The main conclusion of Nigel Hiscock's important but ill‐arranged book is that the ground plans of abbeys and cathedrals of the tenth and eleventh centuries incorporate Platonic wisdom—hence the “wise” in the title catchwords, which come from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians . There Paul likens himself to a sapiens architectus who lays the foundations on which others erect the building. In three of the four translations in The Complete Parallel Bible, however, Paul does not declare himself wise but, (...) rather, “skilled” or “trained.” The discrepancy makes an emblem for Hiscock's investigation: Did the architects deliberately express geometrical ratios significant in Platonic philosophy in their designs or did they proceed by applying their practical skill and training to the lie of the land and the resources available? A subsidiary question is also symbolized in Paul's verse: Was the designer a wise cleric who set the proportions and left the heavy work to someone else?Hiscock builds his answers in two ways. For one, he delivers a chrestomathy of Platonic snippets known in the tenth century and a few telling quotations from wise clerics—the latter concern the expression of significant numbers in the church fabric: a baptistery is octagonal because of an association between creation and the number eight, and a church with a half‐dozen altars is complete because of the perfection of the number six. But, Hiscock emphasizes, numerology does not account for floor plans, and to test the wisdom of the designers he scrutinizes plans of two dozen churches, especially those associated with monastic reformers. He expresses his results in color‐coded lines superposed on the plans, some one hundred of which comprise a valuable appendix.An example will indicate the interest of the findings and the riskiness of the business. The crossing of the transept at St. Michael's Abbey, Hildesheim, makes a square ABCD, proceeding clockwise from A in the northeast corner. AD and BC prolonged give the line of nave piers, AB and DC prolonged that of the arms of the transept. Lines drawn from B at angles of 54° and 60° with BC cut CD extended in E and F, respectively, locating the end piers in the side aisles. Now 60°, as the invariable angle of a three‐sided figure all of whose parts are equal, carries a cornucopia of Platonic and Christian symbolism. Also 54°, because derivable from a pentagon, has the pregnant significance of the figure five, which is the sum of the first male and first female numbers. Repetition of the transept square fixes the nave piers. Then lines between piers, pillars, and pilasters make the special angles with the north‐south and east‐west lines of the grid all over the plan.How much of this construction is mere coincidence? Requiring the intervals between piers in the same line to be equal, we have DE = FE = FD/2. And so it is: / = 0.51. Otherwise put, if angle FBC is 60° and E divides FD equally, angle EBC must be 54° without reference to a pentagon. Against such arguments, Hiscock observes that his analysis has uncovered previously unknown relations between churches confirmed by documents and that his technique, when applied to large nineteenth‐century buildings with repeated bays such as the Crystal Palace, picks out relatively few structurally significant elements.Hiscock is senior lecturer on the design, theory, and history of architecture at Oxford Brookes University and a master craftsman. His scrupulously prepared color‐coded drawings contain much of interest and pleasure for a geometer. Has he definitively answered the old vexed question whether the sapiens architectus intended to express ancient wisdom in his plans? If the architect thus proposed, did his builder faithfully dispose? Paul again may give guidance. “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile”. (shrink)

Anthony Grafton, like Jacob Burckhardt before him, begins his appreciation of Leon Battista Alberti by reviewing how the fifteenth‐century Italian author created a many‐faceted identity through willful self‐fashioning. Grafton, however, offers the reader a much richer Bildungsroman than the older portrait and exposes many forces undercutting the monolithic character of Burckhardt's Renaissance, the same forces that may provide a key to the contrary and doubt‐ridden persona frequenting Alberti's writings. Alberti's ambitions and the leitmotifs of his life from his youthful aspirations (...) to their later glorious fulfillment are laid out in stunning detail.Moving well beyond the unrelenting brightness of Burckhardt's presentation, Grafton also attempts to fuse what have become for scholars the dramatic polarities of Alberti's enigmatic personality. An ambitious scholar and writer on academic subjects, on the visual and practical arts, Alberti was a lover of nature and a sensitive commentator on aesthetic, familial, and cultural ideals. He was also given to irony, despair, and bitter isolation. Grafton makes a strong case for Alberti's dependence on an unwavering determination that compelled him to assume many guises and foster numerous strategies to achieve his literary, social, and economic goals. As his friend Cristoforo Landino once noted, Alberti was like a chameleon. In Grafton's hands, however, Alberti remains dazzlingly inventive and radically humanist, and he endures as appropriately leonine and the hero of his own tale.With a predictable outpouring of references, Grafton evokes Alberti's social, political, and intellectual world and, reprising his earlier writings, develops several themes. These include Alberti's literary erudition and the high price he paid to achieve it; how Alberti applied the lessons of ancient sources to the problems of his own world, and in so doing subverted those lessons to create something new; how the humanist author developed special vocabularies for writing about such novel subjects as the visual arts, instruments of measure, and other current technologies; and, perhaps most surprisingly for a man given to bitterly mocking his contemporaries, how Alberti became involved in the creative energy of early modern life with apparent enthusiasm and accomplished the astonishing feat for a humanist of becoming a practicing architect.Grafton finds Alberti's confidence in a material culture driven by technology, theoretical knowledge, and careful observation expressed forcefully in the dedicatory letter of his essay On Painting addressed to the builder Filippo Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi deserved to be praised not for slavishly drinking from the fountain of the ancients, but for the brilliance of his intelligence and the successful application of his knowledge. Further, by requesting that the architect emend his essay, Alberti, the scholar, is shown to have treated Brunelleschi, the builder, as an equal and thereby to have elevated all technical knowledge. Alberti cleverly places himself within the circle of the ingenious engineers who were masters of practical knowledge based on underlying principles and therefore at the forefront of an intellectual parade led by its most renowned practitioner. One wonders, perhaps, what Brunelleschi at the height of his fame might have desired to learn from the audacious savant.As Alberti masters how to make his way in Florence and among the elegant courts of his day, he is seen to revisit the themes of his youthful writings with ever‐deepening insight. Grafton's reflections on Alberti and Florence, though generally convincing, have been greatly enriched by Luca Boschetto's recent book devoted to that subject . In addition, some of Grafton's notions about the influence of On Painting as centered in courtly art seem to reach beyond the evidence and the explicit directives found in Alberti's writings.The reader interested in Alberti's involvement in science and technology will still want to consult Joan Gadol's Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance , and the lack of a general bibliography will be an irritation to those who like to follow an author's research trail, the trekker in this case having to stumble through a thicket of footnotes. Nonetheless, Grafton has created a richly drawn portrait of Alberti. Scholar and student alike will garner much that is important about this immensely gifted and mercurial man whose writings continue to influence our understanding of the beginnings of early modernity. (shrink)

Study of the foreign magistri and protomagistri of the medieval cathedral of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) (ca 1130-1350, rebuilt after 1693) reveals the social dynamics of artists’ travel in Mediterranean ports. Building on previous research of the builders’ artistic contexts and references, this analysis combines close reading and comparison of contract documents, discussion of Ragusa’s foreign citizenship law, and questions informed by the sociology of mobility. The study concludes that the governor patrons of Ragusa Cathedral exploited the increased physical and occupational (...) mobility of Adriatic builders, then arrested that mobility by offering the builders social advantages in the form of professional security and a path to citizenship. This balance of mobility at multiple levels manifested in the cathedral’s cosmopolitan and open-ended design. (shrink)

The LEGO Movie provides more ways to think about the nature of autonomy and how others can either help or hinder one's development. At the beginning of The LEGO Movie, Emmet Brickowoski is an extreme case of someone who is not autonomous. Emmet is also contrasted with the Master Builders, who are autonomous, making decisions for themselves with confidence and gusto. When Emmet comes into his own as The Special, it is only with the help of others. Emmet (...) begins his development by convincing the Master Builders to follow his plan. Among them, only he has the capacity to really understand others' expectations in a way that will result in a successful plan to stop Lord Business's plot. Wyldstyle experiences a development similar to Emmet's. Her given name is Lucy, and she molds her personality to others' expectations. Wyldstyle's case examines what might be missing in the Master Builders. (shrink)

In The LEGO Movie, Vitruvius's notion of the "The Special" introduces what will be a central motif for the film. As it turns out, the one who finds this "Piece of Resistance" is not quite the hero he was expected to be. Emmet Brickowoski, a construction worker, will find this "Piece of Resistance". Throughout the film, others suggest to Emmet both implicitly and explicitly that he brings nothing of value to any particular individual or to society, and that consequently he (...) himself has no value. If one interpret The LEGO Movie as being driven by Emmet's quest for discovering his value, the real philosophical turning point in the film is not when Emmet's double‐decker couch permits the Master Builders to escape from the sinking submarine and they realize that Emmet's ideas actually are useful. Rather, it is when Emmet realizes their approval is irrelevant to his value. (shrink)

One of the great virtues of LEGO is that it has the potential to make any one of us a Master Builder. In The LEGO Movie, Wyldstyle and Batman present a case study in the value of precision in language. If your basic two‐by‐four brick is the "uncarved block", LEGO makes "carved" ones too: cockpits, irregular minifig heads, all those cool bits. In the case of the LEGO brick, the less it's like a toy, the better we can play (...) with it. According to the Daoists, government is no different: the less it does, the better it works. One of the most telling differences between ancient Greek philosophy and ancient Chinese philosophy lies in their attitudes toward imprecision. LEGO Master Builders understand this. This is the Daoist model of government: commit yourself to the goal, be willing to be flexible, and voila, you've freed yourself of the tyranny of the instruction booklet. (shrink)

The farms in the LEGO Farm theme are immaculate. They feature sparkling clean tractors, pristine fences, and the complete absence of dirt. Whether it is on purpose, or a limitation based on the number of pieces that can be placed inside a box, LEGO Farm presents an agricultural utopia. The farms are smaller, less dependent on toxic inputs, and friendlier to animals than real‐life commercial farms. LEGO Farm often features animals that are clean and well fed. Some animals even appear (...) to be smiling, and that's appropriate considering that they are viewed as living creatures rather than commodities. With LEGO, kids and adults can imagine farms as they would ideally make them. The beauty of LEGO is that anyone can be a Master Builder, building their own MOCs. As a Master Farmer the possibilities for representing environmentally friendly agriculture are endless. (shrink)

The profession of the master builder has become differentiated in the course of the technological developments stemming from industrialization, separating into the professional disciplines of the architect (in the modern sense) and the structural engineer. Ever since, the question has been about the relationship between architect and structural engineer and the nature of their collaboration. Differing responses have been propagated in architectural theory and exemplified by building practice. In this essay, I distinguish between the models of the monologue by (...) an architect or engineer, the soliloquy of the engineer-architect, and the dialogue between architect and engineer as equal partners. For the third model, upon which we will focus our attention, I characterize more precisely the method of collaboration and discuss two construction methods—shear wall-slab systems (also known as deep-beam/slab structures) and truss structures—that call for the method presented. Beginning with a clarification of the concept of tectonics, I conclude by examining whether, with regard to the discussed structures, one can speak of a “new tectonic culture.”. (shrink)

This chapter first distinguishes between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated. Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the (...) bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation. The chapter then discusses The LEGO Movie embodies the paradox that presents three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision. (shrink)

The liberating power of symbols -- The conflict of beliefs -- Between traditions -- Tracing the other of history in history -- A master builder with hermeneutic tact -- Israel or Athens : where does anamnestic reason belong? -- Communicative freedom and negative theology -- The useful mole who ruins the beautiful lawn.

To know Him is to love Him -- God as our personal father -- The unfolding revelation of God -- God's amazing attributes -- The Messiah has come! -- Wonderful Messiah, son of God -- The person of the Holy Spirit -- Holy Spirit, you are welcome here! -- Knowing God by knowing His word -- Knowing the master builder -- God's trustworthy word -- Hungry for his every word -- The uniqueness of God's word -- Getting to know (...) God. (shrink)

How were various strata of local history—Classical, Christian, and Muslim—incorporated into the building of imperial Seville (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and what was the impact of the critical approach to evidence developed in Renaissance Italy on actual urban projects? Three case-studies—of a noble palace, the Casa de Pilatos; of a public park, the Alameda de Hércules; and of a carpentry treatise by master builder Diego López de Arenas—reveal the malleable role of historical evidence in monumental construction projects based on (...) classical and Christian ideals and demonstrate a more methodical use of evidence among artisans practicing traditional medieval craftsmanship. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE AR-SA st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Architectural heritage is considered a fundamental issue in the life of modern societies. In addition to their historical interest, cultural heritage buildings are valuable because they contribute significantly to the economy by providing key attractions at a time when tourism and leisure are major industries. The need for preserving historical constructions is thus not only a cultural requirement, but also an economical and developmental demand. Herein, among different Iranian heritage buildings, pigeon towers, or dovecotes, are of a great importance. Hundreds of dovecotes, dating largely to the Safavid period, dot the fields in the vicinity of Isfahan. On the other hand, valleys formed by creeks in central parts of Anatolia seem to have offered suitable environments for ancient settlements. Cappadocia region and two valleys nearby the town of Gesi accommodate a number of villages surrounded by hundreds of dove cotes in different types. This paper investigates different types of dovecotes in Iran plateau and Central Anatolia, Turkey. The results show there is a fundamental difference between the structures of dovecotes in these two countries. However, ancient dovecotes in Iran and Central Anatolia can be considered good examples of 'architecture without architects' or ' spectacular vernacular architecture'. Master builders who designed and constructed these buildings for such a simple function, created impressive forms without much pretension and bringing forth the tectonic aspects of the art of architecture. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE AR-SA st1:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Keywords: Dovecotes, architecture, Iran, Isfahan, Central Anatolia. (shrink)

A more significant indication of the revived interest in Whitehead, however, is the number of first-rate studies of his philosophy which have been produced in recent years. Three have been published; each is superior in scope, depth, and philosophic insight to the studies hitherto available. In addition, two more works are announced for early publication, one of which at least is of the same high caliber. The authors of these recent books are neither apologists nor detractors, neither loyal disciples nor (...) ideological enemies of their subject. In the main they are themselves philosophers, concerned to understand and to help others understand the constructions of a philosophic master builder, one who, unfortunately, did not himself do all he might have done to facilitate such understanding. We have long needed studies of the sort now appearing. More work is needed for our comprehension to be complete, and our assessments sure. But these recent books have brought these goals within striking distance. (shrink)

This paper investigates sun‑dried mudbrick architecture in the Minoan Palace at Malia on the north coast of Crete (Greece), excavated and studied by the French School at Athens since the beginning of the 20th century. Macroscopic study of the standing architectural remains is combined with geochemical (pXRF and XRD) and petrographic analyses of a selection of mudbrick samples in order to explore patterns and variations in bricklaying, mudbrick recipes, manufacturing practices and mudbrick performance throughout the Pre‑, Proto‑ and Neopalatial periods (...) (2450-1430 BCE). The microscopic composition of the mudbricks highlights the consistent procurement of local raw materials, despite marked differences in macroscopic composition related to varying manufacturing processes that impacted mudbrick performance. This diversity is important enough to indicate the completion of the Neopalatial building project by separate teams of builders, whose skills seem to have varied markedly. The participation in the Neopalatial building project of specialised mudbrick ‘master’ builders is attested but the workforce was also drawn from the site’s inhabitants who had the requisite knowledge to produce standing, though significantly less‑well performing, mudbrick walls. (shrink)

Walter Reese-Schäfer, Karl-Otto Apel, Zur Einführung (with an Afterword by Jürgen Habermas), Junis Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1990, 176pp. DM 17.80 -/- The author, presently a freelance writer published in the newspaper “Die Zeit” and the magazine “Stern,” pro­vides in this small book a clear and concise introduction to sources, themes and conclusions in the philosophy of Karl-Otto Apel. Apel, Emeritus Pro­fessor at Frank­furt, and close colleague of Habermas, characterizes his viewpoint as a “transcen­dental pragmatism” in which a Kantian concern for (...) question regarding “the conditions for the possi­bility of some­thing,” (p.10) mixes with deontological discourse-ethics, semeiotic themes from Peirce, an ap­proach to fallibilism, the demand for “final justifica­tions” (Letzt­begründung) and German her­meneutics. In view of the “den­sity and concentration” of Apel’s texts, which often have a “deterrent effect” upon those not already at home with “the phil­osophical language game,” it is the announced aim of this book to provide a work of translation and clarification of Apel’s special­ized efforts --in effect an orientation to Apel’s work. The book divides into an Introduction, 8 chapters and a summary conclusion --with Habermas’ appreciation, “A Master Builder with Hermeneutic Feeling --The Way of Philosopher Karl-Otto Apel,” bringing up the rear. There is also a bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a short table outlining highlights of Apel’s career. The “Introduction” provides a good overview of the aims of the book and gets one started on central themes. (shrink)

To paraphrase Locke (Essay, 9-10), Leibniz may be counted among the master-builders of modern science, but also among the philosophical under-labourers who helped clear the ground for scientific knowledge. In the area of natural philosophy, he contributed directly to the advancement of science, but his achievements, for instance the invention of the infinitesimal calculus and the foundation of the dynamics, bore the mark of a philosophical mind and were systematically exploited in furthering significant epistemological objectives. The scope of (...) Leibniz's scientific interest and contributions was broad. (shrink)

Due to lacking reliable sources almost no details were available on the educational journey of the joung Descartes. Moreover, contradictions in several publications resulted in the doubt, whether these events, which are so important for the history of science, ever hapened at all. Folowing careful and comprehensive research at the City Archives Ulm, the Hessian City Archives Darmstadt and the Bavarian State Library in Munich the author found evidence that René Descartes met the mathematician and master fortress builder Johann (...) Faulhaber in Ulm.1 Now, the first summary of Descartes' travel report can be given based on further findings (in reliable sources) and corroborated by numerous facts. (shrink)

This paper presents insights into the lived experience of maritime carpentry practices, based on six months of sensory-ethnographic fieldwork as a wooden boat builder’s apprentice. In particular, the author explores the widely-reported experience of tools ‘withdrawing’ from consciousness as craftspeople master their use. Without contradicting these interpretations – many of which are constructed by way of reference to ideas from Merleau-Ponty – the author suggests further theoretical resources to examine the perceptual experience of work after tools cease to be (...) the main focus of the craftsperson’s attention. Heidegger’s idea of ‘circumspection’ is presented as a way to illuminate the relational nature of the subsequent mode of perception, in which the work as a whole fills the consciousness, rather than the individual instruments through which the work is achieved. (shrink)

In _Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – A Propaedeutic_, Thomas Sören Hoffmann invites the philosophically interested reader to converse with, to work with, and to think with the “master philosopher of German Idealism,” the last great system builder of European philosophy.

This book assembles leading legal, political, and moral philosophers to examine the legacy of the work of Ronald Dworkin. They provide the most comprehensive critical treatment of Dworkin's accomplishments focusing on his work in all branches of philosophy, including his theory of value, political philosophy, philosophy of international law, and legal philosophy. The book's organizing principle and theme reflect Dworkin's self-conception as a builder of a unified theory of value, and the broad outlines of his system can be found throughout (...) the book. The first section addresses the most abstract and general aspect of Dworkin's work--the unity of value thesis. The second section explores Dworkin's contributions to political philosophy, and discusses a number of political concepts including authority, civil disobedience, the legitimacy of states and the international legal system, distributive justice, collective responsibility, and Dworkin's master value of dignity and the associated values of equal concern and respect. The third section addresses various aspects of Dworkin's general theory of law. The fourth and final section comprises accounts of the structure and defining values of discrete areas of law. (shrink)

The Italian-born Lanfranc of Pavia and his more illustrious pupil and compatriot Anselm of Bec have long been considered pivotal figures in the theological and especially philosophical developments of the late eleventh century. Long ago dubbed the “father of Scholasticism” on account of his attempts to harmonize reason and faith, Anselm has occasioned increasing scrutiny in recent years as scholars have begun to target the cultural and pedagogical role of Anselm and his milieu in the early stages of the twelfth-century (...) renaissance. In a particularly stimulating interdisciplinary exploration of the cognitive relation between builders and their craft and masters and theirs, Charles M. Radding and William W. Clark have advanced an intriguing model suggesting that theologians and Romanesque builders of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were part of a larger transformative development in which thinkers and artisans developed new methods for solving new problems; these new methods, in turn, transformed practitioners of a craft into members of new and distinct disciplines. The verdict is still out on the precise nature of those important developments, but especially vexing is the question of the abbey of Bec's importance and influence under Lanfranc and Anselm during these changing times. As a leading scholar of Anselm has recently put it, “The character of the school of Bec emerges as a riddle to be solved. What was its focus, what did its teachers teach, and how long did it last?” Recent studies have modified Richard Southern's portrayal of the curriculum of Anselm's school at Bec as largely devoted to monastic ideals and demonstrated that history and law were also studied, that a good number of students went on to become able administrators, and that Anselm may have unwittingly contributed to the rise of courtly love. Much of the fog surrounding the authorial publication and dissemination of Anselm's writings has recently been cleared by Richard Sharpe's meticulous analysis in “Anselm as Author,” revealing a careful and more deliberate editorial planning on Anselm's part than previously recognized. However, even amidst the gathering attention directed toward these figures and their cultural context, it is the most basic and obvious feature of Lanfranc's and Anselm's written record that has been the most undeservedly neglected: their use of dialogue and its correlation to the early development of Scholastic disputation. To be sure, the revival of dialectic in the eleventh century and especially in the twelfth has long been known and rather well charted, particularly with regard to the growth of theology as an academic discipline. What follows is a somewhat more focused line of inquiry. Looking beyond the well-trodden ground of Anselm's philosophy and theology and instead examining his pedagogical innovations, this essay explores Anselm's contribution to the development of literary dialogue and to the origins of the Scholastic disputatio, both valuable tools indeed in his philosophical and theological endeavors. Anselm's influence as a prolific author of dialogues can especially be observed in a younger generation of writers and thinkers who studied with him or directly sought to imitate his style and whose oeuvres need also to be considered. By examining the circle of Lanfranc and Anselm, the methods embodied by their teachings, and the writings they produced, this essay aims to show that the Scholastic dialectical methods, later so prominent in medieval universities, have their origins within the general milieu of monastic learning. More specifically, these methods will be shown to have their origins in Lanfranc's and Anselm's engagement with dialogue and disputation at the school of Bec. (shrink)

The article analyzes the project of scientific justification of language Reforms, realized by the Soviet regime in 20s and 30s, elaborated by Russian and Soviet linguist Evgenij Polivanov (1891-1938). Polivanov claims that a Soviet linguist should not limit his interests to the “general linguistics" and become an active “language builder" and “language politician". The reforms should be carefully planned by the experts in language sciences who master as well the methodology of dialectical materialism. In the polemics against Nikolai Marr's (...) Japhetidology Polivanov argued that linguistics is a strict science and its deductions are not contradictory to Marxism, as the latter is primarily a materialist philosophy. His minimal program consisted in explaining his views on the evolution of language in the Marxist terms. The evolution of language is explained by the influence of internal and external factors. The socio-economical factors are not influencing the language in a direct manner, but their analysis allows to change the channel of language evolution. According to Polivanov, the introduction of Marxism into linguistics will make possible to explain the relationship between intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors and will transform the sciences of language into “social engineering of the future". (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)

The pleasures experienced by boys and men who work and play closely with technology have important implications for both gender and technology. This article presents empirical evidence on the topic from two studies: one of hobbyist “robot builders” who build machines for the U.K. television program Robot Wars, the other of professional software developers working in a large U.S. corporation. In spite of the obvious differences between these two groups, they experience strikingly similar pleasures—in creating technologies, in their skills (...) and knowledge, and in their intimacy and comfort with technology. The authors discuss available gender-based analyses of men’s pleasures in technology, drawing on the empirical material to both challenge and extend these analyses. The authors suggest, tentatively, that technology is a gender-authentic and gender-available avenue for those men who particularly crave certainty because technology appears more certain, easier to understand, and easier to master than other worlds they inhabit. (shrink)

In _Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – A Propaedeutic_, Thomas Sören Hoffmann invites the philosophically interested reader to converse with, to work with, and to think with the “master philosopher of German Idealism,” the last great system builder of European philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Satori:Toward a Conceptual AnalysisAvery M. FoutsOne of the significant points of division between Zen Buddhism and Western thought is the status of the law of noncontradiction.1 In the West, no matter what our ontology, we have overwhelmingly regarded this law as indubitable. For example, Aristotle insists in his Metaphysics that the law of noncontradiction is the most certain of all first principles, the fabric of any significant assertion since (...) any significant assertion can be distinguished from its contradictory.2 In the East, however, Zen Buddhists tend to view this law as provisional, and this presents formidable barriers to communication with the West. At particular issue is the interpretation of satori, the abrupt and momentary Enlightenment experience within the Rinzai school of Zen.The West can learn much from Zen about the subtleties of unhealthy contradictions in consciousness. To this end, satori and the liberation found therein are phenomenological facts worthy of the deepest respect by the West. The problem, however, is that satori seems to demand an interpretation that is irrational according to Western canons of rationality. In light of this, the purpose of this paper is to interpret satori in a way that eases this purported irrationality. A first step is taken toward reconciling Zen and the West by accepting the challenge posed by D. T. Suzuki:The position assumed by the Zen masters is this. They leave the logical side of the business to the philosopher, and are content with conclusions drawn from their own inner experiences. They will protest, if the logician attempts to deny the validity of their experience, on the ground that it is up to the logician to prove the fact by the instruments which he is allowed to use. If he fails to perform the work satisfactorily—that is, logically to confirm the experience—the failure is on the side of the logician, who has now to devise a more effective use of his tools.3In the first section, the logic of the Zen experience is examined through the writings of Suzuki, traditionally regarded as the best expositor of Zen to the West and one who specifically deals with the present theme. While Suzuki does not represent the whole of Zen, he nonetheless "stands in the first rank of the cultural bridge builders between Asia and the West during the twentieth century."4 In the second section, the notion of "intentional identity," the nondualism inherent in cognition, [End Page 101] is elucidated with the help of certain existential Thomists. There is a paradox intrinsic to intentional identity that is just as paradoxical as anything Suzuki claims. I contend that it is this paradox that lies at the heart of satori, and the fact that it has been recognized in the West provides the foundation for the reconciliation. In the third section, it is shown that the first-person subject possesses a prereflective self-consciousness in first-order experience of an external object. This allows us to insert a subject-object dualism into satori, all the while agreeing with Suzuki that the latter experience transcends reflection. In the fourth section, all of the above elements are brought together to provide a conceptual analysis of satori in which rationality is maintained, on the one hand, and the integrity of the experience is maintained, on the other.Illogical ZenIn the Zen tradition, the Absolute, if the term may be used, is nondual; therefore, any affirmation of the Absolute in the form of A as opposed to not-A is to sunder its sacred unity because in the Absolute there are no distinctions whatsoever. For this reason, even though the experience of the Absolute is positive in nature, any attempt to express the truth that lies therein must in the final analysis be by negation, a "not this," a "not that."The problem is that the Absolute of which Zen Buddhists speak encompasses things finite such that the distinctions made in everyday life are something less than the way things really are. This is particularly troublesome when it comes to things considered numerically distinct—for example, this table and that book. This table and that book are each what it is... (shrink)

Two ideal standard clocks, effectively isolated from interaction with other physical systems, and in a region of the universe free of gravitational fields, are assumed to move in any arbitrary manner so that they coincide on at least two occasions. In general, the reading of one of them will become retarded relative to the other in the interval between successive coincidences. This relative retardation is predicted by the restricted theory of relativity, taken together with the assumption that the 'rate' of (...) a clock depends only on its velocity and not on its acceleration. The recognized procedure for calculating the retardation in terms of clock 'rates' is set out, and is illustrated by its application to a simple hypothetical experiment in which one clock remains at rest and the other travels away from and back to it with constant speed in a straight line. There is nothing paradoxical in the predicted retardation as such. The so-called 'clock paradox' arises because an alternative, and apparently valid, calculation procedure, also based on clock 'rates', leads to a contradictory result. The term 'paradox' is something of a euphemism since the two predictions are contradictories. It is shown that the paradox does not arise when direct use is made of the Lorentz transformation without introducing the additional, and non-essential, step in reasoning involved in utilizing the clock 'rates'. It is then shown that the paradox arises only through using these clock 'rates' without due regard to the exact significance of the quantities so described; once this is recognized the paradox is resolved completely within the framework of the restricted theory, which then provides a unique and unambiguous prediction of the relative retardation. Once the paradox is thus resolved, the general theory of relativity can add nothing significant to the analysis. It is shown that the application of the principle of equivalence is essentially trivial; in effect, Einstein and Tolman evaded the real logical issue raised by the contradictory predictions by denying the applicability of the restricted theory and then utilizing, by means of the principle of equivalence, results obtained from it. This tortuous procedure succeeded in evading the paradox rather than in resolving it; it would obviously be quite invalid were the restricted theory indeed inapplicable to the problem. (shrink)

Social scientists have begun elucidating the variables that influence public trust in science, yet little is known about hype in biotechnology and its effects on public trust. Many scholars claim that hyping biotechnology results in a loss of public trust, and possibly public enthusiasm or support for science, because public expectations of the biotechnological promises will be unmet. We argue for the need for empirical research that examines the relationships between hype, public trust, and public enthusiasm/support. We discuss the complexities (...) in designing empirical studies that provide evidence for a causal link between hype, public trust, and public enthusiasm/support, but also illustrate how this may be remedied. Further empirical research on hype and public trust is needed in order to improve public communication of science and to design evidence-based education on the responsible conduct of research for scientists. We conclude that conceptual arguments made on hype and public trust must be nuanced to reflect our current understanding of this relationship. (shrink)

In an appendix, Professor Masters examines the continuity of the several themes of the Platonic-Hermetic tradition as they occur in the five books of the Rabelaisian corpus.

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page 26-28.

Marrying lyrical close reading with critical awareness, Novel Style argues for the ethical value of elaborate styles of writing and demonstrates that artistic excessiveness can provide dynamic responses to the moral complexities of our times.

Implicit processes almost certainly preceded explicit processes in our evolutionary history, so they are likely to be more resistant to disruption according to the principles of evolutionary biology [Reber, A. S. . The cognitive unconscious: An evolutionary perspective. Consciousness and Cognition, 1, 93–133.]. Previous work . Knowledge, nerves and know-how: The role of explicit versus implicit knowledge in the breakdown of a complex motor skill under pressure. British Journal of Psychology, 83, 343–358.]) has shown that implicitly learned motor skills remain (...) stable under psychological pressure and concurrent cognitive demands, and recently [Poolton, J. M., Masters, R. S. W., & Maxwell, J. P. . Passing thoughts on the evolutionary stability of implicit motor behaviour: Performance retention under physiological fatigue. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 456–468.] showed that they also remain stable under conditions of anaerobic fatigue that would have significantly challenged the survival skills of our ancestors. Here we examine the stability of an implicitly learned motor skill under fatigue conditions that primarily tax a different physiological system , but which have equally strong evolutionary connotations. Participants acquired a throwing task by means of an errorless learning method or an errorful method. Motor performance in the errorless condition, but not the errorful condition, remained stable following an exhaustive VO2 max. running test. Our findings replicate and extend the work of Poolton et al., providing further support for Reber’s evolutionary distinction between implicit and explicit processes. (shrink)

Background: In biomedical research, there have been numerous scandals highlighting conflicts of interest (COIs) leading to significant bias in judgment and questionable practices. Academic institutions, journals, and funding agencies have developed and enforced policies to mitigate issues related to COI, especially surrounding financial interests. After a case of editorial COI in a prominent bioethics journal, there is concern that the same level of oversight regarding COIs in the biomedical sciences may not apply to the field of bioethics. In this study, (...) we examined the availability and comprehensiveness of COI policies for authors, peer reviewers, and editors of bioethics journals. Methods: After developing a codebook, we analyzed the content of online COI policies of 63 bioethics journals, along with policy information provided by journal editors that was not publicly available. Results: Just over half of the bioethics journals had COI policies for authors (57%), and only 25% for peer reviewers and 19% for editors. There was significant variation among policies regarding definitions, the types of COIs described, the management mechanisms, and the consequences for noncompliance. Definitions and descriptions centered on financial COIs, followed by personal and professional relationships. Almost all COI policies required disclosure of interests for authors as the primary management mechanism. Very few journals outlined consequences for noncompliance with COI policies or provided additional resources. Conclusion: Compared to other studies of biomedical journals, a much lower percentage of bioethics journals have COI policies and these vary substantially in content. The bioethics publishing community needs to develop robust policies for authors, peer reviewers, and editors and these should be made publicly available to enhance academic and public trust in bioethics scholarship. (shrink)

When labeling an infectious disease, officially sanctioned scientific names, e.g., “H1N1 virus,” are recommended over place-specific names, e.g., “Spanish flu.” This is due to concerns from policymakers and the WHO that the latter might lead to unintended stigmatization. However, with little empirical support for such negative consequences, authorities might be focusing on limited resources on an overstated issue. This paper empirically investigates the impact of naming against the current backdrop of the 2019–2020 pandemic. The first hypothesis posited that using place-specific (...) names associated with China leads to greater levels of sinophobia, the negative stigmatization of Chinese individuals. The second hypothesis posited that using a scientific name leads to increased anxiety, risk aversion, beliefs about contagiousness of the virus, and beliefs about mortality rate. Results from two preregistered studies [N = 504; N = 412], conducted across three countries with the first study during the early outbreak and the second study at a later stage of the pandemic, found no evidence of any adverse effects of naming on sinophobia and strong support for the null hypothesis using Bayesian analyses. Moreover, analyses found no impact of naming on anxiety, risk aversion, beliefs about contagiousness of the virus, or beliefs about mortality rate, with mild to strong support for the null hypothesis across outcomes. Exploratory analyses also found no evidence for the effect of naming being moderated by political affiliation. In conclusion, results provide no evidence that virus naming impacted individual’s attitudes toward Chinese individuals or perceptions of the virus, with the majority of analyses finding strong support for the null hypothesis. Therefore, based on the current evidence, it appears that the importance given to naming infectious diseases might be inflated. (shrink)