The paper discusses Peano's defense and application of permanence of forms as a principle of mathematical practice. (Dedicated to the memory of Mic Detlefsen.).

The intellectual climate in which Aquinas matured was one of conflict. On the one hand, he inherited a philosophical tradition from the Greeks which held that "nothing comes from nothing." On the other, a strong theological tradition held that, since the world was created from nothing, it tends toward nothing and will, in fact, finally return to nothing. ;Aquinas counters that both traditions are mistaken in considering all making as change. Besides the making that is of this particular thing, besides (...) even the universal cause or causes of all generation, there is a more radical making which is of the totality of being. This doctrine we find implicit in the Five Ways, essentially established in the doctrine of essence and existence, and openly explicit in Aquinas's discussions of creation itself. ;That the universe is necessary in itself is no less firmly held by Aquinas. There are two kinds of being that are incorruptible: those whose form completely dominates their matter, and those whose form exists without matter. In addition, the universe of material things itself cannot be corrupted since it has no substratum which could underlie the change. Only by misconceiving the act of creation as change does it make sense to speak of a tendency or possibility to corruption in the created universe. ;The upshot of the marriage of these two positions is that the universe is at once absolutely necessary in itself and totally dependent for its existence on God. Rather than proving to be antagonists, these two positions are actually mutually supportive. Studying the natural world for its own sake reveals the power and perfection of its Creator. Since the world depends on a cause unexplained by the order within it, there is no limit to its ultimate intelligibility, nor, therefore, to the scientific quest. Endless awe at the Creator of such a universe, and an endless field of enquiry--these are the results of Aquinas's option for both and rather than either a created world or the integral, permanent world which science investigates. (shrink)

In this article, I present a critical exposition of and engagement with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s schizoanalysis, and its therapeutic and revolutionary powers. Firstly, I discuss how the aftermath of the May 1968 phenomenon shapes the formulation of schizoanalysis, specifically, in relation to the French people’s desire for voluntary servitude to what they call as ‘State philosophy.’ More importantly, I discuss desire’s social investment, syntheses, and parallogisms. Secondly, I elucidate schizoanalysis’ goal of achieving freedom from all kinds of Oedipalizations (...) and capitalist exploitations from the family to the society writ large. In this regard, it is schizophrenia which is capable of subverting all forms of oppressions or totalizations fabricated by Oedipus and capitalism. Lastly, I explicate schizoanalysis’ aim, which is to reinstate desire’s revolutionary potentialities toward a revolution fueled by “schizophrenia as a process,” which Deleuze and Guattari call as ‘permanent revolution.’. (shrink)

In this paper I outline an argument which Louis Loeb attributes to Descartes, which attempts to ground the epistemic priority of reason over sense‐perception in the brute psychological irresistibility of the former. I claim that the position thus ascribed to Descartes collapses into a crude form of idealism, and attempt to pinpoint precisely the flaw in the argument which gives rise to this collapse. I finish by suggesting that the same flaw might be apparent in Philip Pettit's recent development of (...) the notion of response‐dependent concepts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Species Counterpoint:Darwin and the Evolution of FormsRandall Everett AllsupMy intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms; the gods, who made the changes, will help me—or so I hope—with a poem that runs from the World's beginning to our own days.1I.A recent article in a progressive monthly magazine asked by way of a thesis, "Whose music is the blues?" Under the title, the tag line read, (...) "2003 is the 'Year of the Blues.' But as a music born of oppression becomes a feel-good soundtrack for white America, just what are we celebrating?"2 I recall feeling puzzled by this rather old-fashioned topic of investigation. Anyone with access to the Internet knows that music is not for one group or another. Global file sharing has made ownership as easy as, well, sharing a file. Furthermore, the tendency to depart from ancestral forms, whether as rebellious teenagers, rock guitarists, or both, seems genetically built into us. Life is a metamorphosis and music—like life—evolves.To advance the notion that music is made for one people and not another, that it has absolute or essential qualities, opens a terribly large can of worms. We know, for example, that identity and music are linked, but the relationship is not [End Page 159] mono-directional, causal, or fixed. My relationship to the blues or Broadway show tunes for that matter is defined somewhere within a dense web of group associations, educational opportunities, even closet desires. With regard to psychological research on identity, slippery and impermanent as identity is, this research is really about similarities.3 Conservative in this light, such studies look for commonalities: their goal is to identify "what is."4Fear is often the dominant response to the evolution of a cherished form. Change, however, holds equal parts fear and promise. The Chinese word for crisis, wei-ji, means "opportunity with danger." This essay will contextualize the latter, but focus on the former. It is worth asking, for example, what might result from an examination of anomalies? Rather than attempt to identify "what is," such an inquiry would be concerned with "what else" [the abnormality] as well as "what might be" [the opportunity]. Located, I think, within the anomalies and mutations that seem to fit so well our globally connected world are new codes, altered methods for self-understanding, and interaction in the arts.Charles Darwin and The Origins of Species will provide the conceptual framework for this discussion.5 To look for help in the work of Darwin will require a crossbreeding of scientific theory and metaphor, a cross-pollination of hypothesis and the hypothetical. We will look at how the production of new forms, particularly musical forms, is shaped. Speaking metaphorically, a work of art or entertainment can be seen as an adaptation to and of its environment. We know that cultural products, like all living species, are not permanent entities. Change, Darwin stressed, carries with it purpose. To that end, he looked for variation to help him understand how and why an organism or system developed the way it did. What might be revealed if we apply this procedure to the field of music and music education? We might see eco-systems in various stages of growth, health, and decline. A look at musical forms as mutable, living creations that spring from and reflect a particular condition raises interesting questions about place and purpose.II.Only a hundred and fifty years ago, a single event—a theory!—precipitated a cultural crisis that threw down two thousand years of scientific and philosophic thought. The popular revolt that Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species fueled (and continues to fuel) called into question fundamental beliefs about how the world is made. Darwin's theory that matter and energy are in steady flux, that life is in need of constant variation, implied that fixed or universal truths are nothing more than comforts created by the mind. The Origin of Species was therefore more than a scientific revolution.6 A core tenet of Western culture was challenged by its publication: the so-called immaterial spirit, whether viewed in the [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 373-376 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation, by Glenn C. Arbery; 255 pp. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2001, $24.95. Over the last decade or so, there has appeared an increasing number of books critical of the profession of literary studies. Such criticism has typically (...) been directed at literary theory and its preoccupation with the politics of race, class, and gender. To a limited extent, Glenn Arbery's Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation can be classified as belonging to such a "genre." Early in the book, for example, Arbery argues in favor of the "old-fashioned" idea, as he calls it, that literature is a "mode of knowledge" with the potential to open up transcendent modes of experience. Yet Why Literature Matters is so short on polemics and so long on incisive, sometimes brilliant readings of works ranging from the poetry and fiction of Seamus Heaney, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, and Emily Dickinson to Shakespeare's Othello and Homer's Iliad, that such a characterization is insufficient at best and distorting at worst. Notwithstanding its title, this book is devoted less to advancing a polemic about "why literature matters" than to dramatizing, with performative power and grace, why most of us, politically oriented or not, are already quite sure that it does.Such performative power can be felt throughout Why Literature Matters, but [End Page 373] its presence is especially strong in the final, lengthy chapter on the Iliad, "The Sacrifice of Achilles." Bringing to bear his training as a classical scholar, Arbery contends that the Iliad is "about" a single event: the death or "sacrifice" of Achilles. Achilles, Arbery notes, was not just the greatest hero of the Iliad. He was also the greatest hero of the entire classical world: "Achilles has no rival in glory, either in the generation of heroes before him (not even Herakles), or in the ages after him. According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar wept because he had not accomplished as much as Alexander at the same age, but Alexander the Great envied Achilles."Why, then, does Arbery refer to Achilles' death as "sacrificial"? Drawing on a version of the Greek myth whose source is Pindar rather than the more commonly cited Hesiod, Arbery observes that Achilles' sacrificial death, which is not in fact narrated in the Iliad but is everywhere taken for granted, was necessitated by Zeus' successful plan to forestall a prophecy. That prophecy said that a son would be born to Zeus and the goddess Thetis, who would overthrow the Olympian god as Zeus had overthrown the Titans. Such a son, prophesized to be not the greatest of mortals but, much more, the greatest of gods, would have been--should have been, from Achilles's justly embittered standpoint--Achilles. But in fact Zeus foiled the prophecy by marrying Thetis off to a mere mortal, Peleus, thereby ensuring his own continued reign and Achilles' eventual death.It is the burden of Arbery's discussion to show not just that Achilles comes to accept and even "will" his own death, but that the meaning of such sacrificial death is embodied and given "presence" in the poetic form and language of the Iliad, including especially the descriptions of Patrocles and Hector, each of whom "inhabits the meaning of Achilles" by dying, successively, in Achilles' armor. Arbery goes so far as to compare Achilles' sacrifice with Christ's, asserting that reading the Iliad "in ignorance of the central importance of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis [is comparable] to reading [Dante's] Inferno (where references to holy things are scarce) in ignorance of the existence of Christ."Arbery makes clear, however, that it is the differences, rather than the similarities, that are most important in such a comparison. Those differences revolve around three issues. First, whereas Christ is a deity who sacrifices himself for humanity, Achilles is a mortal who sacrifices himself for the gods. Second, whereas humanity gains ultimate... (shrink)

The problematic of world articulation is central to post-phenomenological approaches. With Castoriadis, it emerges as a significant if shadowy thematic. Its shifting contours in his thought are redolent of the ongoing dialogue between romantic and enlightenment currents. They are also indicative of the ambiguity inherent to cultural articulations of the world in modernity. Here, two world perspectives open up various — and conflicting — interpretative challenges to which a response is necessitated. In Castoriadis's case, these take on particular forms (...) of more general trends of `alienation' and `worldliness'. In particular, the isolation of the social-historical as the sole bearer of creativity tends to result in world alienation, whilst his later shift towards radical physis indicates a trend towards vertical worldliness. Arnason's theorization of world articulation in its twofold sense re-imagines the worldliness of the social-historical both in terms of the world tout court and our concrete stance towards it (or the world towards us). As such, it offers a corrective to the `worldless freedom' of the social-historical in Castoriadis's thought. (shrink)

The philosophic moment of Marx : Marx's transformation of the Hegelian dialectic -- Preface to the Iranian edition of Marx's humanist essays -- The theory of alienation : Marx's debt to Hegel -- The todayness of Marx's humanism -- A 1981 view of Marx's 1841 dialectic -- The inseparability of Marx's economics, humanism, and dialectic -- Capitalist development and Marx's capital, 1863-1883 -- Today's epigones who try to truncate Marx's capital -- Letter to Herbert Marcuse on automation -- Marx's grundrisse (...) and the dialectic in life and in thought -- Capitalist production/alienated labor -- Marx's critique of culture -- Post-Marx marxism and the battle of ideas -- Post-Marx marxism as a category -- Hobsbawm and Rubel on the Marx centenary, but where is Marx? -- Marx's philosophy of revolution vs. non-marxist scholar-careerists in "marxism" -- Paul Mattick : economism vs. Marx's humanism -- Bertell Ollman : pitting "human nature" against Marx's humanism -- The dialectic of labor in Marx and "critical thought" -- Gramsci's "philosophy of praxis" -- Rosdolsky's methodology and Lange's revisionism -- Adorno, Kosik, and the movement from practice -- Marx as philosopher of revolution in permanence-reading Marx for today -- Section A: Marxist-humanism -- Introduction to philosophic notes -- The emergence of a new movement from practice that is itself a form of theory -- New stage of production, new stage of cognition, new kind of organization -- The dialectic of absolute idea as new beginning -- Section B: Black liberation and internationalism -- Abolitionism and the American roots of marxism -- Marx and the two-way road between the U.S. and Africa -- Black intellectuals in dilemma -- Women's liberation and the dialectics of revolution -- Marx's "new humanism" and the dialectics of women's liberation in "primitive" and modern societies -- Marx's and Engels' studies contrasted : relationship of philosophy and revolution to women's liberation -- Letter to adrienne rich on women's liberation, gay liberation, and the dialectic -- Dialectics of organization and philosophy -- Spontaneity, organization, philosophy (dialectics) -- Philosopher of permanent revolution and organization man -- A post-World War II view of Marx's humanism, 1843-1883 : marxist humanism, 1950s-1980s -- Appendices -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

Permanenceand Change was written and first published in the depths of the Great Depression. Attitudes Toward History followed it two years later. These were revolutionary texts in the theory of communication, and, as classics, they retain their surcharge of energy. Permanence and Change treats human communication in terms of ideal cooperation, whereas Attitudes Towards History characterizes tactics and patterns of conflict typical of actual human associations. It is in Permanence and Change that Burke establishes in path-breaking fashion that (...) form permeates society just as it does poetry and the arts. Hence, his master idea that forms of art are not exclusively aesthetic: the cycles of a storm, the gradations of a sunrise, the stages of an epidemic, the undoing of Prince Hamlet are all instances of progressive form.This new Edition of Permanence and Change reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's long sociological introduction and includes a substantial new afterward in which Burke reexamines his early ideas in light of subsequent developments in his own thinking and in social theory.". (shrink)

This paper examines a largely unrecognized mental disorder that is essentially a disability of values. It is their daily contact with this pathology that leads many university liberal arts faculty to demoralization. The deeply rooted disparity between the world of the traditional liberal arts scholar and today’s college students is not simply a gulf across which communication is difficult, but rather involves a pathological impairment in the majority of students that stems from an exclusionary focus on work, money, and the (...) acquisition of things. It is argued that this state of mind constitutes a self-disabling mental illness, which for a society becomes pathological ideology, and for the individual takes the form of clinical narcissism. (shrink)

In this paper architectural forms are presented as symbolic forms issued from the complex semiosis that characterises human cognition (Ferreira (2007, 2010)). Being semiotic objects, these symbolic forms are, consequently, context- dependent_they emerge and have meaning, i.e., they are assigned a functional and/or aesthetic value, in particular physical, social and cultural frameworks. As it happens with all semiotic objects, architectural forms, whatever their nature, are not static but highly interactive. In fact, they act as agents of (...) specific semiotic processes, engaged in a permanent dialectic relationship with the environment they are embedded in. From this dialectics important physical, social, cultural and economic changes frequently arise, redefining this way the original framework for decades to come. As Pallasmaa (2009) points out: “Architecture is existentially rooted, and it expresses fundamental existential experiences, the complex condensation of how it feels to be human being in this world. Architecture grounds and frames existence and creates specific horizons of perception, understanding and identity.” Architecture happens in the context of particular landscapes both natural and man-made, individuating spaces, assigning them an identity, turning the frequently undifferentiated physical environment into “locus”, “place”, “site”, “ort”, definitely contributing to the definition of the mental map that individual minds are able to share collectively. The fundamental role played by architectural forms in the definition of “place” and identity and in the shaping or reshaping of a physical, social and cultural environment is analysed in this paper through a case study that observes the consequences of this dynamics in the development of the social and cultural tissue of a particular city. (shrink)

This study demonstrates that Dewey did not reject Hegelianism during the 1890s, as scholars maintain, but developed a humanistic/historicist reading that was indebted to an American Hegelian tradition. Scholars have misunderstood the "permanent Hegelian deposit" in Dewey's thought because they have not fully appreciated this American Hegelian tradition and have assumed that his Hegelianism was based primarily on British neo-Hegelianism. ;The study examines the American reception of Hegel in the nineteenth-century by intellectuals as diverse as James Marsh and Frederic Henry (...) Hedge and how it flowered in late nineteenth-century St. Louis. The St. Louis Hegelians read Hegel as a particularly practical and politically liberal philosopher whose social philosophy promoted both social diversity and unity. Led by W. T. Harris, they studied Hegel in German and published their own scholarship, as well as translations of German scholarship, in their Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their efforts to make "Hegel talk English" and to base the St. Louis public schools on Hegel's philosophy of education won them national, and even, international attention. The St. Louis Hegelians sought to adapt Hegel's thought to their American context by assuaging elitist elements within it; Dewey's intellectual development was profoundly shaped by their appropriation of his philosophy. ;Dewey drew upon Hegel's argument that humans form societies because of their differences, not in spite of them. Hegel's rejection of the self-sufficient, atomistic individual entailed that the individual is dependent upon others for the satisfaction of material needs. Moreover, like Hegel, Dewey rejected the hedonistic basis of the British political tradition by arguing that humans seek recognition from their equals as well as satisfaction of material needs. Dewey believed Hegel's emphasis upon equality and diversity provided a model of society in which there was fertile ground for the individual to conceive and articulate cultural criticism. The study ends by comparing recent Hegel scholarship to Dewey's, demonstrating that American Hegelianism has returned, in important ways, to a Deweyan reading of Hegel. (shrink)

In 1937 Joan Robinson proposed that “when capitalism is rightly understood, the rate of interest will be set at zero and the major evils of capitalism will disappear”. A permanent zero rate would abolish capitalist profit except in limited cases, leaving nearly all output to be claimed by labour as wages. It would allow capital to be allocated on the basis of prospective social benefit rather than short-term profitability and a collateral basis that favours the wealthy. It would remove some (...) of the economic pressure to use resources unsustainably. So why not do this? I argue that the few available philosophical arguments for positive interest rates are unsatisfactory. Those who want a just and sustainable form of capitalism should target net zero for the interest rate. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a (...) loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening the world to theatre, but because they effectively capture and present the reality of a world that has been thoroughly theatricalised - and they do so more effectively than the main instruments usually employed to analyse reality: philosophy and sociology. With analyses of some of the most important novelists and novels of modern culture, including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Mann, Blixen, Broch and Bulgakov, and focusing on fin-de-siecle Vienna as a crucial threshold chronotope of modernity, Permanent Liminality and Modernity demonstrates that all seek to investigate and unmask the theatricalisation of modern life, with its progressive loss of meaning and our deteriorating capacity to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is artificial. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Girard to examine the ways in which novels explore the reduction of human existence to a state of permanent liminality, in the form of a sacrificial carnival, this book will appeal to scholars of social, anthropological and literary theory. ". (shrink)

Alongwith the major organ of the doctrinal operations, the Permanent Resolution Act, this research presented a situation review article on the Doctrine of the Chittagong Peace Process in Bangladesh with few global strikeable issues. Unarmed surviving Parbatya Chittagong nation of Buddhists population in Bangladesh has not yet been able to form their government since 1997 to 2023, so it has been assumed that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina & Awami League Government of Bangladesh (ALGOB) cheated to weaponless freedom fighters Buddhists people (...) by taking their weapons through the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord 1997 that was signed between Bangladesh and Chittagong HillTracts in order to a Commonwealth of Independence of Autonomy Government, Formation of Legislative Assembly House and Parliament Building Construction, which is also the last official initiative of the Parbatya Peace Process in the Chinese Belt and Road. Following the theater of war between the US-led NATO—Ukraine alliance and the Russian Federation, the 3rd World War situations intended to expand between Bangladesh and Myanmar. This doctrinal paper has been presented through codification of situations of the post-seizure war-fighting battles surviving cold and silent conflicts in Parbatya, Chittagong Hill Tracts, in order to deliver the seized nation onto a free pathway. (shrink)

I knew I was in for trouble, that the going would be rough, when I removed the wrapper from the “Race,” Writing, and Difference issue of Critical Inquiry and observed the word “race” in quotation marks. Something deep was clearly brewing. And any doubts were quickly removed when I turned to the opening remarks of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Who,” he asked me, “has seen a black or a red person, a white yellow, or brown?” . There was a question (...) that spelled trouble, a glove in the face if I ever saw one. Here I was, crude, unregenerate, lacking the hypersensitivity that prevents someone like Gates from making such infra dig distinctions; here I was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy. Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently quiet or of perpetuating ruthless violence—of denying the individuality of all of God’s creation—not only by referring to knives, cats, my brother, or Indians, but simply by referring at all. But why, I wondered, was only the word “race” in quotation marks? Why not every single word in the entire issue of Critical Inquiry? For to refer, it seems, is to colonize, to take things over for one’s own brutal use, to turn everything else into a mere Other. There was Gates engaging in the academic’s favorite pastime, épater les bourgeois, and here was I, a hopeless bourgeois, just asking for a put-down. Harold Fromm is an independent scholar who has taught for many years in university English departments. He has published articles on Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as on literary theory, politics, and professionalism. His most recent work concerns the Brontës. (shrink)

What is the relationship between consciousness and semiosis? This article attempts to provide some clues to answer this question. For doing it, we explore the application of the Integral model to semiotics; that is to say, the metatheory that integrates the inside, the outside, the individual, and the collective dimension, on one hand and, on the other hand, the levels of development, states and types of consciousness. Our principal hypothesis is that the semiosis depends on the “subjectal” form where the (...) self is located temporarily or permanently. To validate it, we analyze the way in which the universe of meaning changes between the self located below the subject (as a form), and the self located beyond of it. According to the Integral semiotics point of view outlined here, the relationship between consciousness and the meaning has to do with the reduction or expansion of the subjectal spectrum, and the trajectory of the self along of it. (shrink)

‘Form’ was a fundamental category of European philosophy from its beginnings in ancient Greece until the 19th century. As Aristotle’s examples show, it originated in craft. Making a pot out of clay is a paradigm case of giving form to matter. During its long career in philosophy, this concept of humble origin expanded into a category for everything: In the 18th century, vide Kant, cognition could have a form (and even had to have it), or ethical decisions, or the experience (...) of beauty. Yet even vis-à-vis much simpler examples objections arise; already a rock, though it must have a shape, will not have form in the same sense as, e.g., a pot. In terms of being true to worldly phenomena, there is a high prize to pay for Western philosophy’s universalization of the concept of form. (shrink)

El trabajo tiene como objetivo fundamentar teórica y metodológicamentela educación del adulto mayor en el contexto de la educación permanente. Para ello, se describe conceptualmente el carácter de la educación a lo largo de la vida, su integración a la existencia humana. Los métodos del nivel teórico empleados fueron el análisis y síntesis para la construcción del marco teórico-metodológico. Quedan argumentados tres modelos pedagógicos necesarios por su importancia en el estudio desarrollado. La educación del adulto mayor se inscribe en el (...) proceso íntegro de educación permanente, al proveer conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes valiosas para el crecimiento personal como respuesta a la dinámica de los cambios científicos, tecnológicos y sociales. The objective of the paper is to provide a theoretical and methodological basis on old people's education in the context of permanent education. To that end, the character of education throughout life and its integration to human existence is described. Theoretical level methods such as analysis and synthesis were used in order to construct the theoretical-methodological framework. Three pedagogical models, which are necessary because of their importance for the study, are argued. Old people's education forms part of the whole permanent education process, as it provides knowledge, skills and valuable attitudes towards personal growth as an answer to scientific, technological and social changes dynamics. (shrink)

The notion of ‘durability’ plays a central role in the discourse, policies, and practices surrounding forced displacement. Yet, for all the talk of ‘durable solutions’ to refugee situations, durability is in many ways the quality most conspicuously absent in refugees' everyday lives and living spaces. As the world has grown progressively more inured to the practice of using provisional spaces of transit as permanent sites of residence, displaced persons are increasingly finding themselves trapped in spaces marked by a kind of (...) permanent temporariness. In this article, I sketch three different ways in which living for long periods of time in temporary spaces can harm inhabitants: first, I argue that non-durability in the home can undermine cognitive function; second, that it can attenuate various forms of agency; and third, that it fails to furnish a ground on which refugees can build meaningful lives and futures for themselves. I conclude by arguing that the deprivation of durable living conditions is not only harmful, but wrongful. (shrink)

This dissertation advances the thesis that modern political freedom has an aporetical relation to the possibility of its own foundation. In the first volume, I examine how Machiavelli establishes the internal relation between political freedom and historical contingency that gives rise to the non-foundational concept of political freedom in early modernity. Far from reducing politics to the activity of providing secure foundations for the state, Machiavelli elaborates a conception of politics torn by the antinomical tasks of giving political freedom its (...) reality in the "form" of the state, and of restoring the anti-realist character of this ungroundable freedom in the "event" of the republic. These two irreducible poles of modern political life correspond to the basic political difference between the process of securing rule and the affirmation of a space of no-rule, where a common political existence is led in the absence of domination. ;The second volume illustrates how the historicist and anti-foundational character of modern political freedom can illuminate the situation of late modernity, viewed politically. The first trait of this situation is revealed by the problematic, yet inescapable, synthesis of political philosophy and philosophy of history. By exploring the reasons for, and the limits of, this synthesis I provide a new interpretation of the complementary ideas that freedom has a history and that history is the history of freedom in view of elaborating a postmetaphysical concept of political freedom. The second trait of the situation of modernity consists in the permanent possibility of situating politically the validity of norms, thereby putting into question the link between morality and metaphysically consolidated principles. Focusing on the contemporary debate over the tension between the validity of a norm and its application to a given situation, I argue that the erosion of metaphysical grounds for the determination of what is right corresponds to the priority assigned to political freedom over justice. This priority is manifest by the fact that, in the situation of modernity, the very difference between fact and norm is drawn on the site of politics conceived as an uncircumventable conflict of interpretations. (shrink)

People have always tried to make predictions; they are necessary and useful, but very often they commit obvious errors, which have negative consequences on decision-making. Prediction errors are in some cases, not few, unavoidable, because the world itself is unpredictable, subject to chance (or randomness in mathematics). Chance is a property of nature. The causes of random events are physically determined, but so numerous and complex that they (the events) are unpredictable. Science is not about certainty. Human knowledge itself is (...) not certain. We can only have provisional truths. Therefore, we must manage to reach a state of accommodation with uncertainty and unpredictability. The complexity of natural phenomena generates events that we cannot control through theoretical modeling precisely because of the ignorance of the causal mechanisms, which exist in their privacy but have not (yet) been revealed by the data and observations at our disposal. We have, on the one hand, life experience taken over and assimilated and established in society and, on the other hand, experience gained from real life. Norm and chance follow each other rather chaotically. The duration of validity of a norm and the moment of occurrence of the random event are unpredictable. However, norms and events coexist in our consciousness. Order and predictability are born (formed and exist) from rules; chance and unpredictability are born from the lack of rules. The highest truths, recognized as such by society cannot be transposed into the life of society only by the force of reason. It is imperative that they are reinforced and embedded in the social behavior of all citizens. Rules are needed. Without rules there is no freedom. (shrink)

Formative intervention methodologies, such as the Change Laboratory, are increasingly being used in work environments. However, the learning process entailed in the application of these methodologies has received insufficient attention and may be facilitated through the use of learning platforms. We examined the development of learning and training strategies for implementing formative interventions, drawing on the experiences of a research group focusing on workers’ health. Information obtained from individuals involved in CL formative activities was analyzed and interpreted using Cultural-Historical Activity (...) Theory and the theory of expansive learning. The process of learning to implement formative interventions unfolded gradually, beginning with the interventionists’ initial exposure to abstract concepts that they subsequently internalized via various mediations and applied in concrete situations. Four key interventionist training strategies used to foster collective learning were identified: promoting dialogues and exchange of experiences, creating environments for continuous learning and permanent discussion, creating spaces for experimentation and the practical application of concepts, and the use of the double stimulation method during training programs. (shrink)

First published in 1923, Lev Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution was the first systematic treatment of art by a Communist Party leader. The international history of its publication and reception has gone hand-in-hand with the development of the Marxist theory of culture. This article highlights several specific concepts in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution which exerted decisive formative influence on critical theory, including the relative autonomy of culture, a broadening of ideology to include cultural practices, and an innovative treatment of class. I (...) conclude that for Trotsky culture can only be described negatively, as its own constant overcoming, as permanent revolution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Modernity as a Rhetorical Problem: Phronēsis, Forms, and Forums in Norms of Rhetorical CultureJames Arnt AuneThe true paradises are the paradises that we’ve lost.—Marcel Proust, The Past RegainedThomas B. Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993, 6) remains both a masterly synthesis of previous constructive work in rhetorical theory and the essential starting point for anyone committed to reconciling the practical impulses of Aristotelian rhetoric, ethics, and politics with (...) the critical imperatives of modernity. In what follows, I try to make a very simple point about Farrell’s recuperation of Aristotelianism: he neglects matters of social causation and institutional design that were essential to Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric. In turn, by displacing the social in favor of the cultural—a displacement characteristic of much recent work in the human sciences (Schudson 1997)—Farrell lacks a coherent account of the gap between the normative aspirations of classical rhetoric and the empirical characteristics of public life in modern liberal democracies.The problem appears most clearly in chapter 7 of Norms : “Criticism, Disturbance, and Rhetorical Community.” Farrell defines culture as “the common definition of places for the invention and perpetuation of meaning. A culture offers to those who live in it symbols and families of practices that [End Page 402] permit ongoing performances of meaning and value” (1993, 277). Summarizing his previous arguments, Farrell contends that Aristotle’s Rhetoric informs modern “cultural occasions” in three ways: “the impetus for rhetorical meaning, which we find in Aristotle’s seminal understanding of phronēsis, typified by deliberative prudence; a concept of rhetorical form, which we have found in the prototype for public inference and judgment—the enthymeme; and a modern rhetorical forum, a space of engagement wherein the modern constraints of rhetorical culture might assert themselves” (1993, 277). Although these three concepts are inherently useful, both for analyzing past rhetorical episodes and for projecting emancipatory rhetorical possibilities in the present, they are insufficiently grounded in a historical account of the differences between ancient and modern prudential deliberation, rhetorical forms, and rhetorical forums. An adequate history of these differences would require attention to modern social systems as a whole, which include the economy, the polity, and social institutions such as the family, schools, religious and ethnic organizations, and, most crucially for contemporary social systems, the entire apparatus of the culture industry, including the news and entertainment “media.”The cultural aspect of the modern social system, loosely following Talcott Parsons (1951), includes norms, which make for communal solidarity, and values, which undergird the whole system. Although a thoroughgoing account of the place of rhetoric in the entire contemporary social system of a modern liberal democracy such as the United States or Canada would have required a book three times as long as Norms, there are three ways in which modernity complicates the appropriation of Aristotle’s concepts. First, rhetorical meaning is very different in a social system in which individual autonomy takes precedence over communal solidarity as a fundamental value (Pippin 1999). Second, rhetorical forms function differently in a social system in which those forms can be commodified (Aune 1994, 2001). Third, rhetorical forums are also far more complex, especially in an extended republic like Canada or the United States, requiring greater attention to the way in which constitutions literally create persons who speak (such as the president or prime minister) and spaces for speaking (Congress, the state or provincial houses [White 1984]). The need to raise massive sums of money to obtain media access for common rhetorical deliberation, as is especially the case in the United States, complicates the notion of a rhetorical forum immensely. Even without adopting a broadly Marxian framework, it is clear that the rise and development of capitalism have permanently altered rhetorical deliberation and its forms and forums. [End Page 403] In what follows, I expand on these three criticisms first, by developing a historical account of the social changes that necessitate a rethinking of classical rhetorical theory; second, by comparing and contrasting Farrell’s work with two other contemporary Aristotelianisms, one antimodernist and the other solidly modernist; and third, by developing a framework for normative and empirical investigation of rhetoric that is, I hope... (shrink)

This paper investigates Vācaspati Miśra’s remarkably complex argumentative architecture in support of non-difference by means of a microsimulation model, the classical gold-crown case. A full range of positions, including instantaneism, transformative continuum, indeterminate common basis reference, difference and non-difference coordination, etc., is put under the scrutiny of the Vācaspati Miśra’s dialectic effort. The possibility of coexistence of multiple properties with a single referent is then formally explored. The analysis is carried out in compliance with the ‘Navya-Nyāya Formal Language’ extensional set-based (...) approach and its non-predicative, and variables free, relational syntax. Repeatable modules and structures of reasoning are identified and designed in the form of hypothesis frameworks, axioms and theorems to allow more accurate inferences, in particular regarding transformation and permanence, together with possible or impossible plexuses of properties. Identity and difference qua mutual absence are thoroughly defined with the aid of these formal tools, which conjointly might cast new light on the heuristic and expressive power of Navya-Nyāya logic, as well as on the theoretical potentialities of the non-dualistic account. (shrink)

In this paper, we test the philosophical endurance of the Nyāya theory of the permanent self. We present a debate between those, who believe in a permanent self, and their opponents in a dialogical form. In our imaginary debate, there are two participants; Gautama—somebody who has studied Udayana’s Ātmatattvaviveka (a text that claims that a self must be a permanent and irreducible entity) and finds its arguments convincing—and, Sugata, who does not believe in a permanent and irreducible self. Although Udayana (...) and other philosophers of the Old Nyāya school were mostly fighting the Buddhist philosophers, Sugata’s arguments are not confined to the Buddhist theories only; he presents several reductionist arguments proposed by Hume, Galen Strawson and Parfit. (shrink)

This article aims to explore a theme of the metaphysica paupera from the reflections of the Friar Minor Luca Pacioli, highlighting their roots in the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian tradition, but also in some aspects of the Franciscan one. I will show, firstly, how in the early Franciscan environment the idea of minor beauty was progressively developed in relation to the form of life that places poverty at its centre. Secondly, I will outline how, in Bonaventure’s reflections, this idea, initially associated (...) with a practical and moral dimension, is reframed in a theological sense, in terms of evangelical perfection, and in a metaphysical sense, finding its full foundation in the idea of a proportional beauty that establishes a metaphysics of relationship. Finally, I will highlight how both ideas – that of a metaphysics of relationship and a Franciscan matrix – persist in Pacioli, in his mathematization of knowledge, capable of including minor beauty as the metaphysical principle of the world, as well as of all human activities and forms of knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to determine the use of the blackboard by teachers of Islamic Culture and Ethics. For this purpose, the views and practices of the teachers regarding the use of the blackboard were examined. The study is important as it was conducted through a combination of interviews and observations and contributes to the literature on the subject. A case study design, which is one of the qualitative methods, was used in the study. The study was conducted (...) with nine Islamic Culture and Ethics teachers selected through purposive sampling method in the center of Bitlis province and in six middle schools. A semi-structured interview form and an observation form developed by the researcher were used as data collection tools in the study. The data obtained from the interviews and observations were analyzed for content and presented in table format and interpreted. The study findings reached themes related to blackboard usage education, usage purpose, usage principles, usage self-efficacy, usage frequency, and usage problems. As a result, the teachers considered themselves sufficient in terms of blackboard usage and had not participated in any training related to blackboard usage. Teachers used the blackboard mainly to add visuality to the lesson, attract attention, provide instant additional and summary information, ensure permanence of knowledge, and activate teachers and students. Teachers frequently used the blackboard in their lessons. However, since teachers used the blackboard without paying attention to usage principles and in an unplanned manner, they encountered various problems related to classroom management such as noise, disinterest, and time loss, and could not benefit from the blackboard at a sufficient level. Nevertheless, it was observed that teachers' use of the blackboard in class added visuality and liveliness to the lesson, attracted the attention and interest of the students, supported teacher explanations, facilitated lesson follow-up, provided a common working area for teachers and students, and supported other educational tools used in the lesson. It is recommended that in-service trainings based on effective use of the blackboard be provided to teachers by experts in the field. (shrink)

According to the BSM- Supergravitation Unified Theory (BSM-SG), the energy is indispensable feature of matter, while the matter possesses hierarchical levels of organization from a simple to complex forms, with appearance of fields at some levels. Therefore, the energy also follows these levels. At the fundamental level, where the primary energy source exists, the matter is in its primordial form, where two super-dense fundamental particles (FP) exist in a classical pure empty space (not a physical vacuum). They are associated (...) with the Planck scale parameters of frequency and distance and interact by Supergravitational forces. These forces are inverse proportional to the cube of distance at pure empty space and they are based on frequency interactions. Since the two FPs have different intrinsic frequencies, the SG forces appear different for interactions between the like and unlike FPs and may change the sign. This primordial form of matter exists in the super-heavy black holes located in the center of each well formed galaxy. The next upper level of matter organization includes the underlying structure of the physical vacuum, called a Cosmic Lattice, and the structure of elementary particles. They have common substructure elements obtained by specific crystallization process preceding the formation of the observable galaxies. The Cosmic Lattice, forming a space known as a physical vacuum, is responsible for the existence and propagation of the physical fields: electrical, magnetic, Newtonian gravity and inertia. The energy of physical vacuum is in two forms: Static (enormous) and Dynamic (weak). The Static energy is directly related to the Newtonian mass by the Einstein equation E = mc^2 and it is a primary source of the nuclear energy. The Dynamic energy is responsible for the existence of the electric and magnetic fields, the constant speed of light and the quantum mechanical properties of the physical vacuum. The next upper energy level is the dynamical energy of excited atoms and molecules. At this level a hidden energy wells exit, such as the internal energy of the electron and the internal energy of atoms with more than one electron. The next upper energy level is at some organic molecules and particularly in the biomolecules that contain ring atomic structures. In such a structure, some quantum states are not emitted immediately, but rotating in the ring. While in organic molecules the energy stored in such a ring is released by a chemical process, in the long chain molecule of proteins in the living organism the stored energy can be released simultaneously by triggering. A huge number of atomic rings are contained in the DNA strands. The release of the energy stored in DNA, for example, is an avalanche process that causes an emission of entangled photons possessing a strong penetrating capability. A sequence of entangled photons emitted by DNA should carry the genetic information encoded by the cordons. This mechanism, predicted in BSM-SG theory, is very important for intercommunication between the cells of the living organism. The next upper level of energy organization may exist in the brain. The brain is an organ of a most abundant number of atomic rings, while its tissue environment might permit complex energy interactions. The human brain contains billions of atomic rings. The next hypothetical upper level of energy organization is an information field, physically existed outside, but connected with the living brain. It corresponds to a specific field known as aura, while the possibility of its existence is still not accepted by the main stream science. The problem is that this field could not be detected by the currently existing technical means used for EM communications. The BSM-SG predicts that this field might differ from the EM field we use for communication, but it is a subject of a further theoretical development that must be supported by experiments using specifically designed technical means. According to the BSM-SG theory, the energy conversion from the primary energy source to the complex levels of matter and field organization is a permanent syntropic process based on complex resonance interactions. (shrink)

Morality bears on what we should forget. Some aspects of our identity are meant to be forgotten and there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us, content that prompts a duty to forget. To make the case that forgetting is an integral part of our moral duties to others, the paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I make the case that forgetting is morally evaluable and I survey three kinds of forgetting: no-trace forgetting, (...) archival forgetting, and siloing. In §2, I turn to how we practice these forms of forgetting in our everyday lives and the goods these practices facilitate by drawing on examples ranging from the expunging of juvenile arrest records to the right to privacy. In §3, I turn to how my account can help us both recognize and address a heretofore neglected source of harm caused by technology and big data. In §4, I end by addressing the concern that we lack control over forgetting and thus can't be required to forget. I argue this challenge can be answered, but there’s a harder challenge that can’t. Forgetting is under threat. To address this challenge and preserve forgetting, we must change the world. (shrink)

Alexander Raven Thomson was a British fascist philosopher, active from 1932 to 1955. I outline Thomson’s Spenglerian views on civilization and decline. I argue that Thomson in his first book is an orthodox Spenglerian who accepts that decline is inevitable and thinks that it is morally required to destroy civilization in its final stages. I argue that this suffers from conceptual issues which may have caused Thomson’s change to a revised form of Spenglerianism, which is more authentically fascist. This authentically (...) fascist view is then seen to fall prey into the problem inherent in the very idea of permanent rebirth. (shrink)

In the context of discussing Deleuze's account of Bergson's idea of non-being, this paper brings into discussion different versions of non-being as available in Indian philosophy. These versions are drawn both from classical Indian philosophy including Vedas and Upanishads and modern Indian philosophy such as Vaddera Chandidas. The paper discusses Deleuze's analysis of Bergson on the relation between non-being and negation. While Bergson rightly traces the roots of non-being to negation, he, however, rendered it to intuition. Extending Bergson's diagnosis of (...) negation as the basis of non-being, the paper goes on to show, using Chandidas's work Desire and Liberation: The Fundamentals of Cosmicontology, how negation in the form of pre-existence and post-existence that negate existence is made possible by permanence. Pre- and post-existence are permanent; in contrast, existence is rendered impermanent and changing. The paper concludes, using the insights from Chandidas, by exposing this conspiracy of metaphysics that renders the real existence as fleeing and impermanent in contrast to the non-being that is projected by the intellect as real. (shrink)

Existing theoretical interpretations contend that modernization is a global but diverse and multidimensional process. Yet, a systematic analysis of multiple forms of modernity and modernization ‘is the major challenge to current social and political theory’ (Wagner). The paper aims at revealing limitations of current theoretical interpretations of modernization and demonstrating systematically essential features of modernity. I describe the crucial criteria of modernization and suggest an integrated approach within which the most influential theories are simultaneously applied as coherent explanations. Such (...) a synergic application allows identifying concomitant dimensions of modernity and modernization. The proposed approach significantly differs from a prevailing theoretical discourse on modernity and modernization. It demonstrates universal features of modernization along with civilization variability and uniqueness of cultural programs, antinomic emancipation trends, permanence of change and innovations, increase of efficiency, competitiveness and the quality of life. All these dimensions relate to a set of consistent interpretations of a complex multi-effects phenomenon, which minimizes the existing conceptual contradictions. The elaborated model supports the notion of modernization as a continuous transition to novel forms of social order which respond to emerging challenges and global competition while an invariant criterion of modernization is the boost in the capabilities of people to make their choices. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between subjectivity and representational form. More specifically, it discusses the transformation in self-representation between life and death by the artist Roger de la Fresnaye, reflecting his modernist articulations of life to pre-modern, classicist figurations of death. For the artist, modernity could not bear the demands that dying made upon representation, as unable to fully accord death a sign. Modernity's dissolution of the subject annihilated the very permanence of identity and presence that death guaranteed, but (...) without its covenant of ritual and history. Instead, classicism provided a coherent anterior body, another face from which he could speak after death: ?one? would always be present to speak for him. The face therefore addresses culture through its specific appeal to, and demand of, time, space, and history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacramental Character and the Pattern of Theological Life:Medieval Context and Early Modern ReceptionReginald M. Lynch O.P.In question 63 of the tertia pars, Thomas Aquinas defines the so-called character that is conferred by certain sacraments (namely baptism, confirmation, and holy orders), as a secondary effect caused by the sacraments, with grace itself identified as the primary effect. As separated instruments of the humanity of Christ, in his mature work in (...) the Summa theologiae Aquinas argues that all Christian sacraments are perfective instrumental causes of the effect of the Incarnation in the human persons who receive them.1 As instrumental means by which these effects are conferred, therefore, for Aquinas the sapiential intelligibility of the sacraments is found in the larger sweep of sacra doctrina and the Incarnation, wherein the ratio and necessity of these larger theological themes contextualize Aquinas's understanding of the necessity of the sacraments themselves as instrumental extensions of the same.2 Taken in itself, aspects of what would later become the question of sacramental character for Scholastics first emerged as a doctrinal topic in the context of patristic debates over the permanence of the sacrament of baptism.3 In the Latin West, the influence of Augustine's distinction between the permanence of the sacramentum received in baptism and its use in charity proved to be a ubiquitous influence [End Page 1337] for later Latin theology.4 Concerning the metaphysical nature of this character, however, in both his Sentences commentary and Summa theologiae, Aquinas joins an ongoing conversation among thirteenth-century Scholastics about the utility of the Aristotelian categories for describing sacramental character. What is sacramental character specifically, and how should this be understood in relation to the wider speculative complexities of grace, the infused virtues and gifts, and beatitude? Because of continued controversy over the role of Aristotelianism in theology during the second half of the thirteenth century, many Scholastics of Aquinas's generation analyzed the quiddity of sacramental character from an Aristotelian perspective, working to describe the doctrine inherited from the Church's tradition using Aristotelian terminology. As will be shown, although some argued that sacramental character should be understood as a habitus, Aquinas argues that character is better understood as a power.The second and third sections of this article will explore the development of Scholastic accounts of the quiddity of sacramental character during the medieval and early modern periods, and the wider theological implications of these conversations. In the final analysis, it is my aim to show not only that Aquinas's account of sacramental character is intrinsically fitting on theological grounds, but that Aquinas's account of sacramental character as a qualitative power conveys and preserves the received theological tradition more effectively than the options proposed by some of his contemporaries. With these larger objectives in mind, the first section of this article serves as a necessary historical prelude—what, precisely, is at stake from the wider perspective of the Church's theological tradition in these medieval and early modern Scholastic debates? Accordingly, the first section will provide an overview of the historical development of the doctrine of sacramental character, focusing specifically on the way in which certain Augustinian doctrinal concepts and linguistic usages developed in later medieval usage and ultimately came to be incorporated into the framework of Peter Lombard's Sentences—the text that would serve as the common backdrop for the Scholastic conversations about the "quiddity" of this same doctrine.In the following, therefore, this article will begin by examining the origins of the doctrine of sacramental character in Latin theology in Augustine's baptismal theology. Building on this foundation, our attention will turn to Peter Lombard's reception of Augustine's as the context in which [End Page 1338] thirteenth-century Scholastic debates about sacramental character would develop. Although the specific metaphysical questions that Scholastics like Aquinas and Bonaventure would entertain do not form part of Augustine's approach to this issue, Lombard's particular articulation of Augustine's sacramental theology would provide the textual and conceptual backdrop against which these later Scholastic conversations would develop. Accordingly, the second section of this article will build on the first, beginning with a consideration of Aquinas... (shrink)

Preface The status of sovereignty as a highly ambiguous concept is well established. Pointing out or deploring, the ambiguity of the idea has itself become a recurring motif in the literature on sovereignty. As the legal theorist and international lawyer Alf Ross put it, “there is hardly any domain in which the obscurity and confusion is as great as here.” 1 The concept of sovereignty is often seen as a downright obstacle to fruitful conceptual analysis, carried over from its proper (...) setting in history to “plague and befog contemporary thought.” 2 . . . So contested is the concept that, rather than pursuing the contestation, many political theorists think we should give up so protean a notion. Granting that the debate on the relevance of sovereignty frustratingly oscillates between claims that it will either continue to exist or that it is about to disappear, forgetting it altogether, and thereby escaping this seemingly endless argument, can easily appear as the most urgent task for political theory . The following argument makes a case that the “urgent task” is not the abandonment of the concept of sovereignty, but an understanding of its essential philosophical nature as an integrated and evolving expression of practical reason. Sovereignty is neither ambiguous nor obscure once its fundamental presuppositions are laid bare and its many philosophical and historical manifestations shown to be the product, in actuality, of a single, dialectally dynamic but integrated set of metaphysical elements. This is the first of three arguments describing the evolution of international law as a manifestation of practical reason through an application of philosophical method to the source , locus , and scope of the concept of sovereignty. It moves from a dialectic balance favoring utility to a balance dominated by legal right to a dialectic of duty to humanity and nature. All three arguments are meant to be a contribution to the new field of International Legal Philosophy as defined by Phillip Allott. 4 This field combines a sensitivity to legal practice with an effort to understand the underlying philosophical determinants of empirical choice and behavior. One purpose of international legal philosophy is to “remove” from the minds of those who study the law what Diderot defined as “the sophism of the ephemeral,” and what Allott calls “the disempowering idea that what xii Preface happens to exist now is inevitable and permanent.” 5 A core imperative is to “reunderstand what it is to be a thinking being” 6 and to rediscover the dialectic between the private and the public as it determines, and is redetermined by, legal practice. This requires a “revolution in the human mind” 7 so that we may transcend the current dependence on positivist methods and empirical fact as an end-in-itself, and try to understand the underlying and more constant and essential ideas and inherent dialectics that constitute the substructure or “metaphysics” of international law. I will approach this “revolution” with the use of R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical method 8 and the philosophy of David Hume, applied to international law as an expression of practical reason. The goal of philosophical method is the construction of a comprehensive policy argument (CPA) for a public policy or legal issue. In addition to the conventional use of empirical models and their logic of investigation in the study of policy and law, CPA requires that an underlying philosophical logic of concepts be deciphered to identify the ideas within the issue, and their definition, overlap, and systematic interdependence. Philosophical method is a means with which to interpret and understand competing systematic and complete conceptual logics, existing at the core of an issue and pertinent to policy change. Philosophical method is therefore not meant to be a replacement for the empirical investigation of a policy or legal issue, or the use of scientific method in social studies. Rather, it is a complimentary and prerequisite method that seeks to transcend the limitations of positivism and present a more complete understanding of the philosophical presuppositions of positivist ideas like power, interest, or strategic rationality. Philosophical method is meant to be used with the facts of the policy or legal issue to match an illuminating logic of concepts with a pertinent logic of investigation . Within the CPA, the use of philosophical method and the metaphysics of a policy or legal issue is assumed to be critical to the full understanding of the overlapping concepts, dialectics, and scale of forms that determine, and are determined by, the empirical context of the policy or legal topic. Specifically, instead of utilizing bits and pieces of various theoretical arguments to address narrowly focused empirical questions, as positivism prescribes, I will address the evolution of international law as practical reason in three phases. Each will be approached through a single integrated logic of philosophical concepts from a particular philosopher (i.e., David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant). This philosophically holistic approach to the law is based on the assumption that only through the use of a single integrated argument in legal analysis can sovereignty, or any concept, be understood as a truly systematic and logical whole. A complete philosophical paradigm has a dialectic integrity and systematic logic that can more adequately describe the evolving essence of a concept like sovereignty. This approach also has the advantage of generating a number of distinct holistic descriptions of the law through the application of different philosophical systems, one at a time, to its factual structure. 9 Positivism does not seek Preface xiii holism, and rejects the idea that “theory” has such a characteristic. The essential or comprehensive substructure of any idea is therefore ignored in a method that recommends the observation of empirical problems through the use of whatever hodgepodge of theoretical elements is seen fit to frame its superstructure. This failure to deal with metaphysics has retarded both an essential understanding of international law as a species of legal system, and any holistic and dialectical conceptualization of its inherent concepts, like sovereignty. A second positivist convention expects modern theorists to create new theory rather than to refine and apply that of existing philosophy. This predisposition is driven by the positivist goal of discovery that ignores refinement as a possible purpose of philosophical analysis. Collingwood argues that philosophy must take that set of ideas already known and utilize existing systematic philosophical arguments to refine them so that they evolve closer to their essence as concepts. Considering this imperative, the idea of sovereignty can be assumed to have had valid usage for hundreds of years, over which time, the concept has evolved to mean different things, each a refinement of the definition that preceded it. Transcending positivism means that the scholar’s search is not for “new” material, but to decipher the metaphysical essence of a concept as it has been made manifest over time and context. These manifestations are rooted, and refined from, the known terms of that concept’s inherent idea(s). Rather than depending exclusively on positivism and its conventions, my work utilizes, in addition to Collingwood, the intact philosophical systems of Hume, Hegel, and Kant to trace the refinement of international law as a product of human practical reason. These paradigms, or integrated systems of logical concepts, will be applied to legal practice individually, so that each CPA can be deciphered separately. This provides a set of integrated and logically intact paradigms for the evolutionary stages of practical reason in international law. Because each argument is applied systematically, a deeper understanding of the source, locus, and scope in the development of law in general, and international law in particular, is possible where it is not with the application of various disconnected components of many theories. Each CPA based on Hume, Hegel, or Kant can then be used to describe a distinct context that its logic of concepts best illuminates; specifically, the (1) genesis, (2) contemporary dilemmas, and (3) future of the international legal system. By widening the perspective of international lawyers and policymakers, they can more easily perceive the dialectic of ideas that has created, and is refined by, the legal practice in which they participate. We also move toward Allott’s goal of “human self-perfecting.” 10 And, in addition, by providing a more complete knowledge of the origins of legal practice and its evolution, we illuminate the practical possibilities for what we might “choose to be” 11 in the future. To achieve this, the essential metaphysical elements of state sovereignty and its inherent evolutionary scale of forms will be deciphered and described. This will transform what appears to be a multitude of definitions and xiv Preface practical realizations of the concept of sovereignty into a set of interdependent manifestations of a single substructure, made of a single set of dialectic elements. The interpretation of international law through practical reason sorts and integrates a diverse and discordant literature and defines state sovereignty as a single concept evolving on a scale of forms that allows it to exhibit diverse character traits, all arising from different combinations of common and essential metaphysical elements. This approach, compared to positivist methods and legal realism, allows one to transcend current agreement that sovereignty is, at best, a narrowly focused set of empirical characteristics or, at worst, “organized hypocrisy.” 12 This method also encourages the scholar and practitioner to understand the predispositions and pitfalls of the concept of sovereignty, as well as its potential future paths, more effectively. The use of philosophical method to create policy paradigms out of preexisting philosophical systems and apply these to international law will be called Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design . This approach allows the use of preexisting and complete philosophical arguments that provide an adequate logic of concepts to chart the evolution of the idea of sovereignty along its scale of forms. An examination of the source of practical reason in human social convention with the employment of a philosophical-policy drawn from Hume’s logic of concepts about human nature will demonstrate this new approach. Why Hume? Because, up to now, without an adequate substructure we have arguments, like Brunne é’ s and Troope’s, 13 that may correctly identify international law as an “interactional” system, but cannot present any argument as to why it is, where this empirical reality comes from, or what its implications are for the future. Comparatively, Hume provides a logic of philosophical concepts that answers these concerns. First, he fulfills the requirements for a fuller understanding of the origin and evolution of law from social convention and the dependence of social convention on the human imperative for society. Second, he offers a more adequate delineation of the overlapping concepts of the law in terms of the ideas and institutions that deal with norms and justice (e.g., principle, process, practice, rule, power, interest). Third, he provides a fundamental understanding of the essential dialectics at the core of a conceptualization of the law with both unconscious and conscious human participation (i.e., passion. (shrink)

Science, and in particular the process of theory-change in science, formed the major inspiration for Karl Popper's whole philosophy. Popper learned about the success of Einstein's revolutionary new theory in 1919, and Einstein ‘became a dominant influence on my thinking—in the long run perhaps the most important influence of all.’ Popper explained why:In May, 1919, Einstein's eclipse predictions were successfully tested by two British expeditions. With these tests a new theory of gravitation and a new cosmology suddenly appeared, not just (...) as a mere possibility, but as an improvement on Newton—a better approximation to the truth … The general assumption of the truth of Newton's theory was of course the result of its incredible success, culminating in the discovery of the planet Neptune … Yet in spite of all this, Einstein had managed to produce a real alternative and, it appeared, a better theory … Like Newton himself, he predicted new effects within our solar system. And some of these predictions, when tested, had now proved successful. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive form early (...) in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

The permanent preservation of objects in global custodianship is a captivating ideal that informs countless museums’ corporate identities and governs collection guidelines as well as politics. Recent research has challenged the alleged perpetuity of collections and collected items, revealing their coherence as fragile and dependent on historically, politically and culturally specific conditions. Duplicates offer an instructive point of entry to explore the idea of collection permanence, museum politics, and the mobility of museum objects. The history of duplicates, moreover, comprises (...) a constellation of practises, concepts and debates that can be found in various forms throughout the intertwined histories of natural-scientific, ethnographic and artistic collections. This history, however, has rarely been questioned or explored. By introducing the issue of duplicates, this paper opens up a discussion that not only connects different forms of collections, but also situates the history of collecting institutions across the disciplinary spectrum within broader political, economic and epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

An extended approach to the comprehension of virtual reality is developed in the article. Virtual reality is understood not only as a logically possible or cybernetically constructed reality but also as continuous turbulence of potencies of the complex natural and social world we live in, the wandering of complex systems and organizations over a field of possibilities, such a realization of forms and structures in which many formations remain in latent, potential forms, and are in the permanent process (...) of making and multiplying a spectrum of possibilities, lead to the growth of the evolutionary tree of paths of development. It is shown that such an understanding of virtual reality corresponds to concepts and notions developed in the modern science of complexity. The most significant concepts are considered, such as the nonlinearity of time, the relationship of space and time, the uncertainty of the past and the openness of the future, the choice and construction of the future at the moments of passing the bifurcation points. Some cultural and historical prototypes of these modern ideas of virtual reality are given. It is substantiated that the vision of virtual reality being developed today can play the role of a heuristic tool for understanding the functioning and stimulation of human creativity. (shrink)

This is a series of connected essays by an eminent French Jesuit theologian. The English translation is very readable; but in style and feeling the book remains thoroughly French. Daniélou confronts the attitude of despair of many contemporary French thinkers with faith in the worthwhileness of human existence and in the truth of Christianity. The essays are often suggestive and illuminating; sometimes ‘tantamount to dogmatism’. Daniélou traces the crisis of truth to an over-wrought confidence in science, to the largely justified (...) mistrust of men’s word, to the substitution of the subjective viewpoint of sincerity for the objective one of truth, and to a concern for effectiveness and action rather than for truth. He then affirms that truth ‘must consist in the mind’s acknowledging God’s sovereign reality’. Against Merleau-Ponty he holds that phenomenology is neutral and does not necessarily imply or lead to atheism; against Malraux and Camus he denies the myth of unhappiness and contends that happiness is man’s heroic vocation; and against Rimbaud he challenges the mystification of poetry and claims there is no mysticism save that of God. To the Christian he underlines the responsibility to assert his faith in the presence of non-believers and says that in rejecting such atheistic humanisms as Marxism he is defending not only God but also man, for ‘man without God is maimed in the essential part of himself’. The solution to the tragedy of division among Christians, according to Daniélou, can be found only in truth; and reform is necessary before unity. Furthermore in a technological society Christianity must invent, for its permanent message, forms of expression which correspond to man’s technical advances; the Christian must consecrate earthly reality and so make the things which turn us away from God the means which lead us to Him. (shrink)

This article explores the labour behind local food in the Canadian Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. Based on surveys and interviews with farmers, migrant farmworkers, and farmers’ market consumers in the province, we suggest that the celebration of local food by government and industry is a form of “local washing.” Local washing hides key aspects of the social relations of production: in this case, it hides insufficient financial and policy supports for Nova Scotian farms and the increased reliance on migrant (...) farmworkers via the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Our research found that a growing reliance on migrant farmworkers was not just the case for larger, industrial farms, but also for smaller farms participating in local and alternative food initiatives, like farmers’ markets and fresh produce subscription boxes. Additionally, our surveys show that while farmers’ market shoppers expressed an interest in supporting local foods, they reported knowing little about farm workers or working conditions. Our paper contributes to the literature on local and alternative food initiatives by connecting the relations of production to consumption. Rather than focusing solely on the nature of the relationships between farmers and consumers and the values embodied in direct agricultural markets, this research explores the central role of permanently temporary migrant workers in local agriculture. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are well aware that theories are underdetermined by data. But what about the data? Scientific data are selected and processed representations or pieces of nature. What is useless context and what is valuable specimen, as well as how specimens are processed for study, are not obvious or predetermined givens. Instead, they are decisions made by scientists and other research workers, such as technicians, that produce different outcomes for the data. Vertebrate fossils provide a revealing case of this (...) data-processing, because they are embedded in rock that often matches the fossils’ color and texture, requiring an expert eye to judge where the fossil/context interface is. Fossil preparators then permanently define this interface by chiseling away the material they identify as rock. As a result, fossil specimens can emerge in multiple possible forms depending on the preparator’s judgment, skill, and chosen tools. A prepared fossil then is not yet data but potential data, following Leonelli’s relational framework in which data are defined as evidence that scientists have used to support a proposed theory. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence to assess how scientists overcome this underdetermination of specimens, as potential data, in addition to the underdetermination of theories and of data, to successfully construct specimen-based knowledge. Among other strategies, paleontology maintains a division of labor between data-makers and theory-makers. This distinction serves to justify the omission of preparators’ nonstandard, individualized techniques from scientific publications. This separation has benefits for both scientists and technicians; however, it restricts knowledge production by preventing scientists from understanding how the pieces of nature they study were processed into researchable specimens. (shrink)

“Skhandas my ass! Even that” Alan Watts, in his oft-quoted 1958 Chicago Review essay “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,”3 fails to mention Philip Whalen—whose “Sourdough Mountain Lookout” appeared in truncated form in the same issue—even though he takes Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg to task. In fact, toward the beginning of his essay, Watts even makes a statement about Confucianism and Taoism that sounds similar to the dynamics one finds at play in Whalen’s poetry. The ancient Chinese (...) practitioners possessed, according to Watts, “a universal vision of life as the Tao or way of nature in which the good and evil, the creative and the destructive, the wise and the foolish are the .. (shrink)

This paper argues that whereas Mach understood thought economy as a principle of practical rationality, Husserl rejected it as a principle of theoretical rationality. The distinction is further supported by their correspondingly different readings of the principle of permanence.

Volume 8 of this landmark edition follows Peirce from May 1890 through July 1892—a period of turmoil as his career unraveled at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The loss of his principal source of income meant the beginning of permanent penury and a lifelong struggle to find gainful employment. His key achievement during these years is his celebrated Monist metaphysical project, which consists of five classic articles on evolutionary cosmology. Also included are reviews and essays from The Nation in (...) which Peirce critiques Paul Carus, William James, Auguste Comte, Cesare Lombroso, and Karl Pearson, and takes part in a famous dispute between Francis E. Abbot and Josiah Royce. Peirce's short philosophical essays, studies in non-Euclidean geometry and number theory, and his only known experiment in prose fiction complete his production during these years. Peirce's 1883-1909 contributions to the Century Dictionary form the content of volume 7 which is forthcoming. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thucydides 1.22.1: Content and Form in the SpeechesThomas F. GarrityThe interpretive problem posed by the speeches of Thucydides is one of the oldest chestnuts in classical scholarship. It has long been debated whether the historian claimed and/or attempted to present verbatim accounts of the arguments put forward by the speakers on each occasion as best he could, or whether he felt free to modify or to invent particular arguments (...) or even whole speeches. And the controversy has been fueled by what has been widely regarded as the ambiguity of the second of the two parts of Thucydides’ famous statement of aims and methods in 1.22.1,. I propose here, instead, that the language in which scholars have found confusion is actually a clear statement pertaining both to the content and to the form in which the speeches are presented by Thucydides.THE ASSUMPTION IN SCHOLARSHIPThe perceived ambiguity of 1.22.1 has baffled generations of scholars, as they have attempted to relate their understanding of Thucydides’ statement concerning the presentation of speeches to what they themselves perceive as the historian’s practice throughout the History. In general, the debate has been characterized by a concerted and ongoing attempt to control the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in 1.22.1 as a necessary ingredient in the construction of interpretive arguments. This uncompromising insistence on a study based on a close examination of Thucydides’ Greek is most evident in the early German scholarship, conducted [End Page 361] primarily from the point of view of the problem of composition.1 In subsequent research, scholars begin to place less emphasis on the significance of the programmatic statement strictly in relation to the problem of composition, but they remain devoted to the idea that a correct understanding of the historian’s aims and methods derives from a precise understanding of the Greek in 1.22.1.2 For all the efforts, however, of such well–known students of Greek, scholars remain sharply divided over the precise meaning of Thucydides’ programmatic statement.Not all participants in the debate, however, have felt this obligation to deduce the precise meaning of the Greek contained in the historian’s programmatic statement. And it is perhaps a measure of despair over finding a solution to the perceived enigma in 1.22.1 that some scholars have found it possible, especially in more recent times, to construct elaborate theories about the historian’s presentation of speeches without providing a detailed analysis of Thucydides’ own statement of aims and methods. The accepted ambiguity of 1.22.1, moreover, has provided such scholars with what they consider to be primary evidence with which they might successfully call into question the “objectivity” of Thucydides as a “scientific historian,” and with which they might thereby persuasively promote the view of him as either an impassioned (outraged) moralist or a tendentious manipulator of his reader’s sympathies.3 [End Page 362]In particular, the traditional view that the dependent participial clause,, is a qualification, or refinement, of the main assertion,,..., is what has led to the assumption that Thucydides is making two separate statements limited to the aspect of the content of the speeches.4 The result of this assumption has been to accept the notion that ambiguity exists in 1.22.1, as no satisfactory analysis has been put forward to explain how Thucydides can at one and the same time be presenting—in terms of content—“what was appropriate” () and “what was really said” (). And some scholars, for whom it is not adequate simply to question the reliability of Thucydides as a historical source, have taken a more extreme step: seizing on the traditional acknowledgment of the difficulties present in 1.22.1, they argue that the dependent participial clause,, is not a qualification at all but rather actually an explicit contradiction of the main assertion,.5 Thucydidean scholarship, then, has presented itself with an ironic result: the inherited assumption in scholarship that both parts of 1.22.1 refer only to the content of the speeches, first developed and seemingly permanently entrenched by early readers of Greek—so many of whom were committed to defending... (shrink)

Ockham’s approach to the problem of the instant of change as it is found in the Summa logicae i, chapter 5, and ii, chapter 19, is usually described as “purely logical,” narrowing the treatment of “begins” and “ceases” to simplistic cases. The aim of this paper is to complement our knowledge of Ockham’s position on the problem of the instant of change by analysing the treatment of the problem he gives in his questions on the Physics 98-101. In these passages, (...) Ockham adopts a “physical approach” in order to deal with problems related to the continuity of alteration and the production of the form of the mix from elementary qualities. To solve these problems, he is compelled to give up one of the most important claims at the basis of the logical approach that he adopted in the Summa logicae, namely that the distinction between permanent and successive entities is not relevant in the assignment of truth-conditions to propositions containing the aspectual verbs “beginning” and “ceasing.”. (shrink)