The realist programme has degenerated by now to the point where it is quite beyond salvage. A token of this degeneration is that there are altogether too many realisms. It is as though by splitting into a confusing array of types and kinds, realism has hoped that some one variety might yet escape extinct. I shall survey the debate, and some of these realisms, below. Here I would just point out the obvious; that in so far as the successes of (...) science mount while realism continues to decline we must conclude that scientific success lends no support to realism. Since it is unlikely to support anti-realism, we have some reason to suspect that the philosophical debate over realism does not concern issues that can be settled by developments in the sciences, no matter how successful science may be. Further, since that success grounds a culture of acceptance for science and its entities, we have reason to believe that the existence of those entities is also not actually the issue that concerns realism. Afortiori, it is not the issue that concerns anti-realism either; nor, I might add, is anti-realism the winner in the philosophical debate that realism has lost. (shrink)

Locke’s thesis states that no two things of the same sort can be in the same place at the same time. The thesis has recently received extensive discussion, with some philosophers attempting to find arguments in its favour and others attempting to provide counter-examples. However, neither the arguments nor the counter-examples have been especially convincing; and it is my aim, in this short note, to present what I believe is a more convincing counter-example to the thesis.

The interest in "social sustainability" has recently increased in the field of urban development. We want societies, cities, and neighborhoods to be economically and environmentally sustainable, but we also want urban areas that are safe, diverse, walkable, and relaxing, just to mention a few examples. Strikingly, however, there is no consensus regarding what definition of "social sustainability" should be employed. Additionally, some people are skeptical about the prospect of finding a useful definition at all and claim it is impossible to (...) satisfactorily define the concept for various reasons, such as its complexity. A potential first step towards navigating this conceptual maze is to provide desiderata for a definition of social sustainability. We defend a list of nine desiderata and thereby create a theoretical framework for analyzing and constructing a definition of "social sustainability". We also examine the skeptical arguments and find that it is premature to conclude that the goal of finding a useful definition is hopeless. With the criteria in place, the future debate can proceed by assessing definitions of "social sustainability" in a more structured and transparent manner. This activity is of upmost importance if we want to create just cities. Keywords: Social Sustainability, Definition, Purposes and Aims, Conditions of Adequacy. (shrink)

We have argued here that to attribute criminal responsibility to psychopathic individuals is to ignore substantial and growing evidence that psychopathic individuals are significantly impaired in moral understanding. They do not appear to know why moral transgressions are wrong in the full sense required by the law. As morally blameless offenders, punishment as a basis for detention cannot be justified. Moreover, as there are currently no successful treatment programs for psychopathy, nor can detention be justified on grounds of treatment. Instead, (...) we argue detention on the grounds of self- defence, due to the severe and continuing threat posed by the psychopathic criminal. (shrink)

One thing that has to be considered in this process is the place of philosophy itself (Williams 2011 [1985], 4). Politicians often argue that they have no right to keep their hands clean, and that...

I attempt to argue that if statements of permission are to serve as a guide to action then no possible worlds account of their truth-conditions can be correct.

In the contemporary discussion of hidden variable interpretations of quantum mechanics, much attention has been paid to the “no hidden variable” proof contained in an important paper of Kochen and Specker. It is a little noticed fact that Bell published a proof of the same result the preceding year, in his well-known 1966 article, where it is modestly described as a corollary to Gleason's theorem. We want to bring out the great simplicity of Bell's formulation of this result and to (...) show how it can be extended in certain respects. (shrink)

The core argument in this paper is that, to reconstruct the last unwritten section on Judging in Hannah Arendt's Life of the Mind , it is necessary to address what Arendt was doing with the book as a whole and how the different parts relate internally to one another. This is no easy matter, especially as the existing sections on Thinking and Willing are quite different in tone from one another. My proposition is that the work should be read as (...) a critique of the life of the `modern' mind, and especially of the differentiation of the modern mind into distinct and reified faculties. The work as a whole is an attempt to understand the distorted forms of modernization that result from the division of the life of the mind into opposing faculties. It is, so to speak, a critique of the combined and uneven development of the life of the modern mind. While Arendt famously argues that the activity of thinking itself conditions people against evildoing, the spectre that informs her analysis of both thinking and willing is the danger of nihilism inherent in these mental activities. The work raises vital questions concerning the conditions under which this danger is actualized and the means by which it might be averted. What this entails for our reconstruction of the missing section on judgment is that, rather than see it as the core of Arendt's contribution to political thought or as the promised solution to an impasse, we should explore the equivocations of judging. This aporetic reading of the text helps clarify Arendt's concerns over the separation of the life of the mind from the world and the role of both judging and understanding in renewing its connections to the world. (shrink)

Singing is universal, and understanding sung words is thought to be important for many listeners’ enjoyment of vocal and choral music. However, this is not a trivial task, and sung text intelligibility is probably affected by many factors. A survey of musicians was undertaken to identify the factors believed to have most impact on intelligibility, and to assess the importance of understanding sung words in familiar and unfamiliar languages. A total of 143 professional and amateur musicians, including singers, singing teachers, (...) and regular listeners to vocal music, provided 394 statements yielding 851 references to one or more of 43 discrete factors in four categories: performer-related, listener-related, environment-related and words/music-related. The factors mentioned most frequently in each of the four categories were, respectively: diction; hearing ability; acoustic; and genre. In more than a third of references, the extent to which sung text is intelligible was attributed to the performer. Over 60% of respondents rated the ability to understand words in familiar languages as “very important,” but only 17% when the text was in an unfamiliar language. Professional musicians (47% of the sample) rated the importance of understanding in both familiar and unfamiliar languages significantly higher than amateurs but listed fewer factors overall and fewer listener-related factors. The more important the respondents rated understanding, the more performer-related and environment-related factors they tended to list. There were no significant differences between the responses of those who teach singing and those who do not. Enhancing sung text intelligibility is thus perceived to be within the singer’s control, at least to some extent, but there are also many factors outside their control. Empirical research is needed to explore some of these factors in greater depth, and has the potential to inform pedagogy for singers, composers, and choral directors. (shrink)

This chapter explains the basic framework of truthmaker or 'exact' semantics, an approach to semantics that has recently received a growing amount of interest, and discusses a number of different applications within philosophy and linguistics. The idea of truthmaking is the idea of something on the side of the world ‐ a fact, perhaps, or a state of affairs ‐ verifying, or making true, something on the side of language or thought ‐ a statement, perhaps, or a proposition. The chapter (...) focuses on the ultimate truthmakers, on what in the world ultimately makes something true, and the question of how the truthmakers make the statements of our language true is of no great concern. It also focuses on the immediate truthmakers, and the question of how they make the statements of the language true will be of greatest concern. (shrink)

There is a standard view of relations, held by philosophers and logicians alike, according to which we may meaningfully talk of a relation holding of several objects in a given order. Thus it is supposed that we may meaningfully—indeed, correctly—talk of the relation loves holding of Anthony and Cleopatra or of the relation between holding of New York, Washington, and Boston. But innocuous as this view might appear to be, it cannot be accepted as applying to all relations whatever. For (...) there is an important class of metaphysical and linguistic contexts which call for an alternative conception of relation, one for which the order of the relata plays no role and in which the application of the relation to its relata is achieved by other means. (shrink)

Faced with realist-resistant sciences and the no-nonsense attitude of the times realism has moved away from the rather grandiose program that had traditionally been characteristic of its school. The objective of the shift seems to be to protect some doctrine still worthy of the "realist" name. The strategy is to relocate the school to where conditions seem optimal for its defense, and then to insinuate that the case for such a " piecemeal realism" could be made elsewhere too, were there (...) but world enough and time. The burden of this paper is to examine this piecemeal approach and to show why, despite the relocation, it cannot escape the difficulties of its grander cousins. For that purpose I begin with some brief historical reminders, and with a quick review of the state of the argument before realism went to pieces. This will help us see what has been abandoned in realism's flight, and what baggage still remains. (shrink)

Trust is often perceived as having great value. For example, there is a strong belief that trust will bring different sorts of public goods and help us preserve common resources. A related concept which is just as important, but perhaps not explicitly discussed to the same extent as “trust”, is “reliance” or “confidence”. To be able to rely on some agent is often seen as a prerequisite for being able to trust this agent. Up to now, the conceptual discussion about (...) the definition of trust and reliance has been rational in the sense that most people involved have offered arguments for their respective views, or against competing views. While these arguments rely on some criterion or other, these criteria are rarely explicitly stated, and to our knowledge, no systematic account of such criteria has been offered. In this paper we give an account of what criteria we should use to assess tentative definitions of “trust” and “reliance”. We will also offer our own well-founded definitions of “trust” and “reliance”. Trust should be regarded as a kind of reliance and we defend what we call “the accountability view” of trust, by appealing to the desiderata we identify in the first parts of the paper. (shrink)

Are there, in addition to the various actual objects that make up the world, various possible objects? Are there merely possible people, for example, or merely possible electrons, or even merely possible kinds? We certainly talk as if there were such things. Given a particular sperm and egg, I may wonder whether that particular child which would result from their union would have blue eyes. But if the sperm and egg are never in fact brought together, then there is no (...) actual object that my thought is about. Or again, in the semantics for modal logic we presuppose an ontology of possibilia twice over. For first, we countenance various possible worlds, in addition to the actual world; and second, each of these worlds is taken to be endowed with its own domain of objects. These will be the actual objects of the world in question, but they need not be actual simpliciter, i.e., actual objects of our world. What are we to make of such discourse? There are four options: (i) the discourse is taken to be unintelligible; (ii) it is taken to be intelligible but nonfactual, i.e. as not in the business of stating facts; (iii) it is taken to be factual but reducible to discourse involving no reference to possibilia; (iv) it is taken to be both factual and irreducible. These options range from a full-blooded form of actualism at one extreme to a full-blooded form of possibilism at the other. The two intermediate positions are possibilist in that they accept the intelligibility of possibilist discourse but actualist in that they attempt to dispense with its prima facie commitment to possibilia. All four positions have found advocates in the literature. Quine, in his less irenic moments, favours option (i); Forbes advocates option (ii), at least for certain parts of possibilist discourse; many philosophers, including Adams and myself, opt for (iii); while Lewis and Stalnaker have endorsed versions of (iv), that differ in how full-blooded they take the possible objects to be.. (shrink)

Two principles of locality used in discussions about quantum mechanics are distinguished. The intuitive no-action-at-a distance requirement is called physical locality. There is also a mathematical requirement of a kind of factorizability which is referred to as "locality". It is argued in this paper that factorizability is not necessary for physical locality. Ways of producing models that are physically local although not factorizable which are concerned with correlations between the behavior of pairs of particles are suggested. These models can account (...) for all the quantum mechanical single and joint probabilities. (shrink)

Aristotle raised a puzzle about the possibility of mixing whose solution is by no means obvious. I here explicate his solution to the puzzle and attempt to make it plausible within the context of his thought. Although we now know that his specific views on mixing were mistaken, his discussion of the topic raises questions concerning the role of capacities and the relationship of part to whole that are still of interest.

This paper establishes a sound and complete semantics for the impure logic of ground. Fine (Review of Symbolic Logic, 5(1), 1–25, 2012a) sets out a system for the pure logic of ground, one in which the formulas between which ground-theoretic claims hold have no internal logical complexity; and it provides a sound and complete semantics for the system. Fine (2012b) [§§6-8] sets out a system for an impure logic of ground, one that extends the rules of the original pure system (...) with rules for the truth-functional connectives, the first-order quantifiers, and λ-abstraction. However, no semantics has yet been provided for this system. The present paper partly fills this lacuna by providing a sound and complete semantics for a system GG containing the truth-functional operators that is closely related to the truth-functional part of the system of Fine (2012b). (shrink)

The recent, influential Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment (Haidt, Psychological Review 108, 814–834, 2001) proposes a primary role for fast, automatic and affectively charged moral intuitions in the formation of moral judgments. Haidt’s research challenges our normative conception of ourselves as agents capable of grasping and responding to reasons. We argue that there can be no ‘real’ moral judgments in the absence of a capacity for reflective shaping and endorsement of moral judgments. However, we suggest that the empirical literature (...) indicates a complex interplay between automatic and deliberative mental processes in moral judgment formation, with the latter constraining the expression and influence of moral intuitions. We therefore conclude that the psychological literature supports a normative conception of agency. (shrink)

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm (...) more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program. While it is true that one can have reservations about the appropriateness of these specific labels, both do elicit distinc tive images characteristic of the key concepts of these approaches and such terminology does serve effectively to contrast this class of theories with more standard formulations of quantum theory. (shrink)

If the legitimacy of international humanitarian and human rights law lies, in part at least, in its capacity to confront dehumanising actions in the modern world, we may speak of the limits of this achievement. It is well known that people who commit genocide or crimes against humanity typically dehumanise those against whom their crimes are committed and that the humanitarian and human rights dimensions of international law were developed in response to the radicalisation of this phenomenon. The expanded scope (...) of international criminal justice caught a cosmopolitan imagination because it seemed to restore an idea of humanity in the face of organised attempts to eradicate the very idea of universal humanity. It also caught a cosmopolitan imagination because it seemed to restore the humanity of the perpetrators as well. They were no longer to be treated as beasts liable to the 'punishment' of the victors but to be brought to trial, held accountable for their deeds and converted back into responsible human beings. Today, however, I suggest that we face a double temptation: in confronting those who commit crimes against humanity to represent them as inhuman monsters rather than responsible human beings; in our compassion for victims of crimes against humanity, it is to represent them merely as victims and not as moral and political subjects. In either case, there can arise a reversal of the problem we are trying to address. I do not suggest this tendency is inevitable but where it is present it indicates an insufficiently reflective relation to international law. I address the problem of reversal through a discussion of three authors (Rawls, Habermas and Arendt) and three issues ('pariah peoples', 'criminal states' and 'monstrous perpetrators'). (shrink)

If a specific question has meaning, it must be possible to find operations by which an answer may be given to it. It will be found in many cases that the operations cannot exist, and the question therefore has no meaning. —Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics..

Assuming minimal fine-individuation--that there are some necessarily equivalent intensional objects (e.g. propositions) that are nonetheless distinct objects, on standard actualist frameworks, the answer to our title question is "No". First I specify a fully cognitively accessible, purely qualitative maximal consistent state of affairs (MCS). (That there is an MCS that is either fully graspable or purely qualitative is in itself quite contrary to conventional dogma.) Then I identify another MCS, one necessarily equivalent to the first. It follows that there could (...) have been more than one obtaining MCS. I then argue that there is more than one obtaining MCS. So there is nothing answering to "the actual world", and the set of worlds is not the set of MCSs. I explore various patch-ups. Finally, I compare the actualist and modal realist notions of worlds, and I argue that even if the realist were right about concrete world ensembles, our reflections indicate that necessary truth is not truth in all worlds anyway, which undercuts the rationale for the realist's program. (shrink)

Se marier avec une dot, voilà une coutume qui, du moins en France, paraît révolue depuis longtemps, tant l'idée que l'on puisse associer mariage et argent heurte aujourd'hui nos sensibilités, attachées à la norme de la gratuité des sentiments amoureux. L'ampleur des changements dans les pratiques matrimoniales du monde moderne occidental ne doit pourtant pas occulter le fait qu'ils sont relativement récents. La dot a encore une importance sociale et économique considérable dans certains...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CHRISTOLOGY IN POLITICAL AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY R. R. RENO Creighton University Omaha, Nebraska Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems ; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself. (...) He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords. Revelation 19:11-16 SHARP IS THE SWORD of The Word of God: so proclaims a growing body of literature in political and liberation theology. Although this literature evidences a deep pluralism when describing wherein the sword is sharp and toward what it is aimed, the unifying claim is that Christianity has decisive political significance. And this significance takes an explicitly theoretical form. Unlike other politically directed theological programs (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Rauschenbush, Paul Lehmann), political and liberation theologies do not restrict the practical to a pre- or post-theoretical moment. The practical questions of liberation and justice are internal to explicitly theological reflection. The manner in which questions of liberation and justice are 291 292 R. R. RENO woven into the fabric of theology is manifold. Juan Luis Segundo, in Liberation of Theology, presents an account of theological method which is necessarily political.1 He attempts to show that, to the degree that it is faithful, theological reflection must be constituted by ideological critique and transformative social commitment. In a similar although more ambiguous way, Matthew Lamb's Solidarity with Victims seeks to build social and political issues into the ground floor of method.2 On a different front, Jiirgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope emphasizes the necessarily political dimension of eschatology.3 Quite far removed from the radicalism of most political and liberation theologies, but equally important and increasingly self-conscious of its theological context, the Roman Catholic human rights tradition can be seen as a political theology which chooses to operate within the context of a strong doctrine of creation.4 1 Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1976). 2 Lamb's program is more than a methodological proposal for theology in itself. He promotes an interesting mixture of critical theory and interdisciplinary study as a path for all inquiry. The result is a pastiche of Adorno and Lonergan. Lamb explains his interdiscipinary vision as follows : " Such a noetic praxis of theologizing would develop academically institutionalized ways of promoting an intellectual conversion (metanoia) whereby the suffering witness of the victims of history would challenge the systems and theories constitutive of our world experience " (Victims, p. 17). However, the critical element of this interdisciplinary "noetic praxis" which Lamb draws from Adorno's Negative Dialectics militates against this " institutionalized" use. At the deepest level Adorno questions the very possibility of a noetic practice which mediates the reality of experience, and he certainly rejects any institutional reification of the small insights which we might garner. For Adorno, critical thought cannot mediate the actual suffering of concrete individuals ; rather, its ultimate impotence in the face of such a reality mirrors the suffering of finite beings. Thought bears witness formally not materially. This basic feature of Adorno's thought runs counter to Lonergan's cognitive optimism, making Lamb's program interesting but implausible. Matthew Lamb, Solidarity with Victims (New York: Crossroad, 1982). SJiirgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). 4 David Hollenbach's Claims in Confiict (New York: Paulist Press, 1979) provides an example of a recent attempt to uncover the theological foundations for a theory of rights. Showing that the language of rights flows from a basic respect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CONVERSION AND CONVERGENCE: PERSONAL TRANSF0l{l'11ATION AND THE GROWING ACCORD OF THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES HAT IS IT that keeps theology and religious studicc1 apart? And what, on the other hand, will bring them together? It will be immediately observul that these questions are put in such a way as to imply that theology and religious studies were things, like rockets in orbit, " already out there now real," that (...) continue in motion according to the principles of their own momentum, and are brought together through forces applied from the outside through human intervention. Obviously this is not exactly the case with the matter in hand. Rather it is that both theology and religious studies are in human subjects in the first place. Some human subjects identify themselves as theologi ::rns: others call themselves scholars devoted to the study of religion. So the question might be put, what keeps them apart, i.e., what separates the theologian from the practitioner of religious studies? Cculd it be that the progressive transformai :ion of human subjects devoted to the study of religion, from one or another viewpoint, brings about the gradual unification of the disciplines in which the meaning of religion is brcmght under control? And if that is the case, what kind of subjective transformation would promote the unification of their objective concern? In the pages that follow these are the questions that will be pursued. The: proximate occasion for my setting out to write something on the topic of the relation between religious studies and theology is the fact of being engaged in teaching in the Department of Religion at l,a Salle University. At the moment 658 CONVERSION AND CONVERGENCE' G50 of writing the curriculum of the department is divided into four sections. They are labeled as follows: (1) biblical studies; (2) theological studies; (3) historical studies; (4) religious studies. In the first sector the focus is obviously the sacred scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Theological studies have to do exclusively with the Christian tradition, the community, its doctrine and its ritual. Historical dudies deal with that same tradition, now not in terms of the entities by which it is constituted, but rather from the point of view of the development of the tradition as a whole in this or that period, both from within and in relation to cultural conditions that have made a major impact on the tradition. Hence, for example, " Religion in America ". Heligious studies, finally, focus on the great religions oi the world other than Christianity, taking in alrn the int2r(faciplinary topic oi "Heligious.Attitudes in Modem Literature". Significantly, under this last rubric no mention or history is made in the section title. In reference to this menu, moreover, it has been said that the department is aci:uaHy doing two quite distinct things. The question that occurs, of course, is what these two distinct things are and hov;r they are related. Even the layperson will discern readily that the distinction has something to do with the difference between inatters that concern the Christian community and the religious beliefs and practice of "others". Therefore, under the banner of the inquiry already outlined, and taking La Salle's setup as somewhat typical, at least of collegiate study of religion in the context 0£ North American Catholic institutions of higher learning, I intend a critical assessment of this menu and its presuppositions. This makes for a twofold purpose: (l) to make a modest contribution to the ongoing discussion of the religious studies/theology problematic ; (Q) to engage in the sort of critique just now suggested. At the outset it should be stated too that the quite substantial contribution of Bernard Lonergan, " The Ongoing Genesis of Methods" (recently published as part of the vol- 660 MAURICE SCHEPERS, O.P. ume, A Third Collection; see works consulted, in fine) is seminal to what follows. The problem is one of method, to be sure; but that fact does not place it in the realm of abstractions. The questions are after all rather concrete. Is there, for example, any dynamic relationship between the study of Buddhist spirituality and the interpretation of Pauline literature? What might be the connection... (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted fantasy, (...) and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phantom Mediators: Reflections on the Nature of the Violence in AlgeriaRéda Bensmaïa (bio)Translated by Hassan MelehyIn order to justify himself, each person depends on the crime of the other. There is a casuistry of blood where an intellectual, it seems to me, has no place, except to take up arms himself. When violence responds to violence in an exasperating delirium that makes the simple language of reason impossible, (...) the role of intellectuals cannot be, as we read every day, to excuse from afar one act of violence and condemn another, which has the effect both of angering the one condemned of violence to the point of rage and of encouraging the one who is not condemned to more violence. If they themselves don’t join the combatants, their role (a more obscure one, to be sure!) must be only to work in the direction of an appeasement so that reason may again have a chance.—Albert Camus, Actuelles IIIAt a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: “Mein ist die Rache” (“Vengeance is Mine”). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after the other. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigré German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, “America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it.”The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It’s a”pan-German” question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn’t it lead to three other questions that are worrying us?: What was? What remains? What will be?—Christa Wolf, “Parting from Phantoms”A few weeks after reading Christa Wolf’s text, the same questions continue to haunt me. “Pan-Maghrebian” questions: what would we be willing to give, each one of us, each Algerian in any case, for what is happening now never to have occurred?What was? What remains? What will be? These are the questions that have guided me in the different steps of writing the text I offer here.In the very fine article he contributed under the heading of “The Intellectual and Society” to the Encyclopaedia Universalis, philosopher François Châtelet wrote, “If we confine ourselves to the three historical groups we have arbitrarily taken as examples—the Greek sophist, the ‘judge’ of the Russell Tribunal, and the eighteenth-century philosopher, it is clear that the would-be intellectual claims to be the teacher and the advocate of political [End Page 85] freedom, of the rights of the person, the architect of a transparent society in which the individual and the citizen coincide.“Doubtless,” added Châtelet, “one aspect or another prevails on him, according to the circumstances; but a certain structure subsists, which may allow us to define, superficially and differentially, intellectuals as a group and an agency” [my emphasis].Beginning with this definition, I would like to examine the following questions: What is the status of intellectuals in a country like Algeria? How can it be explained that they have been and still are the victims of the violence that strikes them today?Given the current situation of international politics, the example of Algeria is inevitable, because in the opinion of numerous analysts what is happening in that country is a test case, a limit case that may serve as an indicator of what the future holds for the formerly colonized countries. For many analysts, the evolution of the political situation in Algeria may also serve as an analytical operator in the large ideological movements that are shaking not only the countries of the Maghreb but also the Arab-Muslim world in its totality. And in... (shrink)

Our final instalment in the debate with Jim Kincaid argues that his value-analysis suffers from weaknesses associated with both Ricardian and Rubinesque interpretations of Marx. These approaches are methodologically flawed, because value-theory does not draw upon externally imposed theories or standards of logic or evidence to check the conceptual or empirical validity of its approach to the understanding of capitalism. Rather, Marxian value-theory involves reconstructing in thought the class-based production-processes underpinning capitalism through to their more complex and concrete consequences (...) in the broader economic and social structures, agencies and processes, through which they are formed, albeit with definite effects of their own. Examination of the methodological shortcomings in Kincaid's analysis is followed by specific rebuttals of his claims about the determination of value and price, the circulation of capital, the role of competition, fixed capital, productive labour and the leverage of value-theory in informing empirical studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience or Interpretation:"What You See Is Not What You Read"Klaus OttmannMuseums of modern and contemporary art are growing at an unprecedented rate. New museums are being founded and existing ones are expanding exhibition spaces and acquiring more and more works of art. Concurrently, cultural institutions compete with a growing number of art fairs, biennials, galleries, and public collection spaces.Since the 1980s the focus of museums increasingly has been on (...) education and interpretation, which among other things has created a boom for audio guides and scholarly exhibition catalogs at the expense of the unmediated experience of works of art. Perhaps what is needed are exhibitions that present art again primarily as "experience," with minimal curatorial and didactic intervention. [End Page 13]I have borrowed the title of my essay from a lecture that was given by Nicolas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries in London, in 1996. His lecture was subtitled "The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art."But the question of the presentation of art, and specifically, that of experience vs. interpretation, by no means originated in the last decades. It is at least as old a question as modern art itself, going as far back as the nineteenth-century French intellectual dispute on the museum between the poet Paul Valéry and the novelist Marcel Proust, as recounted with a sympathetic voice by the German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno in a short essay with the minimalist title "Valéry Proust Museum."There is much to be learned from reading this small text. Paul Valéry criticized the museum of his time (the Louvre) for creating confusion in the mind of the spectator by reducing the experience to the level of information only. No one would want to listen to ten orchestras at once, he argued, yet we are forced to apprehend, at the same moment, a seascape, a portrait, and a still-life, or worse, painting styles completely incompatible with each other. He warned that excess of information would lead to impoverishment of the senses, as art was becoming a matter of education. Valéry's view could be regarded as the conservative position.Marcel Proust's view was more modernist: he regarded the museum as the best place to view art. Devoid of décor and other commonplace distractions, its galleries symbolized for him the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create works of art.Both Valéry and Proust emphasized that art should be enjoyed. But while for Valéry art lost its vitality in the museum and effectively "died," Proust saw an afterlife of art in the museum and in the subjective stream of consciousness of the viewer.For Adorno, both views were too one-sided and extreme. Valéry's absolute unwavering contemplation of pure art takes the risk of neutralization, unless the work can point beyond itself toward a social context. Thus, a work of art is neither an embodiment of a Platonic idea, as Valéry believed, nor is it exclusively a reflection of the soul, as Proust understood it. Rather, in Adorno's view, art is a "force field" between the art and the viewer, both passive and active.In his 1931 lectures on "Art as Experience," the American philosopher John Dewey said:The trouble with existing theories [of art] is that they start from ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that "spiritualizes" it out of connection with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritualization is not a degrading... materialization of works of fine art, but a conception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities found in common experience.1 [End Page 14]In my book The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition, I describe the creative act as an active-passive leap that the artist is impelled to make and the viewer is challenged to repeat.Wittgenstein often spoke about the inexpressible, that which is beyond the limits of language. He called it "running against the boundaries of language." It is something any poet, musician, or painter is familiar with; they all run against boundaries of language, sound, or color... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century FranceEllen S. FineDiscourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France, edited by Alan Astro; Yale French Studies 265pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, $17.00.Ever since France became the first European country to grant Jews equal rights as citizens with the enactment of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1791, the question of identity has been a central preoccupation of French (...) Jews. Their emancipation brought about assimilation to the universalist principles of the French Republic and led them to detach themselves from their own traditions, generating conflicting emotions about what it meant for a Jew to be French. The topic of French-Jewish identity has been reflected upon by writers ranging from Sartre, Memmi, and Misrahi to Levinas and Finkielkraut, none of whose discourses are included in this volume but whose ideas are discussed in Seth Wolitz’s pertinent article, “Imagining the Jew in France: From 1945 to the Present.”Divided into two main sections, “Literary Texts” and “Cultural Contexts,” this collection contains articles written by authors not familiar to English speaking readers. They are excellently translated, mainly by the editor, Alan Astro. In his introductory essay, Astro notes that his aim is to portray the cultural and ethnic diversity of French Jews of different origins and to show their part in the formation of Jewish identity. The focus is on how French Jews feel about their own identity, and not on how others see them.The first section, “Literary Texts,” represents a variety of genres, generally fiction. Over half of the thirteen texts date from the 1970s to the present, and are mostly personal narratives, anecdotal in nature. The tone often conveys “a certain humor or self-irony,” described by Rachel Ertel in her essay, “A Minority Literature” (in the second section) as identifiable traits of a Jewish work.With no logical sequence to the presentation of the texts, a multiplicity of perspectives is clearly the objective. For example, Bernard Frank, whose ancestors have lived in France since the Revolution, feels “as French as anyone else,” yet recognizes that Jews are different, “because they’ve been made to be different.” Wolf Wieviorka in 1936 exalts his “noble pedigree,” being a naturalized French citizen; he was later murdered by the Nazis.North African Jews who emigrated to Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, studied sociologically by Michel Abitbol, are portrayed in Gil Ben Aych’s novel, The Chant of Being (Algerian), and in Paula Jacques’s novel, Aunt Carlotta’s Legacy (Egyptian). Jews of Eastern European descent are depicted in the short stories by Cyrille Fleischman, one of which recounts how a Sorbonne professor of sixteenth-century French literature renounces his eminent career and like his father, opens up a delicatessen in the Jewish quarter of the Marais, thus returning to his roots. Henri Raczymow returns imaginatively to a pre-war Poland in Tales of Exile and Forgetfulness, recreating in French the intonations of Yiddish, the language of his grandparents who died in the Holocaust. In an [End Page 378] outstanding essay, “Memory Shot Through With Holes,” Raczymow articulates urgent questions posed by the second generation: “By what right could I speak, I who was not a victim, survivor or witness?”If the first section is multicultural, the second, “Cultural Contexts,” is interdisciplinary. Annette Wieviorka (granddaughter of Wolf Wieviorka) studies accounts by survivors, revealing the impact of Vichy’s imposing a Jewish identity on its citizens. Wieviorka also evokes the importance of the Six-Day War which compelled assimilated French Jews to proclaim their Jewish allegiance, a pivotal event transforming their sense of identity.Other significant contributions are Gérard Haddad’s exploration of the importance of Judaism in the life and work of Jacques Lacan, an outsider who seemed more concerned with Jewish identity than his fellow psychoanalysts. Ora Avni analyzes Patrick Modiano’s repudiation of his Jewish patrimony in his seminal novel, La Place de l’étoile. Elizabeth de Fontenay comments on how the quant-à-soi (“keeping to oneself”), the reserve characteristic of the French, becomes the quant-à-nous (“ourselves”) for the French Jew who is linked to a community beyond the... (shrink)

I explain a tension between musical creationism (the view that musical works are abstract artifacts) and the view that there is no vague existence. I then suggest ways to reconcile these views. My central conclusion is that, although some versions of musical creationism imply vague existence, others do not. I discuss versions of musical creationism held by Jerrold Levinson, Simon Evnine, and Kit Fine. I also present two new versions. I close by considering whether the tension is merely an instance (...) of a general problem raised by artifacts, both abstract and concrete. I argue that on at least one defensible account of music the tension is especially problematic for abstracta. I focus on musical works, but much of the paper straightforwardly applies to other kinds of abstract artifacts. (shrink)

Reviews the book, The Oxford history of Western philosophy edited by Anthony Kenny . Written by a team of some of the most distinguished scholars, this authoritative and finely detailed compendium traces the history of Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings among the Presocratics to the current era. This paperback volume should no doubt be a welcome addition to the reference library of all theoretical/philosophical psychologists. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

The concept of utopia was abandoned over the years, mainly following the tragic events of the twentieth century which led to the rejection of the grand narratives that characterized modernity. But the challenges of our time invite a rethinking of the concept. The purpose of this article is to offer a non-nostalgic understanding of the concept of utopia through an analysis of Ernst Bloch’s paradoxical concept of “concrete utopia”. My intention is, first, to trace back the genealogy of the (...) concept of the concrete to offer a non-trivial understanding, of it; and, second, to emphasize the importance of the concrete in the creation of the new. I argue that this understanding, coupled with a nuanced way of thinking about the relationship between the present and the future, allows us to reject the simple metaphysical dichotomy between the two. This does not mean sacrificing the present for the sake of the future or vice versa but perceiving the present as containing future possibilities within it. In this way, we can think of utopia as neither a hypothetical ideal (no-where) nor an empirical fact (now-here), but as the no-where of the now-here. That is, as a process of becoming. (shrink)

Riassunto: Se anche i concetti astratti possono essere spiegati completamente attraverso un approccio embodied e grounded è argomento di un crescente dibattito. Tuttavia, le teorie proposte tendono a trattarli come un insieme unitario opposto a quello dei concetti concreti; e nelle ricerche empiriche non c’è concordanza sui criteri per selezionare gli stimoli. Questo studio investiga le implicazioni di tali limitazioni con l’obiettivo di proporre un approccio di ricerca alternativo. Verranno brevemente esaminate le differenze fra parole astratte e concrete, nonché (...) i modelli che ne descrivono la relazione. Dopo aver presentato le recenti prospettive di ricerca, si vedrà come le ipotesi delle teorie a rappresentazione multipla trovano riscontro in alcuni parametri psicolinguistici utili ad analizzare le differenze fra tipi di concetti astratti sulla base delle loro molteplici dimensioni. Si suggerisce così di integrare il modello del continuum monodimensionale della concretezza/astrattezza, al fine di rendere conto della rappresentazione delle varietà dei concetti astratti. Parole chiave: Embodied e Grounded Cognition; Varietà dei Concetti Astratti; Continuum; Rappresentazione Multipla; Dimensioni Semantiche Embodied Cognition and the Challenge ofConcepts. A Multidimensional Approach Abstract: Whether abstract concepts can also be fully explained by an embodied and grounded approach, is a topic of increasing debate. However, the theories that have been put forward tend to treat abstract concepts as a unitary whole in opposition to [the category of] concrete concepts; furthermore, in empirical research there is no agreement on the criteria for selecting stimuli. This study investigates the implications of these limitations with the aim of proposing an alternative research approach. We briefly analyze the differences between abstract and concrete concepts and the models used to describe their relationships. After introducing recent research perspectives, we highlight how the hypotheses of multiple representation theories are reflected in various psycholinguistic parameters that are useful for analyzing differences between types of abstract concepts across multiple dimensions. We suggest integrating the model of the monodimensional continuum of concreteness/abstractness, in order to provide an account for the varieties of abstract concepts. Keywords: Embodied and Grounded Cognition; Varieties of Abstract Concepts; Continuum; Multiple Representation; Semantic Dimensions. (shrink)

Among the reasons that Whitehead is such an interesting philosopher is that his work resonates across philosophical traditions. This collection develops connections between Whiteheadian concepts and recent European thinkers. The purpose is not simply to compare, however, but, as editor Jeremy Fackenthal suggests, to develop a Whiteheadian thinking “in tandem” with European philosophers in order to create disruptions or “dislocations” in thought that can engender creative approaches to contemporary problems.One general feature of the book deserves mention at the outset, though (...) I will return to it later in the review: although phenomenology and hermeneutics are each represented in the volume, roughly half of the essays focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze (if we group these together with essays focused on “new materialism,” which is connected with Deleuze, the proportion is more like two-thirds). This will be no surprise, since Deleuze is the European philosopher who was most appreciative of Whitehead. And yet, the result is that the conversation with “continental philosophy” is highly selective.The book is organized into three parts, each comprised of three essays. In part 1, “Technological and Systematic Dislocations,” William S. Hamrick brings Whitehead into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of “the flesh” to suggest an ecological ontology capable of overcoming the instrumentalization of nature. Hamrick's strategy is to read Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty as contributing to an “ontological foundation” for a sustainable civilization (18). Bo Eberle writes about the “quantified self” suggested in new, wearable self-monitoring technologies. Drawing on Whitehead's notion of causal efficacy, Eberle argues that devices such as Fitbit give us access to bodily states that bypasses the standard ways we are aware of ourselves (i.e., through consciousness). He goes further to argue that, like all ways of knowing, wearable technologies are selective, and that the selection reflects the interests of the manufacturers and promotes a certain kind of subjectivity (in the case of Fitbit, a subjectivity that is oriented toward “getting your steps in”). Whitehead's epistemology thus enables the critic of wearable technologies to understand how contemporary experience and self-understanding is shaped not simply by recent technological mediations but by the material interests embedded in them. J.R. Hustwit and Carl Dyke take on what they call “activist” uses of Whitehead that naively (in their judgment) suggest that a non-relational substance metaphysics is to blame for most of our social ills. They employ the theory of complex adaptive systems in conversation with Whitehead and Antonio Gramsci to show that, in fact, achieving significant social change is far more difficult and even unpredictable than mere insertion of better ideas into public discourse. Dominant hegemonies have ways of adapting and absorbing attempts to undermine them. Here Hustwit and Dyke draw on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur to suggest that resistance to the dominant hegemony is nevertheless always possible because of the vagueness of discourse, allowing a plurality of competing interpretations and thus fractures in the dominant hegemony. However, even this kind of resistance is impossible to control and its effects incapable of being entirely predicted. To the essay's titular question, “Can Whitehead save the world?” the authors answer, “No.”In part 2, “Animal/Human Dislocations,” Jeremy Fackenthal draws on the new materialism of Rosi Braidotti (and Deleuze) along with Whitehead to argue for a “process-relational” nomadism that culminates in a “becoming-imperceptible.” His reading together of Whitehead and Braidotti creates the opportunity to recast the former's concept of objective immortality in such a way that it does not refer to death so much as to being diffused into a relational network. The satisfaction of an actual occasion may be taken as its translation into its effects among its relations. Fackenthal argues that this becoming-imperceptible makes possible a sustainable presence within a fragile network of life. Deena M. Lin uses Whitehead, Braidotti, and Judith Butler to lay out a vision of human life as precarious and deserving attention, care, and solidarity. She presses this vision as a direct moral assault on US (Trump's) policy toward Syrian refugees. Going further, she draws on Braidotti's posthuman account of zoe to argue for universal connection and solidarity with all life that should foster, as the title of her essay puts it, “Welcoming of Syrian Life.” Tano Posteraro offers an intriguing essay drawing on Jakob von Uexküll's account of animal experience. Posteraro argues that Uexküll's notion of an animal's Umwelt, shaped by its distinctive perceptual apparatus, needs to be supplemented by Whitehead's notion of prehension to account for the active dimension of animal perception. Rather than a passive registering of animal environments, Posteraro argues that the latter are constructed, and that concepts (or conceptual prehensions) should be understood as tools with which such environments are constructed.In part 3, “Time, the World, and Abstraction,” three essays probe ways that Whiteheadian and Deleuzian themes may resonate critically and constructively. Kris Klotz brings the thought of Whitehead and Deleuze together to inquire about how alternatives to present social forms are envisioned. He argues that, for Whitehead, every actual occasion involves a selection of some features of the past, and, further, that every selection is also an abstraction from the concrete welter of influences impinging on it. For Whitehead, then, to envision alternatives involves a critique of abstractions, a reinstatement of the concrete plurality of possibilities. This, for Whitehead, is what rationality does: it works at restoring the concrete, and, with it, a series of alternatives that have been eclipsed. To this Whiteheadian analysis, Klotz adds Deleuze and Guattari's critique of “opinion.” For Deleuze and Guattari, opinion is not an idiosyncrasy but a consensus to which differences of experience are subjected. Philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, must always struggle against opinion in order to bring alternatives to light. These conceptions of reason/philosophy, Klotz argues, represent useful ways to critique inequalities and other social wrongs that are embedded in the social forms that are routinely taken for granted. Elijah Prewitt-Davis uses a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with philosophical innovations of Foucault, Deleuze, and Whitehead, to offer a distinctive account of power. Prewitt-Davis calls attention to Deleuze's important book on Leibniz, The Fold, and to how Whitehead's concept of prehension lies at its center. The upshot is that power is not reduced to dominance but, instead, is at work wherever any occasion of experience persists amid the onslaught of the influence of other occasions. Power, as Deleuze wrote, is the capacity to be affected—and to decide how to constitute oneself anew. Keith Robinson offers a detailed account of Whitehead's epistemology along with a reading of Deleuze's analysis of temporality to suggest that there is a common trajectory that seeks to undermine what the title of the essay describes as the “Bifurcation of Nature” (i.e., the separation of natural phenomena and human experience) within the dominant Western philosophical tradition.There is much of value in the volume as a whole. Aside from staging what Spinoza might have called good encounters between Whitehead and a number of continental philosophers, enhancing the conceptual power of each, the contributors are able to make a case that these philosophical trajectories, when read together, have much to contribute to our understanding of and response to the pressing issues of the day. In addition, readers who are interested in the relationship between Whitehead and the new materialism will find this volume to be a helpful resource, stocked with fine examples of how to sharpen new materialist thinking with Whitehead and how to read contemporary contexts through these lenses. On the other hand, this book is not a handbook nor a comprehensive reference. The organizational logic behind its division into sections is murky and the amount of attention given to particular continental philosophers as opposed to others appears somewhat arbitrary: there are recent continental philosophers who get little to no attention at (Derrida, Malabou, Žižek, Agamben, Latour, Nancy, for example), several of whom might prove to be quite interesting to read “in tandem” with Whitehead. Perhaps that is just to say that there are many more essays to be written. (shrink)

The “consequence argument”, together with the “luck objection”, which are summed up by the “standard argument against free will”, state that if our volition were dependent on physical causally indeterministic processes, our actions would lack control and, thereby, result in random behavior that would be a mere matter of luck and chance. In particular, quantum indeterminacy is supposed to be of no use in support of libertarian agent-causation theories because any volitional act interfering with the probability distributions de fining quantum (...) laws would lead to its violation. Building upon recent conjectural work questioning this assumption (Clarke 2010, Kastner 2016, Masi 2023), it is shown, with a concrete example involving quantum indeterminacy, how a hypothetical agent with access to the temporal ordering of events can pre-determine the result of a process taking place in time without modifying the probability laws defining it. This conclusion is then taken as a basis for a libertarian panpsychist interpretative model. (shrink)

The following is excerpted from Sean Gurd’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus published with Uitgeverij this year. Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure. He was regularly selected to (...) have his plays performed in the annual festival of Dionysus at Athens. But the plays were performed in a competition, and in the competitions he lost and lost, winning first place only five times in a career that spanned more than forty years. His corpus reads like the remains of a life spent trying to get a few things right and never being quite satisfied: scenes and schematized combinations of elements recur again and again, each time slightly changed. Hippolytus itself is an example: it contains two scenes in which a sick or dying character lies on a couch or a stretcher and is surrounded by silence and grief; he had experimented with such scenes in Alcestis, and would work with them again in Herakles and Orestes. Nor, judging from appearances, was he immune to the desire to score a hit, or to satisfy the audiences and the judges at the competition. Hippolytus is a rewrite of another Hippolytus, performed several years earlier, which scandalized the audience and certainly did not take first place. In that earlier Hippolytus (called by later writers Hippolytus Veiled), Euripides fashioned a Phaedra who was neither ashamed of loving her stepson nor incapable of taking steps to satisfy her desire. The forwardness of her approach to Hippolytus so outraged him that he covered his head with a robe (hence the play’s later title). Euripides liked to write energetic and self-confident women like this. He staged his Medea in 431, just three years before he revised Hippolytus, and in it the jilted title character murders her children in revenge for Jason’s new marriage to a more politically advantageous wife. Another flop: the play came in third of three. Evidently the judges did not like their women showing agency, especially when the consequences were transgressive. “The ornament of women,” wrote another great Athenian a little earlier, “is silence.”i Euripides’ Medea and his first Phaedra had other decorations. So three years after Medea crashed and burned and some time after the first Hippolytus suffered the same fate, he produced another Hippolytus play with a different setting and story. How could this one not have been a reaction to the failure of the first? “Second thoughts are always better,” he has one of his characters say, as though he were offering an apology for his first thoughts on the same story. In this new version, Phaedra is suicidally ashamed of her love, choosing to die rather than have it discovered, and willing to bring down her beloved Hippolytus in the service of the same end. Now it is Phaedra herself who covers her head in shock and horror at her desire. Only an intermediary, a slave of the house and an old crone with her fingers in all sorts of illicit pots, communicates Phaedra’s secret – against orders – and in consequence brings about the demise of two resolutely moral figures. It worked. For his tale of two well-born nobles with an unswerving commitment to moral action, destroyed by the meddling of a slave (and by the hostility of some particularly uncaring divinities), the judges crowned Euripides winner. It was the first time he had won, after almost thirty years of work. *** What Hippolytus wants more than anything else, as he protests with outrage just before leaving Trozen for the last time, is the benefit of due process – oaths, witnesses, an investigation that would reveal who really lusted after whom. Ironic, given that in the first Hippolytus, as far as we can make out, he did get a trial – but too late, and Theseus’ successful processing of Hippolytus failed to prevent his death. I cannot help hearing in the second Hippolytus’ complaints the anger of his authorial semblable who lost year after year by a process of judging that might have seemed brutal to him. Judges took no cognizance of how he worked, how long or hard or why; they just voted, and Euripides lost. But then I hear, in the fate of the first Hippolytus, an even grimmer commentary. Processed or not, we lose. We run aground. At the very least, this might cast a darker shadow on the business of watching or reading a play: in that twilight, things move too fast to make a fair assessment and, in any case, the reasonably high definition of what you see and hear belies the truth of indistinction, the multiplicities just below the surface. Watching is a constrained activity, a form of captivity, but reading is plastic. This translation was begun to supply the script for an audio version of the play, recorded in the spring of 2012, and here and there it sacrifices literalness for sayability and the voices and passions of the actors on that occasion. But it was finished to be read, and engineered to create a reading caught between the poles of specificity and non-specificity that the play itself conjures and relies on at its generative core. Thus two texts: the one clear, perhaps overprecise, respectably modern in its presentation, and the other ancient, a reasonable approximation of the classical reading process, and indistinct in vital ways. Like early modern dramatic texts, the exact provenance and original function of the scripts that have made it down to us are unknown. We do know that the ultimate survival of Hippolytus was thanks to its wide-spread use as a school text. But its relation to the first performance in 428 BCE is a matter only of speculation. Euripides presumably had a fair copy before production began; it was probably modified during rehearsals. The actors may have had copies, too (probably the young men who served in the chorus did not). The chor?gos, a wealthy Athenian who paid for the production, might have been presented with or just made sure to get his hands on a high-quality text, to commemorate the play’s success. Fans might have been able to buy copies. Any one of these sources might have provided the ultimate progenitor of our text. Several of them might have, in fact, if later editors compared and conflated traditions. The plays toured extensively in the Greek-speaking world, and were restaged as repertoire for centuries afterwards. In the process they were subjected to enough modifications by producers and actors that in the later fourth century the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had a law passed prohibiting performances at Athens from deviating from the official “city” text of the tragedies (which he had commissioned). It is unlikely that the city text was the last word; but it marks an important moment in Athens’ role in their dissemination, since after this the major sites of textual curatorship moved overseas, to Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople. Any single text of any single play is thus no more than a moment of clarity and stability, crossed and subtended by multiple vectors of change, including that of textual flux (from Euripides’ first drafts to the latest printed text) and that of Euripides’ life work as a writer, in the light of which the Hippolytus is just one attempt to produce something exactly right, to win the prize or finally satisfy himself or prove to himself that all this longing for perfection was a waste of time. I am intrigued by the possibility that a single text might somehow serve as a lens onto this wider zone of indistinction, representing a small region clearly but nonetheless containing a blurred image of the whole, like a Leibnizian monad. After all, no text is a witness: it is, rather, a perception and a performance, and what every Hippolytus must perform is the awkward overlay of singular and plural, social practise and subliminal drive, that structures the tragedy. Modern critical editions can do this by juxtaposing a (relatively) clean and simple text with a textual apparatus reporting variants and theorizing the relationship between textual instantiations. A translation lacks the resolution to catch the fine variations which feed into the construction of an apparatus. But there are other means to hand. Guessing at the exact words of the original text is always just that – guessing – though Hippolytus is less problematic than plays like Iphigenia at Aulis. But we can make a pretty secure guess at what such a text looked like. Texts read by fifth-century readers were fundamentally different from what is presented in the best medieval MSS and printed in modern publications. The texts of Euripides’ time and for many centuries afterwards did not indicate word division with spaces (or by any other means) and were extremely sparing in punctuation, often avoiding it altogether. There was only one “case” of letters – what we call “capitals.” Musical sections were inscribed as though they were prose, without line endings to reflect their rhythm or their rhetorical structure. There was no indication of the speakers within a dramatic text, either. The earliest surviving dramatic texts, which come from over a century after Euripides’ death and a time which was much more elaborate and precise in its textual culture, indicated speaker-change with a little line or paragraphos below the line and a double-point [:] at its end. This convention almost certainly does not date back to Euripides’ own time; it may not even date to Lycurgus. In any case, such indications were understood to be readers’ marks: they did not have the same authority as the text and they were subject to readers’ revisions. At least ideationally, if not in concrete and distinguishable fact, a dramatic text was understood as containing no indication of speaker-change (and certainly none of who was saying what). The reader had to figure that out for him-/herself. The clear, legible, easy texts we are accustomed to reading are the fabrications of medieval and modern reading cultures. The first text, then, presents the translation as the text would have been in the mid-fourth century, perhaps decades after Euripides’ death. The second text processes Hippolytus, makes sense of it and makes it “readable.” That is: too distinct, dangerously so. It gets in your way, conjures fantoms, tries to make you see. Fragments of the Hippolytus Veiled, otherwise almost entirely lost, are juxtaposed with similar passages in the text – not to suggest a reconstruction, but a dialogue and a complex set of reassessments. I have not tried to represent the full variety of textual variants, but I have signalled where, for one reason or another, the text is soft and different editions propose excisions or changes. The two texts must be read together: you, reader, form the bridge between the distinctly seen and the indistinct invisible. You, in the end, will be its mask. *** illsandhateddiseaseswhatcanidoforyouwhatshouldinotdohereisthelightandthebrightairyoursickbedisnowout s idethehouseyoureverywordwastocomeherebutyouwillrushbacktoyourbedroomagainyoufadequicklyyoudelig htinnothingyoudislikewhatyouhaveyoulovewhatyoudontitsbettertobesickthantendthesickthefirstissimpleto the secondattachesheartspainandhandsworkeveryhumanlifeispainfulthereisnoendtotoildarknesshidesbehindclo udswhateverisdearerthanlifeweproveunhappyloversofwhatshineshereforlackofknowledgeofanotherlifethere isnoproofforthingsbeneaththeearthonlystoriessustainus liftmybodystraightenmyheadthebondsofmylimbsareloosenedtakemyhandsandmypalearmsthishatistooheavy formyheadtoweartakeitoffspreadmyhairovermyshoulders couragechilddonttossandturnsoviolentlyyouwillbearyoursicknessmoreeasilywithpeaceandanoblemindallmort alssuffer aiaiiwanttodrinkpurewaterfromadewyspringiwanttoliebackandrestunderthetreesinsomegrassymeadowchildw hycrydontsaythesethingsnearthecrowdhurlingwordsmountedonmadness sendmetothemountainiwillgototheforestwherebeastkillingdogspressthespotteddeergodsilongtoshouttothedo gstoshootthethessalianjavelinpastmyblondhairtoholdthebarbeddartinmyhandwhythisanxietychildwhatdoyouc areabouthuntingwhydoyoulustforflowingspringstheresahillwithwaterjustnexttothetowerwecangetyouadrinkt h ereartemismistressofthesaltlakeandthecoursethunderingwithhorseshoovesiwishiwereonyourplainsbreakings t uds whythrowthesefrenziedwordsaboutjustnowyouweresettingoutforthemountaintohuntandnowyoulongforhorses onthewavelesssand thesethingsneedanoracletotellwhichgodreinsyouinanddrivesyoufromyoursenseschild whathaveidonehowfarhaveibeendrivenfromgoodthoughtsiwascrazyiwascursedbysomepowerpheupheualasn ursecovermyheadagainimashamedofwhativesaidcovermeatearmovesdownfrommyeyeanditembarrassesm eithurtstostraightenourmindanditisterribletobeinsanebesttodiebeforeyoubecomelucidagain illcoveryoubutwhenwilldeathcovermeimoldivelearnedalotmortalsshoulddrinkoffriendshipmoderatelynotfrom th edeepestmarrowofthesoulamindslovecharmsshouldbeeasytoundoorthrustawayortiemoretightlyitisaverydiffic ultweightforonesoultolaborovertwopeopleasiamwrackedbypainforhertoomuchdisciplinecausesmoreharmthan pleasureandwarswithhealthipraisetoomuchlessthannothinginexcessandthewiseagreewithme *** Scene 1 Enter Phaedra and the Nurse; the former is recumbent on a couch while the latter bustles about her with gestures that might be those of a caregiver or a guard. NURSE Ills and hated diseases! What can I do for you? What should I not do? Here is the light, and the bright air; your sick bed is now outside the house. Your every word was to come here, but you will rush back to your bedroom again. You fade quickly. You delight in nothing. You dislike what you have. You love what you don’t. It’s better to be sick than tend the sick – the first is simple. To the second attaches heart’s pain and hand’s work. Every human life is painful. There is no end to toil. Darkness hides behind clouds whatever is dearer than life. We prove unhappy lovers of what shines here for lack of knowledge of another life. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us. PHAEDRA Lift my body, straighten my head: the bonds of my limbs are loosened. Take my hands and my pale arms. This hat is too heavy for my head to wear. Take it off, spread my hair over my shoulders. NURSE Courage, child; don’t toss and turn so violently. You will bear your sickness more easily with peace and a noble mind. All mortals suffer. PHAEDRA Aiai. I want to drink pure water from a dewy spring. I want to lie back and rest under the trees in some grassy meadow. NURSE Child, why cry? Don’t say these things near the crowd, hurling words mounted on madness. PHAEDRA Send me to the mountain. I will go to the forest where beast-killing dogs press the spotted deer. Gods! I long to shout to the dogs, to shoot the Thessalian javelin past my blond hair, to hold the barbed dart in my hand. NURSE Why this anxiety, child? What do you care about hunting? Why do you lust for flowing springs? There’s a hill with water just next to the tower; we can get you a drink there. PHAEDRA Artemis, mistress of the salt lake and the course thundering with horse’s hooves: I wish I were on your plains breaking studs! NURSE Why throw these frenzied words about? Just now you were setting out for the mountain to hunt – and now you long for horses on the waveless sand. These things need an oracle to tell which god reins you in and drives you from your senses, child. PHAEDRA What have I done? How far have I been driven from good thoughts? I was crazy, I was cursed by some power. Pheu pheu. Alas. Nurse, cover my head again. I’m ashamed of what I’ve said. Cover me – a tear moves down from my eye and it embarrasses me. It hurts to straighten your mind and it is terrible to be insane. Best to die before you become lucid again. NURSE I’ll cover you. But when will death cover me? I’m old; I’ve learned a lot. Mortals should drink of friendship moderately, not from the deepest marrow of the soul. A mind’s love-charms should be easy to undo, or thrust away, or tie more tightly. It is a very difficult weight for one soul to labor over two people, as I am wracked by pain for her. Too much discipline causes more harm than pleasure and wars with health. I praise “too much” less than “nothing in excess,” and the wise agree with me. ***. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Concept of Will in EarlyLatin Philosophy NEAL W. GILBERT AN HISTORICALDISCUSSIONOf the concept of will is best begun with an analysis of the use of voluntas in Latin philosophy, from its earliest occurrences in Lucretius and Cicero on down to Augustine and medieval times. This development can be traced without much controversy because the line of transmission and development is more or less unbroken. But the correlating of (...) Latin psychological terms with their Greek originals presents problems. Greek philosophy was indeed the source from which Latin philosophical psychology developed: Lucretius reflects Epicurean doctrine, while Cicero and Seneca were strongly influenced by Stoic philosophy when they discussed moral action. However, many modern scholars are convinced that the Greeks had no word that corresponds to our "will" at all, and so we seem to be left with no choice but to regard the will as an original creation of Latin philosophy. But this would be to overlook the fact that ancient Latin writers sometimes specifically equated voluntas with certain Greek terms, and such evidence ought not to go unexamined. Voluntas was well established in Latin usage before Roman writers began to concern themselves with philosophical problems, but it did not have a technical sense. It meant simply "good will," or "favor," or concretely, a "will, or testament. ''I Clustered around it were other derivatives of "volo," such as "benevolentia" and "malevolentia," "well-wishing" and "ill-wishing." When Roman writers began to deal with philosophical problems, there were a number of different contexts in which voluntas could play a leading role. Chief among them, naturally, was the "freedom of the will" which, then as now, intrigued the ordinary man or the moralist. However, discussions revolving around the determinist-libertarian issue often fail to clarify the concept of the will itself. Major philosophers (Chrysippus, Augustine, or Hume, for example) offer fine distinctions within moral action when considering the determinist-libertarian dispute, but lesser figures are apt to "C'est seulement lots de la creation du vocabulairephilosophiqueque voluntas a pris le sens abstrait et technique de 'volont6'." Ernout, A., and A. Meillet,Dictionnaire Etymologique de la langue latine, 4th ed. (Paris, 1959),sub "volo." [17] 18 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY neglect the detailed analysis of moral action in favor of sweeping metaphysical pronouncements. When a Latin writer wished to say that a person did something of his own accord, the locution most natural to him was "sua sponte," an ablative absolute derived from the same root as our word "spontaneous." The nominative case of "sponte" ("spons") was almost never used, so that dictionaries are perhaps somewhat misleading in suggesting that the word "spons" means "free will": it would be more correct to say that the phrase "sua sponte" means "of his own free will." Latin writers also indicate that someone did something willingly by saying that he did it "non invitus" ("not unwillingly "). Finally, they could apply the adjective "voluntarius" to such an action, or say that it was done "ex voluntate." When the latter term begins to be used as a designation for a separate faculty of the soul distinct from reason or intelligence, it begins to resemble the modern concept of will. Augustine is usually given credit for introducing the concept of will into philosophy, but even the earliest Latin treatment of the free-will problem framed the issue in terms of voluntas. Nevertheless, I think that the received view is substantially correct, although it would be more proper to say that what Augustine introduced into philosophy was not the concept of will in general but the concept of the evil will. What Augustine called the "good" will ("bona voluntas") was closely related to the "reasonable desire" of the Stoic sage, rendered into Latin by Cicero as voluntas, without any adjective. The addition of the evil will altered the outlines of moral analysis considerably, involving among other things the major shift from a Socratic or Platonic psychology and ethics (usually labeled "intellectualistic") to a Christian psychology and ethics (usually labeled "voluntaristic"). Such a characterization is likely to be drawn too sharply, and to overlook anticipations of voluntarism in Greek thought or reminiscences of Greek intellectualism in Christian thought. Hence it may be useful... (shrink)

Reviews the book, Martin Buber: The hidden dialogue by Dan Avnon . In this exciting and instructive volume, the author carefully examines the main themes and thrusts of Martin Buber's radical philosophy of dialogue. In recent years it has become increasingly clear that Buber's vision of the basic nature of human existence is not only profound in its intellectual scope and sophistication, but also deeply disturbing in its moral and ethical implications. This fine book, however, seeks to redress this unfortunate (...) shortcoming in the literature—and, all things considered, does a more than adequate job of it. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This is a relatively short book but its brevity is certainly no index of poverty of thought. Quite to the contrary, within its brief compass it offers us a finely concentrated philosophical essay. Its analytical style is economical and consistently clear-headed. It exhibits a sensitivity to necessary detail without loss of the larger picture. It also balances a certain austerity of conceptual discourse with a very discriminating sense of the concrete context of philosophical issues in human experience.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154 BOOK REVIEWS Woznicki highlights his own interpretation of St. Thomas's view of being and order by comparing and contrasting it with the views of other thinkers, such as Duns Scotus and Ockham. Woznicki points out that Duns Scotus's insistance on the primacy of essence over exist· ence led to a metaphysics quite different from that of Saint Thomas, in which existence had priority over essence, Woznicki emphasizes that (...) Ockham's denial of the validity of analogy has bequeathed to us an instrumentalistic understanding of being as being; the real unity of being is replaced by a unity that is the product of our minds. What actually happens in Ockham is that metaphysics is subordinated to the demands of logic. Ockham's metaphysics also resembles the Heraclitean philosophy of becoming, and Woznicki points to Nietzsche as evidence that such a philosophy of becoming necessarily leads to nihilism. In his criticism of Ockham as well as in his criticism of Descartes, Kant, and Whitehead, Woznicki not only makes Thomas seem more attrac· tive but also, at least implicitly, reveals the deleterious effect that influential false philosophies can have on the human adventure. Woznicki 's explanation of Thomas's doctrine of esse does involve abstract thinking, but the result, the rooting of order in esse, is anything but irrelevant. Metaphysics does bury its undertakers; bad metaphysics creates victims. Father Woznicki has produced a fine work as the author of this first volume in the series Catholic Thought from Lublin. I hope that in his role as editor he will be able to present in the near future other volumes as good as Being and Order. Saint John's University Jamaica, New York ROBERT E. LAUDER An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge. By YVES R. SIMON. Translated by Vukan Kuic and Richard J. Thompson. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 180. Almost sixty years have passed between the first appearance of Jn. troduction al'ontologie du connaitre and its English translation. But even though we have had to wait so long, we now have this treasure in hand. An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge leaves no doubt that here is a thinker of the first water. Simon's writings never fail to exemplify the medieval fusion of the concepts " teacher " and " master " in the Latin " magister." As I observed when reviewing one of his posthumously published books, Work, Society, and Culture, BOOK REVIEWS 155 Simon had the knack for using concrete words and vivid imagery drawn from everyday life to carry the reader to the very heart of pro· found thoughts. That testifies to more than just a good prose style; the freedom from reliance on jargon and formalized academic language shows that Simon was neither a " scholastic" (in the pejorative sense of the word) nor a pedant or mere academician. His ready access to everyday language is simply one more indication that he was an independent philosophical thinker for whom reflective personal experience, not the text, was the ultimate court of appeal for arriving at the truth. A case in point is the book's structure. Flipping through its pages, one notices the frequent extended discussions in the footnotes and the abundant citation of classical texts, often leaving room for no more than three or four lines of Simon's own prose on a given page. This may well remind the reader of the musty pedantry of so many doctoral dissertations. But although Simon frequently cites the texts of Aristotle, St. Thomas, Cajetan, and John of St. Thomas, the arguments he advances clearly do not depend on any appeal to the authority of these authors. Although a Thomist, he assumes complete responsibility for his critique of knowledge; he is a thinker whose arguments stand on their own merit. All the references to the aforementioned authorities are truly footnotes; they are never an essential part of Simon's own text. (This bears mention for the benefit of the august members of "The Guardianship of the Undefiled Text of St. Thomas Aquinas," who can be counted upon to insist that commentators, such as John of St. Thomas, are unreliable interpreters of the master's texts.) The book sparkles as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hegelian RhetoricThora Ilin BayerIntroduction: Rhetoric and DialecticAristotle in the famous first line of his Rhetoric defines the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic: "Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic" (1354a). Both rhetoric and dialectic belong to no definitive science. They treat those things that come within the purview of all human beings. As an antistrophes to dialectic, rhetoric concerns particular cases and "may be defined as the faculty [dynamis] of (...) observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (1355b). Dialectic concerns reasoning on general issues and in its generality it is like deduction. But unlike deductive demonstration, dialectic, as Aristotle says in Topics, "reasons from reputable opinions," rather than from premises that are true and primitive (100a).Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason takes a more extreme view of dialectic than Aristotle. Kant regards dialectic as a logic of illusion (Schein) that occurs when reason takes its powers beyond experience to make claims concerning the nature of the soul, world, and God. When reason attempts to determine the nature of what the soul is in itself, its assertions end in paralogisms; when it does so about the world its claims end in antinomies; and when it does so about God its efforts end in the impossibilities of the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. Kant regards rhetoric as having no role in the philosophical pursuit of truth. In the Critique of Judgment Kant classifies rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) as belonging [End Page 203] to fine art. He regards ars oratoria as an art of manipulation and deception that achieves its end by a beautiful show (Schein) of speech that plays upon human weaknesses. He says oratory deserves no respect whatsoever—"ist gar keiner Achtung würdig" (1951, 172n50; 1974, 185n).1 Kant's exclusion of rhetoric from Kritik (with which he identifies philosophy) establishes the general exclusion of rhetoric in the development of philosophical idealism.Hegel interpretation for a century and a half presumed that rhetoric was irrelevant to understanding Hegel's thought. It considered Hegel's dialectic as a method independent of any connection to rhetoric. The first book on Hegel in English, James Hutchinson Stirling's The Secret of Hegel, published in 1863, regards the key to Hegel's system as his formulation of the concrete universal (Begriff). He makes no reference to rhetoric as an element in Hegel's thought (1887, xxii). In his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel mentions Plato's Parmenides as "surely the greatest artistic achievement of the ancient dialectic," but he makes no mention of rhetoric (1952, 57; 1977, 44). A ground for ignoring rhetoric as important for Hegel's philosophy is the fact that Hegel himself ignores it. There is no discussion of rhetoric (Redekunst) in his whole corpus beyond a few pages concerning the differences between poetry and prose in his Lectures on Fine Art (1986, 15:257–68; 1998, 2:986–95).All of the approaches to Hegel in nonrhetorical terms changed with the appearance of Donald Phillip Verene's Hegel's Recollection: A Study of Images in the "Phenomenology of Spirit" (1985) followed by John H. Smith's The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel's Philosophy of "Bildung" (1988).2 Verene's work showed that there is a dialectic between image (Bild) and concept (Begriff) within Hegel's mode of expression that provides the reader with a necessary means of access to the work. Smith's study showed not only that Hegel employs rhetorical principles in the composition of the Phenomenology but that Hegel in his early years studied rhetoric closely and was concerned to master it. Smith's work, although developed independently of Verene's, joined with it to present a new reading of Hegel. This poetical and rhetorical grasp of Hegel's thought has been recently restated in Verene's Hegel's Absolute (2007).My views that follow begin where Verene's and Smith's accounts leave off. I wish to consider two questions that extend what has been broached in their readings of Hegel. (1) In what sense does Hegel's Phenomenology embody a transformation of the Aristotelian conception of rhetoric as an antistrophes to dialectic? (2) To... (shrink)

The genomics “revolution” is spreading. Originating in the molecular life sciences, it initially affected a number of biomedical research fields such as cancer genomics and clinical genetics. Now, however, a new “wave” of genomic bioinformation is transforming a widening array of disciplines, including those that address the social, historical and cultural dimensions of human life. Increasingly, bioinformation is affecting “human sciences” such as psychiatry, psychology, brain research, behavioural research (“behavioural genomics”), but also anthropology and archaeology (“bioarchaeology”). Thus, bioinformatics is having (...) an impact on how we define and understand ourselves, how identities are formed and constituted, and, finally, on how we (on the basis of these redefined identities) assess and address some of the more concrete societal issues involved in genomics governance in various settings. This article explores how genomics and bioinformation, by influencing research agendas in the human sciences and the humanities, are affecting our self-image, our identity, the way we see ourselves. The impact of bioinformation on self-understanding will be assessed on three levels: (1) the collective level (the impact of comparative genomics on our understanding of human beings as a species), (2) the individual level (the impact of behavioural genomics on our understanding of ourselves as individuals), and (3) the genealogical level (the impact of population genomics on our understanding of human history, notably early human history). This threefold impact will be assessed from two seemingly incompatible philosophical perspectives, namely a “humanistic” perspective (represented in this article by Francis Fukuyama) and a “post-humanistic” one (represented by Peter Sloterdijk). On the basis of this analysis it will be concluded that, rather than focussing on human “enhancement” by adding or deleting genes, genome-oriented practices of the Self will focus on using genomics information in the context of identity-formation. Genomic bioinformation will increasingly be built into our self-images and used in order to tailor and adapt our practices of Self to our “personalised” genome. We will keep working on ourselves, no doubt, not by modifying our genomes, but rather by fine-tuning our behaviour. What we are experiencing is a bioinformatisation of the life-world. Genomics-based technologies will increasingly pervade our daily lives, our autobiographies and narratives, as well as our anthropologies, rather than our genomes as such. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Examining the Role of Re-Presentation in Mathematical Problem Solving: An Application of Ernst von Glasersfeld’s Conceptual Analysis” by Victor V. Cifarelli & Volkan Sevim. Upshot: The key philosophical premise of von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism is not necessary to the insightful conceptual analysis presented by Cifarelli and Sevim, which could benefit from abandoning it.

La abrumadora presencia de los textos de autoayuda en la producción editorial de las últimas décadas invita a reflexionar no sólo sobre las necesidades a las que estos discursos intentan responder, sino también sobre los objetivos hacia los que orientan el comportamiento y las actitudes del individuo contemporáneo. En este trabajo abordamos dicha reflexión desde un marco teórico foucaultiano, considerando que los textos de autoayuda caen bajo el dominio de las “tecnologías del yo” y que su función puede interpretarse a (...) la luz del concepto de gobernabilidad . Este concepto entraña la relación entre tecnologías del poder y tecnologías del yo que nos permite comprender el sentido en que el individuo aparece como gobernable, y permite también esclarecer el contacto que las ciencias psicológicas y psiquiátricas mantienen con las finalidades de la racionalidad política vigente. (shrink)

Arne Naess introduced the notion of ?concrete contents? to posit that the qualities we perceive in nature are intrinsic to the things themselves, and not just projections of our senses on to the world. This gives environmentalism more credence than if secondary qualities about the environment are considered subjective in a pejorative sense. But the concrete contents position pushes philosophy toward poetry because it suggests that felt qualities are as primary as logic. For a philosophy to justify itself, (...) it sometimes needs to find resonance with qualities outside its borders. Examples are presented from Italian writer Italo Calvino, the music of the Kahuli people of New Guinea, a film by John Sayles, and a poem by Tomas Tranströmer. The concrete philosophical contents of the world are found in the relationships between philosophy and experience, never inside philosophy alone. (shrink)

The discovery that the universe is fine-tuned for life ? a discovery to which the phrase ?the anthropic principle? is often applied ? has prompted much extra-cosmic speculation by philosophers, theologians, and theoretical physicists. Such speculation is referred to as extra-cosmic because an inference is made to the existence either of one unobservable entity that is distinct from the cosmos and any of its parts (God) or of many such entities (multiple universes). In this article a case is mounted for (...) the sceptical position that cosmic fine-tuning does not support an inference to anything extra-cosmic. To that end three definitions of ?fine-tuned for life? are proposed: the ?slight difference? definition, the (unconditional) probability definition, and John Leslie?s conditional probability definition. These three definitions are the only ones suggested by the relevant literature on fine-tuning and the anthropic principle. Since on none of them do claims of fine-tuning warrant an inference to something extracosmic, it is concluded that there is no definition of ?fine-tuned for life? serving this function. (shrink)