This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy of Religion Metaphysics Epistemology Ethics Philosophy of Mind Science and Language How to Use This Book.

Many philosophers subscribe to the view that philosophy is a priori and in the business of discovering necessary truths from the armchair. This paper sets out to empirically test this picture. If this were the case, we would expect to see this reflected in philosophical practice. In particular, we would expect philosophers to advance mostly deductive, rather than inductive, arguments. The paper shows that the percentage of philosophy articles advancing deductive arguments is higher than those advancing inductive arguments, (...) which is what we would expect from the vantage point of the armchair philosophy picture. The results also show, however, that the percentages of articles advancing deductive arguments and those advancing inductive arguments are converging over time and that the difference between inductive and deductive ratios is declining over time. This trend suggests that deductive arguments are gradually losing their status as the dominant form of argumentation in philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are increasingly arguing for the importance of doing scientifically- and socially-engaged work, suggesting that we need to reduce barriers to extra-disciplinary engagement and broaden our impact. Yet, we currently lack empirical data to inform these discussions, leaving a number of important questions unanswered. How common is it for philosophers of science to engage other communities, and in what ways are they engaging? What barriers are most prevalent when it comes to broadly disseminating one’s work or (...) collaborating with others? To what extent do philosophers of science actually value an engaged approach? Our project addresses this gap in our collective knowledge by providing empirical data regarding the state of philosophy of science today. We report the results of a survey of 299 philosophers of science about their attitudes towards and experiences with engaging those outside the discipline. Our data suggest that a significant majority of philosophers of science think it is important for non-philosophers to read and make use of their work; most are engaging with communities outside the discipline; and many think philosophy of science, as a discipline, has an obligation to ensure it has a broader impact. Interestingly, however, many of these same philosophers believe engaged work is generally undervalued in the discipline. We think these findings call for cautious optimism on the part of those who value engaged work—while there seems to be more interest in engaging other communities than many assume, significant barriers still remain. (shrink)

Comment: This translation contains a correction of an argument in the original English edition, a correction that was subsequently made in the 1999 English Paperback edition, The correction is described below in the final paragraph. Differences in language can seriously restrict one's access to, and knowledge of, the philosophical work that's being done in other countries, and before the publication in 1997 of my book Time, Tense, and Causation, I was not aware of the depth of interest, in Italy, in (...) analytical philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular. Since that time, however, I've had the opportunity of talking to, and corresponding with, Italian philosophers who are currently working very intensely on problems in the philosophy of time. I very much enjoyed those discussions, and so I'm very pleased indeed that my book has now been translated into Italian. -/- The introduction to the book will provide readers with quite a detailed overview of my approach to the philosophy of time, and of the main theses that I am defending. But perhaps it will be helpful here if I try to sketch, very briefly, the big picture. -/- The central issue in the philosophy of time concerns the choice between tensed and tenseless accounts of the nature of time – or, as I prefer to express it, between dynamic and static conceptions of reality. According to tensed (or dynamic) accounts, there are significant ontological differences between the past, the present, and the future – either because the world contains intrinsic tensed properties of passiveness, presentness, and futurity, or else because the past, the present, and the future are not all equally real. In contrast, according to tenseless (or static) views of the nature of time, there are no intrinsic tensed properties, and the past, the present, and the future are all equally real. In this book, I defend a dynamic view of time dash specifically, one according to which, while the past and the present are now real, the future is not. This view has, of course, a very long history, with a version of it having been defended by Aristotle in his famous discussion of the sea battle tomorrow, in which he argued that, although it is now true – indeed necessarily so – that either there will be a sea battle tomorrow or there will not be one, it is not now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and not now true that there will not be one. Only when tomorrow comes will the world contain states of affairs that make one of these propositions true, and the other false. -/- But while this general view of the nature of time has a very long and distinguished history – and also seems, intuitively, quite appealing – it has become clear, especially in this century, that it is exposed to very strong objections – objections moreover, that come not merely from philosophy, but also from contemporary physics, and especially from Einstein's special theory of relativity. One of the main challenges accordingly, for any defense of a tensed or dynamic view of time, is to show that those objections can be answered. -/- In grappling with those objections, however, one thing that emerged very clearly was that some theses that defenders of tensed approaches to time have traditionally viewed as absolutely essential must be abandoned as unsound. The result is that. I was led to a view of the nature of time that is, in many respects, intermediate between tenseless views of time and traditional tensed approaches. In particular, advocates of traditional tensed views almost always maintain that the simplest temporal facts are themselves inherently tensed: they consist of facts such as, for example, that is certain apple is now red. But I maintain that, on the contrary, the simplest temporal facts, rather than being intrinsically tensed, are facts to the effect, for example, that a certain apple is now red at time t. On this fundamental issue, then, I agree with those who accept a tenseless or static view of time, since they too hold that the simplest tensed facts ¬– and indeed all tensed facts – are not tensed facts. How, then, does my approach to the nature time differ from a tenseless or static approach? The answer is that I also maintain that, although basic tensed facts are not inherently tensed, the world is nevertheless a dynamic one, since every present moment is a point at which things come into existence. Events, therefore, are not merely actual or nonactual – as is maintained by advocates of tenseless approaches to time. Rather an event is actual as of some time, and not actual as of other times. One needs, therefore, a temporally indexed notion of actuality, according to which an event is not actual until the time at which it occurs, and given that notion, one can explain, in a straightforward fashion, what it is for events to lie in the past, the present, and the future, and in the way that entails that the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- One task, as I have said, is to show that the many objections that have been advanced against dynamic conceptions of the world dash by philosophers – such as McTaggart, Quine, Smart, Putnam, and Mellor – can be answered. But even if, as I claim, this can be done, one is still left, of course, with the question of what positive reason there is, if any, for accepting a tensed or dynamic view of the world. -/- The argument that I develop in response to this question centers upon the concept of causation, and here I argue, first, that there are decisive objections to reductionist approaches to causation; secondly, that it is possible to set out a very plausible realistic account of the nature of causation; and, thirdly, that the crucial postulates that are involved in that account can only be satisfied in a dynamic world – indeed only in a dynamic world in which the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- This way of defending the view that our world is a dynamic one also has implications for some other issues – in particular, issues connected with the subtle and very difficult metaphysical question of the relation between time and causation. Thus, after setting out the above argument, I attempt to show that if causation can exist only in a dynamic world, then one can both demonstrate that backward causation is logically impossible and defend the view that the direction of time is to be defined in terms of the direction of causation, rather than vice versa. -/- Finally, a comment on the text. It involves one major change from the original English edition – namely in sections 4. 6.2 and 4.7. The change in those sections involves the crucial part in my argument both for the claim that our world is one where the past and present are real, but the future is not, and for the claim that backward causation is logically impossible. It was pointed out to me by Kenji Murota, a graduate student of philosophy at Keio University, that there was a problem in my original formulation of that argument. I'm grateful to him for his incisive criticism, and I'm pleased that I've had the opportunity of correcting that argument in the present edition. (shrink)

Logic in Action/Doron Avital Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide (Napoleon Bonaparte) Introduction -/- This book was born on the battlefield and in nights of secretive special operations all around the Middle East, as well as in the corridors and lecture halls of Western Academia best schools. As a young boy, I was always mesmerized by stories of great men and women of action at fateful cross-roads of decision-making. Then, like as today, (...) I felt the full weight of the moment of truth as it confronts the individual, the man or woman of action, with the imminent necessity to decide. Alongside, as I was climbing up the ladder of education, I found myself just as well captivated by the great intellectual stories of our times, in particular 20th century analytic philosophy and, at its core, the machinery of modern logic. How do then the cool contemplative modes of the philosophical and analytic outlooks, that are better fitting of the philosopher's armchair at the fireplace, hang together with the heat of the battlefield or the angst of the ticking clock of time left to the completion of a daring special operation? Growing up I was pondering exactly that. Not accidently, and in fact as consequence, I have chosen a course in life that challenged me to visit the poles of both theory and practice. I set myself on a mission to unravel the tension between the contemplative inquiry, supposedly theoretical, aiming at the logical structure of things, and the uncompromising test of life and action. The puzzle of the gap between theory and practice has become ever since the guiding question of my life. -/- Not long ago, I met two friends, Avner Shor, a veteran combat soldier of the special forces unit I eventually commanded, and Aviram Halevi, a fellow officer with whom I served. Why will we not put into writing the ideas that guided us during our years of military action, we wondered. At that time, I used to deliver the keynote lectures to the senior officers' course of Israel central intelligence organization, the Mossad. For this I already had to put some of these ideas in writing. Avner was quick to introduce me with a notable publisher and even helped me write the first chapter. With Aviram I sat to many meetings, where he would challenge me with key questions, and we followed them with memories of operations and battles, aiming to draw the required lessons. This served me well when I finally sat down to write the first draft of the book. The result was more extensive than me and my friends had expected. I had to add a particularly long chapter dealing with the story of modern philosophy and logic. This was required, I felt, as no decision-making process lives in an intellectual vacuum. Knowingly or subconsciously, the intellectual climate of the time guides us for better or worse with the decisions we finally take. The initial draft was naturally cumbersome and inaccessible. But here I had the privilege of meeting a particularly talented editor, Rami Rothholtz. I found in Rami both an editor and a critical reader. As an infantry combat soldier at youth and now a senior journalist and editor, Rami insisted on simplifying and refining my ideas. Had it not been for his work, this book would have been literally unreadable. *** I opened my book with a brief description of a single night of a special operation deep at the Lebanon Bekaa valley, far away from Israel northern border. The mission was to kidnap a senior terror leader known to be holding in captivity an Israeli pilot. This was also the last special operation I commanded in my military career. A single special operation night, but what had to precede it? For sure, many months of intense and skillful preparations. What is Planning? This is the question with which I open up chapter (2) of the book. I confront in this chapter two approaches to planning. The first is the one I saw as a mission to myself to cultivate in my many years of military service. The second is the one I saw as representing a deep-rooted fallacy that holds a firm grip on today's conventional wisdom about planning. To further examine the logic of the competing models, I was required in chapter (3) to analyze the concept of "The Standard". I argue that the false model of planning has its roots in an attitude of an uncompromising adherence to the power of literal obedience to standards and rules. The standard, or what is outlined by a rule as prescribing a future course of action, is seen as an answer to the fundamental tension between theory (planning) and practice (execution). I argue in contrast that the standard does not produce an answer but rather what I call: "A Well-Defined Question". In essence, it is a meticulously-well-planned invitation to exercise a fresh judgment. A judgement that has as an anchor the default answer that the standard produces but is open to extension as it confronts the new frame of reference of the test of reality. In chapter (4), I present a new tool for planning and execution: "The Polygon of Risks" or "The Polygon of Execution". The Polygon is a geometric illustration of the underlying tension that exists between all dimensions of the operational project. The construction and conceptualization of the trade-offs that exist between the various dimensions - segments of the polygon - is the first topic on the planner's agenda. I position the concepts of "Daring" and "Taking Proactive and Well-Informed Risks" as necessary logical constituents of the polygon and show how in contrast the false model of planning is responsible for an operational culture that is risk-averse. It encourages, in fact, the piling up of false securities at the segments' level that eventually lead to the collapse of the polygon. The necessary trade-offs relationships that exist between the segments of the polygon express the fundamental tension between partnership and competition: partnership in a joint goal and competition over resources, both material and abstract. When this tension is not managed well, that is, when the players' local optimizations overshadow the global optimization required for the success of the project, the execution polygon collapses. In this scenario, we may find the setting of the bar of "High Standards" in a players' spheres of responsibility to conceal a hidden agenda of personal insurances taken against a possible failure. Once the overall risk is not mitigated by way of collaborative joint executional dialogue, the process that leads to a collapse of the polygon is literally unstoppable. *** In chapter (5), I discuss "(Fateful) Decisions". I examine the way in which we should translate the polygon into sequential critical decisions on the timeline. The execution polygon is not a rigid scaffolding but a dynamic conceptual illustration of the -/- project. It will need now to be converted into successive decision junctions. We will find the content of a decision and its timing on the timeline to be inseparable. The right decision is the one that is taken at the right time. The moment of decision is in fact the last moment of deliberation, the first moment available for action, i.e. the first possible "Can" is also the latest possible "Must". Deciding too soon is analog to the "Jumping of the Gun". The decision maker is forcing a pre-conceived answer to a state of affairs not ripe for an answer, e.g. the target in the shooting range is not yet erected. Late to decide and the decision maker may envision what he or she should have done but reality is no longer available for them to harness it right, e.g. consider a tennis player's frustration when reviewing a too-late-to-react move in the video replay. I review in this chapter many fateful decisions, both historical, from Napoleon's Waterloo, to a Bridge Too Far of WWII, to the failed rescue attempt of American hostages at the time of the Iranian Revolution, as well as fateful decisions I had to take in the course of my military life, both in combat and in special operations, and show the sense in which they all answer to our analysis. The theme of chapter (6) is "The Moment of Truth". This is the moment when everything is on the line and from which there is no turning back. I discuss the formative repetitive structure of the schooling and simulation phase and contrast it with the "One Shot, One Opportunity" nature of the moment of truth. This is extremely helpful when we analyze the logical structure of failures as unwarranted repetitions of past lessons. The schooling curriculum indeed consists of important abstractions drawn from lessons of the past. However, it is when we project them in a fashion that is literal or mechanical that we cross path with the possibility of a failure. The paradox of education is that what we must repeat in school and simulation must be extended and not repeated in real life. What is required of us so we do not fall into the fallacy of repetition in face of the moment of truth is the core subject of the discussion of this chapter. In chapter (7), I took a lengthy philosophical detour surveying the intellectual drama of modern logic, and in general, the story of 20th century analytic philosophy. Readers who choose to bypass the somehow demanding narrative of this drama can do so and still keep the argumentative thread of the book. However, even by way of skipping the more technical parts, I would still urge the readers to delve into the discussion in this chapter as I believe this would grant them a deeper understanding of the overall conceptual framework. I explore here the work of two key figures: the logician Kurt Gödel and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, both were crowned in 2000 by TIME Magazine, as the leading Logician and Philosopher, respectively, of the 20th Century. I review the fascinating logical result of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and examine its relevance as setting a theoretical limit to the power of formalization. This amazing logical result - a result that shakes the logical foundations of 20th century thought in as much as the discovery of irrational numbers shook the foundations of the Pythagorean program of the ancient Greeks - bears significantly on the question of action and the blind trust we place in the power of formalization in the form of protocols and rules. It is here that Wittgenstein's philosophy enters in full force. We follow Wittgenstein as he dismantles our conception of rules as if there were "Railroads to Infinite", i.e. as prescribing for us in-advance their proper employments in all possible -/- future eventualities. Instead we propose that the dilemma of action demands of us an extension of rules rather than a mechanical or blind repetition of their literal imperative. In turn, this extension can serve as a new lesson added to the curriculum of school and simulation. The theme of chapter (8), the concluding chapter, is Strategy, Logic, and Ethics. The chapter comes to place the ethical dilemma in the conceptual map we presented in the book. I discuss here the tension between strategy as a process of setting goals and deriving backward as it were the steps that are necessary for achieving these goals, to the inescapable dictation of the ethical imperative. This unavoidable tension is particularly important against the backdrop of contemporary culture that is guided by a vision of personal success and achievement that may threaten our ability to do what is right. Most of all, I am troubled in this chapter, with the role logic may play, first as a liberating force enabling a change that is tuned to the ethical imperative, and second, as a force designed to justify on logical grounds, as it were, the existing power structure. It is in this junction that brave individuals will be called to challenge the governing logic of the zeitgeist - logic that operates now as an oppressive force that serves the vested interest of beneficials of the existing order. When success is favored over doing what is right, as we must admit is the prevailing cultural mood of our times, that the words of Emanuel Kant carry their full weight: "Do the Right thing and leave the Consequences to God". For this we need heroes and heroines that challenge the time by bearing the full weight of responsibility that comes with the doing of what is Right. *** This book was written more than anything from the perspective of the heroes and heroines of action. Sometimes they may be missing the exact words or the full insight into the solid logical complexity that stands between them and the doing of what is right. They feel what is right to do on the battlefield of life, whether in real battle, in political or economic life or whether in the life of creativity and the quest of the intellect. They do need, in analogy, proper logical and intellectual artillery. I hope they will find the logical cannons they require as they travel through the pages of this book. The rest is in their hands at the Moment of Truth. -/- Doron Avital, Tel Aviv 2011 -/- . (shrink)

According to Joseph Campbell's "No Past Objection" (NPO), popular formal statements of the Consequence Argument are oddly silent about the freedom status of actors who lack a “remote past,” a time prior to their birth at which their universe existed but they did not. As such, NPO problematizes the common view that the Consequence Argument concludes that determinism (perhaps in combination with other things) conflicts with or poses some kind of threat to free will. In this essay, I present a (...) new "explanatory gap objection" to the Consequence Argument which sheds new light on a problem only hinted at in extant work on NPO. As part of this project, I show that NPO misses its mark when targeted at van Inwagen's original logic-text statements of the Consequence Argument, for these arguments must be interpreted given the background assumptions of the classical analytic paradigm in which van Inwagen and his peers were working. However, when the Consequence Argument is unmoored from its original (and now degenerate) paradigm, this argument may be developed as an argument for its original conclusion, but it may also be developed as argument against that view. That is, contemporary statements of the Consequence Argument may used to attack the type of "incompatibilist" conclusion that most philosophers attribute to it. -/- For the most recent version of this manuscript, plz gmail me: kristin.mickelson.42. (shrink)

“Since the actions I perform as an individual only have an inconsequential effect on the threat of climate change,” a common argument goes, “it cannot be morally wrong for me to take my car to work everyday or refuse to recycle.” This argument has received a lot of scorn from philosophers over the years, but has actually been defended in some recent articles. A more systematic treatment of a central set of related issues shows how maneuvering around these issues (...) is no easy philosophical task. In the end, it appears, the argument from inconsequentialism indeed is correct in typical cases, but there are also important qualificatory considerations. (shrink)

Few conditions have sparked as much controversy as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Professional consensus has long suggested that the condition should be classified as psychiatric, while patients and advocacy groups have insisted it is a serious biological disease that requires medical care and research to develop it. This longstanding debate shifted in 2015, when U.S. governmental health authorities fully embraced medical classification and management. Given that some globally respected health authorities now insist that ME/CFS is a serious biological disease, (...) this paper asks whether it can be ethical for the U.K. practice guideline now in development to characterize the condition as a mental health disorder. Following a brief history of ME/CFS controversy, I offer three arguments to show that it would be unethical for the U.K. to now characterize ME/CFS as a mental health condition, considering the relevance of that conclusion for ME/CFS guidelines elsewhere and for other contested conditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 71-80 [Access article in PDF] Some Reflections on the (Analytic) Philosophical Approach to Delusion Louis A. Sass There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." —Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5 The peculiar, often problematic phenome na of psychopathology have been attract ing the attention of analytic philosophers in recent years. The topic of delusion (...) has been a particular draw, with a number of analytic philosophers attempting to use their conceptual tools, usually combined with ideas from cognitive neuroscience, to criticize the traditional understanding and to clarify the nature of this central psychiatric topic. It is useful to have this kind of interdisciplinary dialogue. Indeed, there is good reason to hope that concepts honed in the philosophy of mind and other philosophical subfields will help to sort out our understanding of a phenomenon (or set of phenomena) for which contemporary psychiatric definitions and conceptualizations are clearly inadequate and, in some respects, downright misleading (see Parnas and Sass 2001; Spitzer 1990).1Here, however, I would like to call attention to some weaknesses that, it seems to me, are rather common (I do not say universal) in many analytic philosophical approaches to psychopathology. In my opinion, there is a tendency to formulate issues and arguments in overly polarized, even dichotomous terms, and then to rely too uncritically on these essentialistic formulations in exploring the domain of inquiry. Although this polarizing tendency sometimes has the salutary effect of clarifying conceptual domains, it can, when taken too far, actually hamper our understanding of phenomena that are often fraught with ambiguities and complexities that defy many standard conceptualizations.The relationship between philosophy and psychopathology is obviously a two-way street—we are familiar, for example, with disorders that challenge deep philosophical assumptions about self and mind (e.g., blindsight, split-brain phenomena, perhaps also Dissociative Identity Disorder, and the first rank symptoms of schizophrenia). I am suggesting that, in their work on delusions, philosophers may need to put more emphasis on moving from the natural phenomena [End Page 71] of psychopathology and to the domain of philosophical analysis.I believe that a greater sensitivity to the modes of knowing associated with the phenomenological tradition, and to the forms of conceptual self-critique fostered by Ludwig Wittgenstein, are crucial ingredients for any adequate approach to delusion as well as many other topics in psychopathology. In my opinion, the work of many analytic philosophers interested in psychopathology would be enriched if they spent more time trying to discover and imagine what it might be like to experience certain kinds of abnormal psychiatric conditions, and also speculating about what implications such experiential modalities might have for action and verbal expression. I believe they would also be wise to spend more time questioning, and attempting to transcend, the philosophically derived conceptual distinctions and dichotomies that appear to organize their conceptual universes. Phenomenological imagination and Wittgensteinian critique can show how to move outside the conceptual capsule and into the rich and strange realms of actual experience, both normal and abnormal.So far I have offered only slogans. Let me use the articles by Tim Bayne and Elisabeth Pacherie (2004) and Robert Klee (2004) to flesh out the criticisms I have offered. There is much that is intelligent and much that is worthwhile in both their articles. (For example, I was largely convinced by the criticisms of John Campbell and of Donald Davidson that are central to the articles by Bayne and Pacherie and by Klee, respectively.) Here, however, I will focus only on issues that illustrate the above-mentioned tendencies—tendencies that, in my view, tend to infect even the best writings on the (analytic) philosophy of psychiatry. I will also make some remarks about the works of Campbell and Davidson, the two philosophers criticized in the articles by Bayne and Pacherie and by Klee. Because the article by Eugenie Georgaca (2004) is in a different tradition, I will say only a few words about it at the end. Bayne and Pacherie on the Preservation-Of-meaning... (shrink)

This Special Issue comes at a time when African countries and the Global South in general are facing unprecedented crises in securing energy to power their economies. The crises are necessitated largely by the developed Western countries exerting enormous power and pressure upon the developing world to move away from fossil fuels, while at the same time the West is increasing its uptake on fossils. However, with critical self-reflection we are able to understand that a crisis of this nature is (...) not without historical precedence, as it is preceded by a series of other forms of injustices meted out upon the formerly and still colonized peoples. And not long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic on the health front, and the handling thereof, showed just how skewed and divided the world still is and laid bare race-laden inequalities both at local and global levels. So to be sure, the current crises are part of the history of struggle against race-based social injustices and demonstrate Western desire to continue its stranglehold over its former colonies. And although the energy transition is dubbed the “Just Energy Transition,” for those in the developing world who are negatively affected, there is clearly nothing “Just” about it. So whereas we generally tend to speak of social or historical injustices such as the energy crises and COVID-19, at an epistemological front we find cognitive injustice. Accordingly, the articles in this issue contribute to a series of responses by the anticolonial movement (broadly defined) in relation to injustice, particularly its epistemological ramifications on knowledge and knowledge production in the relation between the colonizer and the colonized, the center and the periphery. Furthermore, the historical exclusion of African and other non-European peoples from participation in reason had the effect that Africans in particular were precluded from philosophy itself, a phenomenon that African philosophy and associated disciplines are today still grappling with in the academy. So in a word, the articles make an important contribution insofar as reckoning with the impact that race and the history of racism has had in philosophy in particular, both as a discipline and as a human mental activity.It should be remembered that the exclusion of Africans from reason and eventually from philosophy is preceded by an earlier one, the exclusion of Africans from recognition at a human level, qua rational beings. One can talk of a history of depersonalizations and dehumanizations; of massacres and deracination inflicted upon the oppressed owing to the colonial encounter. This is why for a scholar and a philosopher of the periphery, to use Enrique Dussel’s term, philosophical inquiry cannot and ought not be divorced from human reality. In fact, scholars of the periphery often stress the need for philosophy not to abstract too much from reality; and for philosophy to confine itself with liberatory human ends, among other things. There are a number of thinkers of the periphery who famously harp upon this point. For instance, Lewis Gordon has introduced the concept of “disciplinary decadence” by which he laments the fetishization of methods and whereby disciplines become an end in themselves, thus not necessarily serving human needs. Other thinkers in this school of thought include the likes of Enrique Dussel, Charles Mills, Cornel West, Angela Davis, and George Yancy to mention but a few. Yancy speaks of the “Density project” with which he has a normative injunction upon Black philosophers. In a similar vein, Dussel remarks in the Philosophy of Liberation that “Philosophy, when it is really philosophy and not sophistry or ideology, does not ponder philosophy. It does not ponder philosophical texts, except as a pedagogical propaedeutic to provide itself with interpretive categories. Philosophy ponders the nonphilosophical; the reality.”1 This reality, as is averred, is in existential phenomenology, not merely objective reality or perhaps something out there existing on its own accord, but rather it is what Jean-Paul Sartre associates with “human reality,” which is reality as lived by people of flesh and blood. So in a world demarcated between center and periphery, human beings and subhumans, whites and Blacks, the anticolonial thinker cannot afford not to raise questions relating to social existence, “the reality.” Thus for those in the academy, one must be able to come to terms with the reality of non-Western and “non-scientific knowledges” (after Boaventura De Sousa Santos) not being recognized as credible knowledge, coupled with the possibility of being forgotten, of being completely wiped out from history. And, as we see with Bernard Matolino’s article in particular, this is the battle that African philosophy has vigorously had to deal with in the previous two or three decades.In the Western canon, philosophy is generally taken to begin with the Greeks and this, as is observed, is no historical accident but forms part of a project to relegate previous philosophical traditions to relative obscurity, and to preclude the rest of humanity from participation in reason. The idea is that for Western modernity to be a viable project, oppressed cultures must out of necessity be denied reason. On this very point, Frantz Fanon would remark in Black Skin White Masks in the following manner: “That victory [on the rational front] played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer.”2 In this regard Mogobe Ramose’s article notes how the Aristotlean concept of man as a rational animal becomes a misnomer insofar as this relates to the Black person. With this sleight of hand, previous civilizations such as the African (Egyptian) and Arab traditions in philosophy are supposed to vanish from history and from the epistemological landscape. In this regard, Mills’s insights will continue to haunt philosophy well into the future, long after his passing. Mills had noted that a typical philosophy program in the Westernized university will normally start off with the two Greek philosophers, namely Plato and Aristotle. From here it moves to cover the Middle Ages and probably end with theories on liberalism. And although this period covers a history of more than two thousand years of Western philosophy, there will be little or no mention of traditions that shaped philosophical thought prior to the Greeks.The above notwithstanding, the articles in this issue show, however, that not only are Africans and oppressed peoples endowed with reflective reason, but that they also possess a unique brand of philosophy. By and large, the articles not only affirm the epistemological standpoint of African philosophy but show its own genealogy, discourse, and objectives among other things.With these short remarks, the following articles cut across these thematic areas: metaphysics of race, epistemic racism, racial ontology, feminism, and decolonial literature. Accordingly, the article by Bernard Matolino begins by delving into the metaphysics of race and notes that while there is no proof that there are distinct races (after Kwame Appiah), race as a matter of social life is alive and relevant. Further, his article goes on to demonstrate how African philosophy emerged as a form of protest and native philosophers’ need to show that indigenous peoples always had a philosophy. In a similar vein, Edwin Etieyibo’s article discusses epistemic racism, and how color prejudice historically translated to other forms of racial injustices such as epistemic racism. His article makes use of the works of such thinkers as Anibal Quijano and Ramon Grosfoguel to trace the genealogy of such injustices in the modern period.Siphiwe Ndlovu’s article looks into the problem of Black marginality, particularly in the modern period. He locates his musings within the social contract tradition but suggests a reading of contemporary marginality through the lens of Mills’s racial contract. Accordingly, instead of seeing Black marginality as a function of exclusion or being cast outside the contract, the article argues that such marginality is due not from exclusions per se but rather from inclusion albeit only as junior—and therefore inferior—partners in the racial contract.Mogobe Ramose’s article begins by endorsing Kwasi Wiredu’s view that there is nothing wrong with African philosophy being preoccupied with questions that are not exactly identical to those of non-African philosophies. Furthermore, his article traces, through D. M. Goldenberg, the roots of anti-Black racism from “colour symbolism” among the Arabs in the classical world, through the Rabbinic era, and later taking the form of race prejudice in Christianity. At the crux of his article is the argument that the prevailing practice of fragmenting the human race into multiple bits and pieces is against the pursuit of justice and peace in human relations.The article by Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse considers Anika Mann’s arguments on race and feminist standpoint as an existential standpoint and foundation. She takes up Mamphela Ramphele’s initial autobiography, Mamphela Ramphele: A Life, to critically reflect on what the actions of “non-subservient Blackwomen” reveal about the lived experience of being Black and a woman under Apartheid South Africa.The article by Siseko Kumalo infuses decolonial and literary criticism as projects that may allow for a recognition of the “ontological legitimacy” of amaqaba (those who rejected colonial influences and education). Through a close reading of S. E. K. Mqhayi’s Intshayelelo: Imbali, the article engages with the question How does a model of inclusive national identity in South Africa, once established, get us to the point of recognition for the Indigene? (shrink)

If the argument from analogy is an argument for other minds it must rely on a single case, The correlation of your mind with your body. If instead it only attempts to show that certain sorts of experiences are associated with other bodies, It can rely on innumerable correlations of your experiences with your behavior. Having determined in this way that ostensive memories are associated with another body and that they are the kind one would expect if one mind (...) had been associated with this body throughout its existence, You can then offer another argument to this effect--And you could do so even if your own memories associated your own experiences with a succession of different bodies. (shrink)

One of the debates of recent moral philosophy concerns the question whether moral judgments express “internal” or “external” reasons. According to internalists, if someone knows or accepts a moral judgment then she must have a motive for acting on it. The motive is part of the content of the judgment: the reason why the action is right is a reason for doing it. According to externalists, this is not necessarily so: there could be a case in which I understand both (...) that and why it is right for me to do something, and yet have no motive for doing it. Since most of us believe that an action’s being right is a reason for doing it, internalism seems more plausible. It captures one element of our sense that moral judgments have normative force: they are motivating. But some philosophers believe that internalism, if correct, would also impose a restriction on moral reasons. If moral reasons are to motivate, they must spring from an agent’s personal desires and commitments. This is unappealing, for unless the desires and commitments that motivate moral conduct are universal and inescapable, it cannot be required of everyone. And this leaves out the other element of our sense that moral judgments have normative force: they are binding. Some internalists, however, have argued that the force of internalism cuts the other way. If moral reasons must motivate, and I show you that an action is morally right, I have ipso facto provided you with a motive for doing it. Moral reasons motivate because they are perceived as binding. A good person, according to these internalists, does the right thing because it is the right thing, or acts from the motive of duty. (shrink)

It is often said that the ontological argument fails because it wrongly treats existence as a first-level property or predicate. This has proved a controversial claim, and efforts to evaluate it are complicated by the fact that the words ‘existence is not a property/predicate’ have been used by philosophers to make at least three different negative claims: (a) one about a first-level phenomenon possessed by objects like horses, stones, you and me; (b) another about the logical form of assertions (...) of existence; and (c) still another about a second-level phenomenon possessed by concepts when they are instantiated. I argue that only the last of these claims, originally voiced by Kant, is both plausible and relevant to the ontological argument. And I try to show that the relevance of the Kantian version comes from its providing the underlying justification for a different, and far less controversial, criticism of the ontological argument. (shrink)

In an address entitled "Democracy and Liberal Education" delivered in 1887, Edward Everett Hale attacked the then President of Princeton University, the distinguished Scottish philosopher James McCosh for his remarks in a lecture to the Exeter Academy. Hale argued, in effect, that McCosh was ultimately "un-American" in his pedagogical purposes. The issues which Hale goes on to address, and the arguments to which he gives vent, show clearly the battle lines as far as liberal education in America was (...) concerned. Hale says that McCosh "encourages the students...to supply our lack of a political body of noblemen by an aristocracy founded on letters and learning." In doing so, Hale explains, McCosh is drawing on analogies "as old as Plato." "They are analogies which come most naturally to a man trained among well-defined classes in social order. But they ought not to be long sustained among people who have been trained in the social order of a democratic republic." For Hale the idea liberal education has no "elitist" or exclusivist overtones. Liberal education does not seek "to make any class of scholars." Indeed, "a true republic expects, in the end, to give a liberal education to all its people...the republic regards a liberal education not as the good fortune of a governing class, but as the privilege, if you please, the necessity of all." When we turn to the man who was the springboard of some of Hale's remarks on education we see that McCosh's concern is whether "America has arrived at a stage at which there is a body of men and women who have leisure and taste to cultivate the liberal arts and advance the higher forms of civilization." But it should be observed that, despite their basic differences of concern and approach, both Hale and McCosh believed that there was such a thing as the truth, that God or the Divine was the ultimate phenomenon for human beings, and that belief in these things helped sustain the good that was liberal society. By recalling the arguments of such men we are provided with a picture which contrasts with the debate between "town and gown" in our own day. If there is still some of Hale's moral seriousness about citizenship in "town" it seems hard to allow there is much of McCosh's moral seriousness about the task of philosophy in the realm of the "gown." To say the least, both civic and intellectual seriousness has declined since Hale and McCosh's time. That is why the kind of discussion in which they engaged should be interesting to us today. It allows us to track both the origins of our condition and the path we have come. The study of American educators such as these can be great value as we face the crisis of education and liberal society of our time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 165 of the church regularly gives renewed expression to inspiration in constantly new existential contexts. There the Christian churches have sometimes done well, and sometimes less well, leading to disillusionment. We can regard all this as a generally accepted consensus among contemporary theologians, though the instruments of the church's teaching authority often have a tendency to dwell on ' the letter ' of earlier statements and to (...) underestimate their historieal and hermeneutical dimensions" (208). Those in the Magisterium who dwell on 'the letter ' believe, erroneously in Schillebeeckx's judgment, that history can and does give rise to nonnative, enduring facts and forms. Theologians who attend to historical relativizing and hermeneutical theorizing, correctly in Schillebeeckx's judgment, know better. His book is clearly designed to demonstrate this point. There is one sense in which his hook docs not, and indeed cannot, fail, given how the facts which he presents for the reader's judgment arise out of the theory with which he begins and necessarily point to the conclusion which his theory already presupposes. This is a fail-safe method for getting to where one wants to go. Unfortunately, it gets there by way of an enormous detour around the facticity of the Catholic faith and practice, a facticity which, despite the efforts of some of our best known (if not finest) theologians over a two thousand year history, has consistently refused to submit to the hypothetical and the theoretical reason of rationalist theologians. Our faith is centered on the Christ, the incarnate, historical Logos of tradition and Scripture, not on the disincarnate, unhistorical logos of theoretical theology. Schillebeeckx is not the first, nor will he be the last, theologian intent upon reducing the Catholic faith to some hypothetical methodology. Happily, however, and perhaps even miraculously, the Church always manages to survive her theologians, a fact which cannot but offer solace to many of the readers of this book. University of St. Thomas Houston, Texas JOYCE A. Ll'J'TLE The.Argument of the "Tractatus :" Its Relevance to Contempora~·y Theories of Logic, Language. Mind, and Philosophical Trust. By RroHARD M. McDoNOUGH. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 311. This book attempts an analysis of the Tractatits Logico-Philosophicus based on taking Wittgenstein's professed "fundamental idea' as the hermeneutic key. Tractatus 4.0312 states, in part: "My fundamental idea is 166 BOOK REVIEWS that the 'log·ical constants' are not representatives." McDonough believes that previous interpreters of the Tractatus have either ignored or downplayed the importance of this statement, and he writes in the conviction that taking it seriously produc&s a reading of the Tractatits that is friendlier toward philosophical language and argumentation than " the strong nagativ& views... which have been hastily claimed " as the import of the book (p. 11). In order to establish this "fundamental idea" as an interpretative device McDonough reminds the reader of links among three ideas. The first is the idea that the logical constants are not representatives. The second is the idea that the sole (real) logical constant is the general propositional form (T 5.47). The third is the fact that the status of the propositions of logic as tautologies exhibits the logic of their constituents, and hence, the logical properties of language and the world (T 6.12). By developing the relations among these ideas, and extending them to the interpretation of the Tractatiis as a whole, McDonough aims to show that Wittgenstein is committed to an explicit, only "technically nonsensical," philosophical doctrin& concerning the derivation of general metaphysical facts about ontology from general facts about the philosophy of logic. This doctrine he characterizes as "the argument of th& Tractatus." By attributing to the book an argmnent or doctrine (in the sense just mention &d) he contradicts those commentators who have understood Wittg·enstein to be earnestly requiring real silence about philosophy and to b& asserting seriously that the Tractatu,s is a self-refuting treatise, to be kicked aside. once its lessons are learned. J\1foDonoug·h begins with vVittgenstein's understanding of negation and th& problem wheth&r there are negative facts. McDonough discusses Russell 's attempt to sort this out, and claims that Wittgenstein diagnoses Russell's mistake in this remark; "For it is difficult... (shrink)

There is a classic disagreement in moral psychology about the mental states that constitute the sincere acceptance of moral claims. Cognitivists hold that these states are beliefs aiming at a correct description of the world; whereas non-cognitivists argue that they must be some other kind of attitude. Mark Eli Kalderon has recently presented a new argument for non-cognitivism. He argues that all cognitivist inquiries include certain epistemic obligations for the participants in cases of disagreement in the inquiry. I will provide (...) additional support for this claim. Kalderon then claims that our moral inquiry lacks the required epistemic obligation and that therefore it must be non-cognitive. I will show that Kalderon’s case against the required obligation fails and furthermore provide some evidence for the existence of this obligation. Therefore, his argument for non-cognitivism is not sound and provides no pressure against cognitivism. (shrink)

Sometimes, after years of painstaking work, someone presents a startling argument that seems to suddenly snatch the ground right out from under your feet. And it's back to square one. Such a conceptual trapdoor caught me by surprise a few years ago. For decades, I had been convinced it is simply inconceivable that subjectivity -- the interior experience of how consciousness feels -- could possibly emerge from a previously wholly objective world, that mind could evolve from ‘dead’ matter. It seemed (...) to me that the arguments of materialist philosophers, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists invariably missed the point. They always began with an assumption of ontological objectivity or physicality, and proceeded to show that that must be the source of consciousness. Well, of course, it had to be -- given their starting assumption. But what they were talking about wasn't consciousness at all. It was usually either some neural correlation, some computer analogue, or some complex and abstract linguistic deconstruction. Whatever their approach, the first-person experience of consciousness -- it's subjective feel -- always slipped through their grasp. They were looking at the problem from the third-person perspective -- from objectivity. And you can't get to here from there. (shrink)

"Anselm of Canterbury gave the first modal "ontological" argument for God's existence. Yet, despite its distinct originality, philosophers have mostly avoided the question of what modal concepts the argument uses, and whether Anselm's metaphysics entitles him to use them. Here, Brian Leftow sets out Anselm's modal metaphysics. He argues that Anselm has an "absolute", "broadly logical", or "metaphysical" modal concept, and that his metaphysics provides acceptable truth makers for claims in this modality. He shows that his modal argument is (...) committed to the Brouwer system of modal logic, and defends the claim that Brouwer is part of the logic of "absolute" or "metaphysical" modality. He also defends Anselm's premise that God would exist with absolute necessity against all extant objections, providing new arguments in support of it and ultimately defending all but one premise of Anselm's best argument for God's existence"--. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 603-604 [Access article in PDF] Irving Singer. George Santayana, Literary Philosopher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 217. Cloth, $25.00. In a prefatory comment, Irving Singer affirms that George Santayana, Literary Philosopher is "an introduction to the part of Santayana's philosophy that has meant the most to me" (xii). The locus of this personal interest, he goes on (...) to say, is in the "humanistic relevance" of Santayana's work. Singer's fruitful reflections on Santayana's literary genius, as well as the great philosopher's depth of critical insight with regard to aesthetics, literature, and love, all testify to this humanistic interest.Singer's examinations of Santayana's critical and fictional works are as accessible as they are interesting, a characteristic which alone recommends the book for readers interested in gaining an introductory understanding. Equally important however is the fact that Singer's reflections lend themselves to a much larger academic audience as well. Santayana's work is revealed, correctly, to be not only relevant to the philosophical community, but to contain contributional elements that are of interest to criticism in both literature and art.This does not mean that Singer avoids criticizing Santayana's philosophy. To the contrary, he levels a key criticism that begs response. Singer believes Santayana is incapable of accounting for interpersonal love. According to Singer, Santayana's deficiency in this regard is due to his belief that "[other] individuals are merely the vehicle [End Page 603] to some cherished ideal" (124). More specifically, Singer holds that Santayana's account of the realization of interpersonal love is restricted by an unnecessary dualism: the gratification of material desires (like Freud), and the distanced contemplation of an ideal (like Plato).This familiar dualism might be referred to as the "desire-renunciation" formula Santayana employs throughout his work in an attempt to pay equal respect to the material ground, and the contrasting ideal groundlessness of all things. For Santayana, the oscillation between desire and renunciation is so obviously reflected in individual aspirations, and in the general course of every human life that, for the philosopher, the task is not to attempt to justify one or the other, but to reconcile them. For Singer however, Santayana ultimately fails in this attempt: "...[Santayana's] attempt to unify Platonism and naturalism fails as philosophy..." (x). He charges that the structure of Santayana's philosophy "fails to show us how people can overcome the split between matter and spirit." Thus, Singer's divergence from Santayana derives from an overall rejection of the philosophical soundness of his work (favoring its humanistic appeal), and from his feeling that Santayana's philosophy never achieves the reconciliation it sets out as its goal. But these charges are unjust, and they seem to arise from an insufficient account of Santayana's doctrine of essence as it relates to his understanding of love.For Singer, "persons" rather than essences (or ideals) are the irreducible themes of human interest: "...loving is not the same as desiring. We desire things or persons for what they can give us, for satisfactions we hope they will provide. In loving anyone, however, we take an interest in that person, as a person and not just as a vehicle to something else" (91). But the implicit charge of this claim, namely, that Santayana's preference for essences as the irreducible themes of human interest results in the view that humans are incapable of loving persons-qua-persons (but only qua-essences), is simply wrong; and, importantly, reflective of a misunderstanding of Santayana's doctrine of essence.Santayana is consistent in his affirmation that in youth, when the demand to act is acute, it is sane to cry and to beat one's fists against the world, while with time and experience, such heated displays become tragic and even unbecoming. The same is true for Santayana with respect to love. It is wisdom reflective of the love of all things to laugh (ironically) at what was in youth an irremediable demand for the love of particular... (shrink)

The authors review Judith Suissa's provocative book, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective, a text that demonstrates the central role of education in anarchist theory. Suissa compellingly argues against the charges that anarchism is overly idealistic and impractical, instead seeing its potential for innovative and liberatory educational change. The authors suggest, however, that an enhanced conversation among critical pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy and anarchist thinking on education can help to show both the continued relevance of radical and creative thinking, and (...) that anarchist thought has been part of the development of oppositional, critical, collaborative, teaching and learning projects. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of Klee's (...) Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

Consider statements like ``Machines will never be able to think'' or ``You cannot turn a cat into a dog''. Many people will find such propositions evident, but we have learned to be cautious. 100 years from now things might look very different; it seems unduly dogmatic to insist on todays opinions as unrevisable points of reference, disallowing future breakthroughs in computer science or biology. The scientific outlook presupposes and enhances a high degree of curiosity and it seems a good idea (...) to generally keep one's meanings flexible so as to master break-downs of everyday understanding induced by unforseen circumstances, science or technology. Such intuitions are at the heart of Quine's philosophy. According to him we find ourselves enmeshed within a web of belief that joins together past and present attitudes, cognitive procedures and evidential tests. The strands show various degrees of coherence and interconnectedness and there are no general rules on how to proceed in case something unexpected happens. Sometimes it is ignored, sometimes it is explained away and sometimes it induces more or less extensive changes in our predictive and behavioural patterns. This seems to be the lesson drawn from the Vienna Circle's battle against metaphysics. Philosophers like Putnam, Kripke and Davidson have, it is true, come up with accounts of meaning, necessity and reality that seriously challenge Quine's indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity, re-introducing elements of a priori presuppositions and (quasi-)transcendental arguments into philosophical discourse. But - compared to Quine's unrelenting insistence on naturalistic first-level talk - those attempts have a free-floating, speculative touch. Quine refuses to engage in elaborate philosophical constructions designed to block the permanent drift of meaning. His is a truly radical position, admirably suggestive and provocative, to be challenged on its own ground. The untenability of a priori truth is suggested by profound experiences that cannot easily be refuted by arguments purporting to show how some more or less exotic sentences could, after all, be held immune from change.1 If the untenability thesis is to be shaken a more down to earth strategy seems to be called for. It would have to be shown that Quine's radical move entails consequences that are highly unattractive even according to its own standards. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.3 (2004) 455-474 [Access article in PDF] "Conscience the Ground of Consciousness": The Moral Epistemology of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection Jeffrey Hipolito Everett Community College. It will hardly come as a shock to the readers of this journal that Kant has been the philosophical gatekeeper of all those who have come after him and that the scale of his achievement was recognized even (...) by his immediate peers and the generation which followed them.1 It may be rather more surprising that Samuel Taylor Coleridge belongs among the most interesting members of that second generation, comparable to Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel in the originality of his response—not because of the Biographia Literaria (1817), the book for which he is now most famous, but because of the stream of work that followed the publication of the revised Friend (1818). Though the Collected Coleridge project has made available a mass of previously unpublished material, which in turn has stimulated a great deal of interesting research, one must still agree with Elinor Shaffer's recent assessment that "we have no accurate or adequate conception of the late Coleridge from 1819 to his death in 1834."2 Shaffer's range of dates is not accidental, indicating that the revised [End Page 455] Friend (and, more specifically, the break with Schelling) marks the beginning of the "late" Coleridge. In the "Essays on Method" that were a part of the revised Friend (1818) Coleridge effectively freed himself of Schelling's Idealism, which is so notoriously crucial to philosophical chapters of the Biographia, by moving away from the latter's metaphysics of the Absolute towards a metaphysics grounded in an ongoing and in principle unending exploration of "inquiry" itself.3 Though it did not appear until 1825, Aids to Reflection was the first book published by Coleridge following the revised Friend. It was his most popular and influential work during the nineteenth century, but it has been read almost exclusively in strictly theological terms. The implicit contention that the "middle" Coleridge of the Biographia was philosophical and that the "late," post-Biographia Coleridge turned to theology as a refuge from the Biographia's failure was ratified by Thomas McFarland's classic argument concerning the late Coleridge's "trinitarian resolution" to the problems that the middle Coleridge could not solve.4 One pernicious effect of this view (which is more nuanced than I have presented it here) is that until fairly recently it was still possible to describe Aids to Reflection as simply "an effort to argue away the terrifying import of The Ancient Mariner, which would lead us, since it jars our moral feelings, to hatred of God."5I argue in this essay that although Aids to Reflection employs theological vocabulary it is more than—indeed, cannot rightly be considered—an exercise in dogmatic Christian apologetics. More specifically, I will show that the book includes a vigorous engagement with Kant's moral philosophy not primarily by undercutting the metaphysical basis of the critical project's architectonic, though this is an ancillary effect, but by putting pressure on the model of judgment that underlies Kantian ethics.The importance of Kant to Coleridge's intellectual development is not a secret. Coleridge himself describes the way Kant "took possession of me as [End Page 456] with a giant's hand," though he confesses he "could never believe it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or THING IN ITSELF, than his mere words express" and that he even "entertained doubts likewise, whether in his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do on the moral postulates."6 Kant's impact on Coleridge was primarily due to his status as a logician and a moral philosopher. Thus Coleridge contends in a letter of 1820 that "Kant will demonstrate to you, that this [Christian] Faith is... grounded on Postulates authorized & substantiated solely by the Moral Being,"7 and adds in another letter five years later that he... (shrink)

Various arguments have been provided for drawing non-humans such as animals and artificial agents into the sphere of moral consideration. In this paper, I argue for a shift from an ontological to a social-philosophical approach: instead of asking what an entity is, we should try to conceptually grasp the quasi-social dimension of relations between non-humans and humans. This allows me to reconsider the problem of justice, in particular distributive justice . Engaging with the work of Rawls, I show that (...) an expansion of the contractarian framework to non-humans causes an important problem for liberalism, but can be justified by a contractarian argument. Responding to Bell’s and Nussbaum’s comments on Rawls, I argue that we can justify drawing non-humans into the sphere of distributive justice by relying on the notion of a co-operative scheme. I discuss what co-operation between humans and non-humans can mean and the extent to which it depends on properties. I conclude that we need to imagine principles of ecological and technological distributive justice. (shrink)

Preface Phillip R. Sloan, Gerald McKenny, Kathleen Eggleson pp. xiii-xviii In November of 2009, the University of Notre Dame hosted the conference “Darwin in the Twenty-First Century: Nature, Humanity, and God.‘ Sponsored primarily by the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at Notre Dame, and the Science, Theology, and the Ontological Quest project within the Vatican Pontifical... 1. Introduction: Restructuring an Interdisciplinary Dialogue Phillip R. Sloan pp. 1-32 Almost exactly fifty years before the Notre Dame conference, the (...) world’s largest centenary commemoration of Darwin’s legacy was held at nearby University of Chicago. This event, organized by a committee spearheaded by University of Chicago anthropologist Sol Tax, drew nearly 2,500 registrants. In attendance were the primary leaders... Part 1. Nature 2. Evolution through Developmental Change: How Alterations in Development Cause Evolutionary Changes in Anatomy Scott F. Gilbert pp. 35-60 For the past half-century, the mechanisms of evolution have been explained by the fusion of genetics and evolutionary biology called “the Modern Synthesis.‘ The tenets of the Modern Synthesis have been generally formulated as such: 1. There is genetic variation within the population. 2. There is competition... 3. The Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms: A New Perspective Stuart A. Newman pp. 61-89 The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, based on Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection in conjunction with a genetic theory of inheritance in a population-based framework, has been, for more than six decades, the dominant scientific perspective for explaining the diversity of living organisms. In recent years, however, with the growth... 4. The Evolvability of Organic Forms: Possible, Likely, and Unlikely Change from the Perspective of Evolutionary Developmental Biology Alessandro Minelli pp. 90-115 Confronted with the extraordinary diversity of animal form, we can ask questions about function and adaptation. How does this animal move? How does it feed? How does it defend itself from its enemies? But we can also ask questions about development, reproduction, and heredity. What mechanisms produce these forms? How are these... 5. Accident, Adaptation, and Teleology in Aristotle and Darwinism David J. Depew pp. 116-143 Charles Darwin framed the Origin of Species to meet criteria for inductive science set out by John Herschel in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. Accordingly, he was distraught when he learned that Herschel, to whom he had sent a copy of his newly published book, was not... 6. The Game of Life Implies Both Teleonomy and Teleology Gennaro Auletta, Ivan Colagè, Paolo D’Ambrosio pp. 144-164 The present contribution is mainly aimed at suggesting the importance of teleonomy and teleology as explanatory mechanisms in biology in the light of recent achievements in the field, and at showing that they play an actual and relevant role in the realm of life. The issue of finality in biology still provokes lively debates in the... Part 2. Humanity 7. Humanity’s Origins Bernard Wood pp. 167-181 One of Charles Darwin’s many achievements is that he began the process of converting the Tree of Life from a religious metaphor into a biological reality. All types of living organisms, be they animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, or viruses, are at the end of twigs that reach the surface of the Tree of Life, and all the types of organisms... 8. Darwin’s Evolutionary Ethics: The Empirical and Normative Justifications Robert J. Richards pp. 182-200 In the increasingly secular atmosphere of the nineteenth century, intellectuals grew wary of the idea that nature had any moral authority. In an earlier age, one might have looked upon the dispositions of nature as divinely sanctioned, and thus one could call upon natural law to ground moral judgment. Certain behaviors, for instance, might have... 9. Crossing the Milvian Bridge: When Do Evolutionary Explanations of Belief Debunk Belief? Paul E. Griffiths, John S. Wilkins pp. 201-231 Two traditional targets for evolutionary skepticism are religion and morality. Evolutionary skeptical arguments against religious belief are continuous with earlier genetic arguments against religion, such as that implicit in David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Evolutionary arguments are also... 10. Questioning the Zoological Gaze: Darwinian Epistemology and Anthropology Phillip R. Sloan pp. 232-266 This quotation from Darwin’s Descent of Man illuminates an under-explored issue in Darwin’s work---not the issue of evolutionary ethics itself, but the epistemology of experience assumed in his work, and the consequences of his application of this “zoological gaze‘ to human beings. I will term this epistemological stance in this chapter “natural historical... Part 3. God 11. Evolution and Catholic Faith John O’Callaghan pp. 269-298 To begin to examine the relation of orthodox Catholic Christian faith to evolutionary theory and the question of human origins, consider words of the fourth pope, St. Clement: Let us fix our gaze on the Father and Creator of the whole world, and let us hold on to his peace and blessings, his splendid and surpassing... 12. After Darwin, Aquinas: A Universe Created and Evolving William E. Carroll pp. 299-337 At the 2000 Jubilee Session for scientists, held at the Vatican in May of that year, Archbishop Józef Życiński offered an eloquent assessment of contemporary discourse on the relationship between the natural sciences and theology. He ended his address with the comment that what is needed today is a new Thomas Aquinas. I remember... 13. Evolutionary Theism and the Emergent Universe Józef Życiński pp. 338-354 The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species has been celebrated in the context of an animated debate concerning both scientific and philosophical issues implied by the theory of evolution.1 One finds a deep diversity of attitudes, both methodological and semantic, in the current debates on evolutionary... 14. Beyond Separation or Synthesis: Christ and Evolution as Theodrama Celia Deane-Drummond pp. 355-380 The fervor with which popular discourse on science and religion has continued to bubble up in the anniversary year celebrating Darwin’s achievements shows that the publically perceived conflict between science and religion will not go away. Academic discussion on such matters is therefore not just peripheral to cultural concerns but takes... Part 4. Past and Future Prospects 15. Imagining a World without Darwin Peter J. Bowler pp. 383-403 What would have happened if Charles Darwin had not lived to write On the Origin of Species? Perhaps his bad health caused the early death he feared, or maybe he fell overboard while on the voyage of the Beagle. Would the world have still experienced the Darwinian Revolution under another name, or would the history of science, and... 16. What Future for Darwinism? Jean Gayon pp. 404-423 What future for Darwinism? I will propose some criteria for exploring this question in the domains of both evolutionary biology and the human sciences. Do not expect me to tell you where we will stand thirty years from now. It will be enough to identify a few general tendencies. For the sake of brevity, I will not devote a preamble to explain... Contributors pp. 424-430. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:305 HUME, HENRY MORE AND THE DESIGN ARGUMENT This paper is a contribution to research on the sources of Hume's statement of the design argument, whose analysis is the great subject of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. My surmise is that Hume's statement is probably his own. It is not a direct quotation from any source, but more 2 likely a fabrication drawn from several sources which presents the strongest (...) statement Hume could devise. My aim here is to demonstrate that one of Hume's sources is the works of Henry More (16141687 ). By a comparison of their language I mean to show the extent to which Hume drew on More for his formulation of the design argument. One of More's works, Divine Dialogues (1688), could have been Hume's modern example for treating the design 4 argument in a dialogue. It could have given Hume pointers for the organization, tone and characters of his own Dialogues. On a large view, the whole of Pialogues Concerning Natural Religion, with their artful match of position and counter-position, can be seen as a statement of the design argument. But on a close view, we can distinguish specific elements in Hume's statement; and for three of these elements we can show a close parallelism between Hume and More. The elements in Hume's statement to be considered here are.· (1)Cleanthes' introduction of the design argument in Part II, paragraph 5; (P 143) (2)"instances of design" offered by Cleanthes; (D 154, 185) and 306 (3) completing Hume's exposition of the design argument, Parts X and XI of the Dialogues, with their questions about the implications of human misery and the ill-workings of the world for the wisdom and benevolence of the universe maker (D 193-213). In addition to parallelisms between Hume and More at these points, there are a few straws in the wind that are worthy of mention. To pave the way for these comparisons, let me set out More's statements of the design argument. There are three of them. (1) More's first statement of the design argument occurs in An Antidote against Athéisme, (1652). The second of this work's three books is devoted to the design argument. Here is one of the earliest statements of the design argument in English; and it may be its first statement in an English work that is philosophical, rather than devotional or theological, and intended to convince solely on the basis of reasonable arguments. More sets out of the argument in three parts. First, there is the introductory remark: "...I would have my atheist walk with me awhile in the wide theater of this outward world, and diligently to attend to those many and most manifest marks and signs that I shall point to in this outward frame of things, that naturally signify unto us that there is a God" (AA 37-38). The 'walk' covers the next sixty pages, wherein More lists feature after feature of the world that he finds to instance divine design. At the end of this extensive catalogue, More then draws his conclusion: Wherefore the whole creation in general and every part thereof being so ordered as if the most exquisite reason and knowledge had contrived 307 them, it is natural to conclude that all this is the work of a wise God, as at first sight to acknowledge that those inscribed urns and coins digged out of the earth were not the products of unknowing nature, but the artifice of man (AA 97). (2)More's second statement of the design 7 argument is in The Immortality of the Soul (1659). More establishes to his satisfaction that matter is in motion, because "...when God created it, he D superadded an impress of Motion upon it...." That conclusion paves the way for the following paragraph: We have discovered out of the simple phenomenon of motion, the necessity of the existence of some incorporeal essence distinct from matter: but there is a further assurance of this truth, from the consideration of the order and admirable effect of this motion in the world. Suppose matter could move itself, would mere... (shrink)

Does the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks require a re-evaluation of his thought? In the present text we will deal with this question and reach the conclusion that a change of theoretical perspective on Heidegger’s work is indeed justified. The franker and less cautious style of the Black Notebooks puts in the foreground stances that were already known, but were previously relegated to the background: it becomes possible thereby to establish that Heidegger’s philosophical views host a significant lot of (...) unwarranted prejudices, which are incorporated in his picture of the ‘history of being’. We argue that in his process of radical questioning Heidegger progressively drops all available rational methods and epistemic criteria, and that this paves the way to the unwitting reception of personal prejudices in his theoretical frame: Heidegger knowingly abandons all the theoretical instruments that could enable him to discriminate between deeply felt prejudices and proper philosophical intuitions. We conclude our analysis by proposing some criticisms that should be acceptable also to scholars sympathetic with Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s vindication of an ‘erratic’ way of thinking, where the journey is more qualifying than the result, turns out to be incompatible with the assertiveness of the many unjustified claims disseminated across the Black Notebooks. Moreover, Heidegger wants to show the narrowness of an overwhelmingly dialectical and argumentative attitude, while his late style of thinking unwittingly discredits an alternative philosophical style, that widely appeals to a ‘principle of charity’ in the collaboration between author and reader. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arthur A. Krentz DRAMATIC FORM AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONTENT IN PLATO'S DIALOGUES AN intriguing innovation in the history of philosophical discourse is Plato's employment ofdramatic dialogues as his deliberately chosen means ofcommunication. Throughout the history of philosophy scant attention has been focused on this feature of Plato's works. Recently, however, some students of Plato's writings contend that it is crucial for interpreters to give careful attention to the dialogue form (...) in order to reach an essential understanding of the philosophical content. Thus WernerJaeger, commenting in 1934 on the importance of the form of Aristotle's philosophical works, mentions as an aside that, "Even in the case of Plato, the importance of the form for the understanding of his particular thought has often been overlooked for long periods; departmental philosophers and students ofliterature in particular are always prone to consider it as something literary which had no material significance for Plato, in spite of the fact that it is unique in die history of philosophy. By now, however, most persons know mat the study of the development of the form ofhis writing is one of me main keys to a philosophical understanding of him." ' In spite ofJaeger's contention that most contemporary interpreters of Plato are aware of the significance of investigating the dramatic form for an understanding of a dialogue's content, a survey of the literature on Plato shows that interpreters often abandon such a concern in their own approach to his dialogues. For example, many interpreters treat dialogues as treatises, ignoring the dramatic features in order to concentrate on the examination of the logical, epistemológica!, ethical or other philosophical aspects of the argumentation in a single dialogue or group ofdialogues; as a result interpreters tend to separate the content from the form of Plato's works.2 The effect of this approach is one-sided, for, although such interpretations attempt to do justice to the arguments, they ignore the dramatic features of the dialogues and their bearing on an interpretation of die philosophical substance. Currently a growing number of interpreters of Plato in Europe and North America hold that a consideration of the form of Plato's dialogues is important 32 Arthur A. Krentz33 for an understanding oftheir content and philosophical message.3 1 am in agreement with this position and in this article I consider some reasons that may have led Plato to adopt dialogue as his medium of philosophical expression and attempt to show how attention to the dialogue form shapes the interpretation of their content. Unlike his philosophical predecessors who cast their writings in the form of extended poems, aphorisms, or treatises "On Nature," Plato wrote dramas. That the dramatic form ofhis writings is not incidental to his philosophical purposes becomes apparent as one considers how Plato presents philosophy in a fundamentally different way from that of his predecessors and successors who adopted the essay and treatise as the paradigm ofphilosophical communication. In a philosophical work such as a treatise, an author ordinarily attempts to state his own position on issues under discussion as clearly and as forcefully as possible. This, however, is not the primary aim of Plato's works, for certain features of his dramas indicate that he deliberately concealed his own views. Of special note in this regard is the fact that Plato never speaks on his own behalf in the discourses he creates. There is no character named "Plato" unequivocally declaring the author's own position.4 Instead a variety of interlocutors ask questions, investigate philosophical problems, and puzzle over solutions while Plato remains noticeably silent. This silence of Plato indicates that he did not regard the unequivocal presentation of his own views to be of paramount importance. If this had been his aim, Plato had only to write a dialogue which included himselfas one ofthe characters clearly stating his own position. Having engaged in many philosophical discussions with Socrates and with his own students, Plato could have written a dialogue based on such conversations. His not doing so is sufficient to show that he did not use his writings as a primary vehicle for transmitting his own position in his own words. Nor did Plato use... (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the argument from design is in many respects the most impressive, as everyone remarks that Kant remarked. Certainly it is an argument which seems to have appealed to the popular imagination and even today does not lack philosophical proponents. The purpose of the present paper is to examine a recent formulation of the argument. In particular I shall be concerned to bring into the open its dualist assumptions and to show (...) how these militate against its general plausibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliadby Lorenzo F. GarciaJonas GrethleinL orenzoF. G arcia. Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad. Hellenic Studies 57. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013. Distributed by Harvard University Press. viii + 321 pp. Paper, $22.50.The philosophy of Heidegger continues to cast a spell on some Classicists. It is less Heidegger’s own interpretations of Greek authors that serve as stimulus than the (...) main work of his early career, Sein und Zeit(Halle 1927), that seems to invite applications to ancient texts. Reading such studies as Shanske’s Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History(Cambridge 2007), I keep wondering to what extent the attractiveness of Heidegger to some Classicists ultimately derives from the impact that ancient texts may have had on the formation of his philosophy. Attending a humanistisches Gymnasium, Heidegger received a thorough training in Greek and must have read a fair amount of ancient texts in the original. Besides tying in with the existentialism of his day, the gloomy nature of Heidegger’s philosophy is highly reminiscent of what is traditionally referred to as Greek pessimism. It is easy, for instance, to sense in the concept of “ Sein zum Tode” an echo of the sentiment of the Herodotean Solon that “we must look to the conclusion of every matter and see how it will end” (Hdt. 1.32.9). The common tenor notwithstanding, applying Heidegger’s philosophy of Being to the interpretation of ancient literature is a daunting task.In Homeric Durability: Telling Time in the Iliad, Garcia draws on Heidegger to show that “the subject of the Iliad... is time itself and the durability of its objects to withstand time’s withering flow” (5). Garcia claims that the tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy of time plays out in the Iliadat various levels. For Heidegger, Daseinis defined by death, which is always impending and thereby constitutes its totality. Daseinis essentially Sein zum Tode(“being-toward-death”). This, Garcia argues, is reflected in the temporal economy of the Iliadwhich hinges on the notion of “not yet” already encapsulating a “no longer.” Various physical objects, humans, and, to some extent, also gods are presented as enduring, but fated to fade. Garcia’s central argument is that they thereby reflect the temporal dynamics of epic poetry itself. To him, kleos aphthitondoes not imply the idea of eternity, but a duration that entails its own ending. Before discussing the soundness of this argument in conjunction with its deployment of Heidegger, let me give a brief synopsis of the individual chapters.In chapter 1, Garcia elaborates on “the rhetoric of time and memory”; while “time has disintegrating effects..., memory in a pure or ideal form, on the other hand, preserves its object against time” (45). This dialectic comes to the fore in Iliad2 where the rotting of the ships and the flagging morale of the [End Page 481]Greeks indicate the “loss of cohesion through waiting” (55). At the same time, Garcia claims, Odysseus’ intervention illustrates the power of memory. Odysseus reminds the Achaeans of Calchas’ prophecy which he remembers as if “it was either yesterday or the day before” and “thereby seeks to undo the disintegration of the Achaeans’ emotional resolve” (63). The tension between the decaying force of time and the attempt at recuperation through memory yields the framework for the investigation of various entities and their temporal dynamics in the main part of the book.The second chapter is devoted to the fate of the bodies of Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector. In the eyes of Garcia, “the preservation of these exquisite corpses serves as an analogue within the poem for the very project of the epic commemoration of Achilles—as if the epic were a ‘freezing’ of temporal flow against the ravages of time” (66). However, neither the application of ambrosia and nectar nor funeral rites achieve permanent preservation: bodies can be removed from time only temporarily. They are subject to “the logic of the ‘still perfectly’ and ‘not yet’” (94) and thereby mirror the fame of Achilles which, despite its longevity, carries its termination in itself.In chapter... (shrink)

Traditional compatibilism is the view that free will is compatible with determinism. Humean-law compatibilism (a.k.a. weak-law compatibilism), is the view that free will is compatible with determinism, where determinism is defined in terms of a broadly Humean view of the laws of nature. A growing number of philosophers hold that Humean-law compatibilists are targeted by and have special resources to resist arguments for traditional incompatibilism, including the Consequence Argument (cf. Beebee and Mele 2002, Perry 2004, Hetherington 2006, Berofsky 2012, (...) Mele 2013). In this paper, I argue that Humean-law compatibilism is not a proper target of the Consequence Argument and that Humean-law compatibilists have no unique resources to show that the Consequence Argument is unsound. Moreover, I attribute the rise of the paradoxical notion of Humean determinism, upon which Humean compatibilism is based, to Peter van Inwagen’s failed attempt to capture the traditional metaphysical doctrine of determinism (as he himself characterizes it) in the impoverished language of symbolic logic. -/- For the most recent version of this manuscript, plz gmail me: kristin.mickelson.42. (shrink)

God was dead to Kevin Vost for most of his adult life. Baptized, confirmed, and raised Catholic, at age 17 Vost left it all behind as he immersed himself in atheism for a period that lasted over two decades. Paralleling a successful career as a psychologist and professor, Vost allowed his clinical perspective to drive his faith perspective as well, falling into a common trap for many Catholics. This timely book's unique approach gives credit where credit is due, as Vost (...) describes the good elements in the thinking of several famous atheists. But then, from experience and logic, he shows how each of these thinkers falls short. From there, Vost opens the doors to the philosophers and psychologists whose work, implicitly or explicitly, has paved the way toward belief in God, and even in Jesus Christ. And finally, from the perspective of a clinical psychologist, Vost unveils how theologians, popes, and Catholic philosophers persuaded him to abandon this atheism and embrace faith in Christ and the Church. Each chapter ends with a "Truth Box" that spotlights a chink in atheism's armor, adds a cautionary perspective, or highlights an important argument foundational to faith. With patience and perspective, Vost will lead you on a journey that reveals how reason, science, and faith work together to find the truth. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

The argument from existence is often used as an attempted justification for our use of animals in commercial practices, and is often put forward by lay-persons and philosophers alike. This paper provides an analysis of the argument from existence primarily within the context of blood-sports (applying the argument to the example of game-birding), and in doing so addresses interesting and related issues concerning the distinction between having a life and living, or worthwhile life and mere existence, as well as (...) issues surrounding our responsibilities to prospective and actual beings. However, my analysis of the argument will go beyond the animal ethics context; it is important that it does so in order to reveal the troublesome implications of the argument and to highlight the sorts of unethical practices it supports. In particular, in applying the argument to a relevant example concerning human beings, I will discuss how the argument from existence could be used to justify the ownership of slaves who were reared for slavery. My objective is to show just how problematic the argument from existence is, with the aim of laying the argument to rest once and for all. (shrink)

Introduction to edited volume, Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy.

Even though it has always seemed to me so evidently erroneous, the view that we must test our normative theories against our intuitions has continued to have many adherents [...]. But now it faces its most serious challenge yet, in the form of Peter Unger's Living High and Letting Die. On one level this book is an attempt to tighten the argument I advanced in 'Famine, affluence and morality'. Unger argues that we do wrong when we fail to send money (...) to overseas aid organizations that will use it to save many lives. But he does much more than that. He makes his argument by presenting a wide variety of examples and telling us about the intuitive responses that he had found most people - especially his students - have to them. The responses are very difficult to reconcile with each other. Unger then offers explanations for them. His explanations are devastating for the view that we should take our intuitive responses to particular cases as the test of a sound theory, because the explanations show that our intuitive judgments are based on things that are obviously of no moral significance at all. Here is an example. Unger uses some variants on the 'trolley problem', much discussed by philosophers during the past thirty years. The problem is posed by a runaway trolley rolling down the railway track, on course to kill several innocent people further down the line. In one version of the problem you can throw a switch that will divert the trolley down another track, where it will kill just one innocent person. In another version, there is no switch, but you could push a very heavy person off a bridge in front of the trolley. The heavy person will be killed, but the trolley will be stopped and the six people will be saved. Most people think that you should throw the switch, thus causing one to die, rather than six; but they think it would be wrong to push the heavy person off the bridge into the path of the trolley. To a consequentialist this difference is puzzling. In both achieve this outcome? A Kantian, however, can claim that the responses show that our intuitions are in line with the Kantian idea that it is wrong to use someone as a means, even if by doing so there is a net saving of innocent human life. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 27-32. “My”—what does this word designate? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to,what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary . I can’t sleep till I devour you / And I’ll love you, if you let me… Marilyn Manson “Devour” The role of poetry in the relationalities between people has a long history—from epic poetry recounting tales of yore; to emotive lyric poetry; to (...) rude, irreverent limericks; to Hallmark cards which have ditties that allow one to cringe, and somehow fall in love at the same moment. Without going into a notion of aesthetics, or attempting to choose which form of poetry is superior, we might want to consider why the form of poetry itself has long been a part of relationality. And whilst doing so, we might always keep in mind that poetry—especially poetry that moves, transports us—is the form that Plato has been warning us about, particularly if we want to become good citizens.As Avital Ronell teaches us in Stupidity : the poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes (287). And considering that the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, we might begin to ask ourselves why one lover is warning against another—if the philosopher is in love with wisdom, then is the poet perhaps his rival, his challenger, for that very love? For, one must also remember that Plato—through Socrates—mentions constantly that Homer is his favourite. Moreover, by adopting both his own voice, whilst mixing it with Socrates’, Plato is adopting the form of poetry that he warns most about—the warning almost serves more as a homage to poetry than anything else. Here, we might open the register that one of the main reasons that he ejects a particular kind of poet is on the grounds of effecting effeminacy on the populace—good poetry moves you, affects you, transports you, shifts you beyond reason, puts you “out of your mind.” However, Plato also teaches us that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon, or the muse. This moment of divine intervention is one that seizes—perhaps even ceases—you; putting you “beyond yourself.” In other words, a good rhetorician must always already be open to the possibility of otherness—the same otherness that possibly resides in the feminine. One could also trace this back to the poet that he both loved, and feared, most—Homer. Perhaps the effect of effeminacy that Homer's poetry opened is precisely the source of its power: through listening to Homer, one's body, one’s habitus is opened to the possibility of the feminine. And here, one must remember that the source of all learning—and all teaching—also lies in mimesis, in repetition, in habit. Once the habitus is opened to the possibility of invasion, of intervention, of otherness, there is quite possibly no possibility of distinguishing whether the mimesis is that of reproduction, or if there is always already a productive aspect to it. And by extension, if learning cannot be controlled, the very notion of teaching itself is shifted from a master-student relationality to one where the master is potentially changed as well—the relationality between the master and the student is not only inter-changing, but one cannot even know who is teaching, or learning, at any point. All that can be said is that they are in a relationality; which means that one is ultimately unable to locate the locus of knowledge, of wisdom—the site of which Plato is attempting to convince us is the sole domain of the philosopher. And it is this that philosophy is cringing from. To compound matters, philosophy is striving for wisdom; which can only come from the Gods. In other words, this is a gift that has to be bestowed on them—and more than that, wisdom is always already exterior to one’s control and knowledge. At best, it is the role of one to recognise the gift, to answer the call as it were. Here, if we listen carefully, we can hear the echo of Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone. And as we are attempting to respond to the call of wisdom—the call that both poetry and philosophy are listening out for—it might be helpful to recall the agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville. In the biography, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude , Robert V. Bruce notes that Aleck and Melly made a “solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communication with the other if it were possible to do so” (63). Since Melville was the one who passed on first, this pact put the onus on Aleck to receive the call of his brother. If you take into consideration the fact that until Melville’s death, both brothers had been working on an early prototype of the telephone, the instrument of distant sound can be read as an attempt by Aleck to maintain the possibility of keeping in touch with Melly, of hearing the voice from beyond. However, this was a connection that was not premised on any knowing, reason, or rationality; it was rather, one that was based on hope, and born out of love. And here, if we eves-drop on a cross-line with The Telephone Book , we can pick up the voice of Avital Ronell once again and hear, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading” (380). In other words, the telephone can be read as the openness to the possibility of responding to the other; one that might always remain unknown. Even in this day of caller-identification, we can never know for sure who the other person on the line is until we pick up: hence, the only decision we can make—the effects of which we remain blind to until it affects us—is to either pick up or not, to either respond or not. And it is not as if the decision to pick up comes without risks: each time we answer a call, we run the risk of it ruining our day. Even when we don’t know who the caller is, perhaps especially when we don’t know who the person on the other end of the line is—and here one only has to think of prank calls—we are leaving ourselves completely open to being affected by another. Thus, philosophy finds itself in the position of Vladimir and Estragon. Since they have no idea who Godot is, they can never know if or when he shows up—thus, if he (and we are taking his gender on the word of the boy, some boy—we don’t even know if it is the same boy—who comes round in the evening) has already come, they would not be in the position to know it. And even if someone comes to them and announces that “I am Godot,” the wait would not be over—without referentiality to the name, they would have to take on faith that that person is indeed Godot. Hence, all they can know is that they are waiting for Godot; and Godot is the name of that waiting itself. All philosophy can know is that it is waiting; and wisdom is the name of that waiting itself. Which brings us to Tina Turner’s eternal question, “what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” In order to begin to consider that, we have to first attempt to examine the notion of love itself. Perhaps we might begin to consider what the difficulty of the statement “I love you.” For, if love is a relationality between two persons—both of whom remain singular, and are attempting to respond to each other—this suggests that neither of them subsume the other under themselves. In other words, the other remains wholly other. If this is so, then the “you” in the statement always remains shrouded in mystery. And even if the “you” was replaced with the name of the person, the veiling remains: for, names refer both to the singularity that is the person, and also every other person bearing that name, at exactly the same time. To compound matters, the only time one has to utter a persons name is in their absence—thus, the correspondence of a name to that particular person is at best an affect of memory. And if we consider the notion of memory, we have to also open the register of forgetting—bringing along with it the problem that there is no object to forgetting. For instance, when one utters “I forgot,” all one is uttering is the fact that one has forgotten, and nothing more—the moment there is an object to the statement, one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. Moreover, we have no control over when forgetting happens to us. And since it is always already exterior to us, affects us, and has no necessary object, there is no reason to believe that every moment of memory might not bring with it a moment of forgetting. Hence, whenever we utter a name—even if we accept the correspondence between the utterance and the person in front of us—all we are doing is uttering the fact that we are naming. Thus, it is not so much that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ but more appropriately, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’—the relationality between its name and the phenomenon of its sweet smell can only be established after that moment of naming, that instance of catachresis. So, whenever one utters “I love you,” not only is it a performative statement, it is the very naming of that love—all you are doing is establishing a relationality between you and the other. And since there is no necessary referent—one is naming that referentiality as one utters it—this suggests that it is always already a symbolic statement; without which the mystery of the other cannot me maintained. In other words, one cannot love the other without maintaining this symbolic distance—through a ritual; in this case the utterance “I love you.” This might be why Valentine’s Day seems to provoke such a massive reaction: the most common one from people (besides florists) being, Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Those among the nay-sayers who maintain a soft spot for Karl Marx would proceed to call it the commodification of relationships; those who prefer the Gods would claim that the sanctity of relationships has been profaned; the gender theorists would note how the fact that males buy the gifts only serves to highlight the unequal power-relation between the genders. Whichever side and variation of the arguments they choose boils down to this: the discomfort lies in the fact that they are confronted with the notion of relationships moving into a mediated sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only; it should not only remain between them, but more pertinently, be an unmediated experience between two persons. Which of course completely misses the point. For, if we reopen the register that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, there must then be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is, one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding; effectively effacing the other. If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationality; all negotiation is gone and the other person is a mere extension of the self—one is in a masturbatory relationality with one’s imaginary. Hence, any relationship must always already carry with it the unknown, and possibly always unknowable. The other person is an enigma, remains—must remain—enigmatic to you. This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person—and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is. For, if the mystery of the other is unveiled, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love: one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; a check-list. And if they are knowable, this suggests that they can also be negated, and hence, the love can also go away. Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event—and if it is an event, then strictly speaking, it cannot be known before it happens; at best, it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realised retrospectively. At the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere: this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, I was struck by love;” or even more so by, “I was blinded by love.” This is a blinding to not only the subject of the encounter—the self—but also of the very object of that encounter, the “you”—all that can be said is that there is an encounter. And it is for this reason Cupid is blind: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time), but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. Since there is an unknowable relationality with the other person, the only way you can approach it is through a ritual. This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the God(s), one has no choice but to approach them symbolically. These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless—the actual content is interchangeable—as it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets; and secrets are never about their content(s). Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret. This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work: since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret. Occasionally the actual content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance. For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings. In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognise the significance of the knowledge of my birthday. This means that you have to know that you know something. Since the God(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the God(s). The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritualised role. It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them. The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange. Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received. This means that the worst thing that one can do is not give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person. This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the reciprocal gift would be nothing more than a calculated return. The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind. In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and also a reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). Naturally, this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. But it is precisely the stupidity involved that saves the relationship from being banal—more importantly, stupidity prevents it from entering the mere profane. This is not to say that an enigmatic love cannot end—of course it can. However, the difference lies in the fact that if the relationality is wholly transparent, it is subsumed under reason—completely predictable, within the self, and thus never open to the possibility of otherness, exteriority, musing. A love that is an event is one that is also open to the possibility of the divine, the sacred—always already closer to the possibility of wisdom. If we establish that both love and wisdom are exterior, to our knowledge, and the finitude to our selves, this suggests that both are names for the possibility of openness to otherness. In other words, and what choice do we have here but to use the words of the other, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—is a name for one who is waiting, and nothing more. But that still leaves us with the question of this uncomfortable relationality between philosophy and poetry. But before we address that question, we have to take a momentary detour, and consider the whether it is possible to call one a poet. For, if we take the notion of a poet to be one who reaches the highest levels of rhetoric (beyond the lawyer, and the orator, who only aim to either please the crowds, or convince by way of sophistry), then we must also acknowledge that one can only become a poet at the moment of seizing, the point of inspiration, by the muses. Without this divine moment, all (s)he can do is practice her craft. As no one can control when the muses make their appearance, one could always be practising in vain—in some way, one is always already practising to be least in the way when the muse whispers into one’s ear; one is practising so as not to be vain. And since one cannot know when the muse will appear, there is no time frame to the practising—unlike the lawyer who speaks against a clock, poetry knows no time; the only time that matters is the time appropriate to poetry itself. Thus, all the poet (if one can use this term) is practising for the possibility of effacing her/him self—and waiting. Thus, in order for poetry to occur, in order to be seized, the poet—along with all her concerns—must cease. In other words, there is no poet; there is only the possibility of poetry. However, even as there is no time frame to this waiting, even as all we can say is that poetry is a name for waiting, the one who is practising is always already also in time. And since (s)he is in a symbolic relationality with the possibility of poetry, this suggests that the practising is her sacrifice, and time is precisely what she is sacrificing. Here, it might be helpful to turn to a strange source when it comes to poetry—Georges Bataille—and consider his teachings in the first volume of The Accursed Share where he reminds us that, the “essence [of sacrifice] is to consume profitlessly .” This is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” He continues: Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” (58) Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie is severed symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice, the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth…Once chosen, he is the accursed share , destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things…” (59). And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (55). For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. Thus, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. So even as (s)he is sacrificing her time to poetry, it is always already beyond her knowledge whether what (s)he is doing is actually preparing her for poetry or not—all (s)he can know is that she is sacrificing and nothing more. Hence, all (s)he can do is to open her self to the possibility of this relationality—all (s)he can do is be in love with poetry. At the moment the muse whispers into her ear, (s)he ceases to be, and becomes a medium for poetry—and since this possession is always already beyond our cognitive knowledge, this is also a moment of divine wisdom. In other words, there is no difference between poetry and wisdom—the moment of poetry is the moment of wisdom. And this might be the very reason for the philosopher’s aversion to poets. Not so much because they may corrupt the youth (this is after all the aim of all thinking, all philosophy), but precisely because in order to do so, the philosopher must wait for a moment of possession, for divine musing, for poetry. Hence, all thought, all thinking, all philosophy, is nothing but the waiting for the possibility of poetry itself. (shrink)

_Does the existence of evil call into doubt the existence of God? Show me the argument._ Philosophy starts with questions, but attempts at answers are just as important, and these answers require reasoned argument. Cutting through dense philosophical prose, 100 famous and influential arguments are presented in their essence, with premises, conclusions and logical form plainly identified. Key quotations provide a sense of style and approach. _Just the Arguments_ is an invaluable one-stop argument shop. A concise, formally structured summation (...) of 100 of the most important arguments in Western philosophy The first book of its kind to present the most important and influential philosophical arguments in a clear premise/conclusion format, the language that philosophers use and students are expected to know Offers succinct expositions of key philosophical arguments without bogging them down in commentary Translates difficult texts to core arguments Designed to provides a quick and compact reference to everything from Aquinas’ “Five Ways” to prove the existence of God, to the metaphysical possibilities of a zombie world. (shrink)

I examine the relationship that obtains between the work of Derrida and Rawls, not least because of the conviction that Derrida (and post-structuralism more generally) offers certain invaluable things to political thought that analytic political philosophy would do well to take account of, particularly as concerns the relation between time and politics. In Derrida’s case, his emphasis on the radical difference of the future, the ‘to come’, serves as a guardrail against political absolutisms of all sorts. On his view, when (...) the future is thought of as known or susceptible of teleological prediction, this tends to lead to what might be rhetorically called outbreaks of either Fascism or Communism (albeit initially non-organised, non-systematised, and without direct state complicity) in which that future state of affairs can justify the violent means needed to get there. Derrida’s many and varied arguments about the way in which the future disrupts the present, and has its impact upon the present, without itself being capable of coming to any kind of definitive presence, precludes this move. His quasi-transcendental emphasis on the importance of time and futurity to any understanding of the political is also useful when employed as a critical tool to examine analytic political philosophy: it highlights that this tradition is often either atemporal in its calculations, or relies upon references to intuition (and ‘commonsense’) in more or less obvious ways, both tendencies which deserve be subjected to critical scrutiny for their tacit alignment with a conservatism that wants to preserve the status quo. But the argument that I propose is not simply that figures like Derrida are able to show us the presuppositions and problems with analytic political philosophy and with Rawls’ work in particular. On the contrary, although philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze acknowledge the necessity of political calculation, it is also the case that it is vastly under-thematised in their work. Utilitarianism and liberalism offer two sustained and important attempts at providing such a calculation and it seems to me that a rapprochement of these traditions is required, fleshing out the kinds of political calculations that might better respect the significant moral insight at work in post-structuralism. In order to point to the need for such a political philosophy, this essay highlights some problems with Rawls and Derrida’s two competing ways of treating the political, juxtaposing Rawls’ insistence upon the calculable and narrower understanding of the political against (or, more aptly, in apposition with) the Derridean focus upon the incalculable. (shrink)

In the eyes of the philosophical public, F.H. Bradley is recognized primarily for the theories he advanced in Appearance and Reality, which themselves are known, on the whole, only through the writings of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. It has been suggested that the rejection of idealism during the early twentieth century, and the subsequent rise to prominence of analysis, was for Moore and Russell in many respects a rejection of the central ideas in Appearance and Reality. History, we are (...) told, is always written by a conflict’s victors, and surely to this philosophy is no exception. Bradley’s notable fall from prominence, however, has deposited him in the philosophical netherworld, and his metaphysical arguments, when mentioned, are often invoked to show students how they by all means must not conduct their own. That Bradley was an idealist, a monist, an absolutist, and even a mystic are all things everyone seems to know, but I suspect that upon the careful inspection of Bradley’s project, these labels can be shown to supply only misleading half truths, and in some cases, might not stick at all. But let me make clear that in this paper, my concern will not be with what has been said about Bradley. Rather, this is a paper about what Bradley says. (shrink)

​This book describes argumentative tools and strategies that can be used to guide policy decisions under conditions of great uncertainty. Contributing authors explore methods from philosophical analysis and in particular argumentation analysis, showing how it can be used to systematize discussions about policy issues involving great uncertainty. The first part of the work explores how to deal in a systematic way with decision-making when there may be plural perspectives on the decision problem, along with unknown consequences of what we do. (...) Readers will see how argumentation tools can be used for prioritizing among uncertain dangers, for determining how decisions should be framed, for choosing a suitable time frame for a decision, and for systematically choosing among different decision options. Case studies are presented in the second part of the book, showing argumentation in practice in the areas of climate geoengineering, water governance, synthetic biology, nuclear waste, and financial markets. In one example, argumentation analysis is applied to proposals to solve the climate problem with various technological manipulations of the natural climate system, such as massive dispersion of reflective aerosols into the stratosphere. Even after a thorough investigation of such a proposal, doubt remains as to whether all the potential risks have been identified. In such discussions, conventional risk analysis does not have much to contribute since it presupposes that the risks have been identified, whereas the argumentative approach to uncertainty management can be used to systematize discussions. (shrink)

The general argument of this essay is that poetry is an everyday ambition and an everyday accomplishment. The evidence for this – a good bit of which I will amass enthusiastically in what follows – is everywhere in our language. I explore this according to three guiding intuitions: (i) people, at least some of the time, want to give their words a similar intensity or fullness and show the same skill in unleashing verbal power, as poets do – seeking (...) words that will carry their voices; (ii) people say things give me the same aesthetic bliss and ache of gratitude that poetry gives me; and (iii) there seems to be a poetic or aesthetic dimension to all of language, without which words would not have the significance for us that they do. I end the essay by saying why the poetry in our everyday speech complicates the relation between the ordinary and (different versions of) the extraordinary as other philosophers have imagined it. (shrink)

The Legacy of Aristotelian Enthymeme provides a historical-logical analysis of Aristotle's rhetorical syllogism, the enthymeme, through its Medieval and Renaissance interpretations. Bringing together notions of credibility and proof, an international team of scholars highlight the fierce debates around this form of argumentation during two key periods for Aristotle's beliefs.Reflecting on medieval and humanist thinkers, philosophers, poets and theologians, this volume joins up dialectical and rhetorical argumentation as key to the enthymeme's interpretation and shows how the enthymeme was the source (...) of a major interpretive conflict. As a method for achieving the standards for proof and credibility that persist across diverse fields of study today including the law, politics, medicine and morality, this book takes in Latin and Persian interpretations of the enthymeme and casts contemporary argumentation in a new historical light. (shrink)

In recent philosophical work on attention, several authors have employed versions of an argument purporting to show that attention is not identical to any cognitive process. Others have criticised this argument. The present article addresses those various criticisms, and shows the original argument to be a valid one. It also shows that this argument cannot be resisted by taking attention to be a disjunction of several processes, by taking it be a genus of process that is composed of various (...) species, nor by taking it to be a process-determinable, for which particular cognitive processes are determinates. The metaphysical position that most readily accommodates this argument’s conclusion is a version of adverbialism. It should be understood as making a claim about the essence of attention. Some of the confusions in this area are shown to originate in the difficulty of glossing such a claim in modal terms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 95-99 [Access article in PDF] Delusional Content and the Public Nature of Meaning:Reply to the Other Contributors Robert Klee The contribution by professors Bayne and Pacherie (2004) is an earnest attempt to defend a popular model of monothematic delusions against criticisms launched by John Campbell (2001). This model of monothematic delusions holds that such delusions are rational attempts by the sufferer to explain (...) to herself specific kinds of anomalous sensory/affective experiences. Bayne, Pacherie, Campbell, and for that matter Sass, Harper, and Georgaca, write as if semantic meaning accrued to words in a language term by term, as if meaning is "private" to the deluded person, and that she might therefore mean almost anything by her own idiosyncratic use of the public language she otherwise speaks. This is a notorious mistake. As Hilary Putnam famously put it in his classic 1975 paper "The meaning of 'meaning,'" "Cut the pie any way you like, 'meanings' just ain't in the head" (1975, 227). That is, meanings are not ethereal interior mental objects, private to the speaker—they are not private inner episodes that take place in some mental center stage of consciousness. The deluded person does not and cannot succeed in changing the meaning of a term in a public language like English merely by an individual act of imaginative will involving the making of a bizarre assertion—not even if she repeats it a thousand times. The public nature of meaning, if I can coin a phrase for it, is the central theme in the work of the later Wittgenstein. Even before Putnam, Wittgenstein had made the same point in his Philosophical Investigations via a famous footnote in which he writes, Can I say 'bububu' and mean "If it doesn't rain I shall go for a walk"?—it is only in a language that I can mean something by something. This shows clearly that the grammar of 'to mean' is not like that of the expression 'to imagine' and the like." (2001, 18e) Wittgenstein argues that the answer to the rhetorical question in the footnote is an emphatic No. To mean something by the use of words in a public language is not equivalent to an act of individual free imagination. The languages we each speak, including the unfortunately deluded among us, are public not private, and insofar as the notion of meaning has an understandable sense, the meaning of a term is fixed by its actual public use, across large time intervals, in many different contexts, by the many millions of speakers of the language in question. It is time that segments of the intellectual map beyond the borders [End Page 95] of philosophy got the news about this, for I think an appreciation of this point would forestall certain objections and argumentative moves that otherwise take up space in the psychological literature.Bayne and Pacherie (2004) describe Campbell's model of monothematic delusions as proposing that "delusions can be usefully regarded as Wittgensteinian framework propositions" (p. 7). I have discussed this notion in my main paper, although I do not use the terms framework propositions; I stick to Wittgenstein's own words. Wittgenstein called them, literally in the German, propositions that "stand fast for us" (feststehen). This description strikes me as less misleading than calling them framework propositions, for the latter expression suggests that they could in some sense be replaceable by a different framework of framework propositions, something that Wittgenstein in no way ever meant to suggest. Wittgenstein did not think of these propositions as individualized or privately owned—as beliefs that might vary considerably across the population of speakers of the language in which they are expressed. That is why he explicitly wrote that they stand fast for us. Note the plural pronoun. There is something irreducibly collective, something publicly owned, about the epistemology of these propositions. These propositions represent the accumulated certainties that precipitate out of what is commonly shared in human experience over long time intervals. Precisely because what stands fast for us is... (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest a new interpretation of the argument given in Proslogium 3 which can be derived from the passage. My suggestion is that the argument in Proslogium 3 can be read as a sub argument for the premise (3) of the ontological argument given in Proslogium 2. This premise says God can be conceived to exist in reality. But the fool might refuse to accept this premise by claiming that perhaps God is a logically impossible object, and (...) thus it cannot be conceived to exist in reality. My new interpretation is that the argument in Proslogium 3 is to support premise (3) of the ontological argument by showing that God can be conceived to exist in reality, that it is not a logically impossible object. After suggesting a new interpretation of the argument, I defend it against two possible objections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Dialogue:The Principle of Civility in Academic DiscourseForest HansenSeveral months ago New York Times columnist David Brooks addressed the lack of civility in recent public discourse. "So... you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth.... You get people who prefer monologues to dialogue.... You get people who... loathe their political opponents."1One might think that by contrast academia, and especially academic (...) publications, would provide a bastion of civil discourse. Alas, even academia has been infiltrated. At least it so appears to me when I read some of what has been recently published in the name of the philosophy of music education.I find that disheartening.However one defines "philosophy," it minimally entails raising questions whose answers are reasonably debatable. The key word here is "reasonably." Those who are committed to philosophical activity criticize positions they oppose by formulating arguments, giving examples, calling on accepted facts, clarifying the meaning of terms, and bringing to bear the principles of formal and informal logic. And thus they open themselves to counter-criticism of the same [End Page 198] sort. Nowhere in this enterprise is there need—or room—for invective, sarcasm, name-calling, ad hominems, or any other kind of personal abuse. One might call this The Principle of Civility in Academic Discourse.Philosophy differs in this respect from polemics. In one of its senses "polemics" means "the art or practice of disputation or controversy," and so seems a close cousin to philosophy. However, while "philosophy" traces its etymological roots to "love" and "wisdom," "polemics" is derived from "war." Polemics is a kind of verbal warfare. Typically polemicists are willing to use any tool at their disposal—even underhanded ones—to "win" the war of ideas. Polemics in this usual sense dispenses with objectivity and fairness (though it may make such a pretense). In fact, people who mount personal attacks thereby reveal their lack of philosophical tools and diminish their argument.Distinguishing philosophy from polemics does not mean that all philosophical claims are equal. Some positions are stronger than others, some weaker. Some can be dismissed relatively out of hand if they are illogical or do not square with normal experience. But even when positions are inadequate, the persons who advance the positions deserve to be treated with courtesy, respect, and collegiality.Typically, people trained in philosophy assimilate this principle as a matter of course. They have learned that over the centuries great minds have disagreed about every philosophical issue—whether the make-up of ultimate reality, the nature and sources of knowledge, the existence of god, the justification of morality. So too with what the nature of music is, what music should be taught and how, what is the purpose of music education.No one has a corner on the answers to such questions. The floor should always be open to debate—to consideration of new proposals and reconsideration of old ones. In disciplines where some matters are more or less settled (as in natural science and mathematics), such arguments disappear and new quests hope to find new settled answers. But in philosophy, more fundamentally than in any other traditional academic discipline, the discussion, the reasoned argumentation, is ongoing.Many years ago Douglas Morgan, in his essay "Must Art Tell the Truth"2 eloquently captured this spirit of philosophy:Philosophy is itself to be conceived as an invitational, dialectical activity rather than as any system of dicta. A philosopher can be thought of as [one] who, far from commanding assent with any thunderous barrage of argumentative artillery, invites you to think [about] the world or some aspect of it in a somewhat different way. "Come in," [the philosopher] says cordially, "and welcome. Sit down. Let me mix you an idea. Sip this thought, and tell me how your own experience looks. If you should find my way of construing our [End Page 199] world unappetizing or unpromising, pray show me your way. Let us once again in the good old Greek way, dia-lego, talk it through together."Finally, The Principle of Civility in Academic Discourse ought to be conveyed in our classrooms, as we foster new generations in... (shrink)

This thesis shows morality to be broader and more diverse than its human instantiation. It uses the idea of machine morality to argue for this position. Specifically, it contrasts the possibilities open to humans with those open to machines to meaningfully engage with the moral domain. -/- This contrast identifies distinctive characteristics of human morality, which are not fundamental to morality itself, but constrain our thinking about morality and its possibilities. It also highlights the inherent potential of machine morality to (...) be radically different from its human counterpart and the implications this has for the moral significance of machines. -/- My argument is particularly focussed on moral theory, which is the study of the observable and hypothetical conceptual structures of morality. By identifying structures that are recognisably moral in nature but which sit outside the boundaries of human realisation, we have tangible proof that a meaningful distinction exists between human morality and the wider moral domain. -/- This is achieved by showing that certain essentially human limits restrict the conceptual possibilities open to human realisation. The tight coupling between these limits and the existing conceptual structures of human morality also explains why it is unjustifiable to assume that the same structures would be suitable for machines. They do not share these same limits with us, which leads me to conclude that many conceptual structures are quite distinctive to human morality and that the structures of machine morality would be significantly different. Four examples illustrate these conclusions concretely. -/- The first, supererogation, is an example of a moral concept that doesn't easily extend to machines. Human limits dictate what it is reasonable to expect from one another and restrict our ability to pursue aspirational moral goals. I show that machine supererogation, if it is at all possible, would require a very different justificatory basis to be coherent. -/- The second, agency, is an example of a concept whose structures extend beyond the bounds of human realisation. The greater flexibility of artificial identity allows machines to experiment with novel forms of inter- and intra-agency. In comparison, human agency structures are limited by their tight coupling with human conceptions of identity. -/- The third, moral aspiration, is a concept with a distinctive function in human morality. Certain aspirational ends are peculiar in that they are obviously unrealisable and even undesirable, yet their pursuit is instrumentally justifiable. This justification depends on cognitive limits that aren't shared by machines, which leads me to conclude that the role of moral aspiration in machine morality, if there is any, would necessarily differ from its human counterpart. -/- The fourth, moral responsibility, is an example of a concept whose existing practices don't translate over to machines. We don't understand machine agency well enough to be able to judge a machine's culpability or effectively blame it. Consequently, I suggest that a responsibility conception prioritising understanding over blame is a more promising avenue for a shared conception suitable for both humans and machines. -/- This thesis does not speculate about the existence of moral machines. This remains an open question, and one that is largely irrelevant for my conclusions as the idea alone is enough to advance our thinking. It does this by helping us identify the boundaries of human morality, and then, to think beyond them by recognising the possibilities of machine morality. (shrink)