In the topological semantics for modal logic, S4 is well-known to be complete for the rational line, for the real line, and for Cantor space: these are special cases of S4’s completeness for any dense-in-itself metric space. The construction used to prove completeness can be slightly amended to show that S4 is not only complete, but also strongly complete, for the rational line. But no similarly easy amendment is available for the real line or for Cantor space and (...) the question of strong completeness for these spaces has remained open, together with the more general question of strong completeness for any dense-in-itself metric space. In this paper, we prove that S4 is strongly complete for any dense-in-itself metric space. (shrink)

We introduce a suitable notion of eight-shaped curve in the product S × ℝ of a Suslin line S for the real line ℝ, and we prove that if S is dense in itself, then every collection of pairwise disjoint eight-shaped curves in S × ℝ is countable. This parallels a folklore result which holds for the real plane.

We give an example of a dense o-minimal structure in which there is a definable quotient that cannot be eliminated, even after naming parameters. Equivalently, there is an interpretable set which cannot be put in parametrically definable bijection with any definable set. This gives a negative answer to a question of Eleftheriou, Peterzil, and Ramakrishnan. Additionally, we show that interpretable sets in dense o-minimal structures admit definable topologies which are “tame” in several ways: (a) they are Hausdorff, (b) (...) every point has a neighborhood which is definably homeomorphic to a definable set, (c) definable functions are piecewise continuous, (d) definable subsets have finitely many definably connected components, and (e) the frontier of a definable subset has lower dimension than the subset itself. (shrink)

We develop the theory of Krull dimension forS4-algebras and Heyting algebras. This leads to the concept of modal Krull dimension for topological spaces. We compare modal Krull dimension to other well-known dimension functions, and show that it can detect differences between topological spaces that Krull dimension is unable to detect. We prove that for aT1-space to have a finite modal Krull dimension can be described by an appropriate generalization of the well-known concept of a nodec space. This, in turn, can (...) be described by modal formulaszemnwhich generalize the well-known Zeman formulazem. We show that the modal logicS4.Zn:=S4+ zemnis the basic modal logic ofT1-spaces of modal Krull dimension ≤n, and we construct a countable dense-in-itselfω-resolvable Tychonoff spaceZnof modal Krull dimensionnsuch thatS4.Znis complete with respect toZn. This yields a version of the McKinsey-Tarski theorem forS4.Zn. We also show that no logic in the interval [S4n+1S4.Zn) is complete with respect to any class ofT1-spaces. (shrink)

We prove strong completeness results for some modal logics with the universal modality, with respect to their topological semantics over 0-dimensional dense-in-themselves metric spaces. We also use failure of compactness to show that, for some languages and spaces, no standard modal deductive system is strongly complete.

We study the monadic fragment of second order intuitionistic propositional logic in the language containing the standard propositional connectives and propositional quantifiers. It is proved that under the topological interpretation over any dense-in-itself metric space, the considered fragment collapses to Heyting calculus. Moreover, we prove that the topological interpretation over any dense-in-itself metric space of fragment in question coincides with the so-called Pitts' interpretation. We also prove that all the nonstandard propositional operators of the form q (...) $\mapsto \exists$p ), where F is an arbitrary monadic formula of the variable p, are definable in the language of Heyting calculus under the topological interpretation of intuitionistic logic over sufficiently regular spaces. (shrink)

It is a landmark theorem of McKinsey and Tarski that if we interpret modal diamond as closure, then $$\mathsf S4$$ S4 is the logic of any dense-in-itself metrizable space. The McKinsey–Tarski Theorem relies heavily on a metric that gives rise to the topology. We give a new and more topological proof of the theorem, utilizing Bing’s Metrization Theorem.

In the topological semantics, quantified intuitionistic logic, QH, is known to be strongly complete not only for the class of all topological spaces but also for some particular topological spaces — for example, for the irrational line, ${\Bbb P}$, and for the rational line, ${\Bbb Q}$, in each case with a constant countable domain for the quantifiers. Each of ${\Bbb P}$ and ${\Bbb Q}$ is a separable zero-dimensional dense-in-itself metrizable space. The main result of the current article generalizes (...) these known results: QH is strongly complete for any zero-dimensional dense-in-itself metrizable space with a constant domain of cardinality ≤ the space’s weight; consequently, QH is strongly complete for any separable zero-dimensional dense-in-itself metrizable space with a constant countable domain. We also prove a result that follows from earlier work of Moerdijk: if we allow varying domains for the quantifiers, then QH is strongly complete for any dense-in-itself metrizable space with countable domains. (shrink)

This compact and somewhat dense study seeks to probe several root ideas in Tillich’s thought, in the conviction that Tillich "is pre-eminent as ‘healer’ of rankling modern wounds—mental, moral, spiritual." In pursuing his aim, Professor Anderson views Tillich ironically, though not uncritically, from the standpoint of existential Thomism. Five pairs of ideas in Tillich’s thought provide the outline of the book. Symbol and faith as ultimate concern: "Tillichian symbols are objectively grounded analogies, revalatory of aspects of reality otherwise opaque (...) to us." Faith, a total act "wherein all the elements of one’s personality are ’synthesized’ and ‘transcended'," is expressible only in terms of revelatory analogies. The philosophy-theology duality: Both philosophy and theology are concerned with the meaning of Being, but they differ in three ways: philosophy probes the meaning of Being in itself, while theology considers its meaning for us; the attitude of the philosopher is intellectually detached, whereas that of the theologian is "personally committed in virtue of loving concern"; the content expressed by philosophy is "intelligible structure," whereas that of theology is "spiritual significance." Tillich’s conception of the philosophy of religion is dealt with in this context. Reason and Revelation: Ontological reason is a faculty for apprehending actual existence; technical reason is concerned with discovering means for ends. The divorce of these two functions of reason during the last one hundred years has been disastrous. By giving a truth which is both certain and of ultimate concern, revelation can reconcile the conflicts which reason experiences. Revelation is the unveiling of man’s personal ultimate concern in terms of symbols and myths. Anything can be the conveyor of revelation, since every being participates in Being-itself. Being and God: Being-itself is the Ground of Being, the Power of Being, the ineffable God. Though no thinker can avoid making God an object of knowledge, God transcends the subject-object structure. Being and Love: For Tillich, life is "being in actuality," and "love is the moving power of life," "the drive towards the unity of the separated." The highest form of love is agape, love of persons, and above all of God, for their own sake. All of this is well-trodden ground. However, Professor Anderson’s synthesis is careful, and his critical remarks are often helpful. His emphasis on the pervasiveness of love in Tillich’s understanding of being, reason, and faith, adds a dimension to which other commentators have paid less attention.—H. F. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to tackle the sociosemiotic strategies through which the relation between power and visibility is articulated in today’s metropolitan São Paulo. Drawing on the theoretical-methodological framework of Greimasian and post-Greimasian semiotics, the following hypotheses are put forth: (1) contemporary São Paulo is characterized by a true visual hypertrophy, which manifests itself, all at once, in both its architectural and mediatic landscapes; (2) in São Paulo, power is hypervisible and apparently transparent; (3) the excess of (...) images, gazes, and perspectives produces, in São Paulo, dense and wide areas of topological, mediatic, and social invisibility; (4) the predominant visibility in São Paulo can be qualified as a “populist” visibility. Based on these assumptions, this article intends to contribute to the consolidation of a critical debate on the visual matrices of power and on social processes of exclusion and inclusion currently in place in global metropolises. Likewise, it is intended to contribute to the elaboration of a theoretical-methodological framework capable of understanding and addressing the complexity of the phenomena that characterize such debate. (shrink)

It is shown constructively that, on a metric space that is dense in itself, if every pointwise continuous, real-valued function is uniformly sequentially continuous, then the space has the anti-Specker property. The converse is also discussed. Finally, we show that the anti-Specker property implies a restricted form of countable compactness.

In this research, we present the most important characteristics of the so called and so much explored Jesuit Edition of Newton’s Philosophi? Naturalis Principia Mathematica edited by Thomas Le Seur and Fran?ois Jacquier in the 1739-1742. The edition, densely annotated by the commentators (the notes and the comments are longer than Newton’s text itself) is a very treasure concerning Newton’s ideas and his heritage, e.g., Newton’s geometry and mathematical physics. Conspicuous pieces of information as to history of physics, history (...) of mathematics and epistemology can be drawn from it. This paper opens a series of study concerning Jesuit Edition, whose final scope is to put in evidence all the conceptual aspects of such edition and its role inside the spread of scientific ideas and inside the complex relation science, popularization & society. (shrink)

It is a classic result (McKinsey & Tarski, 1944; Rasiowa & Sikorski, 1963) that if we interpret modal diamond as topological closure, then the modal logic of any dense-in-itself metric space is the well-known modal system S4. In this paper, as a natural follow-up, we study the modal logic of an arbitrary metric space. Our main result establishes that modal logics arising from metric spaces form the following chain which is order-isomorphic (with respect to the ⊃ relation) to (...) the ordinalω+ 3:$S4.Gr{z_1} \supset S4.Gr{z_2} \supset S4.Gr{z_3} \supset \cdots \,S4.Grz \supset S4.1 \supset S4.$It follows that the modal logic of an arbitrary metric space is finitely axiomatizable, has the finite model property, and hence is decidable. (shrink)

It is a celebrated result of McKinsey and Tarski [28] thatS4is the logic of the closure algebraΧ+over any dense-in-itself separable metrizable space. In particular,S4is the logic of the closure algebra over the realsR, the rationalsQ, or the Cantor spaceC. By [5], each logic aboveS4that has the finite model property is the logic of a subalgebra ofQ+, as well as the logic of a subalgebra ofC+. This is no longer true forR, and the main result of [5] states that (...) each connected logic aboveS4with the finite model property is the logic of a subalgebra of the closure algebraR+.In this paper we extend these results to all logics aboveS4. Namely, for a normal modal logicL, we prove that the following conditions are equivalent: (i)Lis aboveS4, (ii)Lis the logic of a subalgebra ofQ+, (iii)Lis the logic of a subalgebra ofC+. We introduce the concept of a well-connected logic aboveS4and prove that the following conditions are equivalent: (i)Lis a well-connected logic, (ii)Lis the logic of a subalgebra of the closure algebra$\xi _2^ + $over the infinite binary tree, (iii)Lis the logic of a subalgebra of the closure algebra${\bf{L}}_2^ + $over the infinite binary tree with limits equipped with the Scott topology. Finally, we prove that a logicLaboveS4is connected iffLis the logic of a subalgebra ofR+, and transfer our results to the setting of intermediate logics.Proving these general completeness results requires new tools. We introduce the countable general frame property (CGFP) and prove that each normal modal logic has the CGFP. We introduce general topological semantics forS4, which generalizes topological semantics the same way general frame semantics generalizes Kripke semantics. We prove that the categories of descriptive frames forS4and descriptive spaces are isomorphic. It follows that every logic aboveS4is complete with respect to the corresponding class of descriptive spaces. We provide several ways of realizing the infinite binary tree with limits, and prove that when equipped with the Scott topology, it is an interior image of bothCandR. Finally, we introduce gluing of general spaces and prove that the space obtained by appropriate gluing involving certain quotients ofL2is an interior image ofR. (shrink)

It is a landmark theorem of McKinsey and Tarski that if we interpret modal diamond as closure, then \ is the logic of any dense-in-itself metrizable space. The McKinsey–Tarski Theorem relies heavily on a metric that gives rise to the topology. We give a new and more topological proof of the theorem, utilizing Bing’s Metrization Theorem.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:164 BOOK REVIEWS the " causes and remedies " of homosexuality (this entails a guarded challenge to the notion of " constitutional " homosexuality) and a special outreach to people with AIDS; a long endnote undertakes to defend the thesis that AIDS can sometmies he, at least in a qualified sense, divine punishment for sexual sin (p. 110 n. 4). Ashley's essay concludes with an apology for any unintended (...) offense resulting from imprecise or otherwise infelicitous expressions of his position; and he suggests that such lapses on the part of the CDF letter itself were " inevitable in a document that had to he brief and directly to the point in order to clear up the ambiguities with which this complex question has been obscured" (p. 109). My personal assessment is that Ashley has succeeded much better than CDF in minimizing such problems; he might have been even more successful had he not been so intent on downplaying or excusing the letter's undeniable faults in this regard. Of course, Ashley is here engaging in debate with the Vatican's critics; were he instead directly addressing CDF, his approach might well have been different. Even in the present context, however, as a better gesture toward gay and lesbian people wounded by the letter's simplistic and harsh prescriptions, it would have been well for Ashley to repeat the observation he once addressed to U.S. and Canadian bishops assembled in Dallas for a sexuality workshop (Feb. 2-6, 1981): "Overfacile solutions to the tragic dilemmas of life which people are experiencing make the Church appear smug and silly." The debate over this issue will continue, as indeed it must. The participants in this hook, notwithstanding problems on either side, have contributed significantly to the ongoing conversation and have set a high standard which we must hope will he emulated by all who carry the conversation forward. Pontifical, University of St. Thomas Rome, Italy BRUCE WILLIAMS, O.P. Perplexity in the Moral Life: Philosophical and Theological Considerations. By EDMUND N. SANTURRI. Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1988. Pp. 256. $35.00. Edmund Santurri has written an important book about a central issue in moral theory and a fundamental problem in the moral life. On occasion, one feels on the horns of a dilemma. Whatever course of action might he taken, it appears as if wrong will he done in the process of doing right. Thus, we want to keep promises, but if we keep BOOK REVIEWS 165 this promise, we will cause or allow some great harm to come to an· other person. How ought this sort of dilemma to he understood? Santurri argues that there are within the traditions of moral philosophy and theology two ways of construing the problem. One can say either that moral dilemmas of the sort Santurri discusses are the re· sult of deficient knowledge and so in principle resolvable, or that they stem from the structure of the moral universe itself and are in consequence not resolvable. It is Santurri's contention that Christian ethics must hold to the former position and defend the view that in all dilemmatic contexts there is a way to dispel moral perplexity through more adequate moral knowledge. In order to establish this thesis he undertakes a review of typical philosophical and theological literature that addresses the problem he has identified. Santurri's review of the philosophical literature, though on occasion unnecessarily dense, is always competent and generally thorough. Among others, he reviews the work of David Lyons, Bernard Williams, and Thomas Nagel. His conclusion is that philosophical argument can establish neither of the two possible views of moral dilemma as superior to the other. Arguments designed to establish both points of view prove inconclusive in the end because they beg more fundamental ques· tions concerning the content, nature, and function of morality itself. Thus, Santurri argues that moral perplexity cannot he interpreted adequately apart from a discussion of " certain fundamental questions of moral ontology " (p. 4), and he quite successfully shows that these questions are passed over or inadequately treated in the philosophical literature. The fundamental questions he lists are these: Are moral codes simply systems of convention or do these... (shrink)

In my paper, by drawing on the writings Heidegger developed in the late 1920s, I wish to display what we may refer to as the thorough educational nature of Heideggerian reflection. It is my argument that the analysis of Dasein we find in the early Heidegger displays an extraordinary deep and dense reflection on selfhood and subjectivity, a reflection that is rooted in subject’s freedom and transcending. By paying attention to the interplay between these two features, I argue that (...) in the late 1920s, while challenging the notion of an all-encompassing consciousness as the place where everything should be understood and managed, Heidegger built a conception of selfhood and subjectivity in terms of freedom, responsibility, and ongoing transformation. Such a conception, I argue, is in and of itself educational. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Acts of Askēsis, Scenes of PoiēsisThe Dramatic Phenomenology of Another Violence in a Muslim Painter-PoetNauman Naqvi (bio)[End Page 50]The Divinity is beautiful and loves beauty. Cultivate the ethos of the Divinity. Askēsis is my glory, and all askēsis is from me.— Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, Sahih al-Bukhari>> Introduction: Presenting the Drama of the Gnostic Ontology of Violence in IslamIn current discourse on violence in Islam, the fundamental importance (...) of the Prophetic distinction—a distinction iterated in a number of hadith, or speech-events of the Prophet Muhammad—between the greater, inner jihad, against the ego (al-jihad al-akbar), and the lesser, outward jihad, against oppression and animosity (al-jihad al-asghar), has often been cited. Even so, an originary measure of the significance of this exemplary distinction—abyssal in its simplicity, disclosing as it does the divinity proper to the divinely ordained imperative of jihad (such disclosure of divinity being the very task and telos of the Prophetic speech-event, its very eventfulness (hadatha)—has hardly been taken or heeded.It has not, to begin with, been explored that both forms strikingly share the violent word, jihad: in Arabic, forceful effort or struggle. It is as if the reality and intensity of these two radically different forms of force are adequated a priori in the Prophetic speech-event—if anything, it is the former, the inner jihad, that has the greater reality, the more violent, imperative intensity. With their difference a matter of degree and quality, the two are at once intimately related and violently real, linguistically leaving us little space for the distinction between the metaphoric and the literal in this demanding economy, language, and ontology of violence.1The line that has been drawn between the two forms of violence in the Prophetic speech-event is not ontological per se—it is the axis of the stage of their dramatic encounter, the battle line of their distinction. This axis, this vertical battle line of distinction, is the strait, but upwardly infinite, dramaturgical space wherein is enacted the gnostic ontology of violence in Islam. It is the axial line of force emanating from Islam’s extraordinary emphasis on the radical purification of one’s intention, one’s very intentionality (i.e., the purification not just of the springing ground of one’s comportment, but of the anterior ground where one receives and apprehends the real as such), in a quest for the demanding Divinity that would hurl the Islamic subject both inside and outside itself in its own endless search and infinite encounter. It is the battle line of distinction that races through the world stage of Islam’s arts, knowledges, and practices—the auratic line of force pulsating through the fields of its charismatic inheritance of generous visions, discourses, and gestures. Indeed, it is the piercing erotic arrow of divine love and mercy that is the subtle motus animi continuus of Islam’s graceful works of poiēsis.For the violent task of askēsis assigned by the great imperative of inner jihad is closely related both to the imperative of beauty in Islam—where the effects of askēsis: virtue and virtuosity, are densely, passionately cathected and imbricated with the beautiful2 by [End Page 51] virtue of the latter’s manifestation of divinity—as well as to the imperative of knowledge, wherein theory and praxis are united in askēsis.3Beauty and its creation—the act of poiēsis —are also, then, violently real, as are knowledge and its effects, since together they all have a kenotically violent askēsis as the condition and telos of their possibility, as the very ground(s) of their emergence and potentiality. Thus, the significance of the greater jihad is (again) to be read potentially, in the entire range of the arts, gestures, habits, and letters of Islam, its artifacts and bodies, where generous, kenotic, sacrificial logics are on display, not just in the lesser archive of jihad (in acts of greater jihad on far bygone battlefields), but in the epic world-panorama of the acts and scenes of askēsis and poiēsis that are... (shrink)

In the topological semantics for modal logic, S4 is well known to be complete for the rational line and for the real line: these are special cases of S4’s completeness for any dense-in-itself metric space. The construction used to prove completeness can be slightly amended to show that S4 is not only complete but strongly complete, for the rational line. But no similarly easy amendment is available for the real line. In an earlier paper, we proved a general (...) theorem: S4 is strongly complete for any dense-in-itself metric space. Strong completeness for the real line is a special case. In the current paper, we give a proof of strong completeness tailored to the special case of the real line: the current proof is simpler and more accessible than the proof of the more general result and involves slightly different techniques. We proceed in two steps: first, we show that S4 is strongly complete for the space of finite and infinite binary sequences, equipped with a natural topology; and then we show that there is an interior map from the real line onto this space. (shrink)

Summarizes and illuminates two decades of research Gathering important papers by both philosophers and scientists, this collection illuminates the central themes that have arisen during the last two decades of work on the conceptual foundations of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Each volume begins with a comprehensive introduction that places the coverage in a broader perspective and links it with material in the companion volumes. The collection is of interest in many disciplines including computer science, linguistics, biology, information science, psychology, (...) neuroscience, iconography, and philosophy. Examines initial efforts and the latest controversies The topics covered range from the bedrock assumptions of the computational approach to understanding the mind, to the more recent debates concerning cognitive architectures, all the way to the latest developments in robotics, artificial life, and dynamical systems theory. The collection first examines the lineageof major research programs, beginning with the basic idea of machine intelligence itself, then focuses on specific aspects of thought and intelligence, highlighting the much-discussed issue of consciousness, the equally important, but less densely researched issue of emotional response, and the more traditionally philosophical topic of language and meaning. Provides a gamut of perspectives The editors have included several articles that challenge crucial elements of the familiar research program of cognitive science, as well as important writings whose previous circulation has been limited. Within each volume the papers are organized to reflect a variety of research programs and issues. The substantive introductions that accompany each volume further organize the material and provide readers with a working sense of the issues and the connection between articles. (shrink)

This Article applies the concept of "legal transplant" to the slavery regimes that sprang up in all regions of settlement during the first two centuries of English colonization of mainland America. Using a distinction between "extrastructure" and "intrastructure," we can divide the Anglo-American law of slavery into discourses of explanation/justification and technologies of implementation. The two components were produced from distinct sources. English law possessed few intellectual resources that could be mobilized to justify and explain slavery as an institution. Here (...) we find the law of nature and nations uppermost. English law offered many resources, however, for the management, distribution and control of movements of people. Thus, the Anglo-American law of slavery combined two transplanted resources within itself. As colonial settlements turned into slave societies, local innovations increasingly supplemented original transplants, compensating for their deficiencies and limitations and becoming, in turn, a third species of transplant. Assembly laws moved from colony to colony, creating commonalities within regions of settlement, and also — more interestingly — among regions usually thought quite distinct. Together the three species of transplants created densely instrumental slave regimes that enumerated all the ways in which summary mutilations and executions defined the slave’s life on the edge of death. (shrink)

This article provides an ethical critique of the Good Clinical Practice (GCP) and Declaration of Helsinki (DoH) documents. While the previous criticisms of GCP are entirely correct, there is much more wrong with the document than has previously been acknowledged, including a circular definition and an astonishing vagueness about ethical principles. In addition to its failure to provide adequate ethical protection of participants, the procedurally dense nature of GCP lends itself to a box-ticking culture where important ethical issues (...) are overlooked because they are not ‘mentioned on the form’. In contrast, the DoH is a much more effective ethical document, but actually goes too far in one respect. It transpires that the best ethical guidelines for clinical research would be neither over-prescriptive in regard to particular ethical issues (as the DoH is) nor neglectful of them (as GCP is); correctly framed ethical principles will provide sufficient protection to participants while also ensuring a culture of ethicovigilance in clinical trials. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," it (...) is inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American LiteratureElizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio)I begin with what we might call a bipolar disturbance in literary criticism. Caught between the materialism of cultural studies and the formalism of philosophy, literary criticism is construed, on the one hand, as useless—struck dumb by its lack of purpose in the face of real politics and real bodies—and, on the other hand, as singularly (...) efficacious, the only tool through which to reveal the essentially discursive character of all forms of culture, including bodies and politics. While this rhetorical model of criticism is regularly posited as politically bankrupt, as having no purchase on the facticity of the world, the model of materialist cultural criticism is just as regularly unmasked as, at base, rhetorically constructed and thus guilty of concealing its own formalist dimensions. 1 This “disturbance,” as I’ve described it, tends to be acted out as a debilitating dialectic: caught between formalism and materialism, literary criticism is left without any ground to stand on. Yet this peculiar bipolarity within literary criticism is intimately linked to the strange status of literature itself. Language becomes recognizably literary at the moment it assumes a rhetorical or formal dimension rather than serving as the invisible conduit of mimetic representation. 2 Whence, evidently, the allure of formalism for literary criticism: form would seem to be exactly what demarcates the literary from the nonliterary, what defines the exclusive territory of literature. Yet formalism, as has been widely and persuasively argued, tends to turn literature into precisely the kind of artifact that means little in relation to the world and tends to obscure the worldly relations that inform the text and its production. Indeed, in the field of Cultural Studies—a field whose defining gesture is political engagement—“formalist” is a term whose meaning often comes to approximate “apolitical.” “Formalist,” fashioned as opprobium, speaks chidingly of hermeticism or more acerbically of the insidious erasures enacted by universalism.In contemporary criticism, formalism has thus come to occupy an important antipodal position which encompasses far more than the New Critical practices of the 1940s and ‘50s. In emphasizing the formal, intrinsic qualities of the literary work, New [End Page 46] Critics closeted the text away from the world and from the possibility of social action: their agenda has thus been construed as politically quietist and inherently conservative. 3 Yet the term “formalism,” used as a charge of conservatism, has been applied more broadly to poststructuralist criticism as well. Paul Lauter, for instance, uses the term “formalist” to describe deconstruction as an avatar of New Criticism: both emphasize textual relations to the exclusion of extratextual considerations. Poststructuralism, Lauter and others have argued, continues an aestheticization of literature which turns literary criticism over to an elitist and ultimately irrelevant “priesthood.” ‘“Formalist,’” writes Lauter, “suggests that the whole enterprise of literary theorizing subsists behind dense academic walls, where de Man speaks only to Heidegger, and Heidegger speaks only to God” [138]. While Lauter bases his analogy between poststructuralism and New Criticism on the charge of hermeticism as well as a lack of historical engagement, the notion of “form” as it appears in poststructuralism is nonetheless significantly different than the “form” that animated New Critical endeavors. Where New Critical “form” concerns specifically literary structures—irony, metaphor, tension, unity—the poststructural referent for these rhetorical terms is often the “form” of language or subjectivity itself. Accordingly, the meaning of “form” (and, indeed, “formalism”) undergoes a marked shift from specific rhetorical articulations to larger theoretical claims about language and identity.This second, broader articulation of form has been critiqued less for hermeticism or quietism than for its implied universalism—that is, for fashioning subjects and discursive forces in uniform shapes without regard for political and historical specificity. Stuart Hall, for example, whilst defining the practice of Cultural Studies, warns against theories of the subject (in this case psychoanalysis) that tend toward universalism: “The manner in which this ‘subject’ of culture is conceptualized is of a trans-historical and ‘universal’ character: it addresses the subject-in-general, not an historically-determinate social subject, or socially determinate particular language” [Hall 70]. On this reading, formalist theories of poststructuralism... (shrink)

Étienne Souriau was a refined and demanding thinker, with an aristocratic demeanour, far removed from the currents of ideas dominant in his time. A difficult and erudite author, out of tune with the times he lived in, he would seem the least likely candidate to appeal to a hurried and globalised public like that of the twenty-first century. A sophisticated representative of a rationalist positivism, no stranger to the Husserlian canon and not even insensitive to the motivations dear to the (...) gnoseological debate of Cartesian and Kantian matrix (as well as to the major themes of classical metaphysics), Souriau pursues the ideal of a constructive philosophy, capable of understanding – and at the same time favouring – the advancement of the creative process conceived as a set of poetic acts and progressive dynamic operations. In his texts, Souriau is attentive to grasping the correspondences, exchanges and reciprocal transitions between one mode of existence and another, as well as the resonances between the various art forms in the different fields of knowledge, testing an original method that is epistemologically very fruitful. The aim of this monographic issue of Aisthesis dedicated to Étienne Souriau is to explore his thought in its multiple aspects, in order to measure its topicality in relation to the themes and problems that characterise contemporary philosophical debate, with particular reference to aesthetics and ontology as well as to the dense network of connections between the two fields. One of the most interesting characteristics of Souriau’s thought that has stood the test of time would appear to be its multifacetedness: the quality of lending itself to being applied even to spheres that are apparently very distant from reflection on art, such as cultural anthropology, political philosophy or morality. It seemed to us that it largely owes its relevance precisely to the intersections between one field of knowledge and another. The issue contains twelve contributions on Souriau that explore his main aspects in depth. They range from analyses devoted to the architecture of Souriau’s thought (his general philosophy) in the essays by Dominique Chateau and Filippo Domenicali, which can furnish a useful overall picture of the man, to essays that attempt to focus on the more properly ontological core of this thought, such as those devoted to the arabesque motif (Luigi Azzariti-Fumaroli), the theory of the soul (Sjoerd Van Tuinen) or the multiplicity of worlds (Noëlie Plé). Interspersed between these are contributions that focus more on the comparison between Étienne Souriau’s thought and the philosophers of his time, such as Dufrenne (Maryvonne Saison), or with well-known later philosophers who explicitly referred to him, prolonging his creative impetus, such as Gilles Deleuze (Casey Boyle) and Bruno Latour (Aline Wiame), the true architect of the current Souriau “comeback”. Finally, in addition to essays of a more theoretical nature, there are contributions that attempt to re-evaluate certain aspects of Souriau’s aesthetics, such as the fruitfulness of the cues that can come from his thought for the debate on animal aesthetics (Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis and Andrea Scanziani), or the possible topicality of his theory of forms (Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarie). In the “Miscellaneous” section, this issue hosts a number of studies that aim to explore the aesthetic implications of new technologies, the themes of ecological aesthetics, as well as to offer an unusual profile of Baumgarten. (shrink)

Working through Balaska’s deeply perceptive, elegantly written, and profoundly honest book, Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit, a reader steeped in the recent academic literature about either or both of its main figures may come to feel herself placed at what is, itself, a certain kind of limit. The limit I mean is the limit of a familiar type of theoretical discourse about the constitution and structure of language and subjectivity as Wittgenstein and Lacan treat them: it includes the (...) discourses that seek, for instance, to articulate how language and sense are constituted in the Tractatus, and thus what is really meant by “logical form” and “nonsense” there; or those that aim to comprehend the true relationship of our biological nature to language, culture, and the advent of freedom in Lacan; or, again, those that try to find, in either thinker’s works, the precise location of the delicate logical buttonhole that would alone permit us entry, from within everyday language and life, to the absoluteness of an ineffable beyond. These discourses all treat of language and life, but handle these phenomena at arm’s length, theorizing the structure of each and the form of their relationship in such a way as to establish, ultimately, their mutual convertibility to one another, their mutual absorption into a third, more inclusive term, or adduce translations from the dense theoretical matrices of one thinker’s treatment of them to the other’s. Balaska’s book, doing none of these things, rather succeeds in bringing out how an interconnected reading of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Lacan may speak to and inform our response to a certain kind of experience that is characteristic for both thinkers, and typical as well of those moments and occasions of our lives in which we may find ourselves drawn to reflect on what meaning is and how we relate to it. (shrink)

Since commencing its illegal invasion in 2022, the Russian military and authorities have committed numerous war crimes against the people of Ukraine. These include the mutilation and execution of combatants; the torture, kidnapping, forced expulsion, rape, and massacre of civilians; and indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas. In this essay, I evaluate the strategic implications of this misconduct, focusing exclusively on Western responses. I argue that war crimes can and often do negatively impact the strategic goals of the perpetrator, but (...) whether and how this occurs is rarely governed exclusively by the offending action. Western perceptions of battlefield atrocity, shaped as they are by identity, race, and politics, may radically shift from one context to another. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, the status of both the participants and the conflict itself has helped inculcate a particular sensitivity among Western actors to the battlefield criminality of Russia. Drawing on evidence from the 2022 Bucha massacre and the ongoing bombing of Ukrainian civilians, I argue that Russian misconduct has consolidated Western support for the Ukrainian military effort, politically, diplomatically, and materially. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese TextAerin CaleyHuang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Text. By Paul Unschuld. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 520. $75.00.As a student in my final year of formal training in Zen Shiatsu, I am looking to my future. While I will soon begin (...) my practice, I also intend to continue my studies, particularly with respect to the history of Chinese and Japanese medicine. My biggest [End Page 130] challenge will be that I don't understand either of these languages, leaving me at the mercy of translators, in a field where meaning is often dependant on nuance.I was, therefore, very interested to read Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Text by Paul Unschuld. Although it is considered a seminal text, the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen is not a unified manual of medicine but the accumulation of writing and experience that predated its compilation. In his efforts to translate this book, Unschuld attempted to take into consideration the broad variety of influences that would affect its intent and meanings.The body of work that is known by this name underwent many revisions through the years, attaining the form we recognize today approximately twelve hundred years ago. Even working within the original language this presents several challenges. The first is that language and meanings change, and this sometimes obscures the intended connotation even for a scholar conversant in the original language. Unschuld also took into consideration the fact that the book had many editors, each working within a different social, political, and religious milieu. Medical knowledge grew with each generation, based on and referring to the writings of the time, many of which are no longer extant but are assumed to have been available to readers of the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen.If one were to postulate that this work was perfectly understood in Chinese, Unschuld would still face a challenge in his attempt to translate it into English. There are concepts in Chinese that have no equivalent in English and therefore present a challenge for someone trying to remain true to the original intent. He explains that this difficulty begins with the title itself, which is normally given as "The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Chinese Medicine." Although Huang Di is usually translated as Yellow Emperor, there are implications of the word emperor that are not part of huang, and, in fact, Unschuld prefers to leave the word untranslated, as there is no English option that does not alter the intent of the original.Like most important books, the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen cannot be fully grasped in one reading. I expect to revisit it many times throughout my life, as my experience in life and my practice leaven my understanding. I truly believe that texts such as Unschuld's will be an important part of my developing perception. Knowledge that is examined divorced from its formative circumstances loses the heart of its meaning, and Unschuld has made important progress in revealing the keys to the essence of the Su Wen.Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Text is a dense but fascinating read. Unschuld has done a good job of providing the information needed to be clear and thorough without getting bogged down in what are probably intriguing details. The layperson in Chinese history and textual analysis will likely find it occasionally rough going, but I found it an inspiration to learn more. Overall, I believe Paul Unschuld's work to shows him to be a worthy disciple of Wang Bing, one of the Su Wen's editors, who wrote: "I hope to elucidate the message of the sages and to make their mysterious sayings shine. They should resemble the stellar constellations hung up on high.... [T]hey should resemble the crystalclear water in a deep spring where scales and shells can be distinguished." [End Page 131]Copyright © 2005 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Eternities: Henry James’s Horatian Sense of Time KATHLEEN RILEY Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. —Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 On a visit to Bodiam Castle in Sussex in 1908, Henry James remarked to Edith Wharton: “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”1 The potency of those two words derives from their immediate evocation of an arrested (...) moment between the day’s halcyon perfection and its imminent dying fall. Small wonder that those same words were later used to mythologize an Edenic Edwardian England poised on the brink of war, to preserve in aspic the fancy of a gilded innocence and order, and the promise of “blue remembered hills,”2 careless of the teeming, tumultuous reality of an England already in the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge. James’s masterpiece of 1881, The Portrait of a Lady, begins with a luxuriously redolent depiction of a summer afternoon, of the hours before dusk that constitute a pleasurable little eternity, of the languorous rhythms and rituals of what Disraeli called “the sustained splendour of [a] stately life.”3 Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.4 This passage, it strikes me, is essentially Horatian in its Epicurean delight in the passing moment. For the Augustan poet Horace, this delight, which is intrinsically elegiac, is expressed in the sympotic pleasures of wine and friendship, in the freedom aestivam sermone benigno tendere noctem (“to prolong the summer night with genial conversation,” Epistles i.5.11). For Henry James, it rests in “the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” in the lengthening shadows on an English lawn by “the reedy, silvery Thames” (PL 32). In both cases the evanescence of these simple pleasures is deeply felt and pleasure itself heightened by an undertone of melancholy, by a nostalgic apprehension of the present. LOCI AMOENI in his review of Augustus J. C. Hare’s Days near Rome (1875), Henry James commented: “The smallest pretext for quoting from Horace—the most quotable of the ancients— should always be cultivated.”5 His own facility for quoting from Horace was evident from his earliest published works, and belied an “extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous” education shuttling, at his father’s restless instigation, between New England, Britain and Continental Europe.6 James’s biographer, Leon Edel, recorded the family legend that William James (Henry’s Irish grandfather), “who was eighteen in 1789, when he set foot in the New World, 22 little eternities brought with him a ‘very small sum of money,’ a Latin grammar and a desire to visit the fresh battlefields of the Revolutionary War.”7 Young Henry’s instruction in Latin grammar seems to have begun in the Old World, under a private tutor in London in 1855, a Scotsman named Robert Thomson who later ran a small school in Edinburgh attended by Robert Louis Stevenson. It... (shrink)

I. The name earned early notoriety from L. Ambivius Turpio, the actor who performed in all the plays of Terence. It appealed to Lucilius: quid tibi ego ambages Ambivi scribere coner? Also to Wilhelm Schulze, duly citing the Lucilian reference. In the sequel the nomen failed to enlist proper regard. Three persons bore it, diverse in life and rank: a tavern keeper on the Via Latina, a gourmet writer, a procurator governing Judaea. To the first and to the third, erudition (...) in the recent time denies recognition; and the second through inadvertence misses his place and period. The Ambivii call for redemption. The venture will lead along circuitous or devious paths, ‘per ambages’, in the pursuit of names and identities. From that operation various instruction accrues on the flank. II. First, a casual notice in the criminal record of a family of the better sort at Larinum. Cluentius and his slaves, so it was alleged, had made an assault on ‘Ambivium quendam, coponem de via Latina’ . Traditional texts remained content with that name. Not so long ago recourse to manuscripts produced ‘A. Bivium’. It was adopted in two standard editions. Had editors given a thought to nomenclature, they might have conceived some disquiet. Absent from the repertorium, the nomen appeared to lack attestation. In itself no bar, to be sure. The dense forest of local Italian nomenclature carries plenty of unique specimens. Reassurance could be sought from ‘Bivellius’ and ‘Bivonius’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Little Way:Ferdinand Ulrich on AccidentsRachel M. ColemanWe live in a material reality. Obviously it is not the case that we live in a merely material reality, but it is worth remembering that we are corporeal substances given to be in a corporeal reality. Our materiality informs every aspect of our being, everything about us—including how we come to know.The German philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich never forgets this about the (...) human being or the reality in which the human is given to be—indeed, Ulrich, like his intellectual mentor and constant dialogue partner Thomas Aquinas, is a realist. That is to say that, like Thomas, Ulrich is always thinking about the world as it is given to man to inhabit and understand. This then includes thinking about matter, which, because of its status as lowest rung on the ladder of creation, is often overlooked in our thinking. Our materiality, with all of its implications for man, the world, and the task of man that is philosophy—that is, thinking and knowing being itself—is a touchstone for Ulrich's metaphysics and indeed all of his work.1Ulrich's dense and textured metaphysics can be approached in many ways, but perhaps none is so crucial as his attention to the small and seemingly insignificant, which is why he gives so much time and attention to matter throughout his corpus—for what could be more insignificant than that which does not exist in itself? Ulrich's attention to matter, however, is not simply in the speculative mode, wondering about the nature of potentia pura (though this is also included), but rather this kind of speculation leads [End Page 377] Ulrich to thinking through the implications of materiality for man's being and knowing. One of these is what Ulrich refers to repeatedly throughout Homo Abyssus, his great work of metaphysics and meta-anthropology, as "the little way." In the first chapter of that book, Ulrich writes:The light of being, since it doesn't cling to itself or allow reason to come to an end "next to" God, is therefore precisely what compels speculative reason to transcend beings into the absolute ground. This act of transcendence enraptures reason, which has been illuminated by being, elevating reason into the light of absolute truth, while reason precisely thereby enters onto the "little way" in the multiplicity of finite being.2According to Ulrich, in order to know and understand being itself, or "absolute truth," as quoted just above, human reason must enter onto this "little way," which can be reached only "in the multiplicity of finite being."The materiality of the world and the multiplicity of finite being therein have everything to do with each other, and Ulrich claims that, in order to know and understand absolute truth or being itself, precisely this multiplicity must be our starting point. Already then, at the beginning of Homo Abyssus, Ulrich draws our attention to the significance of matter.Ulrich receives this phrase, "the little way," from none other than St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who, in accepting her littleness, so to speak, not as a burden but as a gift, was given to work great acts.3 We have a clue already, [End Page 378] then, for beginning to understand how Ulrich conceives of matter and multiplicity: as that which, though nothing in itself, allows us to know the greatest truths—indeed, the "absolute truth." [End Page 379]Here we cannot explore every aspect of what Ulrich means when he uses the phrase "the little way," nor can we outline the entirety of how Ulrich's thinking about matter and materiality informs his metaphysics.4 We can, however, approach this topic in Ulrich's thinking through one particular implication of material being: accidents, or accidental being. Accidents do not subsist in themselves, but rather only in another—that is, substance—and as such, according to Ulrich, often get passed over in our thinking in favor of what we think of as more important subjects. And yet, in a certain sense, accidents are all we ever encounter in the world: while the tree could theoretically be any color at all, it... (shrink)

The present is, in fact, made out of the residue of the past.For here the question is nothing less, I venture to say, than the problem of man, of man's humanity, and of humanism. But situated where language no longer lets itself be effaced.A note to readers, an apologia: this is an experimental critical theory essay, a performative piece of academic writing that attempts to wrestle with the porous zones, the hiccups, slips and falls between languages, translations, and between (...) writing and genre. Some readers may find it obscure, dense, in parts; open and too free, too vulnerable, too self-revealing or narrative–too variable in its intensities, its modalities, its genres. But that is also the point. It is in part... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Thomas and the Divine MercyMark JohnsonA PUZZLING THING about the topic of the divine mercy as presented in the early part of the Prima pars, especially in light of the detailed commentaries presented by Cessario and Cuddy, 1 is how relatively little Thomas speaks about it. Pope Francis devoted the entire 2016 year to a Jubilee of Mercy. The Catholic Theological Society of America followed suit (...) by devoting its 2016 conference to the topic. Yet Thomas does not devote a single Scholastic question to it in the Summa. The topic of the divine names gets question 13 (12 articles), the divine knowledge gets question 14 (16 articles), and the divine will gets question 19 (12 articles). Our anchor text, question 21, is a four-article-long question that emerges from the larger issue of God’s will in itself (absolute). Yet the question is not about the divine mercy on its own, but is rather about features or properties of the divine act of love, a topic to which the whole of question 20 is devoted. God’s justice and mercy are considered in question 21 as quasi-virtues that perfect the divine act of love (question 20), which in turn is the proper act of God’s will (question 19).2 The divine will of question 19 [End Page 355] is Halley’s Comet, and mercy is the tail of dust trailing in its wake. When God’s mercy does appear it seems to vie with God’s justice for our attention.Cessario and Cuddy help us understand why this is, both with their two-part structure and with the sources they employ, the commentators. My focus here will be on the original text in its own light, before the varnish of the commentators. Thomas’s original is a dense chiaroscuro, which both raises questions and offers opportunities.First, while Thomas is still well within the consideration of the divine being and action (STh I, qq. 3–26), he is sensitive to our human understanding. For us humans an element of suffering seems to be built into any consideration of mercy. It is the first hurdle that needs to be jumped in question 21, article 3; objection 1 frets about mercy because it is a subset, a species, of sorrow—and that cannot be in God. In the body of the article, Thomas alludes to sorrow via a consideration of the quid nominis of mercy. The term misericordia means having a miserum cor, a heart afflicted by the sufferings of another. Thomas dismisses this right away; in the body of the article he says “being saddened at the misery of another does not befit God” (tristari... de miseria alterius non competit Deo). He does not say more. Similarly, in addressing the first objection he notes that the objection was invoking mercy as a kind of “being affected by suffering” (obiectio illa procedit de misericordia, quantum ad passionis affectum). Again, he gives no further commentary.3 [End Page 356]With the concern about God’s “co-suffering” with us dispatched, Thomas addresses a second objection, the satisfying of which will allow for the existence and procedure of the next article (a. 4). The objection focuses upon the divine justice and worries that mercy seems to mean some kind of “loosening up” of the divine justice (relaxatio iustitiae), in which God seems to act contrary to himself, to his utterances or dictates (dicta sua). Thomas addresses this concern head-on; there is no loss or relaxation of the divine justice, but rather a fulfilling and indeed exceeding of the dictates of divine justice. An example both explains and foreshadows: the man who owes someone a hundred dollars but who fulfills the debt when he pays him two hundred dollars of his own money, has both met the demands of justice and acted with liberality and mercy. He has acted above and beyond justice (supra iustitiam operando). 4 Remembering that objection 2 had included a concern about acting against one’s own self and dictates, Thomas adds that remitting an offense made against oneself by another—he may have had peccatum originale originans in mind—has the... (shrink)

The contribution examines the notion of occasionalismo sensista, or also known by the expression of formalismo sensista, that the Italian philosopher Adelchi Baratono was proposing in the ’30s and ’40s of the twentieth century. Best known for his dense volume, Il mondo sensibile. Introduzione all’estetica, Baratono is among the first thinkers of his time in Italy to start a confrontation with Kantian criticism in aesthetic context, looking groundwork for an alternative route to the one proposed by the Italian Neo-idealism. (...) In fact, against the absolutization of the subject, which Baratono ascribes, in particular, to the thought of Giovanni Gentile, he affirms the profound otherness of subject and object in front of which philosophy is bound to be wrecked. In this perspective, the “sensible world” for Baratono is in itself, regardless of the knowing subject, because everything is resolved in the “world within and around us”. In this perspective, Baratono affirms that the feeling is all this, that is something without which are neither perception nor the concept and even the idea. The feeling, therefore, far from being considered the first stage of knowledge, is the real existence. (shrink)

Situations of conflict giving rise to social dilemmas are widespread in society and game theory is one major way in which they can be investigated. Starting from the observation that individuals in society interact through networks of acquaintances, we model the co-evolution of the agents’ strategies and of the social network itself using two prototypical games, the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Stag-Hunt. Allowing agents to dismiss ties and establish new ones, we find that cooperation and coordination can be achieved (...) through the self-organization of the social network, a result that is nontrivial, especially in the Prisoner’s Dilemma case. The evolution and stability of cooperation implies the condensation of agents exploiting particular game strategies into strong and stable clusters which are more densely connected, even in the more difficult case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

The 2017 Riyadh Summit is one of the events that various media outlets densely covered. Drawing upon Van Dijk [ 53 ] Ideological Square, this study aims at identifying the in-group and out-group in ten pro-government Arab newspapers and investigating the discursive sub-strategies that were utilized in the representation of “us” and “them.” The findings reveal that most of the Arab newspapers tended to utilize a bundle of negative other-representation discursive sub-strategies to establish a dichotomy between “us” and “them” and (...) thus, construct “us” either directly or indirectly. It was found that negative lexicalization, distancing, and vagueness were the most frequently employed discursive sub-strategies in negative other-representation, while national self-glorification was the most frequently used discursive sub-strategies in positive self-representation. The study concludes by recommending other researchers to explore the same topic but in broadcast media, taking into account the prosodic aspects as well as the discourse itself. (shrink)

From a phenomenological point of view, others present themselves as unities within my intentional life as a whole, constituted ‘for’ me even while maintaining a certain reserve. This ‘reserve’ is meant to indicate that the consciousness of alter egos involves the consciousness of a breach that does not obtain between consciousness and its other ‘objects’. Indeed, there is an obvious sense in which this very consciousness requires a considerable modification of the phenomenological understanding of the ego itself and the (...) way in which intentional life is constituted. As a means of accounting for intersubjectivity without reducing it to the ego or vice versa, the author of this short, but densely written volume focuses on the body as the place in which the above mentioned breach is constituted and countenanced in tandem with a transformed conception of the ego. The rationale for this strategy is outlined in chapter one, “Alterity and Otherness: The Problem of the Body in the Cartesian Meditations,” where the author observes, to begin with, that “the reduced ownness” cannot be defined as ‘nonalien’ since it is embodied and, as such, includes its “own inescapable otherness... thus indicating that the ‘inside’ of the ‘I’ is ordered in such a way that the experience of alterity is possible.” While providing some important clues, this observation does not explain how alterity in fact is experienced. The beginning of an explanation, Dodd suggests, is to be found in the passive synthesis of my body and another’s and, on the basis of that pairing, the interpretation of the other’s body in analogy with the way the ego mundanely expresses itself in its body. Thus, the most basic answer to the question of how another ego-life can be constituted in its alterity yet in my consciousness is provided by “expression” as a mundane and mutual modification of my life and others, in short, by their encounter, not as transcendental subjects, but as living bodies. The remainder of the book accordingly focuses on the body as “the basic element of the encounter between two lives”, based upon Husserl’s account of the three essential features of a “physical thing”: extendedness, materiality, and temporality. (shrink)

This article asserts that traditionally dominant models of health promotion in the US are fairly characterized by methodological individualism. This schema produces a focus on the individual as the node of intervention. Such emphasis results in a number of scientific and ethical problems. I identify three principal ethical deficiencies: first, the health promotions used are generally ineffective, which violates canons of distributive justice because scarce health resources are expended on interventions that are unlikely to produce health benefits. Second, the health (...) promotions used tend to expand health inequalities between the affluent and the least well-off. Third, the health promotions used are likely to intensify stigma against the least well-off, a deficiency that itself may exacerbate the ‘densely-woven patterns of disadvantage’ that characterize life on the tail of the social gradient. Because Powers and Faden’s health sufficiency model of social justice argues that the amelioration of such clusters of disadvantage should be the primary ethical goal of public health policy, methodologically individualist models of health promotion are ethically deficient and should not stand as primary approaches for health promotion in a just social order. (shrink)

En 1950, Paul Ricœur publia une imposante Philosophie de la volonté, vite brocardée par la vague structuraliste et les critiques de toute « philosophie de la conscience ». On y trouve notamment une analyse du phénomène de l’hésitation qui contient bien des éléments encore pertinents. Phénomène bien connu, l’hésitation n’a pas été vraiment thématisée en tant que telle, même si, comme le montre Ricœur, l’histoire de la philosophie est susceptible d’aider à le faire. Mais le doute cartésien, par exemple, n’est (...) guère hésitant. Ce chapitre fourmille d’analyses denses mais claires, d’allusions qu’il faut expliciter, de métaphores « vives » très riches, qui permettent de concevoir un sujet se cherchant dans l’hésitation avant de se choisir dans la décision. Il y a là un concept indispensable à toute théorie de l’action.Philosophie de la volonté, a major work published by Ricœur in 1950, was quickly derided by members of the structuralist trend and by those critical of every single « philosophy of consciousness ». The book includes notably an analysis of the phenomenon of hesitation, many elements of which are still relevant. Although a well known phenomenon, hesitation has never been fully analyzed in itself, even though the history of philosophy, as Ricœur shows, might be helpful in such an endeavor. Cartesian doubt, for instance, shows hardly any hesitation. This chapter is replete with dense yet clear discussions, with allusions that require elucidation, and with a wealth of vivid metaphors which help us to envisage a subject in search of himself through hesitation, before choosing himself through decision. Such a concept is indispensable for any theory of action. (shrink)

Robert Corrington's ever-emerging theory of ecstatic naturalism is dense with possibilities for secondary studies. The task of attending to the rich theoretical territory of Corrington's philosophical world is in itself deserving of many monograph-length treatments. Nam T. Nguyen's Natures Primal Self not only takes on this task but also triples the workload by attempting to compare and contrast Corrington's ideas with the philosophies of Charles Peirce and Karl Jaspers, who are notably difficult to penetrate in their own right (...) and conspicuously disparate from one another. As would be expected, Nguyen's study brings a plethora of interesting philosophical questions to the foreground with respect to these three .. (shrink)

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

Is the mind flat? Chater (2018) has recently argued that it is and that, contrary to traditional psychology and standard folk image, depth of mind is just an illusory confabulation. In this paper, we argue that while there is a kernel of something correct in Chater’s thesis, this does not in itself add up to a critique of mental depth per se. We use Chater’s ideas as a springboard for creating a new understanding of mental depth which builds upon (...) findings in contemporary cognitive science. First, we rely on the predictive processing framework in order to determine a proposed neural contribution to mental depth, specifically in hierarchical predictive knowledge. Second, drawing from an embodied approach to cognition, we argue that mental depth results from the depth of our embodied skills and the situations in which we are embedded. This allows us to introduce to a new realist notion of mental depth, one which can only be explained once we attend to the dense patterns of skillful interaction within a rich artefactual and social environment. (shrink)

A Kleene lattice is a distributive lattice equipped with an antitone involution and satisfying the so-called normality condition. These lattices were introduced by J. A. Kalman. We extended this concept also for posets with an antitone involution. In our recent paper (Chajda, Länger and Paseka, in: Proceeding of 2022 IEEE 52th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic, Springer, 2022), we showed how to construct such Kleene lattices or Kleene posets from a given distributive lattice or poset and a fixed element of (...) this lattice or poset by using the so-called twist product construction, respectively. We extend this construction of Kleene lattices and Kleene posets by considering a fixed subset instead of a fixed element. Moreover, we show that in some cases, this generating poset can be embedded into the resulting Kleene poset. We investigate the question when a Kleene poset can be represented by a Kleene poset obtained by the mentioned construction. We show that a direct product of representable Kleene posets is again representable and hence a direct product of finite chains is representable. This does not hold in general for subdirect products, but we show some examples where it holds. We present large classes of representable and non-representable Kleene posets. Finally, we investigate two kinds of extensions of a distributive poset $${\textbf{A}}$$ A, namely its Dedekind-MacNeille completion $${{\,\mathrm{\textbf{DM}}\,}}({\textbf{A}})$$ DM ( A ) and a completion $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) which coincides with $${{\,\mathrm{\textbf{DM}}\,}}({\textbf{A}})$$ DM ( A ) provided $${\textbf{A}}$$ A is finite. In particular we prove that if $${\textbf{A}}$$ A is a Kleene poset then its extension $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) is also a Kleene lattice. If the subset X of principal order ideals of $${\textbf{A}}$$ A is involution-closed and doubly dense in $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) then it generates $$G({\textbf{A}})$$ G ( A ) and it is isomorphic to $${\textbf{A}}$$ A itself. (shrink)

The standard arguments for antirealism are densely abstract, often enigmatic, and thus unpersuasive. The ubiquity and irreducibility of what linguists call generic statements provides a clear argument from a specific and readily understandable case. We think and talk about the world as necessarily subject to generalization. But the chief vehicles of generalization are generic statements, typically of the form “Fs are G,” not universal statements, typically of the form “All Fs are G.” Universal statements themselves are usually intended and understood (...) as though they were only generic. Even if there are universal facts, as Russell held, there are no generic facts. There is no genericity in the world as it is “in-itself.” There is genericity in it only as it is “for-us.”. (shrink)

The chapter deals with the two most distinctive elements of the Introduction of the Naturrecht Feyerabend, namely the notions of an end in itself and autonomy. I shall argue that both are to be interpreted with regard to the aim of explaining the ground of right. In this light, I suggest that the notion of an end in itself counters a voluntarist conception like Achenwall’s with a claim whose necessity has a twofold ground: First, the representation of an (...) unconditional worth emerges as a structural element of the practical use of reason. Second, that representation concerns the necessary self-understanding of moral subjects. Finally, I argue that the other distinctive element, the occurrence of the notion of autonomy, is best understood as an application of that idea to a specific issue, which Kant addresses by showing that freedom is a self-regulating domain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 693 between the world of our sense perception and the world of objects "in and for themselves," had suggested that the failure to appreciate this distinction was a "Grundvorurteil" common to all controversies, and, finally, had argued for the need to distinguish between the self revealed in "inner sense" and the self as it is in itself, unknowable to us. In his extremely valuable article, "Funzioni (...) logiche e categorie in Kant," Silvestro Marcucci retlects on a complex of issues surrounding Kant's claim to have discovered some sort of correspondence between the components and structure of a "table" of logical functions and those of a set of"pure concepts" or "categories" for the objective determination of objects through the contents of human sensibility. Of central concern to Marcucci is the error of supposing that what is in question is either a mere parallel between functions of judgment and categories or some sort of real identity between them. What is in question, according to Marcucci, are three "uses" but only two "levels" (piani): the foundational level is that of an operative.judgmental "functionality" by which the categories and the pure forms of general logic are produced. He argues that Kant is appealing here neither to pure logical form nor to logical "functions" that are in some way identical with the categories of understanding, but rather to functions of judgment more fundamental than either. The final two essays deal with two of Kant's immediate heirs, Reinhold and Fichte. In "The Sun of Enlightenment" Nathan Rotenstreich argues that Reinhold's notion of Enlightenment had an important social aspect, which is concerned with the distribution of enlightenment and is distinguished from his systematic view. Claudio Cesa, in "Die Vieldeutigkeit des Begriffes 'Trieb' von J. G. Fichte" traces the development of this important concept from Reinhold's concept "Kraft," which was itself neither sensible nor intellectual but changed depending upon its objects: sensibility, understanding, or reason. Cesa goes on to outline how Fichte developed a more positive notion including the conception of inner purposiveness expressing itself in humans as a form for realizing the I. JANE KNELI.ER Colorado State University RICHARD AQUILA University of Tennessee George J. Seidel. Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" of z 794: A Commentary on Part I. Purdue University Series in the History of Philosophy. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 126. Cloth, $25.00. Paper, $12.95. The recent revival of interest in Fichte is now well entrenched in North America and has begun to yield a fairly diverse harvest: new translations, articles, monographs, and, predictably, conferences and a scholarly society. With this volume, however, we have the first entry in the "commentary" category. Given its notorious obscurity and disarray, Fichte's corpus--particularly his Jena corpus, which has remained the main focus of attention--would seem to be an apt subject for the genre. The work to which Seidel has 694 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER ~995 devoted his attention--the Foundations of the Entire "Wissenschaft~lehre"--particularly invites this sort of undertaking; it is a text which, by Fichte's own account, was intended to be accompanied by elaborations, illustrations and explanations. Seidel focuses on what is certainly the most interesting and important part of the text, the first three sections (about 3~ pages in all) which together make up "Part I" of this version of the Wissenschaftslehre. It is here that Fichte tries to articulate the basic principles that will govern his entire philosophical investigation. He uses as the lever for his enquiry two fundamental logical dicta--the principles of identity and contradiction--claiming to uncover three fundamental principles which underlie them: the principles of selfpositing, counter-positing and limitation. The body of the Wissenschaflslehreitself is an elaborate dialectical attempt to work out the implications of these basic features of human subjectivity--in particular to use them to give a deduction of the fundamental categories of human experience. There are a number of different approaches that a commentary might take to this dense piece of text. At one extreme stands the example provided by Findlay, whose commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology takes the form of a detailed paraphrase... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Answer to Catherine König-Pralong, Eun-Jeung Lee, and Jyoti MohanSelusi Ambrogio (bio)I want to start my reply by expressing my deep gratitude to the three reviewers who devoted their energy and time to reading and commenting on my book. Their wise comments and criticisms helped in shaping my upcoming research plans, as well as in refining my understanding of this historiographical topic. The eventual readers of this research will certainly (...) benefit from their arguments. I will reply to each review separately, one after the other. Also I could never thank the editors of Philosophy East and West enough for the honor they bestowed on me in hosting this debate.Mapping the ExclusionCatherine König-Pralong provides an extremely knowledgeable and refined review of the book in three sections. The first section is a theoretical evaluation and discussion of the outputs of the monograph through the lens of Reinhard Koselleck's theory of the "temporalization of history" (Verzeitlichung [End Page 230] der Geschichte)1 and her unequalled expertise on the imaginary maps of civilizations. I completely agree with her statement that "from the doxography of the seventeenth century to Brucker's eclecticism, philosophical historiography seemed to be much less attached to historical accuracy than to delimiting regions and identifying peoples and their minds—in a word, to territorializing." The territorialization of philosophy into maps that presented first the lost seeds of divine wisdom (perennialism) and afterwards the exclusive regions of rationality (eclecticism) shows more the Western necessity for a self-definition rather than an effective understanding of the thought of other civilizations. As Metha perfectly expresses it, "Long ago 'Asia' and the 'Orient' became almost existential categories in the European mind."2 It is in this context of 'spatialization of identities' that philosophy became one of the leading characteristics—when not the leading one—of European identity. As the reviewer lucidly remarks, this happened at the expense of philosophy itself. Practical philosophy was put under the superior control of theoretical and logical faculties. It is true that this process was achieved in German pragmatism and Kantian historiography, but this was already evident in Heumann and Brucker's historiographical productions.In her dense analysis, König-Pralong provides bibliographical suggestions that could be integrated within the monograph. I have to admit that, unluckily, I've never come across the two outstanding essays by Wimmer and Rüdiger on Chinese philosophy as a problem of historiography in the eighteenth century, both published in 2017.3 On the contrary, I eagerly read the reviewer's book La colonie philosophique, which was published in March 2019. However, at that time, my monograph was already in the hands of the editor, undergoing the process of double-blind peer review and editing, and hence my argumentation could not benefit from her discussion on temporalization versus historicization and the mapping of civilizations. To quote a sentence from her brilliant book: "L'histoire de la philosophie des Lumières programme en effet une rationalisation de l'histoire et une temporalisation de la philosophie."4 This sentence is a perfect explanation of the "de-territorialization" of India and China from the land of historicity and rationality, namely philosophy. For Brucker, India and China did not possess reliable historical sources, showed childish theoretical capacities, and presented oppressive norms that were not based on moral principles and reasoning.The reviewer agrees with the fact that, at the time of Brucker, we can already find reasons for the exclusion of Asian philosophies, but she contests the thesis that the character of this exclusion was already completely displayed. She suggests that Brucker's Historia critica is mostly a destructive history, showing human mistakes, and that the real targets were Neoplatonism and mystical syncretism, not Asian thought. She writes that "Brucker excluded non-European thoughts from philosophy, but not from the history of philosophy." In my view, Brucker did not insert "barbarian" [End Page 231] and "exotic" civilizations in the history of philosophy, but rather in a critical history—that is, historia critica—of human mistakes. He clearly states that nothing philosophical could be detected in these lands and that his own use of the term "philosophy" about them is... (shrink)

This article focuses on Sartre’s concept of the practicoinert in his major work A Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1. I first show the progression from Sartre’s previous conception of in-itself to his concept of practico-inert. I identify five different layers of the practico-inert: human-made objects, language, ideas, social objects and class being. I show how these practico-inert layers form the possibilities for our subjectivity and how this represents a change from Sartre’s view of in-itself in Being and (...) Nothingness. I then explore the relationship of freedom to the practico-inert and how Sartre argues that the practico-inert places limits on our freedom. Lastly, I argue that despite the pessimistic picture Sartre paints in CDR, the practico-inert has the potential to both limit and enhance our freedom. I appeal to Sartre’s post-CDR essay ‘A Plea for Intellectuals’ to argue that a Sartrean account of progress requires the utilisation of the practico-inert. (shrink)

This article offers the first systematic investigation of the linguistic forms in which Kant expresses his transcendental idealism since Gerold Prauss’ seminal book Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. It is argued that Prauss’ own argument for the claim that ‘in itself’ is an adverbial expression that standardly modifies verbs of philosophical reflection is flawed and that there is hence very poor exegetical evidence for so-called ‘methodological two-aspect’ interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. A comprehensive investigation of Kant’s (...) adverbial uses of ‘in itself’ rather reveals that there are various groups of verbs that ‘in itself’ modifies, which can more or less all be reduced to a standard use in which ‘in itself’ modifies verbs of predicative being such as the copula. It is also discussed how these findings can be accommodated by the two main alternative kinds of interpretations, that is, two-object and ontological two-aspect interpretations. (shrink)

The discipline of Mental Health Counseling, referred to in this essay as Counseling, has no substantial philosophy. In the United States, much of Counseling philosophy is rooted in the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics. However, this is a code of material conduct, not a substantial Counseling philosophy, and by this orientation the distinction between doing and the knowledge that informs activity is not understood important. Counseling theories thereby adhere in a third principle that is left to disseminate in foreign (...) powers. This is to say, Counseling is commonly understood as a name for a loose set of theoretical practices bound by ethical standards, that these practices are reckoned to lay apart from one another while all referencing or otherwise answering to psychology. Due to this deferment, the apparent rise of mental health issues could be attributed to a weakening of intentional focus, since psychology, by its own scientific standard, is less a standard of care than an experimental method oriented in discovering and implementing an objective reality through which it then offers corrective protocols. This essay draws upon philosophical efforts more rigorous than a granting of epistemological deferment to propose that Counseling is a practice unto itself, in-itself, of a true substance, concerned, involved with, and related to psychology but not subject to it. (shrink)