The rise of the sitar from a limited accompaniment instrument used in the regional courts of Northern India to an internationally recognized cultural icon underscores its importance both as an instrument and a cultural symbol—the sitar mirrors India’s social complexity. This story encapsulates the social, political and economic trauma resulting from the dismantling of Mughal empire to the partition of Pakistan, reflecting contesting social narratives and Hindu/Muslim cultural heritages through the distinctive musical styles modern India. A musical instrument and material (...) object of contested origins, the sitar extends from wood, gourd, wire, and ivory into complex social and cultural networks. I argue that the sitar, as object, cannot be reduced to either an empirical or phenomenological entity; it is a space of potentiality, the actualization of a virtual object. I examine the sitar as both byproduct and narrative, demonstrating how it defies attempts to limit its constantly rupturing borders with imposed cognitive frames, and how materiality and philosophical systems can inform ethnographic practice. (shrink)

The present state of the discussion on relativity -- The theory of motion according to Newton, Leibniz, and Huyghens -- Casualty and probability -- Aims and methods of modern philosophy of nature -- The principle of causality and the possibility of its empirical confirmation -- Rationalism and empiricism -- The freedom of the will -- On the explication of ethical utterances.

The aim of this essay is to ask whether what it calls the "presence" of things, including things of the past, can be rendered in language, including the language of historians. In Part I the essay adumbrates what it means by presence . It also proposes two ideal types: meaning-cultures , and presence-cultures . In the modern period, linguistic utterance has typically come to be used for, and to be interpreted as, the way by which meaning rather than presence is (...) expressed, thereby creating a gap between language and presence. Thus, in Part II the essay explores ways that this gap might be bridged, examining seven instances in which presence can be "amalgamated" with language. These range from instances in which the physical dimensions of language itself are made manifest, to those through which the physicality of the things to which language refers is supposed to be made evident. Of particular note for theorists of history are those instances in which things can be made present by employing the deictic, poetic, and incantatory potential of linguistic expression. The essay concludes in Part III with a reflection on Heidegger's idea that language is the "house of being," now interpreted as the idea that language can be the medium through which the separation of humans and the things of their environment may be overcome. The hope of achieving presence in language is no less than a reconciliation of humans with their world, including—and of most interest to historians—the things and events of their past. (shrink)

For all his profound interest in Secondness and its manifestation in various kinds of indices, including deictics, Peirce rarely addresses the inter-pronominalrelationships. Whilst the American founder of semiotics would designate language as a whole to Thirdness, only within the larger framework of which deictics can work, the German philosopher Cassirer observes that “what characterizes the very first spatial terms that we find in language is their embracing of a defi nite ‘deictic’ function”. For Cassirer the significance of pronominals, especially the (...) I-Thou relationship, lies in its impact on the development of spatial concept that lays the foundation of symbolic forms. It may look strange why the “designatives” of I, Thou, He, in Peirce’s own terms, so obvious in their categorial and empirical differentiation, should fail to be reduceable to the triad of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. It is interesting, however, that in his 1906 correspondence with Lady Welby, Peirce should refer to the strange “Communicational Interpretant”, or “the Cominterpretant, which is a determination of that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place”. Peirce asserts that this communication of a Form, say, being in love, is made possible by sign. This paper discusses Peirce’s and Cassirer’s references to deictics or indexical sign, in particular, inter-personal relationships, in light of Benveniste’s concept of discourse, and probes into a possible subtext underlying the Peirce-Welby correspondence. (shrink)

Here is a fresh look at how science contributes to the bigger picture of human flourishing, through a collage of science and philosophy, richly illustrated by the authors' own experience and personal reflection. They survey the territory of fundamental physics, machine learning, philosophy of human identity, evolutionary biology, miracles, arguments from design, naturalism, the history of ideas, and more. The natural world can be appreciated not only for itself, but also as an eloquent gesture, a narrative and a pointer beyond (...) itself. Our human journey is not to a theorem or a treatise, but to a meeting which encompasses all our capacities. In this meeting, science is the way to find out about the structure of the physical world of which we are a part, not a means to reduce ourselves and our fellow human beings to mere objects of scrutiny, and still less to attempt the utterly futile exercise of trying to do that to God. We have intellectual permission to be open to the notion that God can be trusted and known. The material world encourages an open-hearted reaching out to something more, with a freedom to seek and to be received by what lies beyond the scope of purely impersonal descriptions and attitudes. (shrink)

Summary Ordinary language philosophers frequently draw on the fact that an appropriately selected sentential combination of the form p but not q can, or cannot, be uttered without absurdity; however, they do so without sufficient reflection on the methodology of such combination tests, which results in considerable shortcomings even in practical application. To improve things, I shall discuss two criteria for distinguishing ‘pragmatic’ from ‘non-pragmatic’ implications and for separating the latter into ‘linguistic’ (‘semantic’ and ‘syntactical’) and ‘non-linguistic’ ones (2–3); consider (...) the bearing of the principle of ‘sense-constancy‘ on the applicability of combination tests (4); and call attention to the important, though merely heuristic, function of investigating pragmatic, as opposed to semantic, implications (5.1–5.2). Finally, I shall hint at a striking analogy between the linguistic (yet non-empirical) method of combination tests, the phenomenological method of ‘fictional variation’, and the empirical method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (5.3). (shrink)

We look at lying as an act of communication, where (i) the proposition that is communicated is not true, (ii) the utterer of the lie knows that what she communicates is not true, and (iii) the utterer of the lie intends the lie to be taken as truth. Rather than dwell on the moral issues, we provide a sketch of what goes on logically when a lie is communicated. We present a complete logic of manipulative updating, to analyse the effects (...) of lying in public discourse. Next, we turn to the study of lying in games. First, a game-theoretical analysis is used to explain how the possibility of lying makes such games interesting, and how lying is put to use in optimal strategies for playing the game. Finally, we give a matching logical analysis. Our running example of lying in games in liar’s dice. (shrink)

Theories of belief and meaning have long occupied philosophers. Typically, there is a correlation between the meaning of a sentence that is uttered and the content of the attitude that the speaker thereby conveys. This is also why a sentence can be used to specify content in an attribution of the attitude to the speaker. From the perspective of a theory of semantic content, there is a level of description where mental states and sentences can be said to share a (...) content or meaning. But there is a contrary view gaining currency, claiming that belief and meaning have to be kept apart conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically. Thus it could be that meaning is an internal or private notion that can be accounted for purely linguistically (or even non-intentionally altogether), while the same may not be true of belief. The volume brings together researchers from various areas in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics to address these questions. The tradition of logical positivism, sometimes thought of as having been a passing phase in twentieth-century philosophy, has as a matter of record remained a vibrant force. But it has shifted from broadside critiques of other systems of thought into a deeper study of how the structure of logic and language impact human behavior and psychological conditioning. Among the contributors to this international symposium are Michael Esfeld, Wolfram Hisses, Max Kolbel, Isaac Levi, Diego Marconi, James McGilvary, Olaf Muller, Paul Peitroski and Norbert Hornstein, Sebastian Rodl, and Alberto Voltolini. (shrink)

Polities appeal to the principle of distributive justice when justifying the right to inclusion and exclusion they claim for themselves with respect to immigrants: to each their own place. This paper attempts, in a first stage, to explain the nature of the link between distributive justice and an alleged right to inclusion and exclusion, as manifested in the political use of indexicals such as ‘we’, ‘here’, and ‘now’. Drawing on an analysis of the European Union, it subsequently shows why the (...) use of political indexicals, when officials exercise the EU’s putative jus includendi et excludendi, is only possible by invoking the utterance of a first ‘we-here-now’ that has no referent. The relation between distributive justice and an alleged right to inclusion and exclusion*a polity as a nomos, as I will call it*is rendered both possible and continuously undermined by an anomos*the invocation of a polity and a world that are not and cannot be in empirical space and time. Keywords: borders; political reflexivity; European Union; inclusion/exclusion (Publication online: 7 November 2008) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics. Vol. 1, No. 4, 2008, pp. 193-212. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i4.1893. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein crossed the second Styx, from living memory to history, during the years since the present century began. He is recognized today as one of the most original and powerful thinkers of the twentieth century, and his work belongs to the body of literature philosophers will read and interpret afresh in each generation, for as long as the European intellectual tradition survives. He wrote nothing in political philosophy or jurisprudence, very little in ethics, and the only sustained record of (...) his philosophical ideas about religion and art consists in notes taken by students at his lectures. The Tractatus was published in 1921. In this book, Wittgenstein argues that the logical form of a proposition is utterly different from its superficial grammatical form. The greatest obstacles to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophy are not any inherent obscurity in his ideas, but the aphoristic style in which he wrote and the introverted character of his thought. (shrink)

Freud’s psychoanalysis of Little Hans is a defining moment in psychoanalytic theory, because it marks the first psychoanalytic attempt ever to analyze childhood as an actuality rather than a set of recollected experiences. This article aims to explain Deleuze and Guattari’s dismissal of Freud’s interpretation as an act of silencing the children that is meant to corroborate his own theories of psychosexual development and particularly the Oedipus complex. Deleuze and Guattari are not against psychoanalytic interpretation in and of itself (...) as a creative intervention into the lived actuality of the analysand, but they think that Freudian psychoanalysis misses the opportunity by tracing every aspect of individual existence back to familial figures and relationships. While Freud considers the case of Little Hans as a verification of his theory of sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari regard the case as a perfect example of how psychoanalytic suggestion often distorts the utterances of the analysand for its own interests, thereby failing altogether to grasp the logic of becoming as an escape from familial determinations. (shrink)

Many environmental ills derive from humanity’s unsustainable fondness for meat, a fondness that often pushes (and sometimes breaks) environmental limits and reveals unsustainable patriarchal ideologies. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife each, in very different ways, expose the strands of “meat and gender” enmeshments in Korea and Taiwan respectively, showing the mutual interdependence of carnivorism and patriarchal power. So deeply rooted are the entangled strands of carnivorism and sexism that contesting them (either together or apart) means (...) dismantling the very definition of human corporeality: in The Vegetarian, this means that a woman becomes a plant; in The Butcher’s Wife, it means that a man becomes the very cattle he has spent his life slaughtering; in both, questioning meat is a very dangerous challenge that comes from a woman through a narrative perspective that is clearly feminist. Both novels plainly show deep analogies and correspondences between domestic violence and violence against animals, and yet, in both, there is a taut relationship between vegetable-based histories and a more meat-based modernity. This article argues firstly that the violence of meat-eating in The Vegetarian and The Butcher’s Wife is both physical and psychological. Dreams and madness are involved. Normalcy is male, deviance female. Order is meat, chaos vegetal. And the threat of death will either be fully realized or will hang menacingly in the air. Secondly, this article argues that the novels importantly show that breaking points (psychological and environmental) are often utterly unpredictable and that once breached, the results can also be devastatingly unpredictable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Vol. VI: Theology: The Old Covenant. By HANS Uns VoN BALTHASAR. Trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Ed. John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. Pp. 443. In this penultimate-volume of The Glory of the Lord, von Balthasar sets forth a " biblical aesthetics " in which the manner of the emergence of the Glory of God (...) in the world of man is spelled out. He proceeds by examining the bewildering variety of the manifestations of God's Glory in the Old Testament, but always as unified in their historical convergence upon Jesus, the Christ, the final and definitive presence in history of the divine Glory in whom Word and Image, Messiah and Servant, Son of Man and Son of God, are at one. This manner of proceeding is little consonant with contemporary Catholic exegesis, which prefers to regard the Old Testament as a free-standing hook, and is rather fastidious about reading it as " literally " the prologue and the Sitz im Leben of the New. For such exegetes, the literal and the historical senses are entirely distinct, because of their methodological enlistment in the historical pessimism of the Enlightenment. Balthasar, of course, is not of their camp. Balthasar's mastery of Old Testament exegesis is on a par with the effortless command of the Western philosophical, theological, and literary tradition which he has displayed in the earlier volumes of this work. While he relies heavily upon von Rad, a glance at the index shows that his knowledge of Old Testament scholarship is based upon a wide reading, upon which he levies throughout the book with practiced ease. The exegetical method implicit in his analysis is the one employed by scholars such as de Lubac, Guillet, and Ligier; its classic Augustinian understanding of the free unity of history, and of the consequently free meaning of Old Testament and the New as fulfilled in the Kingdom of God, needs no apology. The currently common supposition that the " literal " sense of Scripture is that which an Enlightened positivism will permit needs only to be recognized to be rejected. In the opening pages of the Introduction Balthasar sets the theme which will dominate the book: the rationally irresolvable dialectical 139 140 BOOK REVIEWS tension between God and all that is not God, a tension inherent in the revelation of the Glory of God. In keeping with the emphasis of his earlier volumes, Balthasar is insistent upon the radical gratuity of the revelation of the Glory of God. The revelatory manifestation of God as God, who is beyond all perception, all knowing, all communication, and yet is communicated, perceived the more surely where the more veiled, and definitively revealed on the Cross. The revelation of God's Glory is of God as the Absolutely Other, as formless, and so as in tension with all form which would mediate the revelation. This communication, this mediation, is utterly ex nihilo; it relies upon no capacity in man, upon no natural process of spiritual development, and is unrelated to, because absolutely transcendent to, all human projects. Impossible to prepare for, the manifestation is constantly new, arising out of no prior possibility in man or his world, and responding to nothing in him which might make the revelation capable of anticipation. The paradox of God's self communication of his formless Glory is then beyond all utterance, and yet is uttered, given form: the final Form is, of course, the Christ. This is the basic datum, the ground upon which all theology rests, and is pure grace, a gift beyond all expectation, incapable of being imagined. All the preparatory Old Testament images finally fail. The paradox, the self communication of God who is beyond all utterance, yet is uttered, has its resolution only in the Form, the personal unity, of Christ. The revelation always at once transcends and assimilates the concrete historical forms by which it is mediated. The pagan materials are transformed by their historical deployment in the revelatione.g., the pagan myths of creation, of divine wars and marriages, the pagan wisdom-and in their deployment, they converge, hut not within the Old... (shrink)

This paper investigates the representation of the Shijing 詩經 and its hermeneutic traditions in Cao Zhi’s 曹植 poetic writings with regard to the reception and utilization of the Shijing at different stages, especially the early third century CE. Cao Zhi not merely appropriated poetic utterances and literary patterns from particular odes but also presented a variety of Shijing-related interpretations, which show correspondences with different hermeneutic traditions that transcended the boundaries of the four main Shijing schools. This case represents a syncretic (...) mode of the reception and utilization of the Shijing within larger intellectual and cultural contexts. The Cao regime, as the new ruling authority in Northern China around the early third century CE, engaged in gathering dispersed literary scholars and cultural legacies, in which the Shijing-related materials and sources played significant roles. Taking Cao Zhi’s syncretic representation of the Shijing and its hermeneutic traditions as an instantiation of these factors, this paper also aims to invite methodological reflections on the traditional and modern studies of the reception of the Shijing, considering its status with both literal significance and hermeneutic diversity in early and medieval China. (shrink)

Hans‐Johann Glock: The Relation between Quine and Davidson: The chapter assesses the interaction between our two protagonists from a historical, exegetical, and substantive perspective. The first section provides a brief biographical account, and contends that at the grand‐strategic level Quine and Davidson are united by a “logical pragmatism.” The next section presents their contrasting attitudes to naturalism. I then turn to more detailed comparisons concerning the philosophy of language: meaning and use, truth, radical interpretation, and the “third dogma of (...) empiricism.” The final section compares and contrasts their conceptions of mental phenomena, focusing on the idea of anomalous monism. Davidson modifies Quinean ideas in significant ways, yet without compromising the naturalistic framework or abandoning empiricism altogether. But whereas Quine's naturalism tends to be scientistic, Davidson's naturalism is anthropological. Human beings, their actions and utterances are physical phenomena; yet they cannot be properly understood by physics, but only by reference to reasons. (shrink)

The concepts of metaphor and symbol within the context of hermeneutics are indebted to Hans‐Georg Gadamer and, especially, Paul Ricoeur. Both of these thinkers depart from the accepted, or “scientific”, definition of symbol, and both see a fundamental difference between symbols and metaphors: a symbol is not simply a metaphor in miniature, nor is a metaphor simply a symbol writ large; symbols are not primarily linguistic, whereas metaphors are fundamentally so. Ricoeur identifies three “primary” symbols as being particularly important: (...) the stain (or defilement), sin, and guilt. But these symbols also have “existential” meanings, of being impure, of being sinful, of being guilty. The metaphor “brings to language the implicit semantics of the symbol”: the metaphorical utterance clarifies the assimilation of one thing to another and of us to things that the symbol confuses. (shrink)

As a graduate student in Linguistics at UMass/Amherst in the 1980s, I was fortunate to be exposed to a number of new developments bearing on the relationship between formal semantics and pragmatics. In the 1970s under the influence of Cresswell, Lewis, Montague, and Partee, enormous progress in semantics was made possible by narrowing the focus of the field mainly to the consideration of the conventional, truth conditional content of an indicative utterance, calculated compositionally as a function of the semantic contributions (...) of its parts and its syntactic structure. Context was typically relegated to the background, in the form of indices of evaluation, though occasionally popping out for more serious consideration, as in the work of Kaplan, Karttunen, and Stalnaker. But eventually the nature of the rigorous formal enterprise itself, confronted with phenomena like Geach’s donkey sentences, presupposition projection, and the context-dependence of tense and aspect, forced the field into a more careful, thorough reconsideration of the relationship between context and content. Hence were born the dynamic theories of interpretation, beginning with Hans Kamp (1981) and Irene Heim (1982), who were both at UMass during my stay there, Heim completing her dissertation and Kamp on the faculty in Philosophy. Such frameworks posit a dynamic interchange between content and context, each dependent on the other, even in the course of interpreting a single utterance. Mats Rooth was also a graduate student at UMass at that time, and wrote his influential dissertation (1985) proposing an alternative semantics for the interpretation of prosodic focus, inter alia shedding light on how focus contributes to the contextual domain restriction of various operators. (shrink)

_Nietzsche's New Seas_ makes available for the first time in English a representative sample of the best recent Nietzsche scholarship from Germany, France, and the United States. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong have brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines—philosophy, history, literary criticism, and musicology—and from schools of thought that differ both methodologically and ideologically. The contributors—Karsten Harries, Robert Pippin, Eugen Fink, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kurt Paul Janz, Sarah Kofman, Jean-Michel Rey, and the editors themselves—take a new (...) approach to Nietzsche, one that begins with the claim that his enigmatic utterances can best be understood by examining the style or structure of his thought. (shrink)

Charles Travis and Hans-Georg Gadamer both affirm radical contextualism, the view that natural language is ineliminably context-sensitive. However, they offer different accounts of the role linguistic meaning plays in determining the contents of utterances. I discuss the differences between Travis's and Gadamer's views of meaning and offer an argument in favour of the latter. I argue that Travis's view assumes a principled distinction between literal and figurative speech that is at odds with his wider contextualist commitments. By contrast, Gadamer's (...) view, on which meaning is ‘fundamentally metaphorical,’ makes no such assumption and thus avoids the difficulty. (shrink)

Das kunstlerische Denken, das auf dem Denken der Sinne beruht, stellt sich seine Zeichen - in der Musik also: seine Klange - nicht vor, sondern lebt unmittelbar in ihnen, badet, watet, schwimmt in ihrer Materie und gestaltet aus ihr neue geistige Lebensformen. Ich nenne das Musikdenken das flussige Denken - so Hans Zender in einer programmatischen Ausserung. Im Hintergrund seines vielschichtigen kompositorischen Werks stehen grundlegende philosophische Fragen: Wie ist das Verhaltnis von Logos und Mythos? Was bedeutet Wahrheit in der (...) Kunst? Wo liegen die Grenzen der Rationalitat? Wie hangen Glaube und Liebe, Leere und Schweigen, Sagbares und Unsagbares zusammen? In neueren Aufsatzen und Aphorismen beruhrt Hans Zender diese und andere grosse Themen des Menschseins. Im Dialog mit Texten der religiosen und philosophischen Weltliteratur - vom I Ging bis zu Nietzsche, von der Bibel bis zum Herz-Sutra - zeigt er, dass es gerade die Paradoxa und Grenzgange des Denkens sind, die Kunstwerk zum Elementarereignis machen. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo, a leading philosopher of the continental school, has always resisted autobiography. But in this intimate memoir, the voice of Vattimo as thinker, political activist, and human being finds its expression on the page. With Piergiorgio Paterlini, a noted Italian writer and journalist, Vattimo reflects on a lifetime of politics, sexual radicalism, and philosophical exuberance in postwar Italy. Turin, the city where he was born and one of the intellectual capitals of Europe, forms the core of his reminiscences, enhanced (...) by fascinating vignettes of studying under Hans Georg Gadamer, teaching in the United States, serving as a public intellectual and interlocutor of Habermas and Derrida, and working within the European Parliament to unite Europe. Vattimo's status as a left-wing faculty president paradoxically made him a target of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, causing him to flee Turin for his life. Left-wing terrorism did not deter the philosopher from his quest for social progress, however, and in the 1980s, he introduced a daring formulation called "weak thought," which stripped metaphysics, science, religion, and all other absolute systems of their authority. Vattimo then became notorious both for his renewed commitment to the core values of Christianity and for the Vatican's denunciation of his views. Paterlini weaves his interviews with Vattimo into an utterly candid first-person portrait, creating a riveting text that is destined to become one of the most compelling accounts of homosexuality, history, politics, and philosophical invention in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper examines and compares the ways in which intentions of the singular kind and the plural kind are subjective. Are intentions of the plural kind ours in the same way intentions of the singular kind are mine? Starting with the singular case, it is argued that “I intend” is subjective in virtue of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is special in that it is self-identifying, self-validating, self-committing, and self-authorizing. Moving to the plural form, it is argued that in spite of apparent differences, (...) attitudes of the form “we intend” are subjective in the same way. The self-knowledge at work here is plural rather than singular. This supports a plural subject account of collective intentionality. It is argued that the worries sometimes raised in the literature against the metaphysical “spookiness” of plural subjects are due to a fundamental misconception of the way in which attitudes of either kind –singular and plural – are subjective. (shrink)

Production of Presence is a comprehensive version of the thinking of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, one of the most consistently original literary scholars writing today. It offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past thirty years, together with an equally personal view of a possible future. Based on this assessment of the past and the future of literary studies and the humanities, the book develops the provocative thesis (...) that, through their exclusive dedication to interpretation, i.e. to the reconstruction and attribution of meaning, the humanities have become incapable of addressing a dimension in all cultural phenomena that is as important as the dimension of meaning. Interpretation alone cannot do justice to the dimension of "presence," a dimension in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on our senses and our bodies. Production of Presence is a passionate plea for a rethinking and a reshaping of the intellectual practice within the humanities. (shrink)

Nasr (Islamic studies, George Washington U.), in a series of ten lectures, argues that, unlike in the West, where scientific thought has been secularized, in the East, knowledge and religious experience have remained unified. Drawing from Buddhist, Hindu, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions, he finds in each the idea of perennial wisdom as a philosophical basis for such unity. Paperback edition ($10.95) not seen. A reprint of the 1987 original with a new (short) preface. The paper edition (06459-4) is available (...) for $13.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo, a leading philosopher of the continental school, has always resisted autobiography. But in this intimate memoir, the voice of Vattimo as thinker, political activist, and human being finds its expression on the page. With Piergiorgio Paterlini, a noted Italian writer and journalist, Vattimo reflects on a lifetime of politics, sexual radicalism, and philosophical exuberance in postwar Italy. Turin, the city where he was born and one of the intellectual capitals of Europe (also the city in which Nietzsche went (...) mad), forms the core of his reminiscences, enhanced by fascinating vignettes of studying under Hans Georg Gadamer, teaching in the United States, serving as a public intellectual and interlocutor of Habermas and Derrida, and working within the European Parliament to unite Europe. Vattimo's status as a left-wing faculty president paradoxically made him a target of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, causing him to flee Turin for his life. Left-wing terrorism did not deter the philosopher from his quest for social progress, however, and in the 1980s, he introduced a daring formulation called "weak thought," which stripped metaphysics, science, religion, and all other absolute systems of their authority. Vattimo then became notorious both for his renewed commitment to the core values of Christianity (he was trained as a Catholic intellectual) and for the Vatican's denunciation of his views. Paterlini weaves his interviews with Vattimo into an utterly candid first-person portrait, creating a riveting text that is destined to become one of the most compelling accounts of homosexuality, history, politics, and philosophical invention in the twentieth century. (shrink)

The first English translation of Hans Reichenbach's lucid doctoral thesis sheds new light on how Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was understood in some quarters at the time. The source of several themes in his still influential The Direction of Time, the thesis shows Reichenbach's early focus on the interdependence of physics, probability, and epistemology.

The overarching topic of this dissertation is the semantics and pragmatics of definite descriptions. It focuses on the question whether sentences such as ‘the king of France is bald’ literally assert the existence of a unique king or simply presuppose the existence of such a king. One immediate obstacle to resolving this question is that immediate truth value judgments about such sentences are particularly unstable; some elicit a clear intuition of falsity whereas others simply seem awkward or strange. Because of (...) these variations, truth value judgments are generally considered unreliable. In the first chapter of the dissertation, an explanation of this phenomenon is developed. It is observed that when these types of sentences are considered in the context of a discourse, a systematic pattern in judgments emerges. This pattern, it is argued, should be explained in terms of certain pragmatic factors, e.g. whether a speaker’s utterance is interpreted as cooperative. A detailed and general explanation of the phenomenon is then presented which draws importantly on recent research in the semantics and pragmatics of questions and focus. It is shown that the behavior of these judgments can be systematically explained, that truth value judgments are not as unreliable as standardly assumed, and that the proposed explanation best supports the conclusion that definite descriptions presuppose rather than assert existence. In the second chapter, the following problem is investigated. If definite descriptions are assumed to literally assert existence, a sentence such as ‘Hans wants the ghost in his attic to be quiet’ is incorrectly predicted to be true only if Hans wants there to be a ghost in his attic. This prediction is often considered evidence against Russell’s quantificational analysis and evidence in favor of the referential analysis of Frege and Strawson. Against this claim, it is demonstrated that this problem is a general problem about the existence commitments of natural language determiners, i.e. not an argument in favor of a referential analysis. It is shown that in order to avoid these undesirable predictions, quite radical changes to the semantic framework are required. For example, it must be assumed that a sentence of the form ‘The F is G’ has the open sentence ‘x is G’ as its asserted content. A uniform quantificational and presuppositional analysis of definites and indefinites is outlined which by exploiting certain features of so-called dynamic semantics unproblematically assumes that the asserted contents indeed are open sentences. In view of the proposed quantificational/presuppositional analysis, the dissertation is concluded by a rejection of the argument put forward by Reimer and Devitt that definite descriptions are ambiguous between attributive and referential uses. Reimer and Devitt’s argument is based primarily on the assumption that definite descriptions are conventionally used to communicate singular thoughts and that the conventional meaning of a definite description therefore must be fundamentally indexical/directly referential. I argue that this argument relies crucially on tacit assumptions about semantic processing for which no empirical evidence is provided. I also argue that the argument is too general; if sound, it would be an argument for an indexical treatment of most, if not all, other determiners. I then conclude by demonstrating that the view does not explain any new data and thus has no clear motivation. In short, this dissertation provides a detailed pragmatic explanation of a long-standing puzzle about truth value judgments and then outlines a novel dynamic semantic analysis of definites and indefinites. This analysis solves a significant problem about existence commitments — a problem that neither Russell’s nor the Frege/Strawson analysis are equipped to handle. This analysis is then defended against the claim that definite descriptions are ambiguous. (shrink)

In a recent article, Hans Maes argues that examples drawn from contemporary visual art shed new light on the long-standing and seemingly intractable debate between Hypothetical Intentionalism (HI) and Moderate Actual Intentionalism (AI). He presents two test cases that, he argues, tilt the scale in favour of AI. In this paper I re-examine Maes's two test cases, and argue that neither succeeds as a test case. The first case fails because it confuses a relevant fact about the artwork with (...) the artist's intentions for the work. The second case fails because the work in question does not count as an utterance. The failure of Maes's examples suggests that the interpretive norms surrounding contemporary visual art cannot settle the debate between AI and HI. (shrink)

This two-part article is a sequel to a two-part paper published in Logos in 2008–2009. It provides a round-up of the current situation of the book industry in Africa today, together with a brief review of the activities of the various organizations that have supported African publishing over the years. Part 1 examines the persistent failure of African governments to support their book industries and public libraries in a tangible and positive fashion. It reviews the current status of book development (...) councils in Africa, the unsatisfactory progress in establishing national book policies, the challenges of generating book industry data, and the opportunities presented to African publishers by the new digital environment. An Appendix provides a list of conferences, meetings, and seminars on publishing and book development held in Africa between 1968 and 2019. Part 2 of this article will appear in Logos, 30. (shrink)

Religions around the world show support, ambivalence and antagonism towards the right to freedom of religion. Legal and political debates are affected by these profound differences. In this book an international group of scholars offer theoretical and empirical analyses.

Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology examines the tension between God and the world through a constructive reading of the Trinitarian theologies and Christologies of Sergii Bulgakov, Karl Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. It focuses on what is called 'the problematic of divine freedom and necessity' and the response of the writers. 'Problematic' refers to God being simultaneously radically free and utterly bound to creation. God did not need to create and redeem the world in Christ. It (...) is a contingent free gift. Yet, on the other side of a dialectic, he also has eternally determined himself to be God as Jesus Christ. He must create and redeem the world to be God as he has so determined. In this way the world is given a certain 'free necessity' by him because if there were no world then there would be no Christ. A spectrum of different concepts of freedom and necessity and a theological ideal of a balance between the same are outlined and then used to illumine the writers and to articulate a constructive response to the problematic. Brandon Gallaher shows that the classical Christian understanding of God having a non-necessary relationship to the world and divine freedom being a sheer assertion of God's will must be completely rethought. Gallaher proposes a Trinitarian, Christocentric, and cruciform vision of divine freedom. God is free as eternally self-giving, self-emptying and self-receiving love. The work concludes with a contemporary theology of divine freedom founded on divine election. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being and Time. A Translation of “Sein und Zeit by Martin HeideggerP. Christopher SmithMartin Heidegger. Being and Time. A Translation of “Sein und Zeit. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Pp. xix + 487. Paper, $18.95.A new English translation of Heidegger’s best book, Sein und Zeit has been eagerly anticipated ever since the appearance of the Macquarrie/Robinson translation in 1962.1 For anyone (...) with an ear for German would find that, in turning Heidegger’s visceral prose into wooden terminology, this first pathbreaking and very scholarly translation failed completely to render the startling and wholly untraditional diction of this work, a diction that rocked a staid and stifling academia and that in lectures preceding the book’s publication had therefore attracted students in droves, among them Leo Strauss, Hanna Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, and Hans Jonas. At long last, a new translation, Joan Stambaugh’s, is here, but, unfortunately, it is no better in this crucial regard, and it is not as scholarly either. (Macquarrie/Robinson do provide many detailed and useful accounts of their choices of translation.) Indeed, the new translation often seems to be a mere revision of the old and falls into much of the old translation’s terminological uprooting of Heidegger’s sometimes thick but always earthy language. Here are three examples.In S we find this rendering of Heidegger’s preliminary account of the phenomenological method he will apply in “laying out” our “factual” human existence “there” “in the world” of our cooperative taking care of life’s tasks:This “a priori” of the interpretation of Da-sein is not a structure which is pieced together, but rather a structure which is primordially and constantly whole. It grants various perspectives on the factors which constitute it. These factors are to be kept constantly in view, bearing in mind the preceding whole of this structure.(S 37)In M/R this same passage is translated, somewhat more readably and accurately, as:In the interpretation of Dasein, this structure is something ‘a priori’; it is not pieced together, but is primordially and constantly a whole. If affords us, however, various ways of looking at the items which are constitutive for it. The whole of this structure always comes first; but if we keep this constantly in view, these items, as phenomena, will be made to stand out.(M/R 65) [End Page 148]We note, first, how many of the M/R translations are taken over by S: “not a structure... pieced together,” which mistranslates “keine zusammengestückte Bestimmtheit” (SZ 41) or “not a determination arrived at bit by bit,” and “[structure]... primordial(ly) and constant(ly) (a) whole” for “eine ursprünglich und ständig ganze Struktur,” in which the English “primordial” turns the rather ordinary “ursprünglich” or “originally” into a technical term. Indeed, this phrase might best be rendered in more usual English along the lines of “This structure, assumed a priori... is originally, and continues to be, a whole.” For the point, lost in S but preserved in M/R with their “however,” is precisely that even though Dasein has been determined ahead of time to have the basic structure of a whole, we can still elucidate different sides of it phenomenologically by “throwing them into relief” (compare Heideger’s “phänomenal abzuheben”). In S, Heidegger’s pivotal “phänomenal” is lost altogether.Here, next, is how S renders Heidegger’s account of the call of conscience, which calls us back from our having lost ourselves in pressed busyness and vain chattering, at just that moment when these lose all their significance for us and go dead:The call is lacking any kind of utterance. It does not even come to words, and yet it is not at all obscure and indefinite. Conscience speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence. Thus it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces Da-sein thus summoned and called upon to the reticence of itself.(S 252–53).And here is the M/R translation:The call dispenses with any kind of utterance. It does... (shrink)