In Max Black’s Objection to Mind–Body Identity, Ned Block seeks to offer a definitive treatment of property dualism arguments that exploit modes of presentation. I will argue that Block’s central response to property dualism is confused. The property dualist can happily grant that mental modes of presentation have a hidden physical nature. What matters for the property dualist is not the hidden physical side of the property, but the apparent mental side. Once that ‘thin’ side is granted, the property dualist (...) has won. I conclude that although Block is wrong to think that the property dualist must argue for so-called thin mental properties, Block, and the physicalist, are able to resist property dualism. But any attempt to bolster this resistance and do more than dogmatically assert the crucial identity runs a serious risk of undermining the physicalism it is meant to save. (shrink)

In diesem Band werden Beiträge gesammelt, die sich nicht nur auf rein formal logische Aspekte, sondern auch auf Probleme beziehen, die mit der Erkenntnistheorie, der Naturphilosophie und der Dialektik in Verbindung stehen. Iván de los Ríos Gutiérrez stellt die Aristotelische Kontingenzlehre dar. Miguel García-Valdecasas erörtert die wissenschaftstheoretischen Fundamente der Aristotelischen Nous-Lehre. Joseph Li Vecchi entwickelt ein formales Modell für Inferenzen, die auf der Grundlage von analogischen Verhältnissen basieren. Niels Öffenberger charakterisiert die abgeleiteten Wahrheitswerte, die sich durch die Dichotomie der schlichten (...) Wahrheit und der schlichten Falschheit ergeben. Paloma Pérez-Ilzarbe und María Cerezo verteidigen durch eine Interpretation der Struktur der Assertion die Gültigkeit des Bivalenz prinzips im Rahmen der Aristotelischen Wahrheitstheorie. Gabriela Rossi präsentiert eine systematische Darstellung der Rolle der lysis als Instrument der Aristotelischen Dialektik. Mirko Skarica untersucht die zeitgenössische Rezeption der Aristotelischen Auffassung des einfachen prädikativen Satzes bei Vertretern sowohl der analytischen als auch der phänomenologischen Tradition. Alejandro G. Vigo charakterisiert das Aristotelische Modell der Kausalerklärung in der Naturphilosophie in Verbindung mit dem Begriff eines sog. Hintergrundsholismus. (shrink)

. History of the concept of economic efficiency . INTRODUCTION James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize by proving that the process by which elected officials ...

Michael Bloomberg assumed office as the 108th mayor of New York City on January 1, 2002. As he leaves the mayoralty—having won re—election twice‐his public health legacy is bitterly contested. The public health community views him as an urban innovator—a rare political and business leader willing to fight for a built environment conducive to healthier, safer lifestyles. To his detractors, Bloomberg epitomizes a meddling nanny—an elitist dictating to largely poor and working—class people about how they ought to lead their lives. (...) His policies have sparked intense public, corporate, and political ire—critical of sweeping mayoral power to socially engineer the city and its inhabitants. Here, I seek to show how Bloomberg has fundamentally changed public health policy and discourse. He has used the engine of government to make New York City a laboratory for innovation‐raising the visibility of public health, testing policy effectiveness, and probing the boundaries of state power. Even though the courts have blocked some of his boldest initiatives, he has offered a paradigm for the “new public health”—reaching beyond infectious diseases to upstream risk factors in everyday life and the human habitat. I also critically probe various arguments designed to derail his policies, along with the overarching charge of unjustified paternalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Frederick J. Streng Book Award:An Interview with Paul Ingram and Sallie KingSallie B. King and Paul O. IngramSallie King and Paul Ingram have been named winners of the 2003 Frederick J. Streng Book Award for their edited collection The Sound of Liberating Truth: Buddhist-Christian Dialogues in Honor of Frederick J. Streng (Curzon, 1999). Sallie King is professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University in Harrisonburg,Virginia. Paul (...) Ingram is professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma,Washington. Both are past presidents of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. There is some irony that they have won this award named after Fred Streng, one of the founders of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, for a volume that is a essentially a festschrift honoring the work of Fred Streng. Following is an edited interview with both of the winners.Buddhist-Christian Studies: What made each of you want to put together this collection of essays?Paul Ingram: Before I met Fred at the first "East-West Religions in Encounter" meeting organized by David Chappell in 1980 in Hawai'i, I was well acquainted with his work in history of religions. Fred by this time was recognized as one of the most important scholars in the field, and I deeply admired his work, particularly his book on Nagarjuna. As it turns out, he had read some of my work on Pure Land Buddhism and was as interested in meeting me as I was in meeting him. We became friends and colleagues. Because of our mutual interest in interreligious dialogue in general and in Buddhism in particular, he suggested that we should co-edit a volume of selected papers from the 1980 conference. This volume, Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: Mutual Renewal and Transformation, was subsequentlypublishedby the Universityof Hawai'i Press in 1986 and is still in print.Sallie King: I had long admired Fred's book on Nagarjuna, which uniquely and powerfullyopenedup the religiousmeaningof Nagarjuna'swork.I later metFred through the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies and discovered that this admirable scholar was also a most admirable human being. We had lengthy, in-depth conversations when our paths crossed at various conferences. After Fred died, David Chappell, who had become the president of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, suggested to Paul and me that we edit a volume of this kind in honor of Fred. Neither Paul nor I hesitated. For my part, I felt such a loss when Fred died that I was very happy [End Page 313] and honored to have this opportunity to make a gesture of respect and gratitude toFred.Besides his obvious scholarly achievements, what were Fred Streng's other gifts?PI: Fred was always generous in his support of colleagues. Many of us in the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies are where we are professionally because of Fred's celebration of our work in all its diversity. He was one of the founding members of the Society, and he worked long and hard to make it a place for not only scholarly Buddhist-Christian encounter, but also a venue for nonspecialists to engage in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. All of us have been creatively transformed by Fred's work. After Fred's death in 1993, David Chappell invited Sallie and me to co-edit a volume of essays to honor Fred's memory and celebrate his work. We did so gladly and without reservation.SK: Fred was a very balanced person who had seriously engaged with all the important areas of human life. He was profoundly spiritual, seriously concerned about social issues, unfailingly kind and generous to others. Though he was at the top of his field, he remained straightforward and natural and always met even far-junior scholars as equals; he could not have been more encouraging and supportive. His spirituality, his scholarship, his engagement with social issues and his caring for others were all interdependent, mutually constructive of who he was and of his various projects.Were assignments for the book difficult to make?PI: The most difficult problem was selecting who to invite. Sallie and I identified five themes in Fred's scholarship, and we needed... (shrink)

Malcolm-Smith, Solms, Turnbull and Tredoux [Malcolm-Smith, S., Solms, M., Turnbull, O., & Tredoux, C. . Threat in dreams: An adaptation? Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1281–1291.] conducted a rigorous study that sampled two populations differentially exposed to threat in real life, and found that critical predictions from the Threat Simulation Theory of dreams [Revonsuo, A. . The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 877-901.; Revonsuo, A. . Did ancestral humans dream for (...) their lives? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 1063–1082.] were not supported. Specifically, we found no evidence of increased realistic threats to physical survival or enhanced threat avoidance in the dreams of those from the exposed population. Revonsuo and Valli’s [Revonsuo, A., & Valli, K. . How to test the threat simulation theory. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1292-1296.] commentary on our study argues that the methods we used are so flawed as to render the results meaningless. In this response article, we address the criticisms raised in their commentary. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo parte de un interrogante y se propone abordar un problema, a saber, si existen y son posibles una epistemología de la imposibilidad o, lo que es equivalente, una ciencia de la indeterminación. A fin de resolver el problema, se proponen tres argumentos. Esto son: primero, la imposibilidad, como la indeterminación, no deben ser concebido en modo alguno como limitaciones, restricciones o carencias. Por el contrario, se trata de ganancias o adquisiciones en el campo del conocimiento y de (...) la investigación. En segundo término, la imposibilidad significa un abandono de toda la tradición centrada en la importancia del ser, la realidad, lo dado, lo que acaece o lo que está ahí. Lo que está en juego es una fantástica revolución científica. El tercer argumento pone en evidencia que el mundo y el universo no tienen una determinación específica, y ciertamente no dada de antemano. Sobre la base de estos tres argumentos el artículo afirma que no hay ninguna disyuntiva entre una epistemología de la imposibilidad y una ciencia de la indeterminación, y que la buena investigación puede avanzar por este camino gracias al descubrimiento o la invención, que es la dúplice forma de una educación e investigación que sabe de cambios y transformaciones. Algunas conclusiones de cara a las ciencias sociales y humanas se extraen el final.: This paper starts with a question and is devoted to solving a problem, namely so establish whether an epistemology of the impossible or a science of indetermination are at all possible. In order to solve the problem three arguments are set out: firstly, impossibility very much as indetermination are not to be conceived in any sense as limits, restraints or constrictions. Quite on the contrary, they are assets that are won or acquired in the field of research and knowledge. The second argument claims that the impossible entails abandoning the entire tradition centred around being, reality, the given, what happens or what is at-hand. What is at stake is a fantastic scientific revolution. The third argument point out that the world and the universe do not have any specific determination, and certainly not one established beforehand. Based on these arguments this paper argues that there is not disjunction between an epistemology of the impossible and a science of indetermination, for research can go forwards thanks to discovery or invention which are a twofold form of research and education that know about change and metamorphosis. Several conclusions are drawn at the end vis-à-vis the social and human sciences. (shrink)

Estruturando conceitos (raízes do conhecimento). Noções sobre a gramática Ioruba -- O complexo Jêje-nagô -- A palavra e suas possibilidades -- A natureza e o homem -- Corpo individual e corpo coletivo -- A noção de saúde física e mental -- O surgimento da doença -- Os Ajogun -- Especificando conteúdos (ramos de conhecimento). A medicina Ioruba -- Òsányìn, o dono de todos os vegetais -- A folha e a sabedoria -- Omolu, o grande médico -- Os àwon Òrìsà se (...) apoderam das folhas -- O Sistema Ioruba de Nomenclatura e classificação das plantas -- O ritual Sàsányìn -- As plantas, seus cantos e encantos -- Glossário de ervas : ficha catalográfica -- Glossário de aplicação das ervas -- Glossário por nome de ervas : português -- Glossário por nome de ervas : ioruba -- Glossário por nome de ervas : nome científico -- Glossário de ervas Òrìsà -- Glossário de palavras em ioruba utilizadas no texto -- Apêndice: àse e atitude sustentável. (shrink)

An interview with Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the publication of his book Is Water H2O?, which won the Fernando Gil International Prize for the Philosophy of Science. So far, the last work of prof. Changa is a book of Realism for Realistic People. A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science, published in late 2022 by Cambridge University Press.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual HistoryJohn Patrick DigginsMen and ideas advance by parricide, by which the children kill, if not their fathers, at least the beliefs of their fathers, and arrive at new beliefs.Sir Isaiah Berlin1I was supposed to wind up the study of mine, and become the Lovejoy of my generation—that's the silly talk of scholarly people.Saul Bellow2To become "the Lovejoy," with the implication that (...) each generation could only have one, was the ambition of Moses Herzog in Saul Bellow's novel, written a few years after he had won the Nobel Award for literature. Herzog presents the life of a professor who has as many sexual escapades and as much personal angst as he has scholarly interests, too unfocused to be another Lovejoy. Bellow's novel is full of letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other modernist minds who brought Western intellectual life to a standstill, posing a lasting question mark about the possibilities of knowledge. Bellow taught in the program of the Committee on Social Thought at [End Page 181] the University of Chicago. His colleague and close friend Allan Bloom also taught in that program. But when Bloom wrote the best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, he cited Nietzsche and Heidegger as part of the "German disease" that did so much to subvert academic thought, supposedly turning students into zombies, walking air heads responding only to vacuous visual stimuli and mind-numbing music, with Rock n' Roll blasting through a Walkman and having the effect of a "masturbational fantasy."3While Bellow's epistolary novel interrogated modernist thinkers, Bloom's popular tract of the times cited many classical thinkers as a countervoice to the modernists—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Kant, Lessing, Schiller, Locke, and Rousseau. Such minds also figured prominently in the works of Arthur O. Lovejoy. But the recitation of such names leaves the impression that Lovejoy concerned himself only with the main currents of European intellectual history. On the contrary, two of his most important and often neglected books are The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Reflections on Human Nature.4 There one finds profound meditations on two vital episodes in the history of ideas in America: the Enlightenment and the philosophy of pragmatism. Perry Miller, arguably America's greatest intellectual historian, skipped over the Enlightenment as he proceeded to study the Puritans and then the transcendentalists, and he never seemed to have much interest in the pragmatists.5 But what Lovejoy had to write on the Enlightenment and pragmatism is richly ironic.The pragmatists claimed to have liberated modern thought from the easy assumptions of the "Age of Reason," and today's poststructuralists charge that eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers deceived themselves in looking to the advent of knowledge as an answer to the presence of power. Lovejoy's books offer a different take entirely, making us aware that it is the modernist thinkers who may be deceiving themselves with the dubious promises of pragmatism and the arrogant conceits of poststructuralism and deconstruction, whose proponents claim to be the first "masters [End Page 182] of suspicion." In many of Lovejoy's works, nothing is resolved and everything is left suspended in a state of honest suspicion.Lovejoy was comfortable with contradiction, and hence more in tune with Augustine, who looked to the depths of human consciousness for spiritual knowledge, than with Aquinas, who believed evidence for God and human freedom could be found in reason alone. Nowhere is Lovejoy's affinity for the emotions of consciousness better seen than in his several essays on romanticism, both English, French, German, and even its origins in Chinese aesthetics and Confucian ethics. It was not reason and the notion of order and regulation that appealed to Lovejoy but the spontaneous promptings of nature springing forth without reflection or design. He delighted in quoting Voltaire against classicists and scholastics. "Worship God and practice justice—this is the sole religion of the Chinese literati.... O Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, Bonaventure, Francis, Dominic, Luther, Calvin, canons of Westminister, have you anything better? For four thousand years this religion, so simple and so noble, has endured in... (shrink)

John Meier distinguishes ‘the real Jesus’ from ‘the historical Jesus’. Meier claims that whatever happened to the real Jesus after his death, his resurrection cannot belong to the historical Jesus because that event is in principle not open to the observation of any observer. But why think that the resurrection is not observable in this way? Meier finds justification in Gerald O'Collins' view that although the resurrection of Jesus is a real event, it is not an event in space and (...) time and hence should not be called historical, since a necessary condition of historical occurrences is that they are known to have happened in our space‐time continuum. Is this a good argument for the resurrection's being in principle excludable from the historical Jesus? A close examination of the argument reveals that it is not and that Meier's adoption of such a procedure contradicts Meier's own historical methodology. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to estimate the worth of two feminist strategies over identity. Judith Butler, from a foucaultian point of view, propose to subvert the category of identity as a > with disciplinary effects over individuals. Seyla Benhabib, who bets for > thinks that is better to try to contextualize the identities without having to recur to an abstract, formal and empty mode of self hegemonic in the philosophical tradition. Why are we interesting in this debate? Because (...) the ethic and political consequences of this theoretical controversy are decisive to redescribe the feminist identification based on the concept of woman. The > is one of the polemical focus in a feminist philosophical movement that, finally, have won academic credibility. (shrink)

Seguindo os passos de Stanley Cavell e de Stephen Mulhall, argumentarei neste artigo que o cinema pode oferecer contribuições genuínas para a filosofia. Para tanto procurarei mostrar que os principais obstáculos para considerar o cinema como capaz de fazer filosofia derivam de pontos de vista bastante restritivos sobre a natureza da racionalidade, da cognição, do significado - e, finalmente, da filosofia e do cinema eles mesmos. Apresentarei alguns desses obstáculos e indicarei formas de removê-los, adotando uma interpretação mais ampla dessas (...) noções. A compreensão resultante será então elaborada em mais detalhes por meio da leitura de um filme específico - Rashomon, de Akira Kurosawa - que considero uma obra exemplar de ficção cinematográfica capaz de refletir filosoficamente sobre a natureza da realidade e de nossa própria existência. Essa leitura será enriquecida por meio de um "interlúdio heideggeriano" que trata da importância dos estados de ânimo para nos sintonizar com o mundo. Finalmente, e com essas considerações em mãos, concluirei minha análise de Rashomon e farei um balanço dos resultados. (shrink)

This is a talk given in honor of O'Neill at the Pacific APA when she won the Berggruen Prize in 2018.

The intention of this article is to reconstruct the debate between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas which occurred between the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s. In order to observe this period the later developments of these thinkers won’t be taken into account. The article plans to examine the central problematic of the debate related to the difficult relationship between historic tradition and critical reflection. The tension between these two terms will be used as a reference (...) for discussing the relationships between hermeneutics and critical theory. (shrink)

The Quine-Putnam Indispensability argument is the argument for treating mathematical entities on a par with other theoretical entities of our best scientific theories. This argument is usually taken to be an argument for mathematical realism. In this chapter I will argue that the proper way to understand this argument is as putting pressure on the viability of the marriage of scientific realism and mathematical nominalism. Although such a marriage is a popular option amongst philosophers of science and mathematics, in light (...) of the indispensability argument, the marriage is seen to be very unstable. Unless one is careful about how the Quine-Putnam argument is disarmed, one can be forced to either mathematical realism or, alternatively, scientific instrumentalism. I will explore the various options: (i) finding a way to reconcile the two partners in the marriage by disarming the indispensability argument (Jody Azzouni [2], Hartry Field [13, 14], Alan Musgrave [18, 19], David Papineau [21]); (ii) embracing mathematical realism (W.V.O. Quine [23], Michael Resnik [25], J.J.C. Smart [27]); and (iii) embracing some form of scientific instrumentalism (Ot´ avio Bueno [7, 8], Bas van Fraassen [30]). Elsewhere [11], I have argued for option (ii) and I won’t repeat those arguments here. Instead, I will consider the difficulties for each of the three options just mentioned, with special attention to option (i). In relation to the latter, I will discuss an argument due to Alan Musgrave [19] for why option (i) is a plausible and promising approach. From the discussion of Musgrave’s argument, it will emerge that the issue of holist versus separatist theories of confirmation plays a curious role in the realism–antirealism debate in the philosophy of mathematics. I will argue that if you take confirmation to be an holistic matter—it’s whole theories (or significant parts thereof) that are confirmed in any experiment—then there’s an inclination to opt for (ii) in order to resolve the marital tension outlined above.. (shrink)

W.V.O. Quine has famously objected that (1) properties are philosophically suspect because (2) there is no entity without identity and (3) the synonymy criterion for property identity won't do because there's no such concept as synonymy. (2) and (3) may or may not be right but do not prove (1). I reply that Leiniz's Law handles property identity, as it does for everything else, then respond to a variety of objections and confusions.

U članku se pokušava odrediti svjetonazorno polazište bioetike, posebno one »integrativne «. Prvo će biti istaknut značaj tzv. pogleda na svijet za obrazovanje filozofskih pozicija. Zatim se pokreće pitanje o svjetonazornoj pozadini bioetičkih pozicija, pri čemu se kao njihov zajednički nazivnik pokazuje »bioprotekcionizam« kao vrsta umjerenog biocentrizma. Naposljetku se preispituje osnova integrativne bioetike koja inače ima zadatak promišljati svjetonazorne pretpostavke bioetičkih učenja. U tu svrhu će se ponuditi dvije interpretacije koje će rezultirati ukazivanjem na perspektivizam odnosno pluriperspektivizam kao onaj pogled (...) na svijet koji do izražaja dolazi upravo u integrativnoj bioetici.Im Aufsatz wird der Versuch unternommen, den weltanschaulichen Ausgangspunkt der Bioethik zu ermitteln, vor allem der „integrativen Bioethik“. Zuallererst wird die Bedeutung der sog. Weltanschauungen für die Bildung der philosophischen Positionen hervorgehoben. Des Weiteren wird die Frage nach dem weltanschaulichen Hintergrund der bioethischen Positionen aufgeworfen, wobei sich „Bioprotektionismus“, eine gemäßigte Variante des Biozentrismus, als ihr gemeinsamer Nenner erweist. Schließlich wird die Grundlage der integrativen Bioethik überprüft, die ansonsten die Aufgabe hat, die weltanschaulichen Voraussetzungen der bioethischen Lehren zu reflektieren. Zu diesem Zweck werden zwei Interpretationen angeboten, die zum Perspektivismus bzw. Pluriperspektivismus hinführen, als jener Weltanschauung, welche gerade in der integrativen Bioethik zur Geltung kommt. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: ‘Logic and Divine Simplicity’. Philosophy Compass 6/4 : pp. 282–294, doi: Author’s IntroductionFirst‐order formalizations of classical theistic doctrines are increasingly used in contemporary work in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, as a means for clarifying the conceptual structure of the doctrines and their role in inferential procedures. But there are a variety of different ways in which such doctrines have been formalized, each representing the doctrines as having different conceptual structures. Moreover, the adequacy (...) of such formalizations as such has, at least with respect to some classes of doctrines, been disputed. One reason for disputing their adequacy derives from the conceptual impact of classical theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity.Author RecommendsFrege, Gottlob ‘Begriffsschrift: a formula language of pure thought,’ trans. Michael Beany, in The Frege Reader, ed. Beany. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 47–78. The preface contains interesting remarks about the purpose of formalization as understood by the chief pioneer of modern formal logic. These remarks are also connected by Frege to his views on the relation between thought and language more generally.Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, A.N. Principia Mathematica, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.The preface and first section of the long introduction contain remarks on the purpose and advantages of formalization. Chapter 1 of the introduction contains what is probably one of the first formalizations ever of a theistic doctrine, and is given in terms of a definite description analysis.Suppes, Patrick ‘The Desirability of Formalization in Science,’The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 20, pp. 651–64.Clear and concise discussion of some of the advantages of formalization in philosophical inquiry, written by a prominent contemporary American philosopher‐logician.Nieznański, Edward ‘The Beginnings of Formalization in Theology,’ in Advances in Scientific Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Paul Weingartner, eds. Gerhard Schurz and Gregory J.W. Dorn. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Ropodi, pp. 551–9.A valuable paper that narrates, among other things, the programme of formalizing theistic doctrines that emerged in Poland in the 1920s under the influence of the Lvov‐Warsaw School. Various examples of formalizations are also given.Quine, W.V.O. Mathematical Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.In Section 27 of this classic study, Quine offers a formalization of theistic doctrines which seeks to avoid the difficulties of earlier formalizations by means of a subtle extensional singleton set analysis. The proposal has not won many adherents, but is worthy of careful study nonetheless.Woleński, Jan ‘Theism, Fideism, Atheism, Agnosticism,’ in Logic, Ethics and All That Jazz: Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel, eds. Lars‐Göran Johansson, Jan Österberg, and Rysiek Sliwinski. Uppsala: Uppsala Philosophical Studies, pp. 387–400.A concise but lucid survey of some attempts to formalize theistic doctrines and some problems besetting these attempts. Woleński also proposes his own method of formalization, which could be described as a simplified version of Quine’s method in Mathematical Logic.Bocheński, Joseph The Logic of Religion. New York: New York University Press.The first book‐length treatment of the relation between modern logic and theism. It covers much ground, and remains very readable.Alston, William P. ‘Religious Language and Verificationism,’ in The Rationality of Theism, eds. Paul Moser and Paul Copan. London: Routledge, pp. 17–34.Identifies some problems with attempts at articulating theistic doctrines by means of subject‐predicate language. Highly relevant to formalizations of theistic doctrines, even though this topic is not dealt with explicitly.Kraal, Anders ‘Logic and Divine Simplicity,’Philosophy Compass.Offers a survey of three main methods of formalizing theistic doctrines, and of some variants of these methods. Argues that certain formalizations of theistic doctrines are bound to be rejected as conceptually inadequate by all who understand the doctrines at hand within the framework provided by the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity.Sample Syllabus Week I: The Idea of Formalization and the Project of Formalizing Theistic Doctrines Reading:Frege, Gottlob ‘Begriffsschrift: a formula language of pure thought,’ trans. Michael Beany, in The Frege Reader, ed. Beany. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 47–78. Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, A.N. Principia Mathematica, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suppes, Patrick ‘The Desirability of Formalization in Science,’The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 20, pp. 651–64.Nieznański, Edward ‘The Beginnings of Formalization in Theology,’ in Advances in Scientific Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Paul Weingartner, eds. Gerhard Schurz and Gregory J.W. Dorn. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Ropodi, pp. 551–9. Week II: Formalizing Theistic Doctrines: Three Alternative Methods Reading:Woleński, Jan ‘Theism, Fideism, Atheism, Agnosticism,’ in Logic, Ethics and All That Jazz: Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel, eds. Lars‐Göran Johansson, Jan Österberg, and Rysiek Sliwinski. Uppsala: Uppsala Philosophical Studies, pp. 387–400.Russell, Bertrand, and Whitehead, A.N. Principia Mathematica, Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W.V.O. Mathematical Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Week III: Arguments for and Against Some Formalizations of Theistic Doctrines Reading:Bocheński, Joseph The Logic of Religion. New York: New York University Press. Kraal, Anders ‘Logic and Divine Simplicity,’Philosophy Compass, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 282–94.Focus Questions1 What do Frege, Russell and Whitehead, and Suppes understand the purpose or purposes of logical formalization to be, and why do they think formalization can achieve these purposes?2 Woleński sketches some simple ways of formalizing theistic doctrines such as ‘God exists’ or ‘God is almighty’ in terms of 1‐place predicates which he subsequently abandons in favour of other methods. What reasons lead him to abandon these more simple methods of formalization?3 What are the advantages of the definite description formalization of theistic doctrines offered by Russell and Whitehead?4 Quine offers a subtle formalization of the theistic doctrine ‘God exists’ in terms of singleton sets. What problems are Quine’s formalization intended to accommodate, and how does it seek to accommodate them?5 Which relative merits or demerits are there in Bocheński’s and Kraal’s respective arguments for and against the adequacy of certain formalizations of theistic doctrines? (shrink)

A potential proselyte asks the great rabbi Hillel to explain the Torah to him while he stands ‘on one leg.’ Hillel responds with, essentially, the Golden Rule. This Talmudic anecdote is invariably read as critical of anyone who wants a Torah for Dummies. I offer a different interpretation. The Torah-based position, theologically speaking, rests on one principle and one principle alone, God. ‘How can an account of the creation as a whole rest on one principle only? Won’t such a structure (...) stand unsteadily, like a person on one leg?’ Hillel’s response to the request for a distillation of the Torah does home in on the Bible’s novelty. It homes in on what God does and what pagan deities cannot do. But God’s contribution, while needed to account for the human sector of the creation, cannot manage the extra-human sector. For that, a principle that belongs to paganism is required. The whole can stand steadily, as can the proselyte, only on two legs. So his conversation must be with reservations. He might not be able to intone the main creedal profession of the Torah-based religion, the Shema. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord [alone] is our God, the Lord is one’ (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Torah’s defenders have more of a case to make. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 282-287 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience. By Paul O. Ingram. New York: Continuum, 1997. 276 pp. Paul Ingram has set out a formidable task for himself. Even though he identifies himself as an historian of religion, he has chosen to push beyond phenomenological description of the (...) religious enterprise to make a prescriptive proposal, a theology that can illuminate and guide the great faith traditions. Simultaneously, his proposal aims at interpreting the necessity and the outlines of interreligious dialogue. Such dialogue, he argues, is not a peripheral enterprise reserved for a handful of religious exotics. It is central to understanding any and all religious traditions in the postmodern world.All religions have been discovered to reflect inescapable historical and cultural relativization. The old assumptions of unconditional claims and absolute assertions are no longer tenable. The world shared by all the religions today is characterized by an unavoidable religious pluralism. It is in this context that religious affirmations must be expressed and religious life embraced. According to Ingram, this is no accident. It is an ontological inevitability. As process philosophy and its roots in modern physics [End Page 282] --and, interestingly, the Buddhist recognition of dependent co-arising (pratitya samutpada)--understand, reality is unending process. This entails the inevitable relativization and contextualization of everything--including the religions. The theological questions that emerge are crucial ones. Among them: Is there an ultimate unity underlying this diversity, generic features common to all conditioned forms of religious faith and practice? What does religious pluralism show about the nature of the Sacred and of being human? Is any one religious Way best or is this even a question worth pursuing?Ingram proposes that the answers to these questions and the only viable response to religious pluralism can be found in interreligious dialogue. He does not even consider religious exclusivism as a viable option. This means only "inclusivist" and "pluralist" approaches are worthy of consideration, approaches that he names the "theology-of-religions model" and the "primordial model" respectively. Both recognize the problem of the relativity of belief and seek to overcome it. Both see the importance of interreligious dialogue as fundamental to religious affirmation. But Ingram rejects the theology-of-religions model because, despite its openness to other religions and its willingness to have interreligious encounter shape the affirmations and life of the believing community, it is self-encapsulated. One moves out from a particular community of faith, "passing over"--to use the language of John Dunne--into another religious Way in order to be creatively transformed, but only to return once again to the original community of faith. One stays within "the theological circle" (Tillich), one does not get beyond it. Some Christians, accordingly, make a blanket assertion about the ultimate and unsurpassable lordship of Christ despite their indebtedness to the creative transformation that interreligious dialogue can produce.Ingram clearly prefers the "primordial model" even though he recognizes that some of its classical proponents have made it vulnerable to criticism. Aldous Huxley's "perennial philosophy" and Sri Ramakrishan's assertion that "all paths lead to the summit" will not do. Huxley assumes that the mystical recognition of the ineffable common root of all religion critiques the historical and culturally relative expressions of this ultimate reality. But Huxley's attempt to make an end run around the problems involved won't work. His approach is ahistorical, makes uncritical assumptions about the nature of mysticism and religious experience, and is totally undialogical. The particularities of the differing religious Ways are dissolved in a universal solvent that is anything but self-evident. The same holds true for Ramakrishnan's subtly imperialistic (and very Hindu) model. It too has no room for religious particularity and imposes a pre-conceived common denominator on the multiplicity of religious phenomena.Ingram derives his term "primordial model" from Huston Smith's argument that a "primordial tradition" can be discerned underlying the multiplicity and variety of religious expressions. His is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:UNREAL REAL,JSM RAYMOND DENNEHY University of San Francisco San Francisco,, California Contextual Realism, a Meta-Physical Framework for Modern Science. By RICHARD H. SCHLAGEL. New York: :Raragon House, 1986. Pp. xxiv + 808. $22.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-913729-20-5. The Many Faces of Realism. By HILARY PuTNAM. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987. Pp. 98. $8.95 (paper). ISBN 0-81269043 -5. Varieties of Realism: A Rationale fo!f' the Natural Sciences. By RoM HARR.E. Oxford (...) and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Pp. vii + 375. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-631-12592-2. REN PASSMORE wrote his assessment of British moral philosophy, he lamented that the fifty years which :had elapsed since 1900 had produced nothing beitter than so many variations on utilitarianism. Equally, a lament seems in order over the ourrent state of epistemology. After so many years of grappling with the problem of v,aJidating epistemo1log~cail!l'eailism-consider, for example, the American scene during the first severail decades of this century: Roy Wood Sellars et al. announcing the "new realism '' and George Santayana et al. announcing,the "critical realism "one might have hoped for 1 an oiutcome more reassuring than Hie current £deistic realism. But if the fideism disappoints, its rationalizations fascinate. Take, for examp1e, the trio o.f books discussed herein. They undertake a common project: to forge a raitionaJ justification for realism. They shave other features, not so 1audatory, especiaUy :a merely fideis:tic ioommitment to what might best be deseribed as generic realism, which finally evaporaites into 631 RAYMOND DENNEHY idealism. The mo,sit thait the authors can muster on behalf of realism amounts: to no more than this: " Something (what, we don't know) must e.rist outside our minds heearuse we aict on that premise with considemhle success, not only in daily life hut in scientific prructice, aillld a~l the theories used to explruin it aDJd its successes form a logieally coherent whoJe." In other wo11ds, whait these "defenses'' of rerulism offer is a pragmatic representationalism, organized and ultimaitiely vindi!caited by the ideaJist criterion of coherence and der,iving overai11 inspiration from a blind faith in e~tmmental reality. The tip-off,fa,in the books' titles: Contextual Real-ism, The Many Fa(')es of Realism, and Varieties of Realism. How can you taJk about the "contexts," " v;arieties,'' and "many faces " of realism if__,espreiciaJJy by your own admiss:ion-you cannot identify 11eaJ,ity itself? The answer is found in fideism: you want to affirm extramentaJ reality, even though y;ou find it impossible to justify 1that affirmation,rationaHy. So, in a flush. of ega,1itarian fervur, you aooept au plausible claimants to the title of " reality "; and being unabJ:e to say that any one c~aim­ ant is more or ~ess 11eal than any other, you hope to bring matters to a happy conclusion by apperuling to "varieties," "con- :te:xJts," and "many faces" of rea1ity. Hut the imperatives of life and thought maroe,a harmoniza-,tion of ail1l these " realities'' inevitable if anything resembling tl'IUe and false assertions is to he sav;ed. If, for example, common sense tells us that the11e 1a11e,ice cubes and scienee teHs us that the11e are only indeterminate mass particles, we will want to know how these 1 asse11tions can both be true. Clearly, the V'enerahle correspondence criterion of truth won't do here, is:ince we are fruoed with two oompeting objects of correspondence. It thus becomes necessary to enlist :the aid of the pragmatic theory of tmth to deoide which of the " realities " wil,l be designated " xeal '' in a part:iou~ar set of circumstances. Anticipating PiUtnam's examp~e, we ma.y then say that ice cubes~ and pink ones aJt that__,are real when we wish to mix drinks and that iDJdeterminate mass particles,a~11e reail when we wish UNREAL REALISM 633 to produce a scientific ruoom.mt of the phenomenon caHed " ice cubes." Still,.antil(Jipating Schlagel, not even pragmatism carries us far enough because it depends on knowing which resuJtis are felicitous. We thus turn fo the cohe11ence theory of tmth as our final court of... (shrink)

The talk is mainly defensive. I won’t offer positive accounts of the “paradoxical” cases I will discuss (but, see “Extras”). I’ll begin with Harman’s defense of classical deductive logic against certain (epistemological) “relevantist” arguments.

Pindar's Eighth Olympian celebrates the victory of Alkimedon of Aigina in the boys' wrestling at Olympia in 460. This victory was the sixth won by a member of this family . The absence of detail about most of these victories suggests that the family had had little success in the great Panhellenic competitions and that the majority were won at minor festivals. However, one of the remaining five victories was certainly won in one of the four festivals which made up (...) the periodos. In lines 15–18, after preparatory generalizations about the diversity of paths to achievement, all with divine aid, Pindar describes the path of achievement, and the source of divine aid, which features in the victor's family: Tιμσθενες, μμε δ' κλρωσεν πτμος Zην γενεθλωι. ς σ μν Nεμαι πρπατον, 'Aλκιμδοντα δ πρ κρνου λ៹φωι θκεν 'Oλυμπινκαν. Timosthenes, in your case fate allotted you to Zeus as your family god, who made you pre-eminent at Nemea and Alkimedon Olympic victor by the Hill of Kronos. (shrink)

Platonism is the most pervasive philosophy of mathematics. Indeed, it can be argued that an inarticulate, half-conscious Platonism is nearly universal among mathematicians. The basic idea is that mathematical entities exist outside space and time, outside thought and matter, in an abstract realm. In the more eloquent words of Edward Everett, a distinguished nineteenth-century American scholar, "in pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist (...) there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven." In What is Mathematics, Really?, renowned mathematician Rueben Hersh takes these eloquent words and this pervasive philosophy to task, in a subversive attack on traditional philosophies of mathematics, most notably, Platonism and formalism. Virtually all philosophers of mathematics treat it as isolated, timeless, ahistorical, inhuman. Hersh argues the contrary, that mathematics must be understood as a human activity, a social phenomenon, part of human culture, historically evolved, and intelligible only in a social context. Mathematical objects are created by humans, not arbitrarily, but from activity with existing mathematical objects, and from the needs of science and daily life. Hersh pulls the screen back to reveal mathematics as seen by professionals, debunking many mathematical myths, and demonstrating how the "humanist" idea of the nature of mathematics more closely resembles how mathematicians actually work. At the heart of the book is a fascinating historical account of the mainstream of philosophy--ranging from Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, to Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, Rudolph Carnap, and Willard V.O. Quine--followed by the mavericks who saw mathematics as a human artifact, including Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Mill, Peirce, Dewey, and Lakatos. In his epilogue, Hersh reveals that this is no mere armchair debate, of little consequence to the outside world. He contends that Platonism and elitism fit well together, that Platonism in fact is used to justify the claim that "some people just can't learn math." The humanist philosophy, on the other hand, links mathematics with geople, with society, and with history. It fits with liberal anti-elitism and its historical striving for universal literacy, universal higher education, and universal access to knowledge and culture. Thus Hersh's argument has educational and political ramifications. Written by the co-author of The Mathematical Experience, which won the American Book Award in 1983, this volume reflects an insider's view of mathematical life, based on twenty years of doing research on advanced mathematical problems, thirty-five years of teaching graduates and undergraduates, and many long hours of listening, talking to, and reading philosophers. A clearly written and highly iconoclastic book, it is sure to be hotly debated by anyone with a passionate interest in mathematics or the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Imagine a gadget, call it “brain-ovision,” for brain scanning that doesn’t create pictures of brains at all. That’s right, no orbs spattered with colorful “activations” that need to be interpreted by neuroanatomists. Instead, with brain-o-vision, what a brain sees is what you get—an image of what that brain is experiencing. If the person who owns the brain is envisioning lunch, up pops a cheeseburger on the screen. If the person is reading a book, the screen shows the words. For that (...) matter, if the brain owner is feeling pain, perhaps brain-o-vision could reach out and swat the viewer with a rolled-up newspaper. Brain-ovision could give us access to another person’s consciousness. Technologies for brain-o-vision are beginning to seem possible. We are learning how brain activations map onto emotions, memories, and mental processes, and it won’t be long before we might translate activations into Google searches for images of what the brain is thinking. There is a specific brain area linked with face perception, for instance, and even a neuron that fires when it sees Jennifer Aniston. So why, in principle, shouldn’t we be able to scan a brain and discover when it is looking at her—and eventually even learn what she’s wearing? Of course, it may be many years to the beta version. But imagine that everything works out and brain-o-vision goes on sale at Wal- Mart. Could the device solve the problem of whether consciousness causes behavior? With direct evidence of a person’s consciousness, we could do science on the question. We could observe regularities in the relation between consciousness and behavior. If the consciousness always preceded the behavior, we could arrive at the inductive inference of causation and, as scientists, be quite happy that we had established a causal connection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:160 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY A PLATONIC PARALLEL IN THE DISSOI LOGOI The Dissoi Logoi or Two-/old Arguments (Diels-Kranz, II, 405-416) is an anonymous sophistic treatise written in literary Doric at some time subsequent to the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404-403.1 As early as 1911, A. E. Taylor wrote that the treatise "must be seriously reckoned with in any attempt to reconstruct the history of Greek thought in (...) the generation immediately anterior to Plato." 2 But scholars have been slow to take up Taylor's challenge. From those writing in English we have had little beyond the summary in Kathleen Freeman's Companion a and the papers of Adolfo Levi4 and E. S. Ramage." There is not even a full English translation in print, s In this paper I shall call attention to one brief passage which seems to me to be of exceptional interest since it offers a solution to a type of sophistical argument which occurs in Plato's Euthydemus. In so doing, I hope to arouse interest in a document much neglected by historians of ancient thought. Dzssoz Loaox, V, 15. With respect to the assertion that the same man both is and is not, I put the following question: "Does he exist with respect to some particular thing, or just in general?" Then if someone denies that the man exists, he is mistaken, because he is treating (the particular and) universal senses as the same. Because everything exists in some sense. GENI~I~AL REMAI~KS.The nature of the solution offered is clearly based on a distinction similar to that made by Aristotle in On Sophistical Re]utations (166b 37 ft.) between expressions used "in a certain respect" and "absolutely." The formulation of the fallacy to which the distinction is intended to be applied, however, is considerably less clear. Is it supposed that the opponent has put forward an argument purporting to demonstrate (a) that the same man both is and is not, or (b) that a particular man, thought to exist, does not in fact exist? This question can best be answered by an analysis of the Euthydemus passage, to which I now turn. EUTttYDgMUS 283b-e: The sophist Dionysodorus inquires of Socrates and his friends whether they genuinely wish their young prot4g6, Cleinias, to become wise. On gaining their assurance that they do, he then proceeds as follows: 1) You wish him to become wise and not to be ignorant (283d 1). 1This terminus post quem is derived from I, 8, in which the author lists a number of victories and speaks of that won by the Spartans over the Athenians as being "the most recent." "The 6,~ao~X6-tot,"Varia Socratica, Fizst Series (Oxford, 1911), p. 128. aCompanion to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, (Oxford, 1946),pp. 417-423. ""On 'Two-fold Statements,'" American Journal o/Philology, LXI (1940), 292-~06. 5"An Early Trace of Socratic Dialogue," American Journal of Philology, LXXXII (1961), 418-424. 6The present writer has cempleted a translation which is to be published in Mind in the near future. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 161 2) You wish him to become what he is not, and no longer to be what he is now (literally: what he is now, no longer to be [283d 2-3]). 3) You wish for his death, since you wish him no longer to be (283d 5-6). The obvious way of dealing with this argument is to make precisely the distinction made by the author of the Dissoi Logoi at V, 15: we should say to Dionysodorus, "Your conclusion that the friends of Cleinias wish for his death is the result of an illegitimate step: you went from 'you wish him not to be ignorant' to 'you wish him not to be'. To have made this step is to have ignored the distinction between existence with respect to some particular thing, i.e., ignorance, and existence in general." (A later critic might point out to Dionysodorus that he has confused the copulative and existential uses of the verb "to be.") It now becomes possible to return to the question, which of the two formulations, (a) or (b... (shrink)

Among the various methods of deceit, lying is often thought to be a special affront on the grounds that it invites the victim’s trust. Such an explanation is incomplete without an account of the moral significance of trust. This article distinguishes two morally problematic relations to trust, betrayals and abuses, and, appealing to the idea that we should be grateful to be trusted, attempts to explain these wrongs as violations of distinct demands of gratitude for trust. Only the wrong of (...) abuse, not betrayal, is useful for distinguishing methods of deceit. Although lying commits an abuse of trust, it turns out that it is really the broader category of deceit by means of communication that is special in this way. -/- . (shrink)

A necessary companion to the acclaimed Stone Reader, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments is a landmark collection for contemporary ethical thought. Since 2010, The Stone—the immensely popular, award-winning philosophy series in The New York Times—has revived and reinterpreted age-old inquires to speak to our modern condition. This new collection of essays from the series does for modern ethics what The Stone Reader did for modern philosophy. New York Times editor Peter Catapano and best-selling author and philosopher Simon Critchley have curated (...) an unparalleled collection that illuminates just how imperative ethical thinking is in our day-to-day life. Like its predecessor, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments explores long-standing ethical and moral issues in light of our most urgent dilemmas. Divided into twelve sections, the book opens with a series of broad arguments on existence, human nature and morality. Indeed, “big” questions of the human condition are explored by some of our best-known and most accomplished living philosophers: What is the meaning of our existence? Should we really “do what we love”? How should we respond to evil? Is pure altruism possible? Along with these examinations of timeless moral conundrums, readers will find arguments in the more contentious areas of religion and government: Can we have a moral life without God? Does it really matter if God exists? Is patriotism moral? Accessible and provocative, these pieces expose the persistence of the most basic themes and questions of moral and ethical life. Many of the essays stress the crucial importance of directly engaging the most pressing moral dilemmas in modern life. Should we be the last generation, knowing all the harm we’ve done to our planet? Should we embrace our inner carnivores, or swear off all animal products? From gun control and drone warfare to the morals of marriage and reproduction, readers will view familiar debates in new, surprising lights. The editors have meticulously arranged this book to reflect a wide range of perspectives, voices and rhetorical strategies. By directly addressing some of the most complex and troubling issues we face today—racial discrimination, economic inequality, immigration, citizenship and more—the volume reveals the profound power of ethics in shaping our perceptions of nearly every aspect of our lives. A jargon-free, insightful compendium, Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments offers a panoramic view of morality and is a critical addition to The Stone Reader that will energize and enliven the world of ethical thought in both the classroom and everyday American life. Including… The Meaningfulness of Lives by Todd May * A Life Beyond “Do What You Love” by Gordon Marino * Evolution and our Inner Conflict by Edward O. Wilson * Morals Without God? by Frans de Waal * Does It Matter Whether God Exists? by Gary Gutting * The Moral Hazard of Drones by John Kaag and Sarah Kreps * Can Refugees Have Human Rights? by Omri Boehm * Dear White America by George Yancy * Girlfriend, Mother, Professor? by Carol Hay * The End of “Marriage” by Laurie Shrage * When Vegans Won’t Compromise by Bob Fischer and James McWilliams * Should This Be the Last Generation? by Peter Singer. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with the question of what kind of economic system would be needed in order to realize Rawls’s principles of social justice. Hitherto, debates about ‘property-owning democracy’ and ‘liberal socialism’ have been overly schematic, in various respects, and have therefore missed some of the most important issues regarding the relationships between social justice and economic institutions and systems. What is at stake between broadly capitalist or socialist economic systems is not in fact a simple choice in a (...) single dimension, but rather a range of choices across a range of different dimensions. This essay, then, has a dual objective: first, it aims to provide a richer account of this normative territory, while showing how issues of economic democracy, decommodification and the limits of markets, and the role of democratic economic planning, all raise questions of justice that are not well captured by focusing only on questions of ownership. Second, it aims to show how the case for democratic socialism can be developed from Rawlsian foundations, in a way that is sensitive to the normative affinities between Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism and democratic socialism, and which attends carefully to the different kinds of institutional elements which a stable, just, and democratic society would require. Taking these aims together, the hope is that we can move onward to a richer debate about the ways in which the realization of democratic socialist institutions may be seen as a requirement of social justice. (shrink)

Communication is complicated, and so is the ethics of communication. We communicate about innumerable topics, to varied audiences, using a gamut of technologies. The ethics of communication, therefore, has to address a wide range of technical, ethical and epistemic requirements. In this book, Onora O'Neill shows how digital technologies have made communication more demanding: they can support communication with huge numbers of distant and dispersed recipients; they can amplify or suppress selected content; and they can target or ignore selected audiences. (...) Often this is done anonymously, making it harder for readers and listeners, viewers and browsers, to assess which claims are true or false, reliable or misleading, flaky or fake. So how can we empower users to assess and evaluate digital communication, so that they can tell which standards it meets and which it flouts? That is the challenge which this book explores. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Momma taught us to keep a clean house. Dust the wood furniture every two weeks. Clean the bathrooms once a week. Wipe down the baseboards once a season (Those damn baseboards. I still got bruises on my knees from scrubbing those things). Sweep away the cobwebs—and pray that those spiders are either dead or delirious (Livin in the country don’t mean you like bugs, especially the ones with too many legs ). Didn’t matter that the house was full of stuff: Great-Grandma’s heirloom dresser, that weird Mammy salt shaker and matching Uncle Tom pepper grinder (Where the hell did Momma get those P.O.S.’s?), the outdated drapes from Belks, Dad’s favorite wooden TV tray, and that uuuuugly love seat that some crazy uncle thought was a glorious find from the Salvation Army (Momma tried to make it pretty with some pillows, but no amount of love could help that seat). Spring Cleaning meant pullin all that furniture away from the walls and holdin your breath to see what time collected in the crevices. Then you gotta be careful not to breathe out too heavy cause the dust would go flying fore you got a chance to catch it. If you didn’t, you’d quickly find out if you’re allergic to dust. Quarter cup of lemon Lysol in a bucket of steaming water and an old wash rag. Maybe two. A dust towel and citrus-scent Pledge. Me and my brothers would fight over who cleaned what. Somehow the twins always got the easy stuff: vacuuming or moving dirt around with the feather-duster. Finishing in enough time to fly down the street on their bikes with the neighborhood kids. Older sister never got off that easy. Each of my stubby fingers morphed into plump, lemon-fresh golden raisins by the time that whole damn house was done. I would finish just in time to sit with Nadine on the porch, counting the seconds til the sun turned off and the fireflies fluttered on. The craziest thing: despite all that cleaning, the house still smelled like Momma’s cookin. That Old House. Might have been some of Grandma’s and Great-Grandma’s cookin mixed in there too. Pork chops. Ham hock soaked in collards. Pinto beans and mustard greens. Corn bread and my Auntie’s famous macaroni and cheese. Didn’t matter if the oven was cold and the valve of the gas stove had been shut for days. A stranger woulda thought someone’d been slavin away in that kitchen for a week straight. No Sweet Citrus & Zest Fabreze back then. Lysol would mask the odors for a little while. Not long enough to overpower the 50 years of goodness marinated in buttermilk, kneaded with lard, and fried in Crisco that’d been embedded in the wallpaper and window treatments. All that grime—dead skin, hair follicles, Carolina clay, carpet lint, yippee-little-dog fur—was evidence of life. We were a socially-awkward newly-minted teenager, two rowdy twin boys, a multi-tasking mother, and a road-warrior father. Eventually a strangely-feline Yorkie was added to the mix. And don’t forget about the stray distant relative stopping by unannounced. No corner of that damn house was unmarked. Hand-sewn pillows in the living room that we were forbidden to breathe on somehow had tiny burnt orange paw prints on them (sneaky little dog). It drove Momma crazy. And tore up my fingernails. They still won’t grow back right. Wipe all that shit off just for it to build up again. But that house was inherited and fully paid for. No reason to move. I did move. I was ready to move on. Move up. Move out. Over that small town. Into the big city. Here the streets take on the smells of Momma’s house. Plus piss, shit, and unbathed skin. A hot day means everything cooks and stews in its own juices, making the stench 10x more intense. The apartment is another story. 11 floors up. Big, east-facing windows. Great view of the skyline dotted with some green foliage. And the great lake. Immaculate. Odorless. Not even a trace of tobacco from the previous tenant’s bad habits. No lingering scent of lemon Lysol. No street stench seeping through the window panes. No stray cat hairs. Or dog fur. Not a speck of dust. Futon. Throw pillows. Photos. Knickknacks. Bowls of fresh citrus. Cursedly-assembled desk set from IKEA. Yet the void is too big to fill. Too clean. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:322 BOOK REVIEWS the Holy Office, who in the early 1800s recognized that empirical demonstrations of the earth's motion had finally been given and convinced Pope Pius VII to revoke the longstanding decree against Copernicanism. Unfortunately his greatest opponent turned out to be another Dominican, Father Filippo Anfossi, Master of the Sacred Palace at the time, who had views similar to those voiced by Cardinal Bellarmine in 1615 (pp. (...) 473-475). The story is told in great detail by Walter Brandmiiller and Johannes Griepl, Copemico, Galilei e la Chiesa: Fine delta controversia (1820), gli atti del Sant'Uffizio, Vatican City 1992-summarized in my notice in The Catholic Historical Review 80 (1994): 380-83. It is ironic, of course, that the battle was fought out by two Thomists, the one a progressive and the other a traditionalist, but it is indeed fortunate that it was the progressive Thomist who won out in the end. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. WILLIAM A. WALLACE, O.P. Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism and Just War Theory. By LISA SOWLE CAHILL. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 252. $17.00 (paper). Lisa Cahill's Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism and Just War Theory provides an excellent introduction to questions of peace-making and war-making in the history of Western Christianity. Cahill canvasses the standard sources for her history: the generally pacifist period of the New Testament and the early church (chapters two and three); the emergence of the just war tradition with Augustine and Aquinas (chapters four and five); just war, crusade, and pacifist responses during the Reformation period (chapters six through eight); and just war and pacifist responses in the twentieth -century American debate (chapters nine and ten). Love Your Enemies is relatively comprehensive, even-handed, and well-written. Beyond its general competence, Love Your Enemies provides rich theological fare, situating questions on war and peace in the context of Christian discipleship as a whole. One result of using discipleship as the organizing motif is that pacifism gets an unusually sympathetic and fair hearing. Cahill serves as an excellent reporter on these contentious questions. While often intimating her sympathies, she consistently avoids taking decisive positions or closing avenues of exploration. The title of her final chapter -the "Fragility of the Gospel"-reflects this approach. In this chapter Cahill emphasizes that Christian communities must continuously challenge themselves and their society to live out the gospel of peace (239-44). BOOK REVIEWS 323 What does it mean to live as a follower of Jesus today (ix)? This is Cahill's central question. To this end she asks two further questions. First, what is the way of discipleship established by Jesus with regard to doing violence? Second, to what extent can Christians hope to apply this ethic of discipleship to the wider civil society (40)? These questions arise in a variety of forms throughout the book. For instance, Cahill elegantly shows how a Christian's eschatological commitments (i.e., beliefs about the extent to which God's peaceful rule can be established by a community of believers and/or the extent to which this can be realized in "the world") can affect her response to the possibility of doing violence. While setting as one's task the attempt to find a way to combine Christian discipleship with public responsibility has many strengths, it is not without possible pitfalls. Typically, "Christian responsibility" is contrasted with "the evangelical imperative of non-violence" (see 55-56). But this notion of "responsibility" often begs the central question-i.e., for the Christian, can the most "responsible" stance be anything but what Cahill proclaims to be the evangelical stance of non-violence? While Cahill does acknowledge the strength of the argument by advocates of "responsibility" (i.e., those ~ho set up the non-violent stance in opposition to the faithful following of Jesus), she does not explicitly endorse their move. From her self-professed Catholic context, Cahill strives fo harmonize a neo-Thomist understanding of natural law-that there is "an objective moral order, knowable by reason, that yields universal moral laws by which all human persons and communities should abide" (3)-with a more particularistic... (shrink)

Any theory of experience which postulates that brain mechanisms generate "raw feel" encounters the impassable "explanatory gap" separating physics from phenomenology.

G. A. Cohen has argued that there is a surprising truth in conservatism—namely, that there is a reason for some valuable things to be preserved, even if they could be replaced with other, more valuable things. This conservative thesis is motivated, Cohen suggests, by our judgments about a range of hypothetical cases. After reconstructing Cohen's conservative thesis, I argue that the relevant judgments about these cases do not favor the conservative thesis over standard, nonconservative axiological views. But I then argue (...) that there is a Mirrored Histories case that is such that, if one shares Cohen's conservative attitude, judgments about this case favor Cohen's conservative thesis over a wide range of non-conservative axiological views. Reflection on this case also suggests a different explanation of apparently conservative judgments that merits consideration in its own right. (shrink)

Qualia have proved difficult to integrate into a broadly physicalistic worldview. In this paper, I argue that despite popular wisdom in the philosophy of mind, qualia’s intrinsicality is not sufficient for their non-reducibility. Second, I diagnose why philosophers mistakenly focused on intrinsicality. I then proceed to argue that qualia are categorical and end with some reflections on how the conceptual territory looks when we keep our focus on categoricity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN RES SIGNIFICATA AND MODUS SIGNIFICANDI IN AQIDNAS'S THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY GREGORY RoccA, O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, California ST. THOMAS AQUINAS often refers to the distinction between res significata and modus significandi. He asserls that, whie the :absolute and analogical predicates of positive theology may be pveditcated of God with regard to their RS,1 they mrust,be denied of God with regard to their MS.2 (...) The distinotion, then, is an imporlant element in his 1 For brevity's sake I will refer to res significata, by RS and to modus significand.i by MS; I will also speak of the res/modus distinction. The following abbreviations for Aquinas's works will be used: BDH=Flropositio in librum Boethii De hebdomadibus (Marietti ed., 1954); DA=the disputed question De anima (ed. J. H. Robb [Toronto: PIMS, 1968]) ; DDN=Flropositi super librum Dionysii De divinis nominibus (Marietti ed., 1950); DP=De potentia (Marietti ed., 1949); DSS=De substantiis separatis (Leonine Commission, vol. 40, 1969); DV=De veritate (Leonine Co=ission, vol. 22, 197276 ); Herm.=Sententia libri Peri hermeneias (Marietti ed., 1955); John= Leotura super Johannem (Marietti ed., 1952); Meta.=Sententia libri Metaphysioorum (Marietti ed., 1950); Phys.=Sententia libri Physioorum (Marietti ed., 1965) ; Quod. = Quaestiones quodlibetales (Marietti ed., 1956) ; BOG= Summa contra gentiles (Marietti ed., vols. 2-3, 1961) ; SDO=Eropositio super librum De causis (Marietti ed., 1955) ; SS=Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (Paris: Lethielleuro, 1929, 1933, 1947); ST=Summa theologiae (Alba/ Rome: Editiones Paulinae, 1962). The English translations are my own. For Thomas's positive theology of the divine names, see Gregory Rocca, "Analogy as Judgment and Faith in God's Incomprehensibility: A Study in the Theological Epistemology of Thomas Aquinas" (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1989) 540-615. 2 A characteristic text: "In every name predicated by us [of God], imperfection is found with respect to the name's mode of signifying [MS], 173 174 GREGORY ROCCA, O.P. theological epistemology and onomatofogy.3 For some, however, the distinction wou1d ultimately lead us back to the univocist camp of Duns Scotus,4 for they see it as hiding within itself 1 a latent core of univocity. One writes that the predication involved in 1anafogy of attribution is both univocal and equivocail: " It is univocal, insofar as it ai1ways denotes the siame proprietas rei; it is equivoca,J since, through a differrent modus significandi, it •connotes ' a different existentiail mode of the denoted proprieta.'J." 5 Another writes, in simil.ar fashion, that "the :same property is signifi·ed, hut the way in which the property inheres in the subject is different." a Another contends tha;t the idis:tinJCtion between RS and MS is a" bogus distinction between what words realily mean and what they mean to us." 7 If the res/niodus distinction is an imwhich does not belong to God, though the thing signified [RS'] is suitable to God in some eminent manner " (SOG l.30.277) ; the same sentiment is found in many other texts such as SS L35.LL ad2 and ST l.13.3. Thomas often explains the saying of Pseudo-Dionysius, that negations about God are true while affirmations are vague, by claiming that affirmations are true as regards their RS but not as regards their MS (SS l.22.l.2. adl; l.4.2.l. ad2; SOG l.30.277; DP 7.5 ad2; ST l.13.12. adl; SDO 6.161). a Hampus Lyttkens, however, thinks the distinction plays no essential role in Thomas's theory of the divine names (" Die Bedeutung der Gottesprltdikate bei Thomas von Aquin," N eue Zeitschrift fur systematisahe Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 6 [1964] 277-80). Klaus Muller claims the application of the res/modus distinction to the divine names " says really nothing at all" (Thomas van Aquins Theorie und Praxis der Analogie. Der Streit um das rechte Vorurteil und die Ana,lyse einer aufsohlussreichen Diskrepanz in der "Summa theologiae ", Regensburger Studien zur Theologie 29 [Frankfurt am Main/Bern/NY: Peter Lang, 1983] 100). 4 See Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, HJ77) 78-80. s Jan Pinborg, Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter: liJin uberblick, Afterword by... (shrink)

Heidegger's thinking in the decades following the publication of Being and Time is often deemed irreconcilable with that work. Critics contrast the notion of "resoluteness" in Being and Time with Heidegger's post-war account of "releasement" in an attempt to establish a discrepancy between the allegedly voluntarist humanism of his early work and the supposedly 'anti-humanist' thinking of his later work. By contrast, Mahon O'Brien argues for the structural and thematic coherence of Heidegger's movement from authenticity to the search for an (...) authentic free relation to the world - as captured by the term "releasement". By demonstrating the structural and thematic unity of Heidegger's thought in its entirety, O'Brien paves the way for a more measured and philosophically grounded understanding of the issues at stake in the Heidegger controversy. (shrink)

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

After nearly fifty years of mea culpas and explanatory additions, the biopsychosocial model is no closer to a life of its own. Bolton and Gillett give it a strong philosophical boost in The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease, but they overlook the model’s deeply inconsistent position on dualism. Moreover, because metaphysical confusion has clinical ramifications in medicine, their solution sidesteps the model’s most pressing clinical faults. But the news is not all bad. We can maintain the merits of holism (...) as we let go of the inchoate bag of platitudes that is the biopsychosocial model. We can accept holism as the metaphysical open door that it is, just a willingness to recognize the reality of human experience, and the sense in which that reality forces medicine to address biological, psychological, and social aspects of health. This allows us to finally characterize Engel’s driving idea in accurate philosophical terms, as acceptance of consciousness in the context of medical science. This will not entirely pin down medicine’s stance on dualism, but it will position it clearly enough to readily improve patient care. (shrink)

The grammarian Caesellius Vindex, writing under Trajan, criticized Furius Antias for his newly coined verbs lutescere, noctescere, opulescere and vīrescere. Their meanings in classical Latin are classified by Nicolaie as follows: becoming, the intensification of a quality, the acquisition of a quality. Their number increases in post-classical Latin, in which we also find them used causatively as transitive verbs, e.g. innotescere ‘make known’; Gellius' causative use of inolesco is mentioned below. Incohative verbs descend to Romance languages, where forms in -o (...) and in -sco both contribute to some conjugations, e.g. Fr. finir, finissant; It. finire, finisco, and to English. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Environmental PhilosophyJ. Baird Callicott (bio)The old guy in The Graduate had just one word for Dustin Hoffman's character, Ben: "plastics." This old guy has three words for the future pursuit of environmental philosophers, young and old: global climate change (GCC).GCC is emerging as the central environmental concern of the 21st century. Back in the 20th century, E. O. Wilson's mantra was (I paraphrase) 'abrupt mass anthropogenic (...) species extinction is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us.' In view of the multifaceted catastrophe graphically depicted in the recent acclaimed film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), Wilson's dictum seems quaint. Rather, a world whose very geography will be anthropogenically altered by risen sea levels, whose weather will be increasingly violent and erratic, whose seas will be stagnant and acidified by carbonic acid, etc., etc., is the crime for which posterity is least likely to forgive us—if there is any posterity to make a judgment.According to Al Gore in AIT anthropogenic GCC is a "moral" and "ethical" issue. But he doesn't elaborate. And at the end of the film he provides a lame list of things you and you and you and you—all of us individually AND voluntarily—can do to mitigate GCC, such as swap out halogen light bulbs for compact florescent ones and drive a hybrid car. Think "tragedy of the commons" for the efficacy of that approach to an adequate ethical response to the challenge of GCC.Gore's naivete apart, environmental ethics (EE) as we know it is singularly ill-prepared for dealing with GCC. The problem is one of scale, temporal as well as spatial. Spatially, EE concern was focused on the scale of biotic communities, ecosystems, and landscapes. And the relevant science was ecology. Temporally, the scale was also ecological: It might take Prince William Sound half a century, perhaps even a whole century, to fully recover from the Exxon Valdez spill. In temperate climates, after a clearcut a mature forest might spring up in a century and, through ecological succession, if left alone it will return to old growth in 300 years. Back in the 20th century that seemed like a long time, and we lamented that the ecological temporal scale and the economic temporal scale of [End Page 119] industries like the timber business and the oil business were out of phase, the former measured in decades the latter in quarters. But now, elderly environmental philosophers like me will personally witness little more than the initial environmental consequences of GCC—the occasional Katrina, the occasional hottest year on record, the disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park. We won't live to see (I hope) the cessation of the Gulf Stream or sea-levels rise more than a few centimeters. And the rectification of these consequences will be completed, if they ever are, only after thousands of years have elapsed.How then do we scale EE up to meet the moral challenge of GCC? Spatially we have a huge leap to make from the landscape scale to the biospheric scale. We have to become conversant with a new set of sciences; the relevant sciences are not ecology and conservation biology, but biogeochemistry and earth-systems science.Is a GCC EE even possible? Maybe ethics has temporal-scale limits? We used to marvel at the long view of the Iroquois who considered the consequences of present policies out seven generations. Wow! At 25 years per generation that is all of 250 years (adding on the 75-year life-span of the 7th generation). Can we have ethical concern for the 37th generation, a thousand years out? Or the 121st generation 3000 years out?J. Baird Callicott J. Baird Callicott is Regents Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies in the Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of North Texas. From 1997–2000 he served the International Society for Environmental Ethics as president. He is author, editor, or co-editor of a score of books and more than a hundred journal articles and book chapters. Callicott's research proceeds on six major fronts: theoretical environmental ethics, land ethics, the philosophy of... (shrink)