Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant is the first history of the concept of facticity. G. Anthony Bruno argues that this concept’s coining, transmission, and repurposing by post-Kantian thinkers leaves a lasting divide concerning the question of whether a science of intelligibility can tolerate brute facts. In the phenomenological tradition, ‘facticity’ denotes undeducibly brute conditions of intelligibility such as sociality, mortality, and temporality. This suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question. However, the term’s original use in the (...) German idealist tradition is associated with a negative answer: a science of intelligibility must eliminate bruteness in order to be systematic, as Fichte says, or presuppositionless, as Hegel says. Moreover, eliminating bruteness requires a new logic for deducing conditions of intelligibility from reason’s self-contradictions, a dialectical logic that Fichte invents and Hegel develops. In response to the German idealists, Heidegger argues that dialectic ineluctably presupposes brute facts of lived experience, whose interpretation requires a hermeneutics of facticity. The untold history of the concept of facticity thus contains the deepest parting of the ways after Kant, one in which reason is fated to transform from the hand that holds the world to the thrown activity of being-in-the-world. Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant explores this transformation while confronting our inheritance of the still-pressing post-Kantian question. (shrink)

In this unique work, Professor G.A. Powell Jr. writes: "Thinkers are different from writers—writers are prostitutes. Thinkers desire to be prostitutes." Daily Conversations with My Interloper is first and foremost a celebration of the narrative paradigm, its evolution, latitude of expression, and radical subjectivity in the forms of aphorisms and feuilletons. Following in the literary tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert Camus, John Cage, Emile Cioran, and Susan Sontag, et al., the text chronicles Professor Powell's reflections about the ongoing metamorphoses (...) of cultures, influential literary figures, travel, film, history, ennui, quotidian, and the mundane day-to-day existence in which all people participate. Daily Conversations with my Interloper, is a provocative read for the public and private intellectual interested in a panoply of ideas. (shrink)

George Boole published his account on hypotheticals in his pamphlet The Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847. Hypothetical deductions were not as developed as categorical ones by Boole’s time. It was still common practice to reduce hypotheticals to categoricals. Boole innovated by proposing an algebraic method to derive (equations expressing) the conclusions of hypotheticals. He had developed a calculus of classes for categoricals in his first pamphlet chapters and seemingly intended extending it to hypotheticals. Nonetheless, propositions can be only true (...) or false. In contradistinction with his approach for categorical propositions, here it was not possible to consider things or classes of things but only the cases and conjunctures of circumstances in which the propositions are true. Some criticisms have been raised concerning Boole’s view of logic as the solution of algebraic equations. In order to circumvent such criticisms, we construct a deductive system based on Boole's algebraic treatment and apply it to deductions of those hypotheticals analyzed by Boole. We found that Barbara translated in our notation is useful to eliminate symbols in such deductions. The deductive system presented here has the potential to provide a new perspective on Boole’s approach to hypotheticals in The Mathematical Analysis of Logic. (shrink)

In this paper we first consider hyperfinite Borel equivalence relations with a pair of Borel $\mathbb {Z}$ -orderings. We define a notion of compatibility between such pairs, and prove a dichotomy theorem which characterizes exactly when a pair of Borel $\mathbb {Z}$ -orderings are compatible with each other. We show that, if a pair of Borel $\mathbb {Z}$ -orderings are incompatible, then a canonical incompatible pair of Borel $\mathbb {Z}$ -orderings of $E_0$ can be Borel embedded into the given pair. (...) We then consider hyperfinite-over-finite equivalence relations, which are countable Borel equivalence relations admitting Borel $\mathbb {Z}^2$ -orderings. We show that if a hyperfinite-over-hyperfinite equivalence relation E admits a Borel $\mathbb {Z}^2$ -ordering which is self-compatible, then E is hyperfinite. (shrink)

In a number of contemporary writings on epistemology, the theory of coherence is contrasted to the correspondence theory of truth, according to which the logical truth of forms of cognition is determined by correspondence to their external referent: material reality, an object, a fact, an event, etc. This counterposition makes a certain kind of sense but, as we shall see, the coherence and correspondence theories are not mutually exclusive.

Le XIVe siècle peut sans nul doute être considéré comme «l’âge d’or» de la mystique en Angleterre. Parmi les noms de R. Rolle, W. Hilton, J. de Norwich, l’auteur du Nuage d’Inconnaissance occupe une place importante, gardant un anonymat manifestement recherché. Il apparaît très vraisemblable que cet Anonyme ait longtemps et assidûment fréquenté les milieux cartusiens, s’il n’a pas été lui-même chartreux, avant peut-être de choisir une vie plus radicalement érémitique. Le but de son œuvre est l’union à Dieu par (...) le détachement absolu, union au Tout-Autre selon le mode apophatique légué par Denys le pseudo-Aréopagite dont il se réclame explicitement, et auquel il emprunte le titre de son principal ouvrage. Il revendique également l’influence de Grégoire de Nysse, de saint Augustin, de Richard de Saint-Victor dont il traduira en anglais le Benjamin minor, et laisse clairement entendre qu’il a lu Thomas d’Aquin, saint Bernard et Guillaume de Saint-Thierry. Mais il est une influence profonde et non avouée qu’il nous a semblé intéressant de dégager ici; il s’agit de celle du Miroir des Simples âmes anéanties de Marguerite Porete. (shrink)