My first and main claim is that physics cannot provide empirical evidence for the objectivity of absolute becoming, for the simple reason that it must presuppose it, at least to the extent that classical spacetime theories presuppose an ontology of events. However, the fact that a theory of absolute becoming must be situated in the a priori realm of metaphysics does not make becoming completely irrelevant for physics, since my second claim will consist in showing (...) that relational becoming, once appropriately defined and understood, properly belongs to the tangled set of issues usually referred to with the label “the arrow of time”. In this respect it is argued that the arrow of becoming is more fundamental both than the causal arrow and of other well-known physical processes that are temporally asymmetric. (shrink)

J. M. E. McTaggart, in a famous argument, denied the reality of time because he thought that passage or temporal becoming was essential for the existence of time and that passage was a self-contradictory concept. This denial of passage has provoked a vast literature, two of the most important contributions being C. D. Broad’s painstaking defence of passage in his Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy and D. C. Williams’ dazzling condemnation of it “The Myth of Passage.” -/- A careful reading (...) of these apparently opposed essays reveals that there is a common notion of passage that both philosophers endorse, the successive occurrence of sets of simultaneous events (assuming classical or Newtonian spacetime structure as background). This unexpected agreement provides a notion of the passage of time that, I claim, is lean enough to survive the criticisms of passage-deniers yet robust enough to satisfy the requirements of passage-affirmers. I undertake to describe and defend this notion. -/- . (shrink)

The literature on the compatibility between the time of our experience--characterized by passage or becoming--and time as is represented within spacetime theories has been affected by a persistent failure to get a clear grasp of the notion of becoming, both in its relation to an ontology of events tt"spreadtt" in a four-dimensional manifold, and in relation to temporally asymmetric physical processes.In the first part of my paper I try to remedy this situation by offering what I consider a (...) clear and faithful explication of becoming, valid independently of the particular spacetime setting in which we operate. Along the way, I will show why the metaphysical debate between the so-called tt"presentiststt" and tt"eternaliststt" is completely irrelevant to the question of becoming, as the debate itself is generated by a failure to distinguish between a tensed and a tenseless sense of tt"existencett". After a much needed distinction between absolute and relational becoming, I then show in what sense classical spacetime physics presupposes both types of becoming, for the simple reason that spacetime physics presupposes an ontology of events. As a consequence, not only does it turn out that using physics to try to provide empirical evidence for the existence of becoming amounts to putting the cart before the horses, but also that the order imposed by tt"the arrow of becomingtt" is more fundamental than any other physical arrow of time, despite the fact that becoming cannot be used to explain why entropy grows, or retarded electromagnetic radiation prevails versus advanced radiation. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Steven Savitt attempts to demonstrate that there is an area of common ground between one classic proponent of temporal passage, C.D. Broad, and one classic opponent of passage, D.C. Williams. According to Savitt, Broad's notion of “absolute becoming” as the ordered occurrence of (simultaneity sets of) events, and Williams’ notion of “literal passage,” as the happening of events strung along the four-dimensional space-time manifold, are indistinguishable. Savitt recognizes that some might think it preposterous to (...) maintain that Broad and Williams agree regarding the nature of passage, but by a consideration of Broad’s “OstensibleTemporality,” and Williams’ “The Myth of Passage,” Savitt attempts to demonstrate that they do in fact hold the same, and indeed the correct, view of passage. I shall argue, however, that Broad’s account of the transitory aspect of time is ontologically distinguishable from Williams’ and that only by confusing Broad’s A-theory with Williams’ B-theory or Williams’ B-theory with Broad’s A-theory could Savitt have thought that there is an area of overlap between them. A demonstration of these points will have the benefit of enabling us to clarify the ontological character ofthe dispute, of which Broad was well-aware, between the A- and B-theories of time. (shrink)

There are two conspicuous and inescapable features of this world in which time is real. One experiences a world in flux, a transient world in which things constantly come into existence, change and cease to be. One also experiences a stable world, one in which how things are at any given moment is permanent, unchangeable. Thus, there is transience and permanence. Yet these two features of the world seem incompatible. The primary purpose of this paper is to sketch a metaphysics (...) of time that embraces both features. Crucial to this undertaking is the notion of becoming, that is, coming into existence. I distinguish three distinct phenomena of becoming: temporal, absolute and atemporal. The last is the least familiar of these; it is the phenomenon of coming into existence outside of time. Although the idea that there are things that do not exist in time is not unfamiliar, it is largely taken for granted that if anything comes into existence, it must do so in time. (Indeed, I suspect many think that the idea of a thing coming to be outside of time is simply incoherent.) In this paper, I articulate and defend the notion of atemporal becoming. It is by means of this notion that one can develop a fully satisfactory metaphysics of time, one that honors both transience and permanence and finds for each its proper domain within the world. (shrink)

My essay focuses on the relation between consciousness and reality. I argue, following Georg Cantor, that consciousness is a potential infinite driven by care to invest itself in the world historically. As human beings develop an authentic sense of self they are driven by good faith to postulate an Absolute infinite, which, following Spinoza, we may call God. Thus God, as the Absolute infinite, constitutes our reality, which I characterize as implicate information explicating itself through time. To live (...) authentically is to recognize the nature of God and commit to Him through faith. Faith means to understand one’s self as a potentially infinite consciousness attempting to authentically participate in, and understand, the Absolute of God. (shrink)

Contrary to our immediate and vivid sensation of past, present, and future as continually shifting non-relational modalities, time remains as tenseless and relational as space in all of the established theories of fundamental physics. Here an empirically adequate generalized theory of the inertial structure is discussed in which proper time is causally compelled to be tensed within both spacetime and dynamics. This is accomplished by introducing the inverse of the Planck time at the conjunction of special relativity and Hamiltonian mechanics, (...) which necessitates energies and momenta to be invariantly bounded from above, and lengths and durations similarly bounded from below, by their respective Planck scale values. The resulting theory abhors any form of preferred structure, and yet captures the transience of now along timelike worldlines by causally necessitating a genuinely becoming universe. This is quite unlike the scenario in Minkowski spacetime, which is prone to a block universe interpretation. The minute deviations from the special relativistic effects such as dispersion relations and Doppler shifts predicted by the generalized theory remain quadratically suppressed by the Planck energy, but may nevertheless be testable in the near future, for example via observations of oscillating flavor ratios of ultrahigh energy cosmic neutrinos, or of altering pulse rates of extreme energy binary pulsars. (shrink)

Preface -- Introduction -- Absolute becoming -- From becoming to time -- The time-atom theory -- Motion, ways, and time -- Gateway and lanes -- Linear and circular time -- The eternal perspective -- The way of greatness.

This paper presents a critical review and discussion of three recent major theories of epistemic scepticism. Odegard and Rescher both agree that real knowledge entails certain beliefs. But they both fail to see how beliefs could be absolutely certain. Klein’s book, Certainty: A Refutationof Scepticism, presents the strongest possible view in favor of absolute certainty. I pay attention to its technical details and development by Klein. My conclusion is that Klein’s theory rests on some presupposed ideas that are either (...) counterintuitive or then make the theory trivial: one’s certainty of truth becomes the same as the truth itself. (shrink)

Unlike his other fictional works Blanchot’s 1953 narrative Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas has received comparatively little attention. The reasons for this would seem to lie in the intense abstraction of his writing in this work, which is forbidding even by his own standards, but as I will show, this intensity can be understood as comprising a singular topography of the experience of writing. Blanchot’s narrative thereby becomes a very precise and concrete form of aesthetics, which can be usefully compared (...) to the understandings of melancholy developed by Benjamin and Adorno, but transposed into a more stringent modernist context. (shrink)

The article offers an analysis of the concept of the Absolute in Fichte’s philosophy. Despite the difficulty of the definition, this concept receives a rich and creative rethinking in Fichte and will further influence the philosophical systems of thought. Gradually introducing this concept into his philosophical project of Wissenschaftslehre Fichte often changes its interpretation. So, starting with a somewhat vague understanding of the concept of the "absolute I" through Schelling's criticism of the Absolute, he develops the theory (...) of the manifestation of the Absolute, each time choosing new metaphors to denote it, and sometimes filling it with religious content, when the Absolute becomes a substitute for the concept of God. On the one hand, it’s important not to reduce the Absolute to a simple object of thought because this would indicate the limitation of the Absolute. On the other hand, it would be wrong to consider the Absolute as an empty or neutral concept or something completely enclosed in itself. Then, its existence will be doubtful. Fichte is careful about a clear definition of the Absolute. He solves this dilemma through the idea of the manifestation of the Absolute. Manifestation is the exit of the Absolute beyond itself while remaining unchanged. The ability to manifest itself is a prerequisite that the Absolute can be recognized and thought. This is how the Absolute manifests itself in the form of knowledge. Fichte emphasizes that the Absolute is not a projection of our mind, it may not depend on our thinking, however with such peculiarity that truth and knowledge have their basis in it. Thereby, with the theory of the Absolute, Fichte develops the idea of the foundation that is outside of ourselves, has transcendental character, and thus allows knowledge or truth not to be trapped in subjective tenets. Analyzing step by step the process of evolution of this concept, we will be able to see how in the last years of his life, Fichte states the importance of two realities: the “I” and the “Absolute” and how he explains the connection between them. (shrink)

Absolute velocities in Newtonian mechanics are commonly regarded as unmeasurable. Roberts (Br J Philos Sci 59(2):143–168, 2008) provides a justification for this thesis which appeals to the observational indistinguishability of boost-related models of Newtonian mechanics. Middleton and Murgueitio Ramírez (Australas J Philos, 2020) criticise his argumentation by pointing out that his analysis of the notion of measurement is too restrictive, and that, under a weaker analysis (based on counterfactuals), absolute velocities are measurable. Jacobs (Australas J Philos, 2020) opposes (...) their view, arguing that, on a properly formulated counterfactual-based account of measurement, absolute velocities are unmeasurable. However, in his argument, observational indistinguishability plays no role, even though, intuitively, it is very relevant for the issue of (un)measurability. This paper’s aim is to bring observational indistinguishability back to this discussion. I build upon the observation that there is an analogy between possible views on knowledge and justification on the one hand, and on measurement on the other. In particular, I explore the distinction between externalist and internalist approaches. Counterfactual-based accounts are all externalist, whereas the observational indistinguishability of boost-related models becomes relevant if we are interested in an internalist concept of measurement. (shrink)

In this book, written in the wake of such influential European thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Vattimo, Simon Oliai argues that unless the “European” affirmation of man’s finite existence becomes universal, we shall never rid ourselves of the repressive shadow of a long dead metaphysical idol.

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowing” and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida are tragi-comic consternations. They are theatres of ethical panentheism: they present dramatic “absolute” ethical interpretations and actions, each of which is at once ungrounded and completely seeded. I start with the etymology of “consternation.” Then I discuss the comic vs. tragic interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, arguing it is a consternating tragi-comedy. I analyze the predicate “absolute” in terms of consternations, in a few passages of the book. I (...) elaborate especially upon phenomenological reasoning’s Sache selbst. In the Phenomenology, reason develops by thinking the absolute thing through culture, politics, morality, and religion, reaching completion in “Absolute Knowing.” That absolute is reason’s comprehensive insight into its phenomenological absolutes, and its own absolute sublating. Northrop Frye’s cited claim about myth can be understood in this phenomenological way. With all this in hand, Hegel’s science of experience is formally complete. But the experience of Absolute Knowing is still consternation. To capture the consternating essence of sublation – a consternation by which experience becomes something it was not before – I season this formal science with Shakespeare’s “comedy” Troilus and Cressida, revealing its structural roots to be consternations. (shrink)

Moral absolutes were perceived, by Solov'ëv, in a dual manner: a) from the side of content, of psychology, as when we speak of feelings, emotions, etc.; and b) under a formal aspect, as “ideas,” i.e. logically. Neither of these can be treated without relating to moral absolutes astrue, and without a rationalbelief in their truth, a truth that cannot be logically proved. In my opinion, our time has become keenly aware of the universally human value of Vladimir Solov'ëv's ethics, of (...) its humanist nature, oriented towards the everyday and the ideal tasks of man, and of the concrete direction of his philosophy of “practical idealism”. (shrink)

Aquinas does not argue that natural inclinations per se suffice for moral absolutes, but rather that they suffice to make their objects known as self-evidently good for persons. Acting for the contrary of a natural inclination thereby harms persons and is contrary to the Bonum Precept (Good is to be done and pursued; evil is to be avoided). Acting for a self-evident good, however, becomes morally obligatory only when indispensable.

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)

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)

The following essay has three main objectives. (1) By arguing that the connection between Schelling’s reception of Plato and Kant’s conception of genius is relevant for Schelling’s early development, I show that Schelling’s early Idealism brings to the general problem that plagues German Idealists, i.e., the search for an unconditioned principle that unites theoretical and practical reason, the solution that is genuinely his own. This original solution consists in Schelling’s conception of “creative reason [schöpfersiche Vernunft].” Because the scholarship on German (...) Idealism has thus far been focused predominantly on the analysis of self-consciousness, Schelling’s conception of creative reason remained neglected. (2) I show that the theme of an absolutely free creative subjectivity is shared by many of Schelling’s early works and, hence, I argue that the early development of his Idealism can be interpreted as a beginning of a philosophical system or as a “proto-system” of what is later to become The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). (3) I evaluate Schelling’s speculative extension of Kant’s notion of creative subjectivity and argue that, when compared to Kant’s notion of genius, Schelling’s ‘absolute I’ should be considered a regress rather than a progress. (shrink)

Statistical analysis is often used to evaluate the strength of evidence for or against scientific hypotheses. Here we consider evidence measurement from the point of view of representational measurement theory, focusing in particular on the 0-points of measurement scales. We argue that a properly calibrated evidence measure will need to count up from absolute 0, in a sense to be defined, and that this 0-point is likely to be something other than what one might have expected. This suggests the (...) need for a new theory of statistical evidence in the context of which calibrated evidence measurement becomes tractable. (shrink)

In the second section of the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant introduces the concept of an end in itself and defines it as something whose existence has an absolute value. He continues with the assertion that the ground of a possible categorical imperative lies solely in this end in itself. Now Kant, in his remarks on the realm of ends, also operates with the notions of an end in itself and absolute value — seemingly in a (...) different way, however. Thus, in the remarks on the realm of ends, the rational being becomes an end in itself through its real moral willing and acting, both of which presuppose the validity of the categorical imperative. Basically, the difference in the ways of using the concepts of absolute value and an end in itself consists in the fact that in the first case both serve as precondition for the categorical imperative’s validity, whereas in the passages concerning the realm of ends both are a consequence of its validity. At first glance we therefore must register an inconsistent use of both terms. In what follows, I aim to show that the assumption of such a putative inconsistency expresses a misleading understanding of the internal structure of the end in itself rather than a real problem in Kant’s way of arguing. The present study tries to solve this supposed problem of inconsistency by sketching a more appropriate understanding of the internal structure of the end in itself. (shrink)

The block universe theory of time is commonly said to be incompatible with temporal becoming. This confuses Maudlin who upholds both eternalism and passage. The aim of this paper is to answer Maudlin’s plea for clarification by distinguishing four degrees of temporal becoming. After discussing their respective compatibility with the block universe, I show that Maudlin asks much less from temporal becoming than most philosophers of time. Consequently, his form of becoming is compatible with the block (...) universe, whereas the stronger forms of becoming are not. (shrink)

Some have thought that the process of the expansion of the universe can be used to define an absolute ‘cosmic time’ which then serves as the absolute time required by tensed theories of time. Indeed, this is the very reason why many tense theorists are happy to concede that special relativity is incompatible with the tense thesis, because they think that general relativity, which trumps special relativity, and on which modern cosmology rests, supplies the means of defining temporal (...) becoming using cosmic time. I argue that cosmic time is not up to the task, and that these tense theorists should rethink their strategy in dealing with the theories of relativity. Introduction The Mellor-Rees argument against tense theories Can expansion combat such wrinkles? Event and creation horizons Bursting the balloon. (shrink)

Relative poverty and absolute poverty are often seen to be very distinct concepts and seldom discussed together. While absolute poverty is seen to be about existential threats, relative poverty is understood to be about economic inequality only. One is an issue of basic rights then and the other a question of justice or fairness. But in this picture it becomes incomprehensible why the same concept is used for so different issues. This article tries to show that relative and (...) absolute poverty do have something very important in common. Both concepts are about not having enough goods in order to be able to life a decent life, i.e. a life in dignity. While absolute poverty indicates that someone does not have enough goods to live a decent life under any circumstances, relative poverty indicates that someone does not have enough goods to live a decent life in a given society. So understood poverty in both cases is a violation of human dignity. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political (...) and ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The following are purported to be common-sense features of the world: time’s passage, the unreality of the future, the existence of ‘genuine’ change. All of these common-sense features are accommodated by accepting the phenomenon of absolute becoming, a view of temporal passage in which the unreal future comes into existence in the present. Indeed, most philosophers who lay claim to common-sense views of time accept absolute becoming. I argue that absolute becoming has deeply (...) unintuitive consequences. Specifically, proponents of absolute becoming face what I call the coordination problem: in the absence of a connection between the existing present and the unreal future, one must, but cannot, explain how whatever comes into existence preserves the continuing regularity of the world. The standard options to explain the continuing regularity of the world take the form of appealing to enforcers—causation, laws of nature, and dispositions—to guarantee that what comes into existence preserves these regularities. I show that the very nature of a world in which there is no future means that enforcers cannot guarantee this regular nature of the world. Absolute becoming should therefore be rejected: the future does not come into existence; it already exists. (shrink)

The article individuates free self-alienation and reconciliation as the specific characters of the last chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit, in contrast to an interpretation of absolute knowing as appropriation of otherness within selfconsciousness. Such self-alienation has already been developed by Hegel in the chapter “Religion”. The limit of religion depends on the last opposition to otherness, and not on to the presence of otherness itself, which has already been taken off along the path of self-becoming and self-consciousness. The (...) overcoming of this opposition represents the crucial difference between self-consciousness in chapter IV and self-consciousness of spirit. The inclusion of otherness is realized in the content of revealed religion, but not in the its form, which is imprisoned in the reference to an abstract divinity. The aim of absolute knowing is to change the sense of absoluteness, which has to mean the overcoming of Entfremdung through Entäusserung and Versöhnung, or through the unification of self-consciousness with consciousness: absolute spirit becomes other from itself and includes the other in its own identity. (shrink)

In this paper the relation between being and becoming is analyzed and the Kierkegaard’s existential method is considered. Also the three stages of existence are described as the evolution of a human being. This evolution means gradual creation of true selfhood due to decisive choices and actions. The author stresses that Kierkegaard’s existential anthropology is a version of the dialectical religious existentialism. A human being is paradoxical and her or his conflicts cannot be resolved by rational way. Existence has (...) its own logic, which differs from the dialectical logic of Hegel’s absolute idea or spirit. This logic is paradoxical and needs other laws, i.e. the laws of love, faith and repetition. Repetition is essential for religious experience, because it teaches to be humble. An individual’s humility means that he/she is not disturbed by any superfluous things and he/she does not pursue them. Such humble individual remains quiet in any situations. The author proves that Kierkegaard is one of the philosophers of Modern Time, who struggles against speculative and objective thinking, which depersonalizes a human being; a human’s being is totally subjective and on higher level it is a passion of faith. (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)

For Whitehead and Nishitani, a rethinking of religion necessitates a rethinking of the metaphysics that underlie one’s concept of religion. The dynamism of religion is unveiled only within the metaphysical grounding of an ontology that accommodates the philosophical preference of “becoming” as an ultimate category of reality. The novelty of Whitehead’s theory of religion lies in the process metaphysics that it presupposes. For him, religion, like the whole of reality, is inherently developing and evolving. What Nishitani offers is a (...) rethinking of Western understanding of religion by way of an Asian speculative approach grounded in Zen Buddhism. He argues that Western religion, particularly Christianity and Judaism, has succumbed to the modern predicament of nihilism, or relative nothingness. He radicalizes this same nihility towards absolute nothingness (śūnyatā). For both Whitehead and Nishitani, despite the distortion of religion by religious fundamentalists, genuine religion consolidates and points a society towards its real destiny. However, the realization of religion’s role necessitates reflexivity on its own inherent dynamism. (shrink)

Some ethicists argue that patient confidentiality is absolute and thus should never be broken. I examine these arguments that when critically scrutinised, become porous. I will explore the concept of patient confidentiality and argue that although, this is a very important medical and bioethical issue, this needs to be wisely delivered to reduce third party harm or even detriment to the patient. The argument for absolute confidentiality is particularly weak when it comes to genetic information and inherited disease.

This article intends to argue that Zizek’s dialectics is far from a vulgar progressive sublation of all reality in Concept but a systematic acknowledgement of its radical impossibility. Firstly, the fundamental point of Zizek’s dialectics is not the notion of the sublation of all immediate-material reality but a “sublation of sublation”. The conclusive of moment of a dialectical circle is the immanent act of abrogation or releasing. Then, through the elementary triad structure of the Hegelian notion of reflection, the ultimate (...) secret of Zizek’s dialectical process consists in a “determinate reflection” or a necessary redoubling reflection. The two quintessential examples of this redoubling reflection are the paradoxical monarch and God’s reincarnation. Once his dialectic movement is elaborated, the esoteric definition of subject and subjectivity, as well as the mysterious Hegelian thesis “Substance as Subject” will become rather straightforward. (shrink)

The Courage to Be is Tillich’s best-known work. That this work has retained such popularity perplexes one as a Tillich scholar since this text is anything but easy to understand. This essay offers an analysis of the concepts ‘theism,’ ‘absolute faith,’ and ‘God above God,’ and comes to the conclusion that both proponents of this work as well as its theological critics have misunderstood, and indeed that only because of these misunderstandings could the work have become a bestseller at (...) all. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt at developing a poetic ontology of the senses through an understanding of poetry, or more importantly the poetic as such, i.e., the movement, temporality, and various antinomies within poetic gesturing which interrupt the logic of closed meaning and totalization. Through a range of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, amongst others, and primarily the poetry of Pessoa and Rilke, the paper investigates how poetry (poetics) may not only show us a path toward (...) a poetic ontology (thus an ontology in correlation with the senses and movements of natural and material existence), but furthermore point us toward the possibility of an ethical becoming which mirrors the movements of poetry, in contrast to following the rigid structures of absolute and fixed meaning. The overall intention in this analysis is not to find a clear, complete, or overarching thought which may point us toward the ethical or the good. The attempt here is to show that ethics is an activity, a continuous becoming (analogous to poetics) that can be sensed through a way of being in the world, and "being-with" the world, as compared to simply understood through cognitive forms of abstract knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There are many points of similarity between the views of pacifists and those of people who argue that sentient non‐human animals have absolute rights. Both positions ultimately rest on the assertion that the consequences of a violent action which is intended to preserve some lives by terminating others are more far‐reaching than we generally suppose. When the total net consequences of such actions are considered, it can be seen that an ethic of complete non‐violence might turn out to (...) be optimific in the long run. Hence, absolutist moral positions of this sort should not be seen as irrational, or self‐serving, and are worthy of respectful consideration even if we finally decide that we ourselves cannot accept them. Until we have firm evidence as to whether non‐violence has positive or negative net consequences, the choice between absolute and situationist ethical positions must remain one which depends very largely on personal character. Absolutist positions do serve a valuable ‘conscience‐pricking’ function for the rest of us. They stand most chance of becoming more widely accepted if they are incorporated within a general ethic of positive helpfulness, rather than being presented as purely negative prohibitions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Racine, Oedipus, and Absolute Fantasies*Mitchell Greenberg (bio)Tout mythe se rapporte à l’origine. Toute question d’origine ne saurait ouvrir que sur un mythe [Every myth points back to an origin. Any questioning of origins necessarily opens onto myth].—Jean-Paul Valabrega, Phantasme, mythe, corps et sensAinsi l’itinéraire de la psychanalyse freudienne est-il celui d’une recherche qui... se fait attentive à ce qui du corps réside dans les mots, s’inscrit dans les (...) traces, reste gravé en mémoire au point de n’apparaître que comme réminiscence [Thus the itinerary of Freudian psychoanalysis would be a quest for... what of the body resides in words, is inscribed in traces, or remains engraved in memory to such an extent that it only can reappear as reminiscence].—Pierre Fédida, “L’anatomie dans la psychanalyse”Something happened in the seventeenth century. Somethings in this particularly conflicted period radically altered the ways in which human subjectivity was created and internalized to produce what in our late twentieth century we have come to call modernity. Despite the different and often contradictory inflections we like to give it, it now seems fairly certain that there was a “crisis of the seventeenth century,” a crisis that was traumatic and that was marked, most significantly for our purposes at least, by an altering of subjective sensibility.In an ever-crescendoing leitmotiv from Machiavelli to Montaigne, from Richelieu to Louis XIV, from Olivares to James I, we hear echoing across Europe the same strident clamor. An anxious, pervasive suspicion that the order of things was out of kilter, that in fact the world was sinking into disorder, seems to dominate European thought in the first half of the century. 1 The fear of chaos, especially in societies whose past has been grounded in rigid hierarchical structures, is obviously exacerbated in periods of great [End Page 40] social change. Nevertheless, if we are to believe those political theorists influenced by the work of Freud, this fear, although enflamed by real experience of social unrest, reaches well beyond the actuality of a particular historical event and finds its terrifying power in the most archaic strata of the human psyche. “All civilization,” writes Eugène Enriquez,is a struggle against chaos. Not against chaos as it might or might not have actually existed in prehistoric times, but against the phantasm of a primordial chaos, of a primeval disorder, of an immixture, of the undifferentiated, against an ordinary violence.... Chaos is the constantly retreating horizon in front of which all social organization and institutions are constructed. It returns us to our ancestral fear. We embrace any and all protection against it.[101]The stately image of Classical France, therefore, an image to which we have become accustomed by almost two hundred years of academic history and which finds its most paradigmatic icon in the tragic production of Racine, tends to obscure a reality of almost constant social and religious trauma. For the purposes of my discussion, I would like to return to Racine, who is perhaps the most prominent representative of the aesthetic and ethical tradition of classicism, which, perfected in France in the mid-1600s, will go on to colonize European ethics and aesthetics into the eighteenth century. Despite the radical changes wrought by political, industrial, philosophical, and psychoanalytical revolutions, classicism, through its corollary myth of the unitary ego, continues to haunt our own inabilities to live unneurotically the various drives, contradictions, identifications, and projections that continually tell us that we are not one but many.A central paradox exists at the heart of any discussion of Racinian dramaturgy. While the tragic dilemma of Racine’s theater is profoundly anchored in the passionate, forbidden sexuality of its characters, passions that are inextricably tied to the desiring body, this body is absent, banished from the lexical construction of the Racinian text. How are we to understand the conundrum of a theater that, more than any other, presents incestuous sexual desire and its frustration as the enchafed crucible of tragedy, when the crucible itself has been exiled from the field of representation? In its plots and peripeteia, Racine’s theater ingeniously reconfigures how his protagonists... (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning and being of the absolute spirit in Hegelrsquo;s thought by reflecting through the idea that spirit is the activity and being of gathering through dispersal. In Hegelrsquo;s thought gathering and dispersing are the primary movements through which spirit engages in the processes of its absolute self-cognition, the processes, that is, that underpin the eternal becoming of communal being. Gathering and dispersing thus define the pulsating movement of the absolute spirit in all (...) its facets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:80 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY AVERROES' Quaesitum ON ASSERTORIC (ABSOLUTE) PROPOSITIONS UNTIL 1962 ONLY ONE logical work of Averroes existed in print in the original Arabic? At this late date, D. M. Dunlop published the Arabic text of the short tract by Averroes on the modality of propositions with which we shall be concerned here.' The text published by Professor Dunlop forms part of a collection of treatises by (...) Averroes which has long been known to exist in the immensely valuable collection of Arabic manuscripts of the Escorial Library, near Madrid.' The collection is simply entitled Mas~'il (Questions),' faithfully reflected in the rubric of Quaesita under which several of these treatises are given in Latin versions in the sixteenth-century editions of.4ristotelis Opera cure.4verrois Commentariis. The particular treatise published by Prof. Dunlop deals with the problem of the relationship of assertoric propositions to the modalities of possibility and necessity. This treatise has been accessible for over four centuries in two printed Latin versions, made in Renaissance times from medieval Hebrew translations. The earlier of the Latin versions was made by a Jewish scholar, Ella del Medigo, for the Renaissance luminary Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and was printed in the very rare Aldine incunabulum edition of the Quaesita Averrois in librum priorum (analytiorum Aristotelis) (Venice, 1497). A second Latin translation was made by Abraham de Balmes (d. 1523): and printed in several editions of the Juntine Latin Aristotle (Venice, from 1590): From these versions the main substance, at any rate, of Averroes' xMaurice Bouyges, ed., Averroes: Talkh~ Kitdb al-Maqouldt ("Middle Commentary on Aristotle 's Categoriae") Beyrouth, 1932 (-- Vol. IV of Bibliotheca Arabica-Scholasticorum, S6rie Arabe). sD. M. Dunlop, "Averroes (Ibn Rushd) on the Modality of Propositions," Islamic Studies (Journal of the Gentral Institute of Islamic Research, Karachi), Vol. I (1962), 23-34. sMichael Casiri, Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis (2 vols., Madrid; 1760, 1770), No. 629; Hartwig Derenbourg, Les Manuscrits Arabcs de l'Escurial (3 vols., Paris; 1884, 1903, 1928), No. 632. ' Prof. Dunlop states that "another copy" of the Masa'il (presumably made from the Escorial MS?) exists in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (No. 102 in the catalog of Robles). For information about this translator, see Bayle's Dictionary, art. "BALMIS, Abraham de," where note (B) describes some complaints about his translations from Hebrew to Latin. (I owe this reference to Prof. Richard Popkin.) Note (I) of Bayle's article on "AVERROES" gives some data concerning the Renaissance translations of Averroes, citing inter alia the opinion expressed by Keckermann in his PraecognitisLogicis (II, 2, nb. 32): "How much all Philosophy is indebted to Averroes, can then only be known, when God shall raise up a Genius, who will free our Latin Translations of him from the unintelligible Barbarisms everywhere to be met with, and render him in That Language, in a style, at least tolerable, and intelligible, for the Use of Students in Philosophy." eAristotelis Opera cure Averrois Commentariis, Vol. I. The edition of 1562 is now readily accessible in a photoreprinting made in Frankfurt am Main in 1962, and contains the "Averrois varii generis quaesita in libros logicae Aristotelis, Abramo de Balmes interprete," pp. 75 verso--- NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 81 Quaesitum has been determinable.' The present, reasonably literal translation of the Arabic text should facilitate the work of anyone wishing to form his own judgment about the character of the Latin versions of Averroes' logical treatises, or at any rate the not insignificant number of them that came from the pen of Abraham de Balmes. The Latin version in the present instance is, on the whole, literal to the point of obscurity. It is punctuated by occasional strange, and sometimes ludicrous renderings--as, for example, at 27:6, where "not used in the art of rhetoric" becomes "non uterent agricolae"l Occasionally the Latin incorporates a marginal explanation within the text (e.g., at 29:10), and sometimes it omits phrases of the Arabic text. In general, it is significantly more difficult to derive from the Latin than from the Arabic an exact idea just what it is that Averroes had in mind. Unquestionably the most interesting aspect of Averroes' treatise is the light it sheds... (shrink)

I clarify Hume's concept of miracle with Kierkegaard's concept of absolute paradox. I argue that absolute paradox is like that miracle which, according to Hume, allows a human being to believe Christianity against the principles of his understanding. I draw such a conclusion on the basis that Kierkegaard does not think Christianity is a doctrine with a truth value and, furthermore, he holds that all historical events are doubtful. Kierkegaard emphasizes the absolute paradox as the condition of (...) faith in such a way that it becomes close to Hume's idea of personal miracle which causes the subversion of the believer's principles of understanding. Hence, the absolute paradox cannot be a possible supporting event for the credibility of Christianity. Absolute paradox more closely approximates Hume's second miracle insofar as it makes persons believe contrary to their custom and experience. (shrink)

In Hegel's aesthetics, the element of speculative philosophy is always a notorious aspect that attracts the most complaints from modern art criticism. The book, however, justifies the intelligibility in art in light of Hegel's philosophy of metaphysics. The author explores the philosophical motivations of Hegelian aesthetics, its underlying logic, the relationship between metaphysical core and artistic expression, as well as the contemporary significance and value of metaphysicalised theories of art exemplified by Hegelian aesthetics. Through elucidating the metaphysical core implicit in (...) Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, this book proves that the philosophical considerations of Absolute Idealism bring to art the spiritual seriousness which the Romantics lack. Ultimately, this approach reveals the broad consensus which both Hegel's aesthetics and modern philosophical hermeneutics share, thus bridging the gap between ancient and the modern philosophy of art. The book will appeal to scholars and students studying classical German philosophy, German Romantic literature criticism, and modern art theory. (shrink)

We introduce the Relational Blockworld (RBW) as a paradigm for deflating the mysteries associated with quantum non-separability/non-locality and the measurement problem. We begin by describing how the relativity of simultaneity implies the blockworld, which has an explanatory potential subsuming both dynamical and relational explanations. It is then shown how the canonical commutation relations fundamental to non-relativistic quantum mechanics follow from the relativity of simultaneity. Therefore, quantum mechanics has at its disposal the full explanatory power of the blockworld. Quantum mechanics exploits (...) this expanded explanatory capability since event distributions among detectors per the density matrix follow from spacetime relations (symmetry group) alone. Thus, the event distributions of non-relativistic quantum mechanics follow from a blockworld wherein spacetime relations are fundamental. Per RBW "quantum mysteries" are deflated and the implications for consciousness and the perception of temporal flow and absolute becoming are explored. We conclude that given RBW, consciousness is no less fundamental than any "physical" feature of the world such as brain states. Further, active consciousness is needed to explain the illusion that it is a dynamical world and consciousness in its most fundamental state is relational and non-local. (shrink)

In this paper I employ the notion of the ‘thought of the outside’ as developed by Michel Foucault, in order to defend the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze against the criticisms of ‘elitism,’ ‘aristocratism,’ and ‘political indifference’—famously leveled by Alain Badiou and Peter Hallward. First, I argue that their charges of a theophanic conception of Being, which ground the broader political claims, derive from a misunderstanding of Deleuze’s notion of univocity, as well as a failure to recognize the significance of the (...) concept of multiplicity in Deleuze’s thinking. From here, I go on to discuss Deleuze’s articulation of the ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ which, insofar as it takes ‘recognition’ as its model, can only ever think what is already solidified and sedimented as true, in light of existing structures and institutions of power. Then, I examine Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and the notion of the ‘thought of the outside,’ showing the ‘outside’ as the unthought that lies at the heart of thinking itself, as both its condition and its impossibility. Insofar as it is essential to thinking itself, finally, I argue that the passage of thought to the outside is not an absolute flight out of this world, as Hallward claims, but rather, a return of the different that constitutes the Self for Deleuze. Thinking is an ongoing movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or as Foucault says, death and life. Thinking, as Deleuze understands it, is essentially creative; it reconfigures the virtual, thereby literally changing the world. Thinking is therefore, according to Deleuze, thoroughly political. (shrink)

Skow argues that the best metaphysic of objective becoming is the moving spotlight theory. I agree, but I think the best version of the moving spotlight theory is not amongst the theories Skow describes. I look at Skow's moving spotlight theories that invoke an extra dimension of supertime, or new primitive supertense operators, or that make presentness a fundamentally relational phenomenon, and I raise some problems for these views. I argue that the moving spotlighter should take presentness to be (...) an absolute phenomenon that changes in time. This has consequences for what it means to say the past is real. (shrink)

Peter Singer and Peter Unger argue that moral decency requires giving away all one's “surplus” for the relief or prevention of “absolute poverty,” because not doing so is analogous to refusing to save a drowning child to avoid making one's clothes muddy. I argue that there is a crucial disanalogy between the two cases and, moreover, that there are four independent moral objections to their thesis: it is monomaniacal in ignoring the variety of morally worthy ideals and elevating self-sacrificial (...) aid to the global poor into the sole ideal; it is misanthropic in its indifference to the happiness of those it adjures to give; it is incompatible with integrity; it would have disastrous effects for the poor if it were generally adopted. I argue that genuine beneficence aims at creating or restoring the conditions that enable its beneficiaries to become self-sufficient creators themselves — creators of wealth and of meaningful and enjoyable lives. Small-scale beneficence is necessary for moral goodness, but large-scale beneficence is optional, so long as its absence is not due to a lack of regard for those in need. The uncharitable person violates the neo-Lockean non-waste proviso that we acquire or keep for ourselves and those we love as much, but only as much, as we can use or invest meaningfully or enjoyably, now or in the long run. But someone who invests all his resources in creating something of worth leads a morally worthy life even if he reserves nothing for large-scale charity. Both our capacity for beneficence, which bids us stretch out a hand to those in need, and our capacity for creation, which bids us reach for the stars, are important aspects of our humanity. The Singer-Unger ideal advocates not genuine beneficence but the profligate giving away of wealth to prolong lives, while failing to appreciate what makes life worth living. a Footnotesa I am grateful for helpful comments on this paper from Ellen Frankel Paul, Larry White (who commented on the paper at the 2005 conference of the Association for Private Enterprise Education), David Blumenfeld, and Garrett Cullity (whose comments from Australia were a wonderful example of voluntary international aid to a stranger). I would also like to thank Georgia State University, Bowling Green State University, and the Association for Private Enterprise Education for inviting me to present this paper, and the audiences at these presentations for their helpful discussion. Finally, I would like to thank Harry Dolan for his expert copyediting, which saved me from some embarrassing mistakes and infelicities. (shrink)

What could be the meaning of Christianity on this side or beyond its most traditional transmission? This paper suggests that it could be an invitation to deify our flesh instead of despising it. Indeed, the God of Christianity does not remain out of our physical reach but is incarnate in a human body as a sensitive transcendence living among us on this Earth. One of the main challenges for Christians is thus how to care for, transform, transfigure, resurrect and share (...) their bodies, leading them from mere somas or corpses to divine fleshes. Jesus gives many examples of such a behavior towards the body(ies). However, those who are presumed to represent him and ensure his inheritance neither take into account nor pass on, at least sufficiently, this crucial aspect of his teaching, and in reality, Eastern traditions introduce us more to cultivating our sensory perceptions and spiritualizing our bodies. Another Christian path ought to be the respect for the transcendence of the other as naturally different, therefore an education of our sexuate belonging, to pave the way towards the respect for an absolute sensitive transcendence. A surprising thing in the life of Jesus is also the continual presence of nature, nature as cosmos but also nature that humans are and share. Nature, which is generally viewed as a major component in pagan cults, is the most constant factor in the incarnation of the Christian God and in Jesus’s way of speaking and acting. Now, nature can be shared by all as the teaching of Jesus and his commandment regarding love, which makes Christianity a potentially democratic religion capable of crossing cultural boundaries. They are thus elements in a Christlike legacy which deserve to be considered, as well as arts and culture that it has inspired, before giving it up to the benefit of sciences, technique and a life without an absolute sensitive transcendence to which we can resort in our developing and flowering as human beings. (shrink)

The Romantic Absolute does a spectacular job of reconstructing the main philosophical position of three very difficult figures. The more we know of Romanticism as a movement, the more questions we seem to have, and the more important it seems to be, both to the history of philosophy and to the philosophical questions that concern us today. Nassar’s book represents an important contribution to our understanding of Early German Romanticism and will undoubtedly become an important resource for anyone considering (...) the movement. (shrink)