...) a predicament in which the modern mind must navigate between the dangers present in the hubristic hopes of technological progress and the nihilism he finds in the thought of Martin Heidegger. Jonas’s philosophical biology serves as a critique of these positions that opens up an alternative orientation toward nature—one that grounds not only the ethics of responsibility but the uniquely human activity of reflection. The critique of progress serves, then, as a propaedeutic to the ethics of responsibility and the recovery of an image of man as the reflective animal. Such a recovery of metaphysical speculation from the dogmas of the physical sciences helps encourage a “new humility” in the face of man’s technological power. Jonas hopes to replace man’s desire for self-overcoming with the fear that his “Promethean immoderation” will lead to the biosphere's destruction. This fear acknowledges the limits of man’s knowledge and is thereby accompanied by a posture of Socratic ignorance and the reengagement with the philosophia perennis. That is, a less hubristic ethical theory depends upon a modest philosophical stance toward the whole. Only on the grounds of this epistemological modesty can we hope to proceed into the future with both caution and wisdom. (shrink)

In this thesis I provide an account of the faculty of the mind that Kant calls ‘the power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft]. While there is an abundance of literature on various aspects of Kant’s theory of judgment in the Critical philosophy, there has been no sustained treatment of the nature of the faculty that is the subject of the third Critique (1790). I argue that the power of judgment is a fundamentally reflective, affective, and orientational capacity that occupies a central place (...) within Kant’s account of the human mind. To this end, I trace the development of Kant’s thinking on judgment—from the pre-Critical to the Critical period, as well as from the first to the third Critique—to show how it continues to gain prominence within Kant’s taxonomy of the mind. (shrink)

The paper is partly biographical and partly philosophical. It traces Russell’s philosophical interactions with the British neo-Hegelian philosopher, Harold Joachim, from Russell’s days as an undergraduate in the 1890s to his scathing review of Joachim’s inaugural lecture as Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford in 1920. The philosophical part attempts to evaluate Russell’s main argument against Joachim’s coherence theory of truth, that it is equivalent to the doctrine of internal relations. The paper makes use of Russell’s recently discovered letters to (...) Joachim. (shrink)

"The actuality of the revolution: this is the core fo Lenin's thought and his decisive link with Marx."This essay on Lenin, which appeared in 1924, was intended to head off the massive criticism leveled at Lukacs History and Class Consciousness by Communist Party leadership. It was a period in which Lukacs was decisively influenced by Lenin and by Rosa Luxemburg, and his intellectual development proceeded concretely toward a political interpretation of history and of literature.In a postscript Lukacs remains essentially unchanged (...) in his view of Lenin as a practitioner whose theoretical superiority lay in his ability to assess the sociohistorical uniqueness of any given situation that required action. Looking back, Lukacs regards the book as a document of the mid-twenties--of how a number of Marxists of the period saw Lenin's personality and mission and his place in world events. Ideas in the book were determined by the concepts of the period, its prejudices, illusions, and extravagances. Nevertheless, the book established certain spiritual verities in perceiving Lenin as the active-practical sage who had a skillfull tactical grasp of realpolitik which was neither empirical nor dogmatic but the culmination of a theoretical attitude. "His life was one of permanent action, of continuous struggle in a world in which he was profoundly convinced that there was no situation without a solution, for himself or his opponents. The leitmotiv of his life was accordingly: always be armed ready for action--for correct action." Lukacs further notes that an essential dimension of Lenin's activism was unceasingly self-education and constant openness to the lessons of experience.Lukacs also emphasizes a number of points in the book that remain methodologically valid, including criticisms of Lenin's behavior which were implicit and accurate critiques of Stalin's later development and the increasing bureaucratization and mechanization of the party. (shrink)

The metaphilosophical tendency of philosophical idealism inclines towards a view of philosophy itself that locates the goal of this enterprise in the construction of a cogent and comprehensive account of the nature and grounding human mind's experience of its world. And the coherentism to which idealism in general inclines is operative here as well. However, such a view of philosophizing's mission soon constrains the project to confront the implications of the complexity of human experience-its immense diversity and variability. Conflicting tendencies (...) and tensions are present throughout. Any attempt at the rational systematization of experience is bound to come up against its inner stresses and strains that brings an aporetic complexity to the fore. Against the background of this general line of thought, I have argued in earlier publications for three interconnected theses regarding philosophical methodology. (shrink)