This essay focuses on and attempts to uncover the truly radical character of Nietzsche’s early “philological” work, specifically asking after the benefit he claims the study of classical culture should have for our present, late-modern historical moment. Taking up his study of the Pre-Platonic thinkers in 1873’s Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen , the first section analyzes Nietzsche’s statement that history’s principle task is the uncovering of Persönlichkeiten . I argue that it is not at all the subjective character (...) of a psychologized individual that Nietzsche has in mind, but rather the moment of persönliche Stimmung or ‘being attuned’ to the world, which grounds and gives rise to thinking. In the second section, I show that the phusis or ‘nature’ to which the thinker is exposed in this attunement is comparable to the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian natural forces in tragic poetry, as Nietzsche understands it. This dynamic conception of phusis does not provide a metaphysical substrate or an objectively real ground to which we might return via that Greeks, but is rather essentially phenomenal , i.e. it is nothing other than the movement into and out of appearance, which always entails and requires its reception by the human being to whom it appears. In the final section of the essay, this origin proves for Nietzsche not to be located in a distant past moment. Rather, it is the abyssal origin of the tradition that is always already effective in our present moment, informing our contemporary conceptions of our world and ourselves. (shrink)

In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates distinguishes himself from the natural scientists of his day and indicates that the true philosophical attitude, the love of realhuman wisdom, shares something essential with the mythical attitude. In the following essay, I argue that Socrates criticizes science here for its failure to attend to aporia, to recognize an essentially questionworthy aspect of the world of human experience, an aspect I will refer to as distance. Furthermore, I argue that Socrates aligns his own philosophical activity (...) with myth in its maintenance of this distance. (shrink)

The German-born, Chicago-based Latvian artist Peter Karklins creates small, pencil-and-paper drawings that capture the processes and energies just below the surface of all human life. The complexity of his organic forms is matched by the artist’s meticulous recording of the times and circumstances of the creation of each image on its reverse, providing viewers with added insight into these rich images. In this visually compelling collection, brief essays by an eclectic and distinguished group of scholars deploy a wide range of (...) theoretical approaches—phenomenological, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, iconographical, historical, and musicological—to interpret Karklins’s unusual images and artistic practices. Distinctive in its subject matter and execution, this volume shows Karklins’s work to be a fertile topic for discussion and a vibrant example of intuitive art. The essays in this book also tackle larger questions of philosophy, aesthetic theory, and art history, while offering a fully realized portrait of Karklins as an artist. (shrink)

A bold new conception of Heidegger's model of Destrucktion as a method of interpreting history that enables us to reorient and indeed transform its own most troubling legacies.

_A provocative close reading revealing a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates._.

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of essays on a broad range of themes and figures spanning the entire period extending from the Pre-Socratics to Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic thinkers. Rather than offering synoptic and summary treatments of preestablished positions and themes, these essays engage with the ancient texts directly, focusing attention on concepts that emerge as urgent in the readings themselves and then clarifying those concepts interpretively. Indeed, this is a companion volume that takes a very (...) serious and considered approach to its designated task—accompanying readers as they move through the most crucial passages of the infinitely rich and compelling texts of the ancients. Each essay provides a tutorial in close reading and careful interpretation. Because it offers foundational treatments of the most important works of ancient philosophy and because it, precisely by doing so, arrives at numerous original interpretive insights and suggests new directions for research in ancient philosophy, this volume should be of great value both to students just starting off reading the ancients and to established scholars still fascinated by philosophy's deepest abiding questions. (shrink)

In this essay, I begin by observing that dialectic is the method Aristotle explicitly associates with the activity of philosophizing, both when he introduces dialectic in the Topics and also, with some refinements and developments, in the methodological discussions of later works, the opening pages of the Physics being taken as exemplary. I then interpret these passages, attending very closely to the argument, the imagery, and the etymological resonances of Aristotle’s terminology. This leads me to argue that dialectic, in both (...) its earlier and later forms, is best understood as a proto-phenomenological method, which is to say, a method of clarifying what is already presenting itself in the initial, especially promising, pre-philosophical ‘appearances’ of one’s subject matter, for which Aristotle’s term is ἔνδοξα. Finally, given that this proto-phenomenological dialectic is a method for arriving at an understanding of ‘what is,’ its employment seems to entail a quite radical underlying Aristotelian ontology. That is, Aristotelian thought would seem to be aimed not at objective being, but rather at phenomenal being. (shrink)

In the Cratylus, Socrates seems to present the logos essentially as an always already present yoke binding us to our world. However, this prior and necessary bond does not entail that the world is revealed perfectly and completely in the terms and structures of our human language. Rather, within this bond, the logos opens up a distance between being and appearance, insofar as it points to ›what is‹ as the withdrawn possibility condition for the appearances ordered, gathered and separated according (...) to names. Plato presents the essential ambivalence of logos not only in Socrates’ elenctic arguments, but also in the etymology of Hermes, where the possession of language is a cryptic message indicating to humans a divine wisdom. Thus, as essentially the recipient of such a message, as having been called toward being by the gods, the proper, indeed pious, human response is dialectical question and answer, Socratic searching and investigating together. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt first to clarify what non-metaphysical thinking as a thinking "in the Between" might mean for Heidegger, as presented in his Beiträge zur Philosophie . After determining this as the proper response to the self-concealment Heidegger sees as grounding the appearing of beings, I then attempt to show that the elenctic method of Socrates in Plato's early dialogues exhibits something like the same dynamic. That is, Socrates attempts to situate himself and his interlocutors in a space (...) defined both by the always prior appearance of 'what virtue is' to human beings and by the inevitable obscurity or withdrawal in that very appearing. In so doing, I hope to indicate that something as simple and familiar as Socratic elenctic conversation, although a relic of our tradition, might if properly understood provide us today with one model for how thinking could proceed after Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. (shrink)

This essay offers an assessment of some of the fundamental features and contributions of John Russon’s scholarship on the dialogues of Plato. It focusses on the interpretive method he refers to as “reading as agents of nemesis” and on Russon’s unique emphasis on experience as the ground of philosophical activity in the Platonic corpus. I close by raising two issues that I see as fundamental questions that Russon’s work on Plato leaves unanswered—the difference in ontology, and thus method, between ancient (...) and modern philosophers and the frequently relied upon chronological ordering of Plato’s dialogues. (shrink)

Taking very seriously its anti-Parmenidean character, this essay locates a radically temporalized ontology at the heart of Aristotle’s Physics. We first concentrateon Aristotle’s discussion of kinêsis or ‘change’ as always between opposites, drawing the conclusion that the archai that govern and constitute a change, as opposites, cannot be present in the change itself. Thus, change is what it is by virtue of what is necessarily not present. We then draw the implications of this discussion for chronos or ‘time,’ defined in (...) Book IV of the Physics as “the number of change.” Here, we uncover the ecstatic present moment of natural, changing things, a present constituted by its past and future, which is to say by what is emphatically not present. (shrink)

Situating the Philebus within the greater context of Plato’s late-period reconsideration of his own “theory of Ideas,” this essay offers a coordinated interpretation of two of the dialogue’s central passages—the discussion of the God-Given Method and that of the Fourfold Ontology. These passages prove to be interested not in Ideas apart from their material instantiations, as often seemed the case in the middle period dialogues, but in Ideas as they work on and even in materiality as such, producing an intelligible (...) and even beautiful order in the sensible world. This entails, the essay suggests, something like a shift in the direction of Plato’s philosophical gaze and interest toward material being, and thereby a sort of return home to the embodied human condition. (shrink)

In this paper, I begin with the most basic tenet in Aristotelian metaphysics, namely that ousia or ‘substance’ is ontologically prior to the nine other categories of being, including the pros ti, the condition of being literally ‘toward something’ or what is sometimes called 'relation' or ‘relationality.’ Aristotle repeats this frequently throughout his works and it is, I take it, manifest. However, in the Politics, so I argue here, Aristotle’s dialectical study of common appearances leads him to describe ‘human being’ (...) in a way that runs contrary to this. That is, insofar as the human being is the zoon politikon or ‘political animal,’ it seems to be constituted as the being it is precisely by way of its relatedness to other human beings in the polis. I then try to determine the moment of ‘birth’ for this essentially relational being, and find that it may not be the emergence of the human from the womb, but rather, at least according to this interpretation of the Politics, the moment when we enter into the logos together with others in posing, discussing, debating, and re-posing the abidingly open question of the human Good. (shrink)

_Examines Antigone’s influence on contemporary European, Latin American, and African political activism, arts, and literature._.

This article considers purgation as a possible basis for a theological response to John Caputo's postmodern critique of ethics. It begins by reflecting on purgation and theosis in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa and Origen of Alexandria. It then probes the classical origins of these themes by turning to Sean D. Kirkland's consideration of the aporetic quality of progressions toward the Good in Plato's early dialogues. It emphasises knowledge of the Good as one with its non-knowing and distinguishes (...) this view from Caputo's reading of Hegel. After retrieving some strong metaphysical concepts in light of this reading, it engages Caputo's Against Ethics directly, considering its critique of Aristotle's dependence on contingent events for shaping the ethical life. It situates the purgative struggle for the Good in a distinctly ‘lived’ context through the personhood of Jesus. In orthodox Christology, the Good becomes an immanent ethical agent whose shared ontological horizon with humanity ensures virtue is in nothing other than a life that struggles to reckon with the Good. It concludes with the suggestion that purgation is theosis, and that this entails an attitude of apatheia defined by radical openness to events. (shrink)

Discrepancies between the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) and the adult and pediatric diagnostic guidelines for brain death (BD) (the “Guidelines”) have motivated proposals to revise the UDDA. A revision proposed by Lewis, Bonnie and Pope (the RUDDA), has received particular attention, the three novelties of which would be: (1) to specify the Guidelines as the legally recognized “medical standard,” (2) to exclude hypothalamic function from the category of “brain function,” and (3) to authorize physicians to conduct an apnea (...) test without consent and even over a proxy’s objection. One hundred seven experts in medicine, bioethics, philosophy, and law, spanning a wide variety of perspectives, have come together in agreement that while the UDDA needs revision, the RUDDA is not the way to do it. Specifically, (1) the Guidelines have a non-negligible risk of false-positive error, (2) hypothalamic function is more relevant to the organism as a whole than any brainstem reflex, and (3) the apnea test carries a risk of precipitating BD in a non-BD patient, provides no benefit to the patient, does not reliably accomplish its intended purpose, and is not even absolutely necessary for diagnosing BD according to the internal logic of the Guidelines; it should at the very least require informed consent, as do many procedures that are much more beneficial and less risky. Finally, objections to a neurologic criterion of death are not based only on religious belief or ignorance. People have a right to not have a concept of death that experts vigorously debate imposed upon them against their judgment and conscience; any revision of the UDDA should therefore contain an opt-out clause for those who accept only a circulatory-respiratory criterion. (shrink)

Ian C. Jarvie developed the idea of situational logic in a subtle and effective way. He was also interested in, as well as a contributor to, the institution of academic publication. This chapter provides a situational analysis of an important recurrent pattern in academic publishing, namely, the concentration of work around particular topics, despite the fact that most such work will be unrewarded in the economy of esteem that is meant to be in play.

It is almost universally believed that in quantum theory the two following statements hold: all transformations are achieved by a unitary interaction followed by a von-Neumann measurement; all mixed states are marginals of pure entangled states. I name this doctrine the dogma of purification ontology. The source of the dogma is the original von Neumann axiomatisation of the theory, which largely relies on the Schrődinger equation as a postulate, which holds in a nonrelativistic context, and whose operator version holds only (...) in free quantum field theory, but no longer in the interacting theory. In the present paper I prove that both ontologies of unitarity and state-purity are unfalsifiable, even in principle, and therefore axiomatically spurious. I propose instead a minimal four-postulate axiomatisation: associate a Hilbert space \ to each system \; compose two systems by the tensor product rule \; associate a transformation from system \ to \ to a quantum operation, i.e. to a completely positive trace-non-increasing map between the trace-class operators of \ and \; evaluate all joint probabilities through that of a special type of quantum operation: the state preparation. I then conclude that quantum paradoxes—such as the Schroedinger-cat’s, and, most relevantly, the information paradox—are originated only by the dogma of purification ontology, and they are no longer paradoxes of the theory in the minimal formulation. For the same reason, most interpretations of the theory interpret the same dogma, not the strict theory stripped of the spurious postulates. (shrink)

Chronic pain patients often miss receiving acknowledgement for the multidimensional struggles they face with their specific conditions. People suffering from chronic pain experience a type ofinvisibilitythat is also borne by other chronically ill people and their respective medical conditions. However, chronic pain patients face both passive and active exclusion from social participation in activities like family interactions or workplace inclusion. Although such aspects are discussed in the debates lead by the bio-psycho-social model of pain, there seems to be a lack (...) of a distinct interest in assessing more specifically the social aspects regarding chronic pain. As a result, the social aspects have yet to be taken into a more thorough theoretical consideration of chronic pain and to be practically implemented to help affected patients. By addressing chronic pain patients’ struggle for recognition, this paper attempts to shed light on some of these social aspects. We base this attempt on a theoretical framework that combines patients’ statements with an adaptation of Axel Honneth’s social-philosophical work onrecognition. Thus, this paper tries to make a suggestion on how the bio-psycho-social model of pain can live up to its name by helping to address more adequately some of the more neglected aspects in chronic pain patients’ suffering than has been possible to date. (shrink)

Recent years have been blessed with an abundance of logical systems, arising from a multitude of applications. A logic can be characterised in many different ways. Traditionally, a logic is presented via the following three components: 1. an intuitive non-formal motivation, perhaps tie it in to some application area 2. a semantical interpretation 3. a proof theoretical formulation. There are several types of proof theoretical methodologies, Hilbert style, Gentzen style, goal directed style, labelled deductive system style, and so on. The (...) tableau methodology, invented in the 1950s by Beth and Hintikka and later per fected by Smullyan and Fitting, is today one of the most popular, since it appears to bring together the proof-theoretical and the semantical approaches to the pre of a logical system and is also very intuitive. In many universities it is sentation the style first taught to students. Recently interest in tableaux has become more widespread and a community crystallised around the subject. An annual tableaux conference is being held and proceedings are published. The present volume is a Handbook a/Tableaux pre senting to the community a wide coverage of tableaux systems for a variety of logics. It is written by active members of the community and brings the reader up to frontline research. It will be of interest to any formal logician from any area. (shrink)

Stratified properties such as ‘happy unhappiness’, ‘ungrounded ground’, ‘fortunate misfortune’, and evidently ‘true falsity’ may generate dialetheias (true contradictions). The aim of the article is to show that if this is the case, then we will have a special, conjunctive, kind of dialetheia: a true state description of the form ‘Fa and not Fa’ (for some property F and object a), wherein the two conjuncts, separately taken, are to be held untrue. The particular focus of the article is on happy (...) unhappiness: people suffering from (or enjoying) happy unhappiness (if there is some situation or state of mind of this kind) cannot be truly said ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’, but we can say they are both. In the first section three cases of conjunctive stratification are presented; in the second section the logic of stratified contradictions is explored. The last section focuses on eudemonistic ascriptions: stated that a is happy to be unhappy (or unhappy to be happy), should we say a is happy? unhappy? both? neither? (shrink)

Contemporary Continental Philosophy steps back from current debates comparing Continental and analytic philosophy and carefully, yet critically outlines the tradition’s main philosophical views on epistemology and ontology. Forgoing obscure paraphrases, D’Amico provides a detailed, clear account and assessment of the tradition from its founding by Husserl and Heidegger to its challenge by Derrida and Foucault. Though intended as a survey of this tradition throughout the twentieth century, this study’s focus is on the philosophical problems which gave it birth and even (...) now continue to shape it.The book reexamines Husserl as an early critic of epistemological naturalism whose grasp of the philosophical importance of the theory of meaning was largely ignored. Heidegger’s contrasting effort to revive ontology is examined in terms of his distinction between ontic and ontological questions. In contrast with many earlier studies, the author outlines confusions engendered by the misappropriation of the distinct philosophical agendas of Husserl and Heidegger by such famous figures as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. The book is also original in its emphasis on how social externalism in epistemology, inspired by Karl Mannheim, influenced this tradition’s structuralist and Marxist phases. The philosophical defenses of a theory of interpretation by Gadamer and Habermas are closely examined and assessed and the study concludes with a a probing yet balanced account of Foucault and Derrida as critics of philosophical autonomy. The book concludes by reassessing this century-long divide between the analytic and Continental traditions and its implication for the future of philosophy. (shrink)

We investigate computability theoretic and descriptive set theoretic contents of various kinds of analytic choice principles by performing a detailed analysis of the Medvedev lattice of $\Sigma ^1_1$ -closed sets. Among others, we solve an open problem on the Weihrauch degree of the parallelization of the $\Sigma ^1_1$ -choice principle on the integers. Harrington’s unpublished result on a jump hierarchy along a pseudo-well-ordering plays a key role in solving this problem.

Human aesthetic experiences are pervasive; they are triggered by faces, art, natural scenery, foods, ideas, theories, and decision-making situations, among many sources, and seem to be a distinctive trait of our species. Our moral sense, understood as our capacity to judge events, actions, or people as good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, also seems to be an exclusively human endowment (Ayala 2010). As part of the scientific efforts to characterize the biological foundations of our human uniqueness, recently there has been (...) interest in the brain’s underpinnings of aesthetic reactions to art on the one hand, and in the neural correlates of moral judgment and decision-making on the other (Greene and Paxton .. (shrink)

In his Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (2017) Philip Goff defends his anti-physicalist argument against what he calls the "Dual Carving" objection—the idea that two representations of the very same fact could both be conceptually independent and "transparent," that is, revealing of the essences of the entities in question. His defense invokes a thesis he calls "Minimal Rationalism." I explore exactly how Minimal Rationalism is supposed to turn aside the objection and argue that the formulation of Minimal Rationalism on offer is (...) ambiguous between stronger and weaker readings. Goff needs the stronger reading to use it in defense of his argument, but only the weaker reading is warranted by the considerations he brings to bear in favor of his rationalism. His minimal rationalism is, in sum, insufficiently minimal. The upshot is not only that Goff is deprived of a way of turning back an important objection to his case against physicalism; we also gain a better sense of what kind of rationalist thesis is properly invoked in metaphysics. (shrink)