In this paper we critically examine and seek to extend Philip Kitcher’s Ethical Project to weave together a distinctive naturalistic conception of how ethics came to occupy the place it does in our lives and how the existing ethical project should be revised and extended into the future. Although we endorse his insight that ethical progress is better conceived of as the improvement of an existing state than an incremental approach towards a fixed endpoint, we nonetheless go on to argue (...) that the metaethical apparatus Kitcher constructs around this creative metaethical proposal simply cannot do the work that he demands of it. The prospect of fundamental conflict between different functions of the ethical project requires Kitcher to appeal to a particular normative stance in order to judge specific changes in the ethical project to be genuinely progressive, and we argue that the virtues of continuity and coherence to which he appeals can only specify rather than justify the normative stance he favors. We conclude by suggesting an alternative approach for ethical naturalists that seems to us ultimately more promising than Kitcher’s own. (shrink)

The dissertation deals with the questions surrounding the legal, ethical and strategic aspects of armed drones in warfare. This is a vast and complex field, however, one where there remains more conflict and debate than actual consensus. -/- One of the many themes addressed during the course of this research was an examination of the evolution of modern asymmetric transnational armed conflict. It is the opinion of the author that this phenomenon represents a “grey-zone”; an entirely new paradigm of warfare. (...) International terrorism has not been dealt with in a cohesive fashion. Any international prosecution of terrorism which has been conducted has been either “sectoral” adopting a piecemeal typological approach or has been carried out at the domestic level. -/- A novel approach to the problem, of sub-national actors with transnational reach, was proposed, by attributing certain groups with a new legal personality, that of “Stateless International Entities”, or “SIEs”. Those groups who possess, for all intents and purposes, the same attributes as those of States, could then be judged for their behavior before an international tribunal. Other important topics addressed in this research include an examination of important case law, targeted killing, autonomy, preemption versus prevention, imminence versus intent, the find, fix and finish paradigm, the impact of the media, and the role of the CIA, and finally, the flawed reasoning which adopts technology as a form of strategy. (shrink)

In our target article, we argued that there is a profound functional discontinuity between the cognitive abilities of modern humans and those of all other extant species. Unsurprisingly, our hypothesis elicited a wide range of responses from commentators. After responding to the commentaries, we conclude that our hypothesis lies closer to Darwin's views on the matter than to those of many of our contemporaries.

If embodied models no longer address the symbol grounding problem and a conceptual system can step in and resolve categorizations when embodied simulations fail, then perhaps the next step in theory-building is to isolate the unique contributions of embodied simulation. What is a disembodied conceptual system incapable of doing with respect to semantic processing or the categorization of smiles?

Ex 5,22-6.1 presents Moses appealing to the Lord and God's answer to the prophet. Moses' prayer is configured as a cry of despair stemming from a bewilderment of his vocation as a promoter of liberty, subdued by human conditions. The prophet of failure is paradoxical, since it reveals both as a personal and divine failure. For these reasons, Moses has faith put to the test. His reaction shown by a fiery prayer and full of fervor. God responds with the renewal (...) of the promise of liberation. (shrink)

La ciencia moderna ha reducido el estudio de la realidad a una sola postura mostrando una tendencia reductiva de lo real solamente exclusiva al hecho contrastable de la experiencia sensible. La propuesta es mostrar una contraparte desde una perspectiva filosófica. La filosofía contemporánea, especialmente el denominado nuevo realismo ha comenzado a problematizar esta visión única de lo real. La ontología del siglo XXI permite revalorar las nociones filosóficas de ser, existencia, realidad y cuerpo. Este artículo cuestiona críticamente los resultados científicos (...) alcanzados por una explicación de la filosofía moderna sobre el cuerpo. Una reflexión inspirada en el Cur Deus Homo de San Anselmo de Canterbury, permitirá esbozar esta alternativa crítica al entendido moderno sobre el origen de la conciencia y su corporalidad. La novedad de este pensamiento queda circunscrito al entendido ontológico medieval sobre la creatio ex nihilo, explicación que no recurre por necesidad a un reducto de lo real con sus características espacio-temporales, pues el fundamento del ser viene dado por una exterioridad de un poder creador divino, que si bien, puede no ser aceptado del todo por la filosofía y ciencia contemporánea, el nuevo realismo se ha preocupado por volver a problematizar la cuestión de Dios. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Franco-Ferraz, Theism and the Theatre of the Mind MiguelA. Badia-Cabrera In "Theatre andReligiousHypothesis,"1 MariaFranco-Ferraz offersan eloquent and reasoned argument in favour ofa fresh and different sort of hermeneutic approach to the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as a suitable means to disentangle the web of proverbially difficult philosophical questions posed by Hume in that work. In order to arrive at a coherent understanding ofthe Dialogues as a whole and (...) perhaps also to calm the sense of bafflement which the confrontation with this enigmatical text always provokes, many Hume scholars have taken as a point of departure and clue for unravelling it either one or two of Hume's principal philosophical doctrines or a presumedly unitary view of Hume's philosophy in general. Equipped with one or both of these instruments, they proceed to dissect the arguments of the Dialogues with the intention of determining what Hume's position really is. This task also almost invariably ends by assigning the victory in the dialectical struggle and the representation of the author's 'true' opinions to the character (sometimes even more than one) in whom they are more or less able to find the purest expression ofwhat theyhave previously decided is the kernel oressence ofHume's philosophy. Franco-Ferraz has taken a very different route. For her the key point of the Dialogues lies in the fictional setting in which the theological discussion takes place. She goes on to show that the literary form of the Dialogues is intrinsically connected with its philosophical content so as to serve to elucidate the precise nature ofthe conclusion which is established at the end, in Part XII. In other words, the theatrical structure facilitates a more profound and detailed investigation ofthe problems dealing with the existence and nature of God. In fact, Hume offers no final solutions to these problems and thereby none ofthe characters ofthe Dialogues can properly be said to present the victorious point of view or the one counting with the complete authority ofthe author ofthe play: The most important aspect of this text is the interaction between the different characters' points of view, which, by being in confrontation with each other, undergo reciprocal transformations. (Franco-Ferraz, 228) Volume XVI Number 2 131 MIGUEL A. BADÍA-CABRERA With this one cannot but agree. In addition she clinches her case by 'ai-trull·/ and convincingly showing that there is a profound relation between this theatrical form and some substantive philosophical theses which Hume developed in the Treatise, the first Enquiry, and The Natural History ofReligion. In reality, the theatre metaphor clarifies the sense ofthose philosophical doctrines, which in turn throw light on and corroborate her main contention about the conclusion of the Dialogues. For according to her, any definitive solution to the problems ofnatural theology is not presented at the end by any ofthe characters on behalfofa God-like author (Dieu auteur), and furthermore this deus ex machina solution would conflict especially with Hume's conception of the mind as being une pièce sans théâtre, a drama without a stage (Franco-Ferraz, 234). Such is the substance ofher thesis, if I have succeeded in giving a fairrepresentationofit. I thinkthatherinterpretation providesa novel outlook and one fruitful means ofaccess to an adequate understanding of the Dialogues. But I am quite hesitant with some particular and important aspects ofher reading of that text for the 'inconveniences', in Philo's sense ofthe word, which seem to follow from it, and alsohave a few difficulties in assessing the exact import of one or two of her central claims due to the somewhat vague manner in which, I think, these are formulated. First, at the verybeginningofher paper, Franco-Ferraz quotes the followingpassagefromPartIIIoftheDialoguesin which Demeaobjects to Cleanthes' claim, defended by two very ingenious analogies, that an orderly world like a coherent, articulate speech will always be taken as a sign ofintelligent design: When I read a volume, I enter into the mind and intention of the author: I become him, in a manner, for the instant; and have an immediate feeling and conception of those ideas, which revolved in his imagination, while employed in that composition. (D 155-56) I take issue with... (shrink)

One of the ironies of our time is the sparsity of useful analytic tools for understanding change and development within technology itself. For all the diatribes about the disastrous effects of technology on modern life, for all the equally uncritical paeans to technology as the panacea for human ills, the vociferous pro- and anti-technology movements have failed to illuminate the nature of technology. On a more scholarly level, in the midst of claims by Marxists and non-Marxists alike about the technological (...) underpinnings of the major social and economic changes of the last couple of centuries, and despite advice given to government and industry about managing science and technology by a small army of consultants and policy analysts, technology itself remains locked inside an impenetrable black box, a deus ex machina to be invoked when all other explanations of puzzling social and economic pheoomena fail. The discipline that has probably done most to penetrate that black box in recent years by studying the 1 internal development of technology is history. Historians of technology and certain economic historians have carried out careful and detailed studies on the genesis and impact of technological innovations, and the structu-re of the social systems associated with those innovations. Within the past few decades tentative consensus about the periodization and the major traditions within the history of technology has begun to emerge, at least as far as Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century are concerned. (shrink)

This paper is a rejoinder to Robert Almeder's "On Reincarnation: A Reply to Hales". I argue that even if we stipulate the case studies of the reincarnationists to be good data, the explanatory hypothesis of reincarnation is a deus ex machina. Without a comprehensive scientific or philosophical theory of the mind that embeds the reincarnation hypothesis, the view should not be taken seriously. The fact that reincarnation is the first explanation of the case studies that comes to mind says (...) more about us and our culture than it does about which explanations are the most probable ones. (shrink)

In The Art of Living, Alexander Nehamas argues that Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault undertook a particularist art of living—a unique project of self‐construction. In so doing, argues Nehamas, they based their lives on the life of Socrates, that quintessentially ironic character. To this list of self‐fashioning philosophers, I add Fernando Pessoa, the twentieth‐century Portuguese writer. I argue that Pessoa, via the writings of his heteronyms, also took Socrates as the model for constructing a self. Moreover, Pessoa (...) employed all three kinds of irony that Nehamas argues is present in Plato’s writing, and did so not just to investigate the nature of the self, but to question its very existence. This is Pessoa’s formulation of the problem of the self. But Pessoa also borrowed from Nietzsche’s views on multiplicity, redeploying them in order to fabricate multiple selves. Pessoa’s solution to the problem of the self thus consists in the heteronymic device, which acts as a deus ex machina, unifying the disparate fictional voices and establishing Pessoa as a new, authentic self. Accordingly, Pessoa borrows from both Platonism and anti‐Platonism, distinguishing himself from both, so as to contrive—and simultaneously exemplify—an original art of living. (shrink)

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between (...) man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of PhilosophyDavid EngelAndrea Wilson Nightingale. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiv + 222 pp. Cloth, $57.95.The old saw "Everybody's a comedian" has its counterpart in contemporary academia: "Everybody's a philosopher." Biologists. Psychologists. Linguists. Physicists. Anthropologists. Historians. Even jurists. Many scholars of comparative literature, English, and history can be heard describing what they (...) do, not as literary criticism or history, but as "philosophy." One may even wonder whether we need philosophy departments anymore. Philosophy's private domain has shrunk from what it was under Aristotle (just about every subject short of wagon repair) to its present emaciated condition: it can claim almost nothing for itself alone. The other disciplines have encroached upon it bit by bit. This book is a timely contribution to an important current issue: what is philosophy, [End Page 316] and what does it have to offer? Nightingale argues that Plato faced similar questions. Rhetoricians, tragedians, and comedians all peddled what they had to say as wise (sophon), while dismissing other claims and pursuits as foolishness or worse. Against them and their respective discourses Plato proposed a new candidate: philosophia.Prior to Plato, philosophia meant just "intellectual cultivation." According to Nightingale, it was Plato who made it into a full-blown discipline--or, as she says, invented the discourse. As a way of privileging philosophia (in Plato's new sense of the word) above rival discourses, he parodied them. Nightingale's claims about the parody of other genres and Plato's privileging of philosophia are novel, insightful, and very persuasive. Perhaps it is overstatement to credit Plato with inventing philosophy, but that hardly diminishes the overall impression of this fine book's main arguments.Among Plato's contemporaries, the foremost challenger for the title "practitioner (and teacher) of sophia" was Isocrates. Nightingale uses his Antidosis to show that (1) Isocrates wanted to claim philosophia for himself, and (2) his version of philosophia was significantly different from Plato's. She concludes that the term was still a subject of genuine contention: its meaning mattered to both Plato and Isocrates. As Isocrates advocates rhetorike as philosophia, Plato argues that philosophy is both different from rhetoric and better than rhetoric. Rhetoric aims, ultimately, at public utility as the public perceives that utility, and rhetoric's value is gauged only by the political influence of those who practice it. Plato rejects that entire value system. At bottom it is also the value system of the other genres which, as Nightingale persuasively shows, Plato also parodies.Plato's "parody" (Nightingale's use of the word is broad, but unexceptionable) is "a device for defining and privileging his own pursuits" (59). Moving from rhetoric to tragedy, she considers Gorgias' echoes of Euripides' Antiope. Plato's parody of tragedy subtly criticizes tragedy qua discourse. The tragedian is "ignorant of truth... imitating appearances... gratifying the multitude... fostering the inferior part of the soul," that is, he is precisely what the philosopher is not (67). Socrates and Callicles evoke Euripidean characters: respectively, Amphion (who advocates a private life devoted to the liberal arts) and Zethus (who argues for a life of political activity) (69-70). Plato's unambiguous allusions to Antiope juxtapose not only Socrates and Callicles (and, through them, two irreconcilable views of what philosophy is) but also the tragic hero and the philosophical one (72-73). Plato's "life of the mind for its own sake" orientation wins, ultimately, in both comparisons. Furthermore, just as Amphion's arguments fail to persuade Zethus in Antiope but are eventually vindicated by Hermes' appearance at the play's conclusion, so too Socrates' arguments fail to convince Callicles, and Gorgias' concluding underworld myth parallels Antiope's deus ex machina: affirmation that the view which had been rejected (Amphion's and Socrates') was right, after all (87-88). [End Page 317]Nightingale then examines encomium. Publicly performed epitaphioi and their fictive counterparts (e.g., Menexenus) influenced one another, and the techniques of the encomium, although salient in that genre, occurred elsewhere, including deliberative and forensic situations. In her view, Plato's concern is not narrowly with encomium... (shrink)

In this "concise philosophy of the machine," Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of (...) films, literature, and performance--from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's "Fragment on Machines" to the deus ex machina of Greek drama--Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Suffering, Victims, and Poetic Inspiration Raymund Schwager University ofInnsbruck Poetic inspiration has something to do with the divine. The Greek tragedies are classic examples of that. The poets regarded themselves as inspired by the divine Muses, and in their works the gods are quite naturally present in the lives of human beings. Sometimes the gods treat them in a friendly way, sometimes they spur on conflicts or even inspire (...) human beings to take revenge upon one another. At the end of some tragedies the gods appear as a deus ex machina who brings everything to resolution, or at least pretends to do so. Nevertheless, it is not these various gods, but rather human beings themselves, suffering human beings more precisely, who are at the center of this dramatic event inspired by the divine Muses. Human beings suffer because they come into conflict with each other and fall victim to the vengeful and violent acts of others. In the Greek tragedies human beings do not act in a calm and sensible way. Rather, they are in bondage to their passions, and through these passions the gods speak to them. While performing a sacrifice of purification and thanksgiving, Heracles flies into a rage inspired by several of the goddesses and slaughters his own children. In a Dionysian frenzy Agaue and her companions tear apart her own son. Orestes, believing himself to be obeying a command of Apollo, kills his mother, who had committed adultery and murdered her own husband. And above all, the great, genocidal war of Troy did not so much originate in the longing of Paris for Helen, as in a dispute between the gods. In every respect human beings seem to be more the victims of the gods than themselves wicked persons who commit evil deeds—and they are above all the ones who suffer the most. Helen, the "cause" of the massive slaughter of the Trojan war, is exclusively depicted by Euripides in the role of one who suffers greatly, indeed even beyond the bounds ofhuman endurance. Even Medea, who goes so far as to kill her own children, is not 64Raymund Schwager depicted by the same poet as a moral monster, but as a woman overwhelmed by boundless grief. The gods thus appear in a somewhat murky light: they are indispensable to the poets' purpose yet at the same time severely criticized. For Euripides they are often much worse than human beings. In his Heracles, he goes so far in his irony as to depict the goddess of vengeance herself criticizing Hera, who makes Heracles suffer in order to quench her thirst for revenge which was caused by the unfaithfulness of her husband Zeus. Euripides considers all these stories of gods to be humanly-contrived fables. Nevertheless, he also believes that there can be no drama without the gods. How could the mysterious depths of human passions be understood without the gods? If the poet had no one to indict except other human beings, his works would quickly become nothing but tepid moral tracts. The gods are indispensable and yet they must be criticized: the poetic inspiration in the Greek tragedies thrives on ambiguity. Suffering humanity is confronted with an incomprehensible fate which only the poet's ambiguous parables and images are able to depict. The great suffering figures in the tragedies of Euripides find their echo in another tradition's suffering figure, whose fate is also depicted in poetic words. A suffering figure who also both listens to and argues with his God: Job. A misfortune has befallen Job, which he simply cannot understand. And while even his alleged friends torment him, he suffers even more from his God. Job feels persecuted by God, tormented and driven to despair. Job would like to argue with God and even take him to court. But he cannot do so. He experiences God as an invisible enemy who is present everywhere. Nevertheless, he turns to this same God in his deepest distress and is confident of finding a savior in him. The God of Job is contradictory: this is a God on whom Job can rely but with whom he must also struggle. However, it is just this contradiction... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Erictho and Demogorgon: Poetry against Metaphysics DAVID QUINT Epic without the gods? The Roman poet Lucan (39–65 ce) created a secular counter-epic inside classical epic, removing the genre’s usual pantheon of Olympian deities and replacing them with Fortune. His Bellum civile (titled De bello civili in manuscripts, alternately titled Pharsalia) a poem about the conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey, thereby delegitimizes the emperors who succeeded the dying Roman (...) republic, including Nero, the reigning emperor of Lucan’s day.1 They are not part of a divine plan: no such plan has ever existed. In an epic where the gods are silent or refuse to speak, Pompey’s son, Sextus, anxious to know the future, has to seek other means. In Book 6, he consults the Thessalian witch Erictho about the outcome of the approaching battle in Pharsalia. She reanimates the corpse of a dead soldier on Pompey’s republican side and makes it talk (BC 6.419–830).2 Lucan’s scene of necromancy gave birth to a major antimetaphysical strain in the European literary tradition. Among others, Dante, Cervantes, Marlowe, Spenser, Goethe, and Shelley confronted this episode of the Pharsalia and pondered its implications. Erictho’s magic is a figure for poetic making itself. It turns the supernatural into theater— the divine machinery of epic exposed as a deus ex machina— and these authors’ responses to Erictho will shift from epic into dramatic forms. In place of the gods, in place of the epic visit to the underworld, particularly in place of and in response to Aeneas’s trip to the realm of the dead arion 28.2 fall 2020 2 erictho and demogorgon in the corresponding Book 6 of the Aeneid, Lucan presents Erictho’s macabre performance: human witchcraft and intimations of an alternate, eerie numen residing in the earth, a force of nature. Subsequent readers would give this latter power a name: Demogorgon.3 Lucan links republicanism and freedom to a kind of atheism and to historical contingency. He unmasks and strips the props of religion from Caesarism and monarchy. (In vain for the poet: Lucan was forced to commit suicide in 65 ce, after he was implicated in the failed Pisonian conspiracy against Nero.) Lucan desacralizes poetry itself, which here confesses its limits, which are the limits of human mortality, even as Erictho seems, however briefly, to overcome them. No, poetry cannot literally raise the dead: it is a magic trick that makes the words on the page form into images, take life, and speak to us. Lucan answers the criticisms the philosopher and theologian make to poetry by openly acknowledging the false bottom of the hat from which poetry pulls its rabbits. It has no access to a real bottom, an underworld beyond death; it is all representation.4 The philosopher and the theologian may be poets no less than he is, but they do not want to know it, too busy, perhaps, in supporting tyranny over human minds and bodies. Plato and Augustine are two such critics on either historical side of Lucan, and they help us to understand the stakes of the Roman poet’s project. Both were dissatisfied with literature and they wanted to be something more than the great rhetoricians that they were. In the Symposium, Plato demystifies the archetypal myth of poetry, the singing of Orpheus that sought to bring Eurydice back from death: the gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed and showed him the mere shadow [eidolon] of the woman he had come to seek: Eurydice herself they would not let him take, because he seemed, like the mere minstrel that he was, to be a lukewarm lover, lacking the courage to die as Alcestis died for love, and choosing rather to scheme his way, living, into Hades. And it was for this that the gods doomed him, and doomed him justly, David Quint 3 to meet his death at the hands of women. (179d)5 Behind the words of his shallowly sentimental speaker Phaedrus we can detect Plato’s familiar hostility to poetry, his objection in Book 10 of the Republic that the poet merely imitates the appearances of things and is... (shrink)

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS AN EXPLICATION OF THE FOLLOWING: (1) PEIRCE’S USAGE OF THE TERM "MIRACLE"; (2) HIS CRITIQUE OF HUME AND MILL WITH RESPECT TO PROBABILITY AND INDUCTION; (3) HIS CONCLUSION THAT SCIENCE CAN NEITHER DENY NOR AFFIRM MIRACLES, AND (4) HIS CLAIM THAT MIRACLES ARE INTRINSIC ELEMENTS OF A GENUINE RELIGION. THE CONCLUSION IS THAT IN (4) "MIRACLES" REFERS NOT TO INTERFERENCE IN NATURE BY A "DEUS EX MACHINA" BUT TO THE APPEARANCE OF CREATIVE EVENTS AND GENIUSES IN (...) HISTORY DUE TO THE AGAPEISTIC ACTIVITY OF GOD. THIS NEED NOT CONFLICT WITH THE WELL-ESTABLISHED THOUGH PROVISIONAL LAWS OF SCIENCE. (shrink)

One of the fundamental enigmas of our existence, and for that matter, God's existence, is the act of creation. Has the cosmos been created ex nihilo or was it an intelligent design by God? Does God, having created the world, let it evolve and develop on its own, subject to the rules of evolution and chance; or does God intervene in every step of evolution in a deus ex machina manner? What is the role of man in creation? Is (...) it as central as existentialism and quantum mechanics assure us: that without human consciousness interacting with energy-matter, there would not be any objects and life forms? Is man the crown of creation permanently, or once evolution forms a more effective connecting agent between spirit and energy-matter, will man be relegated to the world of fossils? The book concludes with a thorough examination of human norms, values and morals. As such, this book constitutes a comprehensive treatise on the genesis of the world, the birth of God, and the role of man. (shrink)

L’alliance est la grammaire principale du monde. Phénomène commun, local et universel, le plus pauvre et le plus noble. Elle se trouve cependant aujourd’hui plus que jamais contrariée. Le monde est en dés-alliance sur le plan social, politique, anthropologique, écologique, techno-scientifique, métaphysique. Les demandes répétées de « recréer du lien » en corroborent le fait plus qu’elles n’en dessinent une alternative : affranchies de tout « principe », elles échouent à leur tour sur les rives du nihilisme. C’est que le (...) principe est tombé dans l’oubli. Ses titres ont été, dès la fin du xixe siècle et tout au long du xxe siècle, durement contestés et ses droits confisqués. Nombre de succédanés se sont imposés, avec leurs antinomies et leurs tragédies humaines : Raison suffisante, Progrès, Destin, Cause, État. Le principe ainsi reclassé, déclassé, fut biffé derechef au titre de ce qui lui fut imputé : voracité de l’Un, maîtrise formelle de l’universalité, logique de sécurisation historique. Reconsidérer le principe autrement, i.e. comme alliance, tel est l’enjeu phénoménologique du présent ouvrage : loin de tout Deus ex machina, elle est le jeu de la différence initiatrice, de la pluralité unitaire, de la donation herméneutique. Ainsi, au principe, l’alliance fait être et fait temps. Elle est notre première promesse. (shrink)

Es ist vermutlich kein Zufall, dass zu den ersten Maschinen, mit denen Menschen interagierten, auch Illusionsmaschinen gehörten. Die Theater im antiken Griechenland besaßen kranartige Vorrichtungen, die es erlaubten, Schauspieler überraschend in die Bühnenhandlung hineinschweben und eingreifen zu lassen, Götter mimend, die das Geschehen nach ihren Wünschen lenken konnten. Bekannt ist diese Theatertechnik als ›Deus ex machina‹.

Avatar, le film de James Cameron (2009), aura ete un succes commercial d'une ampleur exceptionnelle, a considerer davantage comme le symptome d'une certaine societe en crise spirituelle, que comme l'expression personnelle d'un createur, fut-il exceptionnel. Sur cette base, Frank Pierobon, au terme d'une deconstruction tres poussee, en extrait l'embleme de notre postmodernite finissante: un Deus ex Fantasma, soit une derisoire redemption par le reve, faute de tout autre salut.

This paper examines the influence of Euripides on Plato, reflecting the intertextuality between Euripides‘ Antiope und Plato’s Gorgias (esp. the agon between Zethos and Amphion and the agon between Callicles and Socrates, then the deus ex machina in the Antiope and the myth of the afterlife in the Gorgias). It is argued that the final part of the Gorgias is a serious philosophical answer to the tragic aporias, which Euripides dramatically staged in his Antiope (that is the aporia of (...) supposed and real kinship as well as the aporia of traditional revenge ethics) and which the viewer should answer for himself according to the conception of Euripidean tragedy. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently begun to write about fashion in dress. They acknowledge that philosophy traditionally ignored the subject altogether or else disparaged fashion. They do not observe that those past philosophers who slighted fashion characterized it as mass imitativeness; but in fact that one-sided characterization is what permitted commentators to overlook innovativeness in fashion. Indeed the figure of the foreigner that recurs in philosophical remarks about fashion only makes sense given a reading of fashion as imitative uniformity. The foreigner becomes (...) a deus ex machina accounting for the newness in fashion that the imitative model renders otherwise inexplicable. (shrink)

Sophokles' Philoktetes is a response to the oligarchic takeover and restoration of democracy in Athens in 411–10 BC. The play explores the grounds, strengths, and weaknesses of democratic discourse, and measures it against alternatives. The final agon between Neoptolemos and Philoktetes defines a model of legitimate persuasion that can replace Odysseus' sophistic and oligarchic modes of interacting with others. The deus ex machina, in turn, brings in an authoritative aristocratic discourse that is superior even to democratic deliberation.

David Pearce has described a proposal which outlines an explanation space within which the question "Why is there something instead of nothing? " can be given a legitimate answer. This is how he describes his endeavour, and he makes it clear that his ideas are purely speculative. He does not have a straightforward answer to the question, nor even a theory. All that he has is a sketch of what a theory which "explains existence" might be like, and how it (...) might arrive at its conclusions. While I must admit that I find his sketch compelling in many ways, there are problems and paradoxes lurking in the very idea that one could explain why the world exists. In the case of Pearce 's proposal, the explanation takes the form of showing that there is nothing to explain. As such, it is similar to necessitarian responses to the problem, which claim that there is no alternative to the existence of the world since something - God, for example - exists as a matter of logical necessity. Pearce does not exactly endorse a traditional necessitarian theory, but he comes awfully close. In my opinion, there is a recognition of balance and proportion in his thesis which makes his thesis more appealing than any reliance upon a deus-ex-machina. (shrink)

Like a great work of literary art, which indeed it is, Alexis de Tocqueville's extraordinary analysis of American society grows more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, (...) like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith's illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view was Heraclitean, the specter of continual change and ceaseless transformation dominating his thought. Surely such a perspective, which antedates both Darwin and Marx, is more appropriate for sociologists in a revolutionary age than elegantly constructed theories of social equilibrium which treat change as a special problem or a deus ex machina. (shrink)

At the very end of Plato's Symposium our narrator awakes to find Socrates still hard at it, and making Agathon and Aristophanes agree that the composition of tragedy and comedy is really one and the same thing:… προсαναγκάӡειν τὸν Σωκράτη ὁμολογεῖν αὐτοὺс τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀνδρὸс εἷναι κωμωιδίαν καὶ τραγωιδίαν ἐπἰсταϲθαι ποιεῖν, καὶ τὸν τέχνηι τραγωιδοποιὸν ὄντα καὶ κωμωιδοποιὸν εἷναι. ταῦτα δὴ ἀναγκαӡομένουϲ αὐτοὺϲ … the two playwrights succumb to sleep, leaving Socrates triumphant. Socrates had to ‘force’ his case; and it (...) is a fact that, though we know of well over 100 fifth-century playwrights, we do not know of a single one who produced both tragedy and comedy. In a famous fragment the comedian Antiphanes complains that the tragedians have an easy time—familiar stories, the deus ex machina etc.—ἡμῖν δὲ ταῦτ' οὐκ ἔсτιν … It is a matter of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Furthermore, there was an entire separate genre besides tragedy and comedy. As Demetrius put it, τραγωιδία χάριταϲ μὲν παραλαμβάνει ἐν πολλοῖϲ, ὁ δὲ γέλωϲ ἐχθρὸϲ τραγωιδίαϲ· οὐδὲ γὰρ ἐπινοήϲειεν ἄν τιϲ τραγωιδίαν παίӡουϲαν, ἐπεὶ ϲάτυρον γράψει ἀντὶ τραγωιδίαϲ. (shrink)

THE FATES of perceiving and remembering have been inextricably intertwined in Western philosophy and psychology. It has been asserted from Plato’s Theaetetus onwards that there can be no remembering without perceiving and, though much less frequently, no perceiving without remembering of some sort. Just how either of these forms of interdependency occurs, however, has given rise to continual controversy. Little discernible progress has been made since Plato first proposed, in the Theaetetus, a model of the mind as an aviary in (...) which individual memories wait like captive birds to be plucked from the cage of recollection in order to aid in the identification of present perceptions. The elaborate and ingenious character of this memory machine—elaborate and ingenious in comparison with the simpler model of the wax tablet also proposed in the Theaetetus—was to prove prophetic, since later treatments of perception often invoke memory as a deus ex machina brought in to resolve ambiguities and perplexities of perceptual experience. (shrink)

The global reality of suffering and death has always demanded an authentic theological response and impelled debate concerning Gods relationship to suffering, as well as the conceivability of the suffering of God. The scope and impact of this suffering in the last century have driven this debate to an acute pitch, demanding to know how one can speak rightly of God in view of the suffering that is inherent and inflicted in the cosmos. While in former ages, some looked to (...) an omnipotent and impassible deus ex machina in answer to this question, many contemporary theologians have revised their understanding of God in relation to the world. With these theologians, Gloria Schaab proposes that a viable response to cosmic suffering is the recognition that the triune Christian God participates in the very sufferings of the cosmos itself. She sets her argument within theology and science dialogue and specifically within the work of scientist-theologian Arthur Peacocke. Informed by the understandings of evolutionary science, grounded within a panentheistic paradigm of the God-world relationship, and rooted within the Christian theological tradition, this work contends that the understanding of the Triune God as intimately involved with the suffering of the cosmos is viable and efficacious in view of the suffering of the cosmos and its creatures. It develops a female procreative model of the creative suffering of the Triune God, an ecological ethics based on the midwife model of care, and a pastoral model of threefold differentiation of suffering in God as steps toward Christian praxis in response to the mystery of God within the pain, suffering, and death of cosmic existence and human experience. (shrink)

Pretendo formular uma definição positiva de loucura: o sentimento de comoção e vertigem psíquica resultante da perceção de conhecimento extra do indivíduo sobre si próprio. Farei um percurso histórico‑filosófico e literário sobre o tópico com alguns dos principais pensadores contemporâneos, de Kant e Pinel, Hegel, Hölderlin e Nietzsche, até Wittgenstein e Derrida. Apresento uma perspetiva diferente da atual convenção cultural humanística que estabelece uma relação de causalidade eficiente entre a entidade nosológica «esquizofrenia», funcionando como Deus ex‑machina, e a produção (...) artística, onde defendo que quem cria e faz arte é o indivíduo, o artista, e não uma suposta deficiência psíquica. (shrink)

Pour de nombreuses théories contemporaines, la nature est devenue le Deus ex machina. Nos sentiments, nos comportements et notre pensée dépendraient de la vie, des mutations, de la sélection naturelle, de la sélection de groupe. Adaptation, mutations, fonctions, utilité, rapport coût/bénéfice, régulation affective ou sociale : ce lexique n'est plus inconnu pour l'amateur. Cet ouvrage prétend repenser l'évolution de l'homme dans un contexte plus différent...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 49-77 [Access article in PDF] The Time of the King Gift and Exchange in Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio Joan Ramon Resina There is something paradoxical about José Zorrilla's revision of the Don Juan legend, a certain contradiction between the play's structure and the logic of the action. The character of the protagonist, the form and implications of Don Juan's salvation, the strategies and temporality of seduction, (...) even the play's generic status--all come under the law of self-cancellation. And so does the historical time in which the play is set: the time of absolute monarchy. The proportionality between terrestrial and eschatological time, organic to the play's Golden Age precursor, 1 is strangely neutralized in Zorrilla's work through an expanding temporality without equivalent in the afterlife; and the same is true of the king's dramatic role through his removal from the scene, which he regulates nonetheless as deus ex machina of the social edifice.A nineteenth-century reader, Francesc Pi i Margall, remarked that "Zorrilla hace a Don Juan escéptico o creyente según lo van exigiendo las peripecias de su drama, y merced a esa indeterminación del carácter, le pone repetidamente en contradicción consigo mismo" (Zorrilla makes Don Juan a skeptic or a believer depending on the drama's events, and by virtue of this indeterminacy, he brings his character repeatedly into contradiction with himself) [204]. This indeterminacy affects not only the libertine's relation to religion but also the doctrinal coherence of the play, which has been the object of debate [see Mazzeo; Abrams; Wang; Romero]. Others, curiously, detect a contradiction between the play's sound theological conception and the author, who "quizá no sabe apenas nada de teología" (perhaps knows next to nothing about theology) [Alberich 16]. Yet not only Don Juan's piety but also his seductions appear self-annulling. For Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Zorrilla's most original and thus most revealing decision is "presentar el acto de seducción engañosa en el momento mismo en que deja de serlo: la carta con que comienza el drama participa de una tradición que también cancela. En el curso de la obra, es y no es un instrumento de seducción; sin cambiar de palabras, es a la vez falsa y verdadera... " (to present the act of deceitful seduction at the very moment in which it stops being deceitful: the letter with which the play starts participates in a tradition which it also cancels. Throughout the play the letter is and is not a tool of seduction; its words are at once true and false...) [83]. In the same line of structural contradictions must be included the play's temporality, which runs counter to the causal logic of the action. As Gustavo Pérez Firmat points out: "In Juan's verses normal temporal and causal sequence collapses, for future events are always catching up and outstripping the present, as if time were circular and past, present, and future travelled the circle at different speeds" [7]. Even the play's representativeness as a privileged [End Page 49] instance of Spanish romanticism has been flatly denied in light of its inconsistencies with the patterns of that movement [Gies, "José Zorrilla"]. 2 But perhaps the most telling contradiction is the one between the play's undiminished popularity for almost a century and its author's sedulous efforts to undermine its prestige. 3Author's second thoughts? A repentant artist in ascetic revulsion against mundane acclaim? It seems reasonable to assume a link between the play's popularity and the contradictions to which it gives expression. Thus, taking at face value the tired notion that Don Juan presents a fundamentally Spanish profile, 4 I will inquire whether the play's manifest contradictions are culturally efficient. 5 To this end, I will need to consider a possible incongruity between nineteenth-century forms of consciousness and the objective historical conditions. Joaquín Casalduero already pointed out a discrepancy between historical changes and... (shrink)

This paper focuses on the disparate phenomena we psychologize as “selfhood”. A central argument is that, far from being a deus ex machina as required in the Cartesian schema, our felt experience of self is above all a consequence of data compression. In coming to this conclusion, it considers in turn the Cartesian epiphany, other traditional and contemporary perspectives, and a half-century’s empirical work in the Freeman lab on neurodynamics. We introduce the concept of consciousness qua process as a (...) force. (shrink)

Reason is the tool of our knowledge but in philosophy this tool encounters difficulties, especially, when it is faced with the big questions - the source of philosophy's deep disagreements. Another difficulty arises from the fact that philosophy and religion cross each other's path: the first draws deductions from rational principles in its approach to religion while the second does not remain firm on its terrain - it keeps looking for rational answers. In essence, this is what this article deals (...) with. If for thousands of years philosophers have been taking turns in arguing and disagreeing with one another on some big questions, there comes a time when the circle has to be broken. In fact, that time has come; this article offers a novel approach to end the age-old debate on, for instance, God talk. (shrink)

On one level this is a case study in science, religion, and morality, with special attention to the consequences for morality of science's embeddedness in society. On another level this is the science-and-theology dialogue between the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother Karl-Friedrich, a physicist. The influence of Karl-Friedrich and the brothers' exchanges on Dietrich's prison theology receives special attention. Because this study is set in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, and Karl-Friedrich's work intersected Germany's efforts to develop a (...) nuclear weapon, the discussion leads to Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. The attention there is to the interplay of science, religion, and morality at the time the bomb was detonated at the Trinity site. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Phenomenology of Moral Presence at Sea Tragic Comedy (or Comic Tragedy): The Paradox of Sailing.