This paper makes a case for a refined look at the so- called ‘fallacy of hasty generalization’ by arguing that this expression is an umbrella term for two fallacies already distinguished by Aristotle. One is the fallacy of generalizing in an inappropriate way from a particular instance to a universal generalization containing a ‘for all x’ quantification. The other is the secundum quid (‘in a certain respect’) fallacy of moving to a conclusion that is supposed to be a (...) universal generalization containing a ‘for all x‘ quantification while overlooking qualifications that have to be added to the more limited kind of generalization expressed in the premise. It is shown that these two fallacies relate to two different kinds of generalization. (shrink)

The fallacy of ignoring qualifications, or secundum quid et simpliciter, is a deceptive strategy that is pervasive in argumentative dialogues, discourses, and discussions. It consists in misrepresenting an utterance so that its meaning is broadened, narrowed, or simply modified to pursue different goals, such as drawing a specific conclusion, attacking the interlocutor, or generating humorous reactions. The “secundum quid” was described by Aristotle as an interpretative manipulative strategy, based on the contrast between the “proper” sense of a (...) statement and its meaning taken absolutely or in a certain respect. However, how can an “unqualified” statement have a proper meaning different from the qualified one, and vice versa? This “linguistic” fallacy brings to light a complex relationship between pragmatics, argumentation, and interpretation. The secundum quid is described in this paper as a manipulative argument, whose deceptive effect lies in its pragmatic dimension. This fallacy is analyzed as a strategy of decontextualization lying at the interface between pragmatics and argumentation and consisting of the unwarranted passage from an ut-terance to its semantic representation. By ignoring the available evidence and the presumptive interpretation of a statement, the speaker places it in a different context or suppresses textual and contextual evidence to infer a specific meaning different from the presumable one. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called “converse accident (CA)”. The fallacy of CA occurs in much the same way as the fallacy of hasty generalization. Not unlike its other related fallacy, accident, which applies a general principle to a particular case to which it does not apply, CA instead generalizes over some cases, or even over one particular case, to make a more sweeping conclusion. This fallacious way of thinking (...) is especially noxious since it often grounds racist, sexist, or other prejudiced beliefs. It should be obvious to most readers how to detect or avoid this fallacy. Thinking of any counter‐example will usually suffice to reveal this fallacy's error. We might conclude that all other fallacies covered in this book are boring and not very exciting to read about. It's up to the reader to discover whether this is an example of the fallacious reasoning that is CA. (shrink)

In this paper I will consider several interpretations of the fallacy of secundum quid as it is given by Aristotle in the Sophistical Refutations and argue that they do not work, one reason for which is that they all imply that the fallacy depends on language and thus fail to explain why Aristotle lists this fallacy among the fallacies not depending on language, amounting often to a claim that Aristotle miscategorises this fallacy. I will argue for a reading that (...) preserves Aristotle’s categorization by a quite different account of how qualifications function. (shrink)

Five errors that fit under the category of jumping to a conclusion are identified: (1) arguing from premises that are insufficient as evidence to prove a conclusion (2) fallacious argument from ignorance, (3) arguing to a wrong conclusion, (4) using defeasible reasoning without being open to exceptions, and (5) overlooking/suppressing evidence. It is shown that jumping to a conclusion is best seen not as a fallacy itself, but as a more general category of faulty argumentation pattern underlying these errors and (...) some related fallacies. (shrink)

I give an analysis of the logical structure of statements describing duties in social roles. Role terms like ‘doctor’ should not be treated as simple predicates, as natural kind terms, like ‘human being’, are. When role terms are treated as simple predicates, fallacies may result. Rather, treat role terms (M) as complex predicates with a simple subject, a person (S), as a base; ‘S qua M’, and then analyze their reduplicative structure. I illustrate and support this analysis by considering sophisms, (...) traditionally known as committing the fallacy of secundum quid et simpliciter, about conflicts of duties in different roles. I end with some remarks about personal integrity. (shrink)

This paper aims to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when Plato (...) says that something both is and is not, he is applying difference on being which is interpreted here as saying, borrowing Aristotle’s terminology, 'is is (esti) in different senses'. I hope this paper can show how Pollachos Esti can bring forth not only a new approach to Plato’s ontology in Sophist and Republic but also a different approach to being in general. -/- Keywords Plato; being; difference; image; pollachos esti; pollachos legetai 1. Being, Not-Being and Difference The three dialogues where the notion of "difference" attaches to the notion of being, namely Parmenides II, Sophist and Timaeus,and specifically the first two we try to discuss here. In these dialogues, Plato is going to achieve a new and revolutionary understanding of being which is not anymore based on the notion of "same" as it was before in Greek ontology. It was his discovery, I think, that the notion of being in the Greek ontology is attached to the notion of the "same" and it is because of this attachment that there have always been many problems understanding being especially after Parmenides. That being has always been relying on the "same" can be found out from the way most of the Presocratics understood it. It was based on such a relationship between being and "same" that a later Ionian, Heraclitus of Ephesus, rejected Being by rejecting its sameness: unable to be the same, being cannot be being anymore but becoming. Heraclitus’ criticism of his predecessors’ understanding of being was due to his discovery that what they call being is not the same but different in every moment. The relation of being and sameness reaches to its highest point in Parmenides. What Plato does in using the "difference" is nothing but the establishment of a creative relation between being and "difference". In this new relation, although he is in agreement with Heraclitus that being is not the same but different, he does not do it by use of becoming. He disagrees, on the other hand, with Parmenides that such a relation between being and difference leads to not being. At Parmenides 142b5-6 it is said that if One is, it is not possible for it to be without partaking (μετέχειν) of being (οὐσίας), which leads to the distinction of being and one: -/- So there would be also the being of the one (ἡ οὐσία του̑ ἑνὸς) which is not the same (ταὐτὸν) as the one. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be its being, nor the one would partake of it. (142b7-c1) -/- The fact that what is (ἔστι) signifies (σημαῖνον) is other (ἀλλο) than what One signifies (c4-5), is being taken as a reason for their distinction. The conclusion is that when we say 'one is', we speak of two different things, one partaking of the other (c5-7). Having repeated these arguments of the otherness of being and one at 143a-b, Parmenides says that the cause of this otherness can be neither Being nor One but "difference": -/- So if being is something different (ἕτερον) and one something different (ἕτερον), it is not by being one that the one is different from being nor by its being being that being is other than one, but they are different from each other (ἕτερα ἀλλήλων) by difference (τῷ ἑτερῳ) and otherness (ἄλλῳ). (143b3-6) -/- The fifth hypothesis, 'one is not' (160b5ff.) is also linked with the notion of difference. When we say about two things, largeness and smallness, that they are not, it is clear that we are talking about not being of different (ἕτερον) things (160c2-4). When it is said that something is not, besides the fact that there must be knowledge of that thing, we can say that it entails also its difference: 'difference in kind pertains to it in addition to knowledge' (160d8). Parmenides explains the reason as such: -/- For someone doesn’t speak of the difference in kind of the others when he says that the one is different from the others, but of that thing’s own difference in kind. (160e1-2) -/- Although the theory of being as "difference" is not fulfilled yet, an exact look at what occurs in Sophist can make us sure that this was the launching step for "difference" to get its deserved role in Plato’s ontology. The notion of the "difference" is not yet well-functioned in Parmenides because we can see that being is still attached to the same: -/- For that which is the same is being (ὄν γὰρ ἐστι τὸ ταὐτόν) (162d2-3). -/- The notion of difference in Sophist is the key element based on which a new understanding of being is presented and the problem of not being is somehow resolved. The friends of Forms, the Stranger says, are those who distinguish between being and becoming (248a7-8) and believe that we deal with the latter with our body and through perception while with the former, the real being (ὄντως οὐσίαν) with our soul and through reasoning (a10-11). Being is then bound with the "same" by adding: -/- You say that being always stays the same and in the same state (ἣν ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχειν) but becoming varies from one time to another (δὲ ἄλλοτε ἄλλως). (248a12-13) -/- That the theory of the relation of being and capacity (247d8f., 248c4-5) matches more with becoming than with being (248c7-9) must be rejected because being is also the subject of knowledge which is kind of doing something (248d-e). It does, however, confirm that 'both that which changes and also change have to be admitted as existing things (ὄντα) (249b2-3). I believe that this is what Socrates would incline to do at Theaetetus 180e-181a, that is, putting a fight between two parties of Parmenidean being and Heraclitean becoming and then escaping. The solution is that becoming is itself a kind of being and we ought to accept what changes as being. This is what must be done by a philosopher, namely, to refuse both the claim that 'everything is at rest' and that 'being changes in every way' and beg, like a child, for both and say being (τὸὄν) is both the unchanging and that which changes (249c10-d4). This kind of begging for both is obviously under the attack of contradiction (249e-250b). For both and each of rest and change similarly are (250a11-12) but it cannot be said either that both of them change or both of them rest, being must be considered as a third thing both of the rest and change associate with (250b7-10). The conclusion is that 'being is not both change and rest but different (ἕτερον) from them instead' (c3-4). The notion of difference helps Plato to take being departed from both rest and change because it was their sophisticated relation with being that made the opposition of being and becoming. Plato is now trying to separate being from rest and, thus, from "same" by "difference". Such a crucial change is great enough to need a 'fearless' decision (256d5-6). The possibility of being of not being is resulted (d11-12) comes as the answer to the question 'so it’s clear that change is not being and also is being (ἡ κίνησις ὄντως οὐκ ὄν ἐστι καὶ ὄν) since it partakes in being?' (d8-9). It is then by the notion of difference that becoming is considered as that which both is and is not. This coincidence of being and not being about change is apparently similar to Socrates’ paradoxical statement at Republic 477a about what both is and is not. -/- Introduction The Republic 476-477 has always been a matter of controversy mainly about two interwoven points. The first problem is the meaning of being here; that whether what he has in mind is a veridical, existential or propositional sense of being. The second problem is his distinction between the objects of knowledge and opinion which seems to lead, some believe, to the Two Worlds (TW) theory. The crucial point in Republic is that what is considered between knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) and ignorance (α͗γνοιας), namely opinion, must have a different object that leads Socrates to draw the distinction of knowledge and opinion between their objects. The problem of understanding being in the fifth book of the Republic is that when it is said that the Form of F is F but a particular participating in F, both is and is not F, it sounds too bizarre and unacceptable. It cannot be imaginable how a thing can be existent and non-existent at the same time. At the first sight, the only solution seems to be the degrees of existence which is called by Annas (1981, 197) a 'childish fallacy' and a 'silly argument'. Kirwan (1974, 118) thinks that Republic V does not attribute 'any doctrine about existence' to Plato and Kahn (1966, 250) claims that the most fundamental value of einai when used alone (without predicate) is not "to exist" but "to be so", "to be the case" or "to be true". The problems of understanding being in Republic and Sophist besides the difficulties of the existential reading led scholars to the other senses of being, mostly related to the well-known Aristotelian distinctions between different senses of being. In the predicative reading, Annas, for example, refers this difference to the qualified and unqualified application. Whereas the Form of F is unqualifiedly F, a particular instance of F can be F only qualifiedly (1981, 221). Vlastos’ well-known substitution of 'degrees of reality' for 'degrees of being/existence' must be categorized as a predicative reading. Kahn thinks that the basic sense of being for Plato is 'something like propositional structure, involving both predication and truth claims, together with existence for the subject of predication' (2013, 96). Believing that the complete-incomplete distinction terminology is misleading about Plato, he thinks that semantic functions are only second-order uses of the verb and it is the predicative or incomplete function which is fundamental. Suggesting a veridical reading, Fine (2003, 70 ff) thinks that while both existential and predicative readings separate the objects of knowledge and belief, it is only her reading which does not force such separation of the objects and thus does not imply TW. Stokes (1998, 266) thinks that though Fine is right saying that Plato does not endorse TW in book V, she is wrong in rejecting existential in favor of the veridical reading. The reception of existential reading can be seen more obviously in Calvert who thinks, in agreement with Runciman, that 'it would be safer to say that Plato’s gradational ontology is probably not entirely free from degrees of existence' (1970, 46). At Sophist 254d-e Plato singles out five most important kinds (or Forms!?) in which the same (ταὐτὸν) and difference (θάτερον) are regarded besides being, rest and change. They are, therefore, neither the same nor the difference but share in both (b3). Being (τὸ ὄν) cannot be the same also because if they 'do not signify distinct things' both change and rest will have the same label when we say they are (255b11-c1). We have then four distinct kinds, being, change, rest and same, none of them is the other. The case of difference is more complicated. When the stranger wants to assess the relation of being and difference, he can say simply neither that they are distinct nor that they are not. He has to make an important distinction inside being to get able to draw the relation of being and difference: -/- But I think you'll admit that some of the things that are (τῶν ὄντων) are said (λέγεσθαι) by themselves (αὐτὰ καθ’ αὑτά) but some [are said] always referring to (πρὸς) other things (ἄλλα) (255b12-13) -/- The difference is always said referring to other things (τὸδέγ’ ἕτερον ἀεὶ πρὸς ἕτερον) (255d1). It pervades all kinds because each of them should be different from the others and is so due to the difference and not its own nature (253e3f.) After asserting that change is different from being and therefore both is and is not (256d), the difference is described as what makes all the other kinds not be, by making each different from being. Given that all of them are by being, this association of being and difference is the cause of their being and not-being at the same time, the issue that its version at RepublicV made all those controversies we discussed above: -/- So in the case of change and all the kinds, not being necessarily is (Ἔστιν ἄρα ἐξ ἀναγκης τὸ μὴ ὄν). Τhat’s because as applied to all of them, the nature of the difference (ἡ θατέρον φύσις) makes each of them not be by making it different from being. And we’re going to be right if we say that all of them are not in the same way. And conversely [we’re also going to be right if we say] that they are because they partake in being. (Sophist 256d11-e3) -/- Plato’s new construction of five distinct kinds and the role he gives to thedifference among them is aimed to resolve the old problem of understanding being which has always been annoying from the time of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Both the ontological status of becoming and that of not being were, in Plato’s mind, based on the absolute domination of the notion of the Same over being. Now, not only becoming is understandable as being but also not being which is not the contrary of being anymore but only different (ἕτερον) (257b3-4). Though I agree partly with Frede that the account of not being which is needed for false statements is more complicated than just saying, as Cropsey (1995, 101) says, that Plato is substituting 'X is not Y' with 'X is different from Y', I totally disagree with him that when we say X is not beautiful, Plato could not have thought that it is not a matter of its being different from beautiful because 'it would be different from beauty even if it were beautiful by participation in beauty' (1992, 411). Conversely, as we will discuss, it is exactly the relation of the beautiful thing, X, and the beautiful itself, in which X shares that is to be solved by the notion of not being as difference. Though it is beautiful because of sharing in beauty, X is not beautiful because it is different from beautiful itself. What the difference is to do is to show how something can both be and not be the same thing. The difference is what makes one thing both be and not be a certain other thing. This equips the difference with the ability to explain a certain thing’s not-being when it is. Thanks to the notion of difference, it is now possible to explain not only not being but also the simultaneous being and not being of a thing: 'What we call "not-beautiful" is the thing that ἕτερόν ἐστιν from nothing other than του̑ καλου̑ φύσεως' (257d10-11). The result is that not beautiful happens to be (συμβέβηκεν εἶναι) one single thing among kinds of beings (τι τῶν ὄντων τινὸς ἑνὸς γένους) and at the same time set over against one of the beings (πρός τι τῶν ὄντων αὖ πάλιν ἀντιτεθὲν) (257e2-4) and thus be something that happens to be not beautiful (εἶναί τις συμβαίνει τὸ μὴ καλόν); a being set over against being (ὄντος δὴ πρὸς ὄν ἀντίθεσις) (e6-7). Neither the beautiful is more a being (μα̑λλον ... ἐστι τῶν ὄντων) nor not beautiful less (e9-10) and thus both the contraries similarly are (ὁμοίως εἶναι) (258a1). This conclusion, it is emphasized again (a7-9), owes to θατέρου φύσις now turned out as being. Therefore, each of the many things that are of the nature of the difference and set over each other in being (τῆς τοῦ ὄντος πρὸς ἄλληλα ἀντικειμένων ἀντίθεσις) is being as being itself is being (αὐτοῦ τοῦὄν τοςοὐσία ἐστιν) and not less. They are different from, and not the contrary of, each other (a11-b3). This is exactly τὸμὴὄν, the subject of the inquiry (b6-7). Hence, not being has its own nature (b10) and is one εἶδοςamong the many things that are (b9-c3). Such far departing from Parmenides’ ontological principle is done on the basis of the nature of the difference. It was the discovery of such a notion that made the stranger brave enough to say that not being is each part of the nature of the difference that is set over against being (258d7-e3, cf. 260b7-8). That the relation of being and difference is difference is the key element of the new ontology. The difference is, only because of its sharing in being, but it is not that which it shares in but different from it (259a6-8). Not being is exactly based on this difference: ἕτερον δὲ τοῦ ὄντος ὄν ἔστι σαφέστατα ἐξ ἀνάγκης εἶναι μὴ ὄν (a8-b1). 2. Difference and the Being of a Copy We discussed above that the sense of being of particulars in Republic V made so many debates that whether being is there used in an existential sense or not. Particulars in Republic are regarded as images in the allegories of Line and Cave. The being of an image/copy makes, thus, the same problem. Plato’s analogy of original -copy for the relation of Forms and their particulars in Republic has obviously a different attitude to being. The main question is that what is the ontological status of a copy in respect of its original? Are there two kinds of being, 'real being' versus 'being' as Ketchum says (1980, 140) or only one kind? What is the difference of being in an original and its copy? Is it a matter of degrees of being or reality as some commentators have suggested? Is it a matter of being relational? By reducing the ontological issue to an epistemological one, Vlastos’ suggestion of degrees of reality in an article with the same name does neither, I think, pay attention to the problem nor resolve it. He agrees that Plato never speaks of "degrees" or "grades" of reality (1998, 219). What allows him to entitle it as such are some of Plato’s words in Republic as well as Plato’s words in some other dialogues (1998, 219). When Plato states that the Forms only can completely, purely or perfectly be real he means, Vlastos says, they are cognitively reliable (1998, 229); an obvious reduction of the issue to an epistemological one. He thinks that when in Republic we are being said that a particular’s being F is less pure than its Form, it is because it is not exclusively F, but it is and is not F and this being adulterated by contrary characters is the reason of our confused and uncertain understanding of it (1998, 222). Ketchum rightly criticizes Vlastos’ doctrine in its disparting from ontology thinking that 'to understand Plato’s talk of being as talk of reality is to obscure the close relation that exists between "being" and the verb "to be"' (1980, 213). He thinks, therefore, that οὐσία must be understοοd as being rather than reality, τὸὄν as "that which is" and not "that which is real" and … (ibid). His conclusion is that degrees of reality cannot interpret Plato correctly and we must accept degrees of being. Allen believes that a 'purely epistemic' reading of the passage in Republic is patently at odds with Plato’s text (1961, 325). He thinks that not only degrees of reality but also degrees of reality must be maintained (1998, 67). What Cooper suggests gets close to this paper’s solution: -/- Plato does not I think wish to suggest that existence is a matter of degree in the way in which being pleasant or painful is a matter of degree. Rather there are different grades of ontological status. (1986, 241) -/- A more ontological solution for the problem of understanding the being of a copy and its relation with the being of its original is suggested by the theory of copy as a relational entity. Based on this interpretation, 'the very being of a reflection is relational, wholly dependent upon what is other than itself: the original…' (Allen, 1998, 62). As relational entities, particulars have no independent ontological status; they are purely relational entities which derive their whole character and existence from Forms (ibid, 67). Although these relational entities are and have a kind of existence, we must also say that 'they do not have existence in the way that Forms, things which are fully real, do' (ibid). Allen (1961, 331) extends his theory to Phaedo where it is said that particulars are deficient (74d5-7, 75a2-3, 75b4-8), 'wish' to be like (74d10) or desire to be of its nature (75a2); an extension that, like F.C. white (1977, 200), I cannot admit. He correctly states that Plato did not start out with a doctrine of particulars as images and semblances but come to such a view after Phaedo, or perhaps after Republic V (1977, 202). Though we may not agree with him about Republic V, if we have to consider its last pages also, we must agree with him that not only the ontology of Phaedo but also that of Republic II-V (except the last pages of the latter book) are somehow different from (but at the same time appealing to) the ontology of original-copy which should exclusively assign to Sophist, Timaeus and RepublicVI-VII besides the last pages of book V. The answer to the problem of Plato’s sense of being in RepublicV can be reached only if we read Republic V based on and as following Sophist. We can find out his meaning of that which both is and is not only by the ontological status he assigns to a copy in Sophist. The kind of being of a copy in Sophist reveals as Plato’s key for the lock of the problem of not being. Let’s see how the ontological status of a copy is the critical point of Plato’s ontology. In the earlier pages of Sophist, we are still in the same situation about not being. To think that that which is not is is called a rash assumption (237a3-4) and Parmenides’ principle of the impossibility of being of not being is still at work (a8-9). At 237c1-4, the problem of "not being" is noticed in a new way which shows some kinds of a more realistic position to the problem of not being. Nevertheless, not being is still unthinkable, unsayable, unutterable and unformulable in speech (238c10). Soon after mentioning that it is difficult even to refuse not being (238d), the solution to the problem appears: the being of a copy (εἴδωλον) (239d). A copy is, says Theaetetus, something that is made referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν) but still is 'another such thing (ἕτεροντοιου̑τον)' (240a8). Nevertheless, this 'another such thing' cannot be another such real or true thing. In answer to the question of the Stranger that if this 'another such thing' is the true thing (240a9), Theaetetus answers: οὐδαμῶς ἀληθινόν γε, ἀλλ’ ἐοικὸςμὲν (240b2). A copy’s being 'another such thing' does not mean another true thing but only a resemblance of it. Not only is not a copy another true thing besides the original, but it is the opposite of the true thing (b5) because only its original is the thing genuinely and being a copy is being the thing only untruly. The word ἐοικὸς is opposed to ὄντως ὄν in the next line (240b7): 'So you are saying that that which is like (ἐοικὸς) is not really that which is (οὐκ ὄντως [οὐκ] ὄν)'. But still a copy 'is in a way (ἔστι γε μήν πως)' (b9). While it is not really what it is its resemblance, it has its own being and reality because it really is a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως) (b11). The Stranger asks: -/- So it is not really what is (οὐκ ὄν ἄρα [οὐκ] ὄντως ἐστὶν) but it really is what we call a likeness (ὄντως ἣν λέγομεν εἰκόνα)? (b12-13) -/- This is Plato’s innovative ontological solution to the problem of not being. Theaetetus’ answer confirms this: 'Maybe that which is not is woven together with that which is' (c1-2). Therefore, a copy neither is what really is nor is not-being but only is what in a way is. Thanks to the ontological status of a copy, the third status intermediate between being and not being is brought forth. The essence of an image, in Kohnke’s words, does not consist 'solely in the negation of what is genuine and has real being' because otherwise 'it would be an ὄντως οὐκ ὄν,essentially and really a not being' (1957, 37). The characteristics of a copy can be summed up as folows: i) A copy is a copy by referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν). ii) A copy is different from that of which it is a copy (ἕτερον). iii) A copy is not itself a true thing (ἀληθινόν) as that of which it is a copy but only that which is like it (ἐοικὸς). iv) It is not really that which really is (ὄντως ὄν) but only really a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως). The conclusion is that: v) A copy in a way (πως) is that means it both is and in not, the product of interweaving being with not being. This leads to the refutation of father Parmenides’ principle, accepting that 'that which is not somehow is (τό τε μὴ ὄν ὡς ἔστι)' and 'that which is, somehow is not (τό ὄν ὡς οὐκ ἔστι) (241d5-7). Besides copies and likenesses (εἰκόνων), we have also imitations (μιμημάτων) and appearances (φαντασμάτων) as the subjects of this new kind of being and thus false belief (241e3). In Timaeus, the world of becoming which cannot correctly be called and thus we have to call it "what is such" (τὸ τοιου̑τον) (49e5) or "what is altogether such" (τὸ διἀ παντὸς τοιου̑τον) (e6-7), consists solely of imitations (μιμημάτα) (50c5) which are identifiable only by the things that they are their imitations. The word τοιου̑τον which had been used to determine the situation of a copy in respect of its original, now becomes the definition of the world of becoming in which everything is an image of another thing, a Being, that stays always the same and is different and separated from its image. Cherniss, in my view rightly, draws attention to the very important point about the ontological status of an image that can at the same time be considered a criticism of the relational theory. What we are being said in Timaeus, he thinks,cannot be explained by saying that an image is not self-related and making its being relational. What is crucial about an image is that it 'stands for something, refers to something, means something and this meaning the image has not independently as its own but only in reference to something else apart from it' (1998, 296). This function finds its best explanation in the theory we are to suggest in the following. 3. πολλαχῶς ἔστι The best way to understand the ontological status of an image in Plato is to see first how his most clever pupil, Aristotle, resolved the same problem that Plato brought his theory of image for its sake. Aristotle’s theory of pollachos legetai is a brilliant and, at the same time, deviated version of Plato’s theory that is able, however, to help us read Plato in a better way. We discuss Aristotle’s theory to reach to a full understanding of Plato’s theory because it is, firstly, constructed in Aristotle in a more clear way and, secondly, it can also be taken as an evidence that our reading of Plato is legitimate. The phrase τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, a so much repeated phrase in Aristotle’s works, is his resolution for some of the ontological problems of his predecessors all treating being as if it has only one sense. Aristotle is right in his criticism of the philosophical tradition specially Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato since all did presuppose only one sense for being and his theory is, thus, a creative and revolutionary solution for many problems that all the past philosophers were stuck in. But it is at the same time somehow a borrowed theory. As we will discuss, both the structure of the doctrine and the problems it tries to resolve are the same as Plato’s doctrine (and even is comparable in its phraseology) though it is in Aristotle, as can be expected, a more clear and better structured doctrine. 1) Associated with the theory of pros hen and the theory of substance, the theory of several senses of being provides a structure which, I insist, is the best guide to understand Plato’s theory of Being in Sophist, Timeaus and Republic. a) Although the theory of pollachos legetai is not necessarily based on the theory of pros hen, they become tightly interdependent about being: -/- Being is said in many ways/senses (τὸ δὲ ὄν λέγεται μὲν πολλαχῶς) but by reference to one (πρὸς ἕν) [way/sense] and one kind of nature (μίαν τινὰ φύσιν). (Metaphysics 1003a33-34) -/- The doctrine of pros hen which is Aristotle’s initiative third alternative besides the homonymous and synonymous application of words, is primarily a linguistic theory that tries to provide a new theory to explain the different implementations of the same word. The pros hen implementation of being is to provide an alternative for the theory of the synonymous (in Plato: homonymous) implementation of being which says being is said in one sense (kath hen) (1060b 32-33). That both the pros hen and the kath hen implementation of a word has one thing (hen) as what is common, makes them in opposition to the homonymous implementation which does not consider anything in common. Whereas both pros hen and kath hen assume a common nature, with which all the implementations of the word have some kind of relation, their difference is that while kath hen takes all the implementations of the word as the same with the common nature, pros hen makes them different. Substance is called πρῶτον ὄν because it is said to be primarily: -/- For as is (τὸ ἔστιν) is predicated of all things, not however in the same way (οὐχ ὁμοίως) but of one sort of thing primarily and of others in a secondary way. So too τὸτί ἐστιν belongs simply (ἁπλῶς) to substance but in a limited sense (πῶς) to the others [other categories] (1030a21-23). -/- The word ἁπλῶς standing against κατὰ συμβεβηκός tries to make substance different from the accidents. When we are being said that τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, it means that only the substance that is simply (ἁπλῶς) the ἕν, the common nature, τὸὄν. When we use the word 'being' about a substance, the being is said differently from when we use 'being' about an accident. The distinction between the substance and the other categories is a distinction between what simply is said to be and what only with reference to (pros) the substance is said to be. The doctrine of pros hen, changing kath hen to pros hen in respect of to on, makes a distinction that wants to show that while there is a kind of implementing the word being that is simply being, there is another kind which is called being only by reference to that which is simply being. In the doctrine of pros hen it is not so that all the things that are said to be are only by reference to a common one thing, but that while one thing is called being because it is that thing itself, the other things are called so without being that thing itself but only by referring to it. At the very beginning of book Γ, it is said that: -/- Being is said in many senses but all refer to one arche. Some things are said to be because they are substances, others because they are affections of substances, others because they are a process towards substances or destructions or privations or qualities of substances … (1003b5-9, cf. 1028a18-20) -/- Substance is what really is said to be and all other things that are said to be are said only in favor of it. This difference of substance from all other senses of being is what is, I believe, primarily aimed in Aristotle’s interrelated theories of pollachos legetai,pros hen and the theory of substance. b) The difference of the implementation of being in the case of substance and the accidents goes so deep that while substance is considered as the real being, the accidents are almost not being. An accident is a mere name (Metaphysics 1026b13-14) and is obviously akin to not being (b21). Aristotle adds that Plato was 'in a sense not wrong' saying that sophists deal with not being (τὸ μὴ ὄν) because the arguments of sophists are, above all, about the accidental (1026b13-16). At the beginning of book , he says about quality and quantity (which look to be more of a being than other accidents) that they are not existent (οὐδ̕ ὄντα ὡς εἰπεῖν) in an unqualified sense (ἁπλῶς) (1069a21-22). The two above-mentioned points, Aristotle’s (a) interwoven theories of pollachos legetai, pros hen and the theory of substance and (b) taking accidents almost as not being, comparedwith substance, brings forth a structure that I shall call Pollachos Legetai (with capital first letters). What is of the highest importance in this structure for me is the difference of substance from accidents and the kind of relation which is settled between them. There is a substance that without any qualification is said to be and the accidents that are said to be only by reference (pros) to it. Adding Aristotle’s point about accidents that they are nearly not being to this relation and difference, we can obviously see how much this structure is close to Plato’s original-copy ontology. We spoke of the relation of being and difference in Plato’s model and the way Plato construes the being of a copy. A copy is a copy only by referring to (pros) a model; it is different from (ἕτερον) that of which it is a copy; it is not itself a true thing as its model and not really that which is (ὄντως ὄν) but only is in a way (πῶς). If we behold the difference of substance and accident in the context of the theory of pollachos legetai and pros hen, we can observe its fundamental similarity with Plato’s original-copy theory in its structure. Allen draws attention to the fact that the relation between Forms and particulars in Plato’s original-copy model is 'something intermediate between univocity and full equivocity' (1998, 70, n. 24) and the same as what Aristotle calls it pros hen (ibid). What made us compare the two structures was not, of course, the complete similarity of two structures (we have to agree with many possible differences of the two theories) but exactly the specific relation between an original and its copy on the one hand, and a substance and its accident on the other hand. As substance and accident do not share a common character and the substance -accident model hints that they stand in a certain relation, there is no common character between the original and copy in Plato’s model as well. Furthermore, their similarity is not confined to their structure only; they are also aimed to solve the same problem. The central point of the theory is that all the predecessors took being in one sense and this was their weakness point. Besides the mentioned above passages about the relation of pollachos legetai and presocratics’, as well as Plato’s, ontology, the relation of the theory with the problem of not being is clear in several passages. In Metaphysics, it is said: 'Being is then said in many senses… It is for this reason that we say even of not being that it is not being' (1003b5-10). Discussing the accidental sense of being, Aristotle points that it is in the accidental way that we say, for example, that not-white is because that of which it is an accident is (1017a18-19, cf. 1069a22-24). We mentioned that he thought Plato was right saying that sophistic deals with not being because sophistic deals with accidental, which is somehow not being (1026b14-16). Plato turned sophistic not-being to what both is and is not and Aristotle to what accidentally is said to be. What helps Aristotle to resolve the problem of not being is his distinction between ἁπλῶς and κατὰ σθμβεβηκός. Aristotle’s "qua" (ᾕ) which is directly linked with his distinction between καθ’ αὑτο λέγεται and κατὰ συμβεβηκός λέγεται, is used to resolve the old problem of coming to be out of not being (Physics 191b4-10). He strictly asserts that his predecessors could not solve the problem because they failed to observe the distinction of "qua itself" from "qua another thing" (b10-13). He then continues: -/- We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said simply (ἁπλως) to come from not being (μὴὄντος). But nevertheless we maintain that a thing may come to be from not being in an accidental way (κατὰ συμβεβηκός). For from privation which ὅ ἐστι καθ’ αὑτο μὴ ὄν, nothing can become. (Phy. 191b13-16, cf. b19-25) . (shrink)

In this paper, an analysis is given of the straw man fallacy as a misrepresentation of someone's commitments in order to refute that person's argument. With this analysis a distinction can be made between straw man and other closely related fallacies such as ad hominem, secundum quid and ad verecundiam. When alleged cases of the straw man fallacy are evaluated, the speaker's commitment should be conceived normatively in relation to the type of conversation the speaker was supposed to be (...) engaged in. (shrink)

Thomas Bradwardine makes much of the fact that his solution to the insolubles is in accordance with Aristotle's diagnosis of the fallacy in the Liar paradox as that of secundum quid et simpliciter. Paul Spade, however, claims that this invocation of Aristotle by Bradwardine is purely "honorary" in order to confer specious respectability on his analysis and give it a spurious weight of authority. Our answer to Spade follows Bradwardine's response to the problem of revenge: any proposition saying of (...) itself that it is false says more than does Bradwardine's proposition saying of it that it is false, and so follows from that other proposition only in respect of part of what it says, and not simpliciter. (shrink)

The phrase _secundum quid et simpliciter_ is the Latin expression translating and labelling the sophism described by Aristotle as connected with the use of some particular expression “absolutely or in a certain respect and not in its proper sense.” This paper presents an overview of the analysis of this fallacy in the history of dialectics, reconstructing the different explanations provided in the Aristotelian texts, the Latin and medieval dialectical tradition, and the modern logical approaches. The _secundum quid_ emerges as a (...) strategy that is based on the pragmatic dimension of arguments, and in particular the complex passage from an utterance (what is said) to its logical form (a proposition in an argument). The medieval and modern logical theories attempted to explain from different philosophical perspectives how the pragmatically enriched semantic representation can be achieved, justified, and most importantly manipulated. The different analyses of this fallacy bring to light various dimensions of the pragmatics of arguments, and the complex interdependence between context, meaning, and inferences. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: hasty generalization (HG). HG is committed when some aspect of the definition of the proper generalization is violated. In other words, the “hasty” aspect of this fallacy is triggered either when there is a lack of knowledge of the selected sample or when the selected sample is not representative of the whole group, or when both and are true. We see HG committed just about every day (...) in politics and the media. In politics, HGs are used to emphasize the extremes of a particular viewpoint. Concurrently, HG is used quite often by advertisers to promote a particular product. To avoid committing this fallacy, the arguer should take into consideration the amount of justifiable knowledge one might have on a particular subject and whether the selected sample being used in the case is justifiably representative of the group in question. (shrink)

First of all I would like to describe inductive and abductive reasoning in the light of the agent–based framework to the aim of clarifying their fallacious character and the role of the so-called ideal systems (logical and computational). Then I will analyze some inductive and abductive types of reasoning that in the perspective of classical and informal logic are defined fallacies. I will describe how in an agent-based reasoning this kind of fallacious reasoning can in some cases be redefined and (...) considered as a good way of reasoning. Finally, I will illustrate how what I call manipulative abduction can be interpreted as a form of practical reasoning a better understanding of which can furnish a description of human beings as hybrid reasoners in so far they are users of ideal and computational agents. (shrink)

One commits the availability error when one pays attention to, or is compelled by, the readily available evidence – the evidence that is obvious, memorable, or psychologically compelling – instead of taking into account all the evidence or the reliable evidence. This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called availability error. The availability error contributes to confirmation bias, the tendency to only pay attention to the evidence that confirms what we believe and ignore the evidence (...) that doesn't. The availability error also encourages other fallacies, such as hasty generalization – where you generalize about an entire group based on a statistically insignificant portion of that group. In fact, memory is especially susceptible to the availability error because we are apt to remember only what is memorable, and that is often only what is psychologically compelling. (shrink)

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write in The New Rhetoric that, “The first half of this chapter is devoted to the analysis of the relations that establish reality by resort to the particular case. The latter can play a wide variety of roles; as an example, it makes generalization possible....” I will suggest that no fallacy theorist or philosopher of science who has a serious interest in bringing the fallacy of hasty generalization to theoretical heel should omit consideration of these wise (...) Belgian words. Although these very words appear to endorse the fallacy outright, they do no such thing in fact. It proves instructive to learn why. (shrink)

Theoretical and manipulative abduction conjectures and manipulations : the extra-theoretical dimension of scientific discovery. -- Non-explanatory and instrumental abduction : plausibility, implausibility, ignorance preservation. -- Semiotic brains and artificial minds : how brains make up material cognitive systems. -- Neuromultimodal abduction : pre-wired brains, embidiment, neurospaces. -- Animal abduction : from mindless organisms to srtifactual mediators. -- Abduction, affordances, and cognitive niches : sharing representations and creating chances through cognitive niche construction. -- Abduction in human and logical agents : (...) class='Hi'>hasty generalizers, hybrid abducers, fallacies. -- Morphodynamical abduction : causation of hypotheses by attractors dynamics. (shrink)

Improving Your Reasoning is an expanded version of Chapter 10 of the author's larger work, Principles of Logic. The first chapter of Improving Your Reasoning is a general survey of arguments--deductive and inductive, valid and invalid, syllogistic and nonsyllogistic--and serves as an introduction for the rest of the book which deals only with fallacies. The types of fallacies are divided by chapter into the following principal categories: begging the question, pseudoauthority, irrelevant appeals, confusion, faulty classification, political fallacies, and inductive fallacies. (...) Each of these categories is further divided into a comprehensive range of sub-categories, with each sub-category presented in a short and easily understandable section. For example, inductive fallacies are divided into hasty generalization, accident, false cause, gambler's, faulty analogy, central tendency, misleading percentages, and misleading totals. Problems and answers are provided. This book may be used as a supplementary text for introductory logic.--T. G. N. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The False Cause Fallacy Hasty Generalizations Failure to Take Context into Account Suppressing Relevant Evidence The Gambler's Fallacy Affirming the Consequent/Denying the Antecedent The Fallacies of Composition and Division Missing the Forest for the Trees.

Aristotle says that a fallacy of accident takes place whenever something is held to belong in the same way to an object and to its accident (SE 5 166b28-30). The Received View among interpreters takes “accident” (συμβεβηκός) in that connection to stand for any predicate that is not identical to its subject, and makes the fallacy consist in mistaking predication for identity. Such an analysis, however, gives “accident” a meaning otherwise unattested in the corpus; makes all (...) cases of the fallacy inconclusive, whereas inferences of the same kind are warranted (with a qualification) at different places in the corpus; does not cover cases which in Aristotle’s view fall under the fallacy of accident, for which a different analysis and solution must be provided; and does not square with Aristotle’s own solution in terms of sameness or difference in substance and being. This chapter presents a new take on the subject, grounded on Aristotle’s expressed views in the Sophistical Refutations and other works, according to which the fallacy takes place whenever a substitution of co-extensives, or even of necessary equivalents, makes reciprocation fail to (necessarily) hold between relata. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called ‘accident’. This fallacy often occurs when people let their attention become distracted by factors, which may be true, other than those relevant in an argument. While the fallacy of accident is an informal fallacy, people can imagine that it has something like this as a form: General principle or rule X applies across the board; particular case x is an example of X; and thus X (...) applies to x. One way to detect or to avoid this fallacy is to ask themselves what generalization is being applied. Once they have that figured out, they can ask themselves whether it really does apply in all cases across the board or whether there is a reason to make an exception in some particular case. (shrink)

In this paper, I characterize Susan Haack’s so called passes-for fallacy, analyze both what makes this inference compelling and why it is illegitimate, and finally explain why reflecting on the passes-for fallacy—and others like it—should become part of critical thinking pedagogy for humanities students. The analysis proceeds by examining a case of the passes-for fallacy identified by Haack in the work of Ruth Bleier. A charitable reconstruction of Bleier’s reasoning shows that it is enlightening to regard the passes-for fallacy as (...) an abuse of the application conditions of the concept of bias, rather than as an egregious case of Hasty Generalization. (shrink)

The achievement of the common good is generally identified, specially in Christian social, economic and cultural environments, with the Kingdom of God. While for many this is an obvious thinking, in this paper this vision is challenged and dismissed. The recent celebration of the 500 anniversary of the conversion of St Ignatius of Loyola serves us as a revulsive to analyze his process of conversion in order to give light to the discussion about the common good and the Kingdom of (...) God. At the same time, we will use the narrative of the three temptations of Christ in order to reinforce our conclusions. In addition, we will reflect about the purpose of the corporation regarding the conversion of St. Ignatius and will discuss if the orthodox economic model could be a way of building the Kingdom of God. Finally, we will propose that only an economic approach that places in its core love, compassion and the logic of the gift could be compatible with building the Kingdom of God on earth. (shrink)

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

Leibniz a tenté de donner une formulation logique de l'ordre, en cherchant à spécifier de la manière la plus générale possible, le sens des termes « antérieur » , « postérieur » et « conjoint ». L'analyse de ces termes tient en trois points. 1) Deux êtres étant donnés, est antérieur par nature (natura prius) celui qui est plus simple, c'est-à-dire celui dont l'analyse requiert un plus petit nombre d'opérations de l'esprit. Par suite, les êtres qui sont conjoints (simul) doivent (...) nécessairement se caractériser par le même degré de composition. 2) Le degré de composition d'un être correspond à son degré de perfection. Si les êtres antérieurs sont plus simples, les êtres postérieurs sont donc plus parfaits. 3) Enfin, deux êtres étant donnés, tels que l'un est plus simple et l'autre plus parfait, on dira que ces êtres diffèrent par le temps si en outre ils se contredisent et, réciproquement, que deux êtres compossibles se contredisent si et seulement s'ils ne sont pas tempore simul, ou s'ils n'appartiennent pas au même « état de l'univers ». Une telle analyse a le mérite de donner un exemple précis et relativement développé de ce que peut être le traitement leibnizien d'une relation particulière. Cette relation reçoit dans la mathesis, quand il s'agit de caractériser l'ordre axiomatique des notions incomplètes, une interprétation satisfaisante, à laquelle Leibniz n'a, semble-t-il, jamais renoncé. Mais l'interprétation métaphysique des termes prius, posterius et simul, qu'on trouve esquissée dans certains fragments des années 1680, soulève des problèmes insurmontables. It is well known that Leibniz's logic is grounded in the inherence of the predicate in the subject and in the compossibility of notions. It naturally stresses, therefore, relations of equivalence, rather than of order. Nevertheless, Leibniz provided a logical analysis of order, i.e. an account of the meaning of "prior", "subsequent", "concomitant". His account comprises three points: 1) Given two beings, the one that is more simple (i.e. the one whose analysis requires less operations of the mind) is prior by nature (natura prius). Hence, concomitant (simul) being. 2) The degree of composition of being corresponds to its degree of perfection. Hence, prior beings being simpler, subsequent beings are more perfect. 3) Given two beings such that one is simpler and the other more perfect, they differ temporally if they also contradict each other; conversely, two compossible beings contradict each other if, and only if, they are not simultaneous (i.e. if they do not belong to the same "state of the universe"). It will be shown that this relation makes it possible to characterize the axiomatic order of incomplete notions (in the field of the mathesis universalis). But the attempt to explain the terms prius, posterius and simul in a metaphysical manner, i.e. by laying the stress on the order among substances, raises grave philosophical problems. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, etymological fallacy (EF). To understand the EF fully, it is important to break down the word etymology, which is a practice that in itself informs the conversation surrounding the fallacy. EF is a willful use of a former definition of a word that has changed meaning and/or developed new connotations because the change does not benefit the one committing the fallacy. To avoid committing the EF, individuals should approach (...) language as they would a scientific process: they may hypothesize the word means X, but after further research and consideration, realize that indeed a word now means Y. Either way, the changing nature of language must be considered and individuals should be learned enough and flexible enough to communicate within the time and culture they inhabit. Clinging to etymons while ignoring the evolution and everyday use of language is neither logical nor truthful. (shrink)

The paradox of mass voting is not, generally speaking, matched by a paradoxical mass attempt to be politically well informed. As Converse underscored, most people are grossly politically ignorant—just as they would be if, as rational‐ignorance theory holds, they realized that their votes don't matter. Yet many millions of them contradict the theory by voting. This contradiction, and the illogical reasons people offer for voting, suggest that the logic of collective action does not come naturally to people. To equate (...) public ignorance with “rational ignorance,” then, attributes too much theoretical self‐consciousness to people. Even if their ignorance is not based on a grasp of the collective‐action problem, however, people's political ignorance is “rational”: but it is less a matter of calculating the low benefit likely to flow from one vote in a sea of millions, than of encountering the much higher cost of being well informed as compared to voting. As the high cost of becoming well informed appears likely to grow, it may be advisable to move off of the political agenda issues that have no clear continuum toward which a mostly ignorant median voter may gravitate. (shrink)

In this article I argue that clients who purchase commercial sex from forced prostitutes should be strictly liable in tort towards the sex-slaves. Such an approach is both normatively defensible and doctrinally feasible. As I have argued elsewhere, fairness and equality demand that clients compensate sex-slaves even if one refuses to acknowledge that fault is involved in purchasing sex from a prostitute who might be forced. In this article I argue that such strict liability could be grounded in the tort (...) of conversion, and not only (as argued elsewhere) in battery. Since the quintessential experience of sex-slaves is that of being treated as chattels, the appropriate legal response is to allow them to benefit from the strict liability imposed on those who interfere with an owner’s dominion over his property. Accordingly, sex-slaves should be viewed as both subjects and objects. As subjects they can sue clients for the violation of their sexual autonomy manifested by their treatment as objects. This approach is both advantageous to sex-slaves, in the sense it affords them protection that might not otherwise exist, and fair, since the ultimate response to the objectification of sex-slaves by clients should be to afford the former a proprietary-based claim against the latter. I further explain why my approach is not problematic on conceptual grounds, anti-commodification sentiments or feminist concerns with the symbolic message of my solution: that the law treats women as property. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: chronological snobbery (CS). First described by the Christian academic Owen Barfield in the 1920s and later popularized by his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, the fallacy of CS presupposes that cultural, philosophical, or scientific ideas from later time periods are necessarily superior to those from earlier ages. Grounded on the Enlightenment's concept of “progress”, this informal fallacy stems from the assumption that the ever‐increasing amount of knowledge in society (...) naturally and perpetually replaces all outdated, disproven ideas with updated, better‐justified beliefs, therefore making old ideas incorrect or irrelevant simply because they are old. Essentially the opposite of the appeal to ancient authority, CS relates to guilt by association, hasty generalization, and poisoning the well fallacies whenever it references unrelated false beliefs held by individuals from the originating time period. (shrink)

This essay begins with a brief description of my approach to the study of argumentation and fallacies which is empirical, historical-textual, dialectical, and meta-argumentational. It then focuses on the fallacy of composition and elaborates a number of conceptual definitions and distinctions: argument of composition; fallacy of composition; arguments and fallacies of division; arguments that confuse the distributive and collective meaning of terms; arguments from a property belonging to members of a group to its belonging to the entire group; several nuanced (...) schemes for arguments of composition; and several principles for the evaluation of such arguments. I then call attention to the fact that some scholars have claimed that the basic argument for global warming commits the fallacy of composition, and undertake a critical analysis of this claim. I show that the global-warming argument is not a fallacy of composition, but is rather a deductively valid argument of composition from the temperature of the parts to the temperature of the whole earth; moreover, I criticize the meta-argumentation of these scholars by showing that the global-warming argument is not similar to the one for global pollution, which is indeed fallacious; finally, I argue that these scholars confuse the global-warming argument with the argument claiming that all effects of global warming are harmful, which is indeed incorrect as a hasty generalization. (shrink)

_Arguments from Ignorance _explores the situations in which the argument from ignorance functions as a respectable form of reasoning and those in which it is indeed fallacious. Douglas Walton draws on everyday conversations on all kinds of practical matters in which the _argumentum ad ignorantiam _is used quite appropriately to infer conclusions. He also discusses the inappropriate use of this kind of argument, referring to various major case studies, including the Salem witchcraft trials, the McCarthy hearings, and the Alger Hiss (...) case. This book makes an original contribution in the areas of argumentation theory and informal logic, contending that, despite its traditional classification as a fallacy, the argument from ignorance is a genuine, very common, and legitimate type of argumentation with an identifiable structure. But the book is also interdisciplinary in scope, explaining many widely interesting and controversial subjects in artificial intelligence, medical education, philosophy of science, and philosophy of law in a clear way that makes it accessible to a broad range of readers. (shrink)

An infonnal fallacy is a reasoning error with three features: the reasoning employs an implicit cogent pattern; the fallacy results from one or more false premises; there is culpable ignorance or deception associated with the falsity of the premises. A reconstruction and analysis of the cogent reasoning patterns in fourteen standard infonnal fallacy types plus several variations are given. Defense of the CMR account covers: a general failure to apply the principle of charity in informal fallacy contexts; empirical evidence for (...) it; how it explains Walton's point that there are both fallacious and non-fallacious instances of fallacy types; how it avoids most "relevance" problems, pennits clearer taxonomizing, and promises pedagogical advantages; how it solves a "demarcation problem.". (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin's Democracy and Political Ignorance suffers from the fallacy of composition: It uses individual-level evidence about political behavior to draw inferences about the preferences and actions of the public as a whole. But collective public opinion is more stable, consistent, coherent, and responsive to the best available information, and more reflective of citizens’ underlying values and interests, than are the opinions of most individual citizens. Because Somin tends to blame the general public for deficiencies in our political processes, he (...) neglects the distorting roles of such elite-level factors as lies and misleading rhetoric from public officials, collusion between the major parties, and money run amok in our elections. Instead, he seeks solutions in such counterproductive measures as restricting the franchise, delegating decisions to unelected “experts,” and decentralizing and downsizing government. (shrink)

In this paper I consider what it might mean to see society as a kind of Rortian conversation. Although the idea of conversation is not always explicit in Rorty's social thought, it is, I think, implicitly present. To therefore invoke it as a model is not to do an injustice to Rorty, but to bring out features of his own thought that he tends to underplay. In suggesting that we take seriously the notion of society as a kind of conversation, (...) we should be careful not to overplay the aspect of talking, which is only a part of conversation. We should bear in mind that it also means living together. It must be admitted, nevertheless, that Rorty introduces the idea of conversation as a way of thinking about discourse, and so the notion as Rorty uses it prioritises the notion of talking. I would argue, however, that Rorty leaves his notion sufficiently vague and undefined to make it amenable to extension. In order to argue that we should look to the idea of conversation as a way of thinking about society more generally, I will proceed as follows. I will begin by considering the notion of conversation as discourse, focusing on two particularly prominent strands of criticism in response to this idea, namely that it ignores the role of argument and reason, and that it is a pointless sort of practice. Having rebutted these strands of criticism, I will outline a way in which we can extend the notion of conversation to society as a whole, and I will do this by debating with critics who see Rorty as privileging language over the more material and institutional aspects of society. Finally, I will argue that the conversational model is superior to the more entrenched deliberative model of democracy. Through an examination of one particular phenomenon, claro culture, which causes practical and theoretical difficulties for the deliberative model, I will offer a prima facie reason for suggesting conversation as a superior and more pragmatic alternative. (shrink)

In Theory and Problems of Logic, Nolt et al. (1998, p. 203) claim that the following argument forms are fallacious: (a) It has not been proved that p. Therefore, ∼p. (b) It has not been proved that ∼p. Therefore, p. Accordingly, they argue that the following instances of (a) and (b) are also fallacious. (ai) No one has ever proved that God exists. Therefore, God does not exist. (bi) No one has ever proved that God does not exist. Therefore, God (...) exists. Nolt/Rohatyn/Varzi’s verdict on arguments from ignorance is acceptable: “Nothing about the existence of God follows from our inability to prove God’s existence or nonexistence (i.e., from our ignorance about the matter)” (p. 203). However, since their analysis glosses over the role played by our epistemic efforts, their example might lead one to believe that theism and atheism are in the same predicament. Nevertheless, as I am about to argue, the weakness of the known arguments in favor of the existence of God coupled with the existence of an asymmetry between positive and negative empirical existential propositions determines a presumption in favor of the atheist that Nolt/Rohatyn/Varzi’s sketchy analysis of arguments from ignorance obscures. (shrink)

The liar analyzes in detail the genealogy of the paradox expressed by Epimenides when he claimed that all Cretans were liars. As he himself was a native of Crete, this expression was paradoxical since he expressed a truth by lying. Epimenides showed that it is possible to construct perfectly correct sentences according to grammatical and semantic rules, but that they in turn express a contradiction insofar as it is true and false indistinctly. Since the beginning of Western thought, the liar's (...) paradox has been resolved from dissimilar points of view. The book will analyze the different proposals developed in order to deactivate their pernicious consequences for any theory of truth. Thus, Aristotle proposed that the liar should be considered a fallacy, so he attempted to dissolve the presumed validity of his argument through insightful distinctions around the secundum quid et simpliciter fallacy. Subsequently, solutions were tested within the framework of discursive, dialectical and hypothetical models. In the book those propositions that change their truth value over time are analyzed, those called in the metapiptonta tradition. In medieval times the liar was assumed to be insolubious. Special attention was given to the discussion around the transcasus. Kant approached the liar from the point of view of the white lies generated by the antinomies of reason. In modern times, special care was taken to translate the liar into new expressive forms in order to pose it from a merely formal point of view. For this reason the study of him focused on showing and describing his circular, self-referential and reflective character. This work emphasizes the study of the liar within the framework of occasional expressions. The self-reference of the liar's paradox is derived from referential expressions that result from the information expressed circumstantially within the framework of a surrounding context. For this reason we propose a systematic study of the occasional in order to dissolve the liar. Our proposal proposes to characterize the surrounding expressions that determine the liar's referential meaning. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called the inflation of conflict (IC). A form of IC is a type of hasty generalization. A wider view of how things stand outside the courtroom may reveal little real disagreement among experts. Conventions in the popular press that promote “both sides of the story” or constant debate formats seem to encourage this type of IC. Another form of IC correctly points to disagreement in a field but (...) incorrectly implies that, as a result, little can be known. Noting disagreement among authorities can be the basis of a good argument. When there is widespread disagreement on the core aspects of a topic and the participants are bona fide authorities, then there is a good reason for a non‐expert to suspend judgment on the issue. (shrink)

This investigation uses the technique of the profile of dialogue as a tool for the evaluation of arguments from ignorance (also called lack-of-evidence arguments, negative evidence, ad ignorantiam arguments and ex silentio arguments). Such arguments have traditionally been classified as fallacies by the logic textbooks, but recent research has shown that in many cases they can be used reasonably. A profile of dialogue is a connected sequence of moves and countermoves in a conversational exchange of a type that is goal-directed (...) and can be represented in a normative model of dialogue. Selected case studies are used to probe special features of using the profile technique as applied to arguments from ignorance of a kind that occur frequently in everyday conversational exchanges. One of these special features is the use of Gricean implicature. Another is the need to use negative profiles of argument. (shrink)

How do social actors get addressees to stop retreating to metadiscussions that derail ground-level discussions, and why do they expect the strategies to work? The question is of both theoretical and practical interest, especially with regard to ground-level discussions of systemic sexism and racism derailed by qualifying “not all men” and “not all white people” perform the sexist or racist actions that are the topic of discussion. I use a normative pragmatic approach to analyze two exemplary messages designed to halt (...) retreats to metadiscussions about using “not all men” and “not all white people” qualifiers in discussions of systemic sexism and racism. I find that social actors use strategies that may at first glance appear to be out of bounds in an ideal critical discussion—e.g., demanding, shouting, cussing, sarcasm, name-calling—to cultivate a context where using not-all qualifiers becomes increasingly costly. The strategies are designed to get addressees to recognize that using not-all qualifiers is not an epistemic correction of a hasty generalization or ethical intervention to halt promulgation of stereotypes about men and white people. Instead, the strategies display that using not-all qualifiers is a fallible sign of willful hermeneutical ignorance, willful ignorance, and an attempt to reassert a measure of social dominance. These findings affirm the need to investigate the various strategies and normative materials social actors actually bring to bear to regulate disagreement. (shrink)

What is Understanding? This is the first of a series of Chats with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Chat). The main goal is to obtain Chat’s response to a series of questions about the concept of ’understand- ing’. The approach is a conversational approach where the author (labeled as user) asks (prompts) Chat, obtains a response, and then uses the response to formulate followup questions. David Deutsch’s assertion of the primality of the process / capability of understanding is used as the starting point. (...) Understanding is posited as a major step in the Big Picture description of emergence in the Universe. Understanding follows the emergence of Brains and Minds, culminating in Power Over the Universe. My evaluation suggests that Chat does indeed offer utility, but also has limitations manifested by overly general responses that do not focus tightly on the questions asked. Chat does yield some gems that could be easily missed. The approach used here includes creating Metaprompts, wherein Chat is asked to create more efficient prompts based on initial promptsThis approach appears to hold significant promise, and will likely be of benefit to those exploring various facets of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs) and designers of Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). Other findings include the need for creating new metrics and ways of discussing intelligence, and various adjacent areas and subprocesses associated with intelligence. Discussions of future directions is also included. (shrink)

Manipulation of quotation, shown to be a common tactic of argumentation in this paper, is associated with fallacies like wrenching from context, hasty generalization, equivocation, accent, the straw man fallacy, and ad hominem arguments. Several examples are presented from everyday speech, legislative debates and trials. Analysis using dialog models explains the critical defects of argumentation illustrated in each of the examples. In the formal dialog system CB, a proponent and respondent take turns in making moves in an orderly goal-directed (...) sequence of argumentation in which the proponent tries to persuade the respondent to become committed to a conclusion by asking questions and offering arguments. Analyzing quotation by using the notion of commitment in dialog, it is shown (a) how an arguer’s previous assertions can be brought to light in the course of a dialog to deal with problems arising from misquotation, (b) how the profile of dialog model allows a critic to analyse the fundamental effects misquotation brings about in a dialog, and (c) how the critic can use such an analysis to correct the problem. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper is a critical examination of argumentum ad ignorantiam, or arguing from ignorance. Ad ignorantiam is regarded as a fallacy, and certainly no route to knowledge, by most philosophers. However, case studies of ad ignorantiam are almost non‐existent, and theoretical discussions few in number. Thus this paper begins with a number of case studies. From them some morals are drawn. The morals concern the interpretation and evaluation of arguments in general and the nature and epistemic value of ad ignorantiam (...) in particular. Two theoretical discussions of the argument‐type are next considered, those of Richard Robinson and John Woods and Douglas Walton. I conclude that there is no general fallacy of ad ignorantiam– no argument is fallacious just because it's an ad ignorantiam– and that sometimes no reason is good reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 35-53 [Access article in PDF] "Truth Is What Works": Francisco J. Varela on Cognitive Science, Buddhism, the Inseparability of Subject and Object, and the Exaggerations of Constructivism—A Conversation Francisco J. Varela Bernhard Poerksen Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft Universität Hamburg Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Santiago de Chile, obtained his doctorate 1970 at Harvard University with a dissertation on the (...) insect eye, and worked there for some time in the laboratory of Torsten Wiesel, the later Nobel Laureate for medicine. From his scientific beginnings as a researcher in biology, he not only studied and practiced biology but, resisting the dominating mainstream, pursued a research program that ignored and broke down traditional disciplinary boundaries. This research program is best characterized as experimental epistemology, a concept introduced by the neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Francisco J. Varela's great aspiration was to examine and answer the philosophical ur-question of cognition with scientific precision and with the help of the best possible theoretical framework. [End Page 35]Having obtained his doctorate, he went back to Chile to work as a professor of biology together with Humberto R. Maturana. He contributed to the writing of the theory of autopoiesis, which was to cause a furor in the world of science as a universally applicable explanatory model. After the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the dictatorship by the putsch general Pinochet, Francisco J. Varela first escaped to Costa Rica, then became a professor at the American University of Colorado and University of New York, and finally returned in 1980 to the University of Chile in Santiago for five years. Temporary positions as guest professor for neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive science in Germany, Switzerland, and France led him to Paris in the end, where he worked as research director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique until his death on May 28, 2001.In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities—blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela's claim is that individual and world create each other. The Computational Model of the Mind Poerksen: The ancient key questions of philosophy are at the center of modern cognitive science. What is the essence of the mind? Do our conceptions represent a given world, which is independent from our minds? What is the formative power of external objects over our perceptions? How does cognition function? The search for an adequate answer and an improved understanding of the human mind has led many cognitive scientists to entertain the assumption that the brain is actually a kind of computer. Memory is taken to be a store. Thinking and perceiving are understood as data processing in the sense that an independent external world is computationally transformed into symbols and represented in the organism in this manner. You are very critical of this view. Why?Varela: If the brain is considered as a kind of computer, then cognitive research is limited to discovering certain self-sufficient shapes—the symbols—together with the rules [End Page 36] governing them—the programs. But this search for symbols and programs will never be profitable because it... (shrink)

Most crises of knowledge stem from lack of information. The current crisis of romantic knowledge stems from the opposite reason: too much information. The abundance of romantic information is the main reason for this crisis, making the romantic realm more complex, diverse and flexible than ever. In recent times, there has become a significantly greater emphasis on romantic ignorance. Romantic abundance facilitates finding a romantic (and sexual) partner, but is an obstacle for initiating and maintaining enduring, profound romantic relationships. A (...) major optimal tool for overcoming these difficulties is a combination of intuition and deliberate thinking. The abundance of romantic information does not make adequate knowledge easy to obtain, and conversely has created a far more complex minefield to navigate. Nevertheless, our contemporary society has enabled the most flourishing romantic environment in the history of love. (shrink)

There is a notion, cataleptic in its effects, that discussion in ethics and values must ultimately be blocked by the “naturalistic fallacy.” We can go so far in analyzing the categories of “good,” “right,” “ought,” “valuable,” and the like, but never so far as to embark from the field of logic or general philosophy and enter the alien provinces of science—at least with a visa. To think to reduce moral problems to those of psychology or biology or to those of (...) “culture,” is The Fallacy, insensitivity to which brands one as a positivist, a dupe of “scientism,” or at least a sympathetic fellow-traveller. Though the vocabulary of The Fallacy is not old—G. E. Moore and his earnest commentators will date it—the idea is almost as antique as philosophy itself; indeed, it is one of the prime devices whereby philosophy has managed to rationalize its subject-matter as something more than an historical accident. (shrink)

This book provides theoretical tools for evaluating the soundness of arguments in the context of legal argumentation. It deals with a number of general argument types and their particular use in legal argumentation. It provides detailed analyses of argument from authority, argument ad hominem, argument from ignorance, slippery slope argument and other general argument types. Each of these argument types can be used to construct arguments that are sound as well as arguments that are unsound. To evaluate an argument correctly (...) one must be able to distinguish the sound instances of a certain argument type from its unsound instances. This book promotes the development of theoretical tools for this task. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. AndersonThomas V. BergVirtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), xiii + 327 pp.To ignore Aquinas's theological backstory to his account of the virtues—namely, his account of grace in its relation to human action—is to distort his account of the virtues. This is the very valid (...) thesis explored by Justin Anderson in Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Anderson critiques the tendency among contemporary Anglophone virtue ethicists to quietly bracket his account of grace even as they admire his account the virtues. More pointedly, Anderson holds that Aquinas's account of virtue is inseparable from his account of sin, grace, "and God's presence in human life and action." He endeavors to evidence Aquinas's authentic account of virtue and its "inner reliance on the theological categories of grace, sin, and divine providence" (1).Anderson thus proposes a reading of Aquinas that is diachronic, analytical and systematic, and text-based, and which follows the logic inherent in Aquinas's own reasoning.And he delivers.After a brief overview of Aquinas's understanding of virtue in chapter 1, in chapter 2, Anderson explores the Thomistic distinction that will largely serve as a heuristic for most of the study: the distinction between virtue secundum quid (pagan virtue) and virtue simpliciter, virtue infused in us by God—virtue in the truest sense of the term.In chapter 3, Anderson traces the historical evolution in Aquinas's understanding of grace as this impacts his understanding of the conditions under which a person can possess or embody virtue. He bases this exploration in part on the work of both Henri Bouillard and Bernard Lonergan. First Anderson explores how that evolution came about in the context of the emergence of two powerful categories of thought: the Aristotelian concept of nature in the twelfth century and the category of the supernatural in the thirteenth. According to Bouillard, Aquinas's understanding of grace would [End Page 1421] have been further shaped by two sets of discoveries during his sojourn in Italy in the early 1260s, the first being two anti-Pelagian tracts of St. Augustine, and the second being the Liber de bona fortuna, a Latin compilation, possibly translated by William of Moerbeke, consisting of two chapters on good fortune, one taken from Aristotle's Magna Moralia, and the other from the Eudemian Ethics.Aquinas discovers in Augustine's anti-Pelagian works the contention that the beginning of faith is from God and not from the individual. As with the grace of final perseverance, both initiation and perdurance in faith are gratuitous gifts of God. In his encounter with the Liber (and particularly his consideration therein of the "problem of the first deliberation"), like other medievals, Aquinas "[was] presented Aristotelian investigations regarding the possibility of a divine movement, even unacknowledged by the agent, at the very roots of human action" (98). And, in Thomas's evolved understanding, this divine influence would constitute an inner movement within the human agent apart from those external circumstances ordained by providence.Anderson embraces the thesis that, in this context, and under these influences, Aquinas's understanding of grace underwent a "revolution," that a mature Aquinas—and this is the thesis of Lonergan—moves beyond a consideration of grace merely as habitus (gratia gratum faciens) to a notion of operative grace, of grace as a movement, utilizing "the unique idea of a 'moving grace', a movement of God in, and in some cases with, the human soul" (105).And—Anderson is emphatic—this revolution in thought quickly steers Aquinas clear of what centuries later will be termed semi-Pelagianism, and toward a firmly anti-Pelagian conception of the human capacity for virtue.Chapters 4–9 comprise the second and third parts of the book. It is here that Anderson masterfully and exhaustively engages in the heavy lifting of evincing just how, in fact, Aquinas's account of virtue is inseparable from his theology of grace. On the supposition that Aquinas's mature theology of grace understands the latter to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Trinity:An Ecumenical ConversationIsidoros C. KatsosIntroductionThis paper explores the potential impact of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's impressive new book on the Trinity for the ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches.1 In doing so, the paper responds to the editors' kind request for an explicitly ecumenical approach to the book. Therefore, this paper concentrates on the issue of the Trinity from an ecumenical perspective. But (...) this is not a simple task. Before reading the book, the reader might have thought that Eastern and Western theologians had somehow reached a gentlemen's agreement that the insertion of the Filioque clause in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed had happened sometime somewhere in the Wild West (namely, at the local Council of Toledo in 589). Building on an honest misunderstanding, the Latin Church gradually added to the initial statement of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, according to which the Spirit proceeds "from the Father" (ek tou patros), that the Spirit proceeds "from the Father and the Son" (ex Patre Filioque).2 In the absence of an ecumenical council that would have settled the issue, the creedal addition became the thorniest issue of theological contention between East and West, leading to the "Great Schism." Things took a new [End Page 493] turn during the twentieth century when Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras decided that a new rapprochement was desirable and possible.3 Since then, Eastern theologians have showed willingness, for the first time in centuries, to quiet down their concerns about the Filioque as unwarranted speculation, if not falsification, of the Trinitarian doctrine of the Church Fathers.4 In exchange, they saw their Western colleagues quieting down their own normative claims about the theological necessity of the Filioque.5 The general sentiment in the theological schools, in the East at least, was that the true reasons of the Schism had relocated from the sphere of theology to the sphere of terminology, history, and culture.6 The controversy over the Filioque could be seen as an infelix culpa that shaped Eastern and Western Christianity as religious communities, a historic misunderstanding of historical proportions. Contextual rather than doctrinal—that seemed to [End Page 494] be the shift achieved in the last century.7 After reading the book, however, the reader might think that we are about to return to the previous state. For White now argues that the Filioque is not "just" an accident of language, history, and culture, something that could have happened or not, but the only correct interpretation of the Nicene faith:When the Father spirates the Spirit from all eternity, he necessarily does so as Father of the Son and so also in the Son and with the Son.(108; emphasis mine)As to the historically contested question of the Filioque, there are … many scriptural and traditional bases in favor of its affirmation. In addition, Aquinas affirms it as a necessary component of Trinitarian theology.(504; emphasis mine)If White's argument is correct, it has serious impact on the ecumenical dialogue: it suggests that, regardless of what happened in Toledo in the sixth century, Christian theologians in East and West ought to understand the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as entailing that the third person of the Trinity always proceeds from the other two together. To put it more pointedly: if the argument of the book is correct, the Orthodox rejection of the Filioque must betoken a failure to grasp something true and important about the life of the Trinity.Clearly, the resurgence of the Filioque as a normative claim poses a genuine challenge for the Orthodox reader. If the Filioque is the correct Trinitarian doctrine, what room is there left for the Orthodox contrary position? In situations like this in the past, an Orthodox theologian would consider whether to meet the argument head on by producing contrary readings of the same patristic sources or to entirely undermine it by softening its conclusions. I presume this would still be the instinctive reaction of the average Orthodox reader. I find this kind of response not conducive to ecumenical dialogue. Let me then probe here with something new. In what follows, I want to... (shrink)

AM Hendropriyono 2021, Filsafat Intelijen. Sebuah Esai ke Arah Landasan Berpikir, Strategi, serta Refleksi Kasus-kasus Aktual, Jakarta: PT Hedropriyono Strategic Consulting. Bagi seorang "filosof emeritus" ("filosof afkiran") seperti penulis buku Hendropriyono menarik karena menjadi kelihatan bagaimana seorang 0tokoh yang profesinya jauh dari filsafat dapat memanfaatkan pendekatan filosofis. Yang dimaksud Hendropriyono dengan "filsafat Intelijens" memang bukan filsafat seperti filsafat moral atau filsafat politik atau filsafat manusia. Melainkan filsafat sebagai cara seorang tokoh inteligens Indonesia menjalankan tugasnya, mengumpulkan pengetahuan tentang ancaman-ancaman tersembunyi yang (...) dihadapi suatu negara, dalam kasus ini, Indonesia. Dalam definisi Hendropriyono: "Filsafat intelijen memahami keamanan sebagai suatu kebebasan dari bahaya yang mengancam personal, informasi, komunikasi, pernaskahan fisik dan non-fisik serta lingkungan hidup manusia" h. 103). Hendropriyono memperlihatkan bagaimana ketajaman filosofis dapat membantu melihat realitas dari pelbagai segi, menghindar misalnya dari tiga sikap keliru klasik yang sudah diangkat oleh para filosof Yunani, sofisme, paralogisme dan sikap echolalian (h. 56), sadar akan perangkap logical fallacies seperti argumentasi ad hominem, sikap latah (bandwagon), kesimpulan yang tergesa-gesa (hasty generalization), menganggap A disebabkan B hanya karena terjadi sesudah B (post hoc, bukan propter hoc), dikotomi keliru, circular reasoning dan membiarkan diri dibawa sesat karena mengikuti suatu red herring (h. 133 s.). Pendekatan filosofis akan membuat was-was terhadap "pemikrian konspirasi", informasi top-down dan hoaks. Dalam bukunya Hendropriyono membawa pendekatan filosofis itu pada kejadian-kejadian di dekade-dekade terakhir. Msalnya Arab spring dengan pergolakan-pergolakan luar biasa yang mengikutinya: Mesir dengan semangat demokrasi yang justru membawa Ikhwanul Muslimen ke puncak kekuasaan, hanya untuk kemudian digulingkan oleh Jendral Siwi dengan dukungan Al Azhar dan Gereja Koptik. Kekacauan luar biasa di Siria dan Irak di mana Amerika Serikat mendukung gerakan demokratis dengan harapan bisa menggulingkan diktator Bashar al-Assad, hanya untuk akhirnya malah menjadi pendukung ISIS - yang menyingkirkan gerakan demokratis - karena Assad didukung oleh Rusia dan Iran. Sebelumnya Amerika Serikat juga dengan logika kepentingannya membuat kacau Haiti: Sesudah Amerika mendukung Jean-Bertrand Aristide, presiden pertama Haiti yang dipilih secara demokratis, yang menggantikan diktator "Baby Doc" Duvalier, tetapi karena Aristide dianggap terlalu kiri, Amerika mendukung penggulingannya; sampai sekarang Haiti kacau. Dan ada contoh logical dan political fallacies lain yang dianalisa, misalnya perang proxy di Afganistan. Tentu Hendropriyono juga memakai pendekatan filsafat untuk melihat pekembangan di Indonesia. Amendemen UUD 1946 pasca reformasi, masalah Papua, gejala populisme, keberhasilan deradikalisasi seperti misalnya terwujud dalam Pondok Pesantren Al-Zaitun. Sama dengan alm. Romo Nikolaus Drijarkara Hendropriyono menunjukkan bahwa "Sila Pancasila yang Ke II, Kemanusiaan yang Adil dan Beradab, merupakan landasan bagi implementasi seluruh sila-sila dalam Pancasila" (142). Tentu ada juga beberapa kesalahan. Perang Napoleon tentu berlangsung di abad ke-18 dan permulaan abad ke-19 (h. 29), Hitler berkuasa di Jerman tahun 1933 (h. 38), demonstrasi dua Desember (212) terjadi di tahun 2017, bukan 2016 (56), dan PD II bukannya diadakan untuk menjatuhkan Hitler, melainkan yang memulainya memang Hitler (146). Buku ini sekaligus membuat pembaca paham bagaimana Hendropriyono melihat realitas politik, baik di Indonesia maupuan situasi internasional. Ia bermaksud menunjukkan bagaimana "kacamata" filsafat membantu untuk memahami apa yang terjadi dalam dimensi politik, dimensi utama yang mau dilindungi dari kejahatan oleh aparat inteligence. Suatu buku yang cukup khas. Franz Magnis-Suseno. (shrink)