In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's ...

B erkeley wrote of ‘the absolute existence of unthinking things’ as being, ‘words which are without meaning and including a contradiction’. There are few philosophers today who do not regard Berkeley as having been mistaken in this view, in that it is regarded as clearly not meaningless to suppose that there might be many objects about which no one happens to be thinking. Nor is it the aim of this paper entirely to resurrect such a view, though it is (...) my purpose to try to show the subtlety of the logical and ontological issues involved in the problem of independent things. (shrink)

The article investigates Meillassoux’s notion of the absolute in relationship with the Kantian and Hegelian philosophical systems. The absolute, as independent of subjective consciousness, is showcased as the meeting point of speculation and fiction. By looking into Meillassoux’s notions of speculation and some works of weird fiction, it is argued that the significant role of imagination as well as a deferred temporality is what facilitates the discussion of both speculation and fiction as faculties able to transcend the limitations (...) that are projected by the correlationist mind. Through a reading of Lovecraftian fiction, both the strong and weak points of Meillassoux’s argumentation in After Finitude and Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction are identified, proving the latter to be a less successful way of grasping the chaotic real. (shrink)

Our paper addresses eight main and traditional issues of Philosophy: the issue of speculative logic; the issue of the fundamental premises of existence and thinking — which engages on the path of absolute ontological reduction; the issue of absolute Nothingness revealed as the ultimate result of the previous reduction; the issue of the realness and effectiveness of Nothingness; the issue of ontological Difference; the issue of the consistency and apodicticity of metaphysics; the issue of the nature of the (...) Absolute; and the issue of the Ontological Argument. The results that we gained at the end of our work show that the ontological Ground is the Absolute and that the Absolute is the transcendent instance of immediate identity of irreducible opposites. This instance is consistent with the traditional claims of philosophical and theological metaphysics and it supports the Ontological Argument through the overcoming of the formal logic principles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Absolute and Ordained Power of God in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century TheologyFrancis Oakley[W]e must cautiously abandon [that more specious opinion of the Platonist and Stoick]... in this, that it... blasphemously invades the cardinal Prerogative of Divinity, Omnipotence, by denying him a reserved power, of infringing, or altering any one of those Laws which [He] Himself ordained, and enacted, and chaining up his armes in the adamantine fetters of (...) Destiny.Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature : A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London, 1652)Of the various attributes characteristically ascribed to God in the Christian tradition—goodness, wisdom, omniscience, omnipotence, and the like—it is omnipotence which of recent years has most persistently been the object of focused attention among philosophers and historians alike. That that should be the case with philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition is not altogether surprising. While it is doubtless a development few would have predicted half a century ago, the years since then have seen something of a recrudescence of interest in a legislative or divine-command ethic. 1 Had that [End Page 437] not itself conspired to make omnipotence an obvious focus of philosophic attention, the deepening contemporaneous preoccupation with modal logic or the logic of possibility would surely have succeeded in so doing. Understood classically as affirming of God the ability to do all things and connoting a virtual capacity for action (as opposed to a power exercised in actuality), omnipotence has proven to be something of a troublesome notion, inviting unrestrained speculation about hypothetical divine action and generating a veritable cat’s cradle of philosophical conundrums concerning the relationship of God’s power to his will, wisdom, goodness, and justice.Medieval theologians and philosophers alike were forced to grapple with these taxing problems, 2 and philosophers of our own era have found them no less directly pertinent to their own logical and ethical concerns. 3 In 1955 Mackie inaugurated what was destined to become an ongoing discussion of omnipotence in the philosophical journals, 4 and such philosophers as Kenny and Keane, Cowan and Wolfe, Dummett, Plantinga, Swinburne, and Geach have been drawn into the fray. Since then, as a result, the pages of Mind, Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and even The Listener have been punctuated by their efforts to grapple with those venerable questions concerning the divine power that had exercised St. Peter Damiani in the mid-eleventh century, brought Abelard to grief a half-century later, and subsequently led Peter Lombard to devote to them a crucial and influential section of his Sentences—whether God of his omnipotence could undo the past, whether he could have made things other than he had, or created a world better than he did, and so on. 5 [End Page 438]While no medievalist can be expected to be anything but gratified by this unexpected testimony to the enduring significance and power of medieval scholastic concerns, those of us interested especially in the intellectual developments of the later-medieval centuries have particular reason to be energized by it. The years since Mackie launched this contemporary philosophical debate have also seen an intensification of interest on the part of historians in the ways in which, during these particular centuries, medieval thinkers themselves came to terms with the implications of the divine omnipotence and dealt with the theological and philosophical puzzles characteristically generated by that notion. Unlike the philosophers, whose concerns have been somewhat more broad-ranging, the historians have focused in particular on a quintessentially scholastic distinction that was developed, it has been said, “as a ‘yes and no’ answer to the question whether God is able to do or arrange things other than he did in creating the orders of nature and grace.” 6 The distinction in question is that between God’s power understood as absolute and as ordained (potentia dei absoluta et ordinata), which the theologians and philosophers of the period deployed as part of their great effort of accommodation between Greek philosophical and biblical notions of the divine, and the historical significance of which the scholarship of the past forty years has served increasingly to vindicate. 7 But while that distinction has been... (shrink)

In Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López reassembles Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on a Hegelian basis, as a conceptual-historical totality, both defending him and proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique that raises problems for Marxian philosophy as a whole.

Background Changes in policies and practices related to repeat cesareans and home birth in the U.S. have been influenced by different interpretations of the risk of poor outcomes. Methods This article examines two cases—vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) and home birth to illustrate how an emphasis on relative over absolute risk has been used to characterize outcomes associated with these practices. The case studies will rely on reviews of the research literature and examination of data on birth trends and (...) outcomes. Results Childbirth involves some unique challenges in assessing health risks, specifically the issues of: (1) timing of risks (lowering health risk in a current birth can increase it in subsequent births); (2) the potential weighing of risks to the mother’s versus the infant’s health; (3) the fact that birth is a condition of health and many of the feared outcomes (for example, symptomatic uterine rupture) involve very low absolute risk of occurrence; and (4) a malpractice environment that seizes upon those rare poor outcomes in highly publicized lawsuits that receive widespread attention in the clinical community. In the cases of VBAC and home birth, the result has been considerable emphasis on relative risks, typically an adjusted odds ratio, with little consideration of absolute risks. Conclusion Assessments of the safety of interventions in childbirth should involve careful consideration and communication of the multiple dimensions of risk, particularly a balancing of relative and absolute risks of poor health outcomes. (shrink)

"An astutely argued and elegantly written (and translated) book on the philosophical genealogy and logical implications of the work of Jacques Lacan."Choice.

This article consists of three parts: the first part presents a synthetic outline of intellectual tendencies in post-Renaissance thought (hermeticism, alchemy, kabbalistics), which generated the iconic turn (emblematics, iconology). Its essence boils down to the integral relationship of the motto (lemma), the engraving (imago), and the poetic text (subscription). The second part is a more detailed analysis of one of the illustrations contained in the first volume of the German edition of Jacob Böhme’s works from 1682 (Amsterdam). The epoch, aesthetic (...) tastes prevailing at that time and the Theosophical content of the work allow us to read this illustration from the point of view of iconology. The third part is devoted to two issues. First, one of the central themes in German idealism was the discussion around the notion of the absolute: whether the absolute can be grasped in concepts (Hegel) or in internal intuition (Schelling). Romanticism was dominated by a tendency to a subjective and speculative approach to the absolute. The philosophy and art of Romanticism was modeled on, among others, medieval German mysticism and Böhme’s theosophy, seeking in these sources the best representation of what is unrepresentable, i.e., the absolute. Secondly, philosophical and artistic Romanticism developed a new type of imagery–language images. The dilemma that resulted from the discussion in German idealism–the notion or inner vision, from the modern point of view, should be solved by a compromise: word and image. (shrink)

This volume explains how Star Trek allows viewers to comprehend significant aspects of Georg Hegel's concept the absolute, the driving force behind history. Gonzalez, with wit and wisdom, explains how Star Trek exhibits central elements of the absolute. He describes how themes and ethos central to the show display the concept beautifully. For instance, the show posits that people must possess the correct attitudes in order to bring about an ideal society: a commitment to social justice; an unyielding (...) commitment to the truth; and a similar commitment to scientific, intellectual discovery. These characteristics serve as perfect embodiments of Hegel's conceptualization, and Gonzalez's analysis is sharp and exacting. George A. Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, USA. He specializes in the fields of political theory, popular culture, and environmental politics and policy. In the areas of popular culture and political theory he has published two articles in the journal Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, as well as the book The Politics of Star Trek: Justice, War, and the Future. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine Heidegger’s critique of Hegel and to determine whether it is justified. Heidegger claims that Hegel tries to reduce everything to a single absolute entity, to the absolute knowing subject. The result is the identification of being and nothing, as Hegel formulates it at the beginning of his Logic. Hegel identifies being with nothing because being has no references, no predicates, no properties. Heidegger agrees with Hegel that being and nothing are (...) the same, but in completely different respects. They are the same because only entity actually exists, i.e. as an existent being. But Being itself does not exist, and should be conceived in an utterly different way from entity. And since Being cannot “be” it is a non-entity and therefore nothing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:God, the Absolute Wise Man, and the Study of ReligionClemens CavallinThe Absolute Wise ManIn the beginning of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], Thomas Aquinas remarks that, according to the Philosopher (that is, Aristotle), the wise man orders "things rightly and governs them well."1 To do this, the wise man needs to pay attention to the proper goal of his activity, that is, the good toward which he (...) is to order things. This means that there can be wise politicians, carpenters, and philologists; but Aquinas has primarily in mind "the absolute wise man" (simpliciter sapiens), who queries both the origin of the universe and its end: God.Moreover, not only does the absolute wise man contemplate the nature of God, the ultimate source and truth of the universe, but as even the highest theoretical wisdom (in the Aristotelean sense of sophia) has a practical, ordering dimension, it is also proper for such a person to teach truth and oppose falsehood—in other words, to be a teacher.2Toward the end of the first chapter of SCG, "The Office of the Wise [End Page 1207] Man," Aquinas returns to his introductory quote from Proverbs 8:7: "My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate impiety." Aquinas interprets impiety (impietas) as "falsehood against the divine truth," and its opposite, piety (pietas), he writes, is another word for religion.3 The absolute wise person is, therefore, in the business of ordering religion toward its proper goal, God as the origin and end of the universe. As a result, besides the mistaken views of heretics, the Christian wise man, according to Aquinas, has to oppose the errors of Jews, gentiles, and Muslims, that is, all non-Christian religions. In refuting the latter two, he has to use natural reason, as they accept neither the Old nor the New Testament.4 And this philosophical task is the fundamental errand of SCG.Moreover, the quest for and ordering of knowledge in relation to ultimate wisdom brings with it a joyous union of "man to God in friendship," as God, the creator, made everything in wisdom, as ordered to himself, the Supreme Being and Truth.5 To pursue wisdom thus divinizes man.However, my goal in this article is not primarily to deepen our understanding of the Thomist spirituality of higher wisdom, but to probe the possibility of a Catholic "religious studies" endeavor inspired by Aquinas's approach in SCG I. My main question is, therefore, whether the office of the wise man is compatible with (or at least complementary to) the idea and practice of religious studies. Or if a Catholic approach to religious studies must do without absolute wisdom and settle for a lower-level goal such as ordering the relations between the diverse religious traditions of global society with the goal of harmonious coexistence? In that case, the spirituality of the scholar turns from divinization to humanization, but in what way would such studies be Catholic?A Catholic "religious studies" is here understood as different from theology of religions, and more generally from dogmatic theology.6 Theology of religions is concerned with questions such as the possible salvific role of non-Christian religions, with how to understand the principle of extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("no salvation outside the Church") and [End Page 1208] the trichotomy of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.7 The main concern of religious studies is not such evaluations, but rather the details of the history of religions and the contemporary diversity and changes of religion and spirituality. The theoretical thrust of religious studies aims at understanding the natural inclination for religion and its manifold manifestations (beliefs, rituals, and myths). It is also distinct from natural theology (for example as found in SCG), as the latter deals with the possibility and scope of rational knowledge of the divine.Moreover, religious studies as a field differs from that of Catholic studies, which has Catholicism itself as the object of study and which combines perspectives from religious studies and theology, often with the aim of cultivating the Catholic identity of a college or university.8Moreover, the interreligious-dialogue active component of interre-ligious studies is more limited... (shrink)

This article provides a detailed conceptual and historical analysis of the controversial and often misunderstood notion of the “absolute,” examines the philosophical reasons behind its development, and offers an in-depth account of Schelling and Hegel’s disagreement on its meaning and role. It uniquely examines romantic as well as idealist views of the notion of the absolute, and investigates both its metaphysical and epistemological foundations.

The absolute pessimistic induction states that earlier theories, although successful, were abandoned, so current theories, although successful, will also be abandoned. By contrast, the relative pessimistic induction states that earlier theories, although superior to their predecessors, were discarded, so current theories, although superior to earlier theories, will also be discarded. Some pessimists would have us believe that the relative pessimistic induction avoids empirical progressivism. I argue, however, that it has the same problem as the absolute pessimistic induction, viz., (...) either its premise is implausible or its conclusion does not probably follow from its premise. (shrink)

Consider the hypothesis H that a defendant is guilty, and the evidence E that a majority of h out of n independent jurors have voted for H and a minority of k:=n-h against H. How likely is the majority verdict to be correct? By a formula of Condorcet, the probability that H is true given E depends only on each juror's competence and on the absolute margin between the majority and the minority h-k, but neither on the number n, (...) nor on the proportion h/n. This paper reassesses that result and explores its implications. First, using the classical Condorcet jury model, I derive a more general version of Condorcet's formula, confirming the significance of the absolute margin, but showing that the probability that H is true given E depends also on an additional parameter: the prior probability that H is true. Second, I show that a related result holds when we consider not the degree of belief we attach to H given E, but the degree of support E gives to H. Third, I address the implications for the definition of special majority voting, a procedure used to capture the asymmetry between false positive and false negative decisions. I argue that the standard definition of special majority voting in terms of a required proportion of the jury is epistemically questionable, and that the classical Condorcet jury model leads to an alternative definition in terms of a required absolute margin between the majority and the minority. Finally, I show that the results on the significance of the absolute margin can be resisted if the so-called assumption of symmetrical juror competence is relaxed. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Takashi Yagisawa’s response to van Inwagen’s ontic objection against David Lewis. Van Inwagen criticizes Lewis’s commitment to the absolutely unrestricted sense of ‘there is,’ and Yagisawa claims that by adopting modal tenses he avoids commitment to absolutely unrestricted quantification. I argue that Yagisawa faces a problem parallel to the one Lewis faces. Although Yagisawa officially rejects the absolutely unrestricted sense of a quantifying expression, he is still committed to the absolutely unrestricted sense of ‘is a (...) real.’. (shrink)

The notion of the absolute time-constituting flow plays a central role in Edmund Husserl’s analysis of our consciousness of time. I offer a novel reading of Husserl’s remarks on the absolute flow, on which Husserl can be seen to be grappling with two key intuitions that are still at the centre of current debates about temporal experience. One of them is encapsulated by what is sometimes referred to as an intentionalist (as opposed to an extensionalist) approach to temporal (...) experience. The other centres on the thought that temporal experience itself necessarily unfolds over time. I show how some of Husserl’s more enigmatic-sounding remarks about the absolute flow become intelligible if they are read as attempts to accommodate both these intuitions at the same time. However, I also question whether Husserl ultimately provides good reasons for preferring his intentionalist approach to a rival extensionalist one. (shrink)

Heidegger places Wagner’s will to the total work of art at the centre of the long 19th century. Nietzsche’s and Mallarmé’s responses to Wagner reflect all the ambiguities of modernism’s myth of absolute creation: the dreams of a new mythology and a new community are shadowed by the knowledge that the gods are nothing more than our fictions. Nietzsche and Mallarmé continue and critically interrogate the two distinct lineages of the total work of art deriving from German romanticism and (...) the French Revolution respectively, at the same time as they anticipate the contrary constructions of the sacred in society in Le Bon and Durkheim. (shrink)

In this paper we give a full account of the work of William Thomson on absolute temperature, which to this day provides the theoretical underpinnings for the most rigorous measurements of temperature. When Thomson fashioned his concepts of ‘absolute’ temperature, his main concern was to make the definition of temperature independent of the properties of particular thermometric substances . He tried out a succession of definitions based on the thermodynamics of ideal heat engines; most notably, in 1854 he (...) gave the ratio of two temperatures as the ratio of quantities of heat taken in and given out at those temperatures in a Carnot cycle. But there were difficulties with using such definitions for experimental work, since it was not possible even to approximate an ideal Carnot engine in reality. More generally, it is not trivial to connect an abstract concept with concrete operations in order to make physical measurements possible. In the end, Thomson argued that an ideal gas thermometer would indicate his absolute temperature, and that the deviation of actual gas thermometers from the ideal could be estimated by means of the Joule‐Thomson effect. However, the measurement of the Joule‐Thomson effect itself required measurements of temperature, so there was a problem of circularity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Appendix: Some Formal Principles and Arguments.

The absoluteness of Christianity is a predicate of the God of the eschatological kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, a kingdom embracing the power of a universal future which also includes the entire sweep of the history of religions.

Walter Kasper, a German cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, is president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, having served as its president from 2001 to 2010. Kasper explains that the interest of theology has been broken off by idealistic thinking, and advocates a new discussion between theology and idealism, of the fundamental importance of the theology of the twentieth century.

Agnes Heller’s philosophy of history is divided between A Theory of History (1982) and A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993). The one is a reflection on the stages of historical consciousness, the other is a manifestation of postmodern historical consciousness, situated between the crisis of European philosophy of history and a dawning world-historical consciousness. The crisis of European philosophy of history is defined by the irresolvable contradiction between the absolute present of Hegel’s self-knowing subject of History and the (...) consciousness of the sheer contingency of the historical present. From Hegel to Benjamin philosophy of history sought the absolute redemption of the contingent moment. It is against this philosophical legacy that Heller sets out in A Philosophy of History in Fragments to rethink the meaning of the present as absolute, not in itself but in relationship to the past and future of our present. Our absolute present is thereby revealed as inescapably paradoxical. Just as we live from the afterlife of a departed absolute spirit so the self-consciousness of our post-modernity resides in the self-consciousness with which we endow the past. Beyond this limit we must return to A Theory of History. Its reconstruction of the evolution of historical consciousness points to the emergence of a truly planetary consciousness and hence to the possibility of the end of history in a philosophy of World History. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant Yearbook Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 1 Seiten: 63-86.

St. Thomas Aquinas has always considered intelligence a potency higher than the will, absolutely speaking. That being said, and in my view, the existential primacy of the will in the act of freedom (particularly in choosing the existential end) is also indisputably Thomistic, as Cornelio Fabro has shown. This paper endeavors to explain Aquinas' doctrine on the absolute primacy of the intellect and thus show that these two primacies can be affirmed coherently, that is, the intellect’s absolute primacy (...) and the will’s existential primacy. Firstly, I will explain the reasoning St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa to justify the absolute primacy of the intellect over the will. Secondly, I will explore some parallel texts, in order to shed light on my interpretation of the Summa and expand our view regarding this and related doctrinal points. Thirdly, I will offer a brief study of Fabro’s position, one in which his concerns regarding the intellect’s absolute primacy are taken into account and carefully considered. (shrink)

According to Seungbae Park, two versions of the pessimistic induction argument against scientific realism, what he calls the "absolute" and "relative" versions, each fail for the same reason. Depending on whether their respective premises refer to distant or recent past theories, either each premise is implausible, or the conclusion does not probably follow from them. I suggest that Park has misconstrued the sort of argument his pessimist interlocutors rely on. When properly recast, the absolute and relative versions of (...) the argument become deductive rather than inductive. The result in each case is an argument that, contra Park, has both a plausible premise and a conclusion that follows from it. (shrink)