The ability of adolescents to access safe and effective new products for HIV prevention and treatment is optimised by adolescent licensure at the same time these products are approved and marketed for adults. Many adolescent product development programmes for HIV prevention or treatment products may proceed simultaneously with adult phase III development programmes. Appropriately implemented, this strategy is not expected to delay licensure as information regarding product efficacy can often be extrapolated from adults to adolescents, and pharmacokinetic properties of drugs (...) in adolescents are expected to be similar to those in adults. Finally, adolescents enrolled in therapeutic HIV prevention and treatment research can be considered adults, based on US Food and Drug Administration regulations and the appropriate application of state law. The FDA permits local jurisdictions to apply state and local HIV/sexually transmitted infection minor treatment laws so that adolescents who are HIV-positive or at risk of contracting HIV may be enrolled in therapeutic or prevention trials without obtaining parental permission. (shrink)

Excerpt from Essays, Literary, Moral and Political Some people are subject to a certain delicacy of passion, which makes them extremely sensible to all the accidents of life, and gives them a lively joy upon every prosperous event, as well as a piercing grief, when they meet with misfortunes and adversity. Favours and good offices easily engage their friendship while the smallest injury provokes their resentment. Any honour or mark of distinction elevates them above measure; but they are as sensibly (...) touched with contempt. People of this character have, no doubt, more lively enjoyments, as well as more pungent sorrows, than men of cool and sedate tempers but, I believe, when everything is balanced, there is no one, who would not rather be of the latter character, were he entirely master of his own disposition. Good or ill fortune Is very little at our disposal: and when a pe_r_son. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

From the beginning of the modern period to the mid-twentieth century most people who wrote on matters of philosophy and psychology assumed that the self is the ego, an inner subject that is the centre of conscious experiencing and an agency of thought and will. However, in the second half of the twentieth century — indeed, beginning even earlier, in the 1920s and 1930s — the notion of the ego became a target of criticism for theorists of widely differing points (...) of view. This critical attention has turned opinion against the notion of the ego in many circles and has raised the issue of its legitimacy. In this paper I address the issue of legitimacy by undertaking a survey of major historical conceptions and criticisms of the ego to see if the notion of the ego might be reconceived in a way that satisfactorily meets critical challenges. The survey begins with Descartes and then works its way forward in time to consider the views of Hume, Kant, Freud, Hartmann, Heidegger, Sartre, object relations theorists, Lacan, postmodernists, and materialists in the philosophy of mind. I state and comment on each of these views. Of necessity, statements of views are highly condensed. The comments assess the views by evaluating each in terms of the others and offer proposals about how particular conceptions of the ego might be reformulated to meet the criticisms discussed. Having completed the historical survey, I gather together proposals from the comments and present a revised conception of the ego that, I believe, is tenable in light of historical criticisms. This revised conception is presented here as a proposal only, a proposal, moreover, that outlines one of perhaps multiple ways in which the ego can be reconceived to meet critical challenges. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A HEIDEGGERIAN CRITIQUE OF AQUINAS AND A GILSONIAN REPLY JOHN F. X. KNASAS Center for Thomistic Studies Houston, Texas I IN HIS BOOK, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics, John Caputo investigates among other points a claim of Etienne Gilson's followers. Their claim is that Heidegger's charge of an oblivion or forgetfulness of being cannot be pinned on Aquinas.1 Aquinas escapes the charge because he (...) alone in the history of Western philosophy deepens the understanding of being to the level of esse. How could someone who has seized upon the fundamental principle of being be guilty of a forgetfulness of being? Caputo begs to differ. A Heideggerian would find the Gilsonian thesis unimpressive. What Aquinas has done remains too ontical, for it still deals with things and the principles of things. Something else escapes Aquinas's eye, and Caputo variously expresses the Heideggerian dissatisfaction :... esse for Aquinas means that act by which a thing comes to be " real " rather than " present " in the original Greek sense of shining and appearing, revealing and concealing.... In St. Thomas the original Greek notion of presencing as the shining in which all appearances shine, as a rising up into appearance, into manifestness, has declined into an understanding of Being as "objective presence," the presence of what is mutely there, as a sound in an empty room is thought to be" there" in naive realism and common sense.2 1 John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 100-1, 117-21. 2 Ibid., p. 199. 415 416 JOHN F. X. KNASAS Also: Hence, St. Thomas takes the being, not in its very Being-that is, in its quiet emergence into manifestness-but in its character as something created.3 Then: The metaphysics of actualitas is basically at odds with the meditative savoring of the original sense of Being as presencing.4 Finally: The early Greek experience of Anwesen, of the simple emergence of things into the light, differs fundamentally from St. Thomas's metaphysics of actuality and science of first causes.5 Caputo's conclusion is that one cannot accept Heidegger's criteria of S eindenken and think that Aquinas meets them.6 But a Gilsonian might humbly take Caputo's correction and still feel constrained to note that if the issue is being in the sense of presencing, then another portion of Aquinas's philosophical doctrine becomes relevant, viz., Aquinas's elaboration of the mechanics of cognition. In sum, things are present to us insofar as our form has been informed by their forms. Formal reception of form allows us to become the really other without loss to ourselves. We are then sufficiently actuated to cause the presence of the real as the term of our cognitional activity.7 a Ibid., p. 200. ' Ibid., p. 201. s Ibid., p. 209. 6 Ibid. 7 " ••• knowing beings are distinguished from non-knowing beings in that the latter possess only their own form ; whereas the knowing being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing, for the species of the thing known is in the knower. Hence, it is manifest that the nature of a non-knowing being is more contracted and limited; whereas the nature of a knowing being has a greater amplitude and extension. That is why the Philosopher says that the soul is in a sense all things." Thomas Aquinas, ST I, 14, 2c, ed. Anton Pegis, The Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945), Vol. I, p. 136. On the Aristotelian background, see Joseph Owens, " Aristotelian Soul as Cognitive of Sensibles, Intelligibles and Self," Aristotle: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens, ed. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), pp. 81-98. A GILSONIAN REPLY TO HEIDEGGER 417 Once more, however, I believe that we have philosophers speaking past each other. For Heidegger believes that presencing requires an understanding of being as an a priori condition. Many texts to this effect exist. One of the most striking is from Heidegger's The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927). I would like to quote it at length. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination by Donald Wayne Viney and George W. ShieldsLeon NiemoczynskiThe Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination. Donald Wayne Viney and George W. Shields. Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2020. 584 pp. $40.00 cloth.Over the past decade process philosophy has undergone a significant renaissance most notably due to the towering presence of the thought of Alfred North Whitehead in that tradition. (...) Charles Hartshorne by manner of contrast has not had such a towering presence. Part of the reason this is the case is due to a paucity of introductory literature on the thought of Charles Hartshorne—literature that might contribute to a “starter kit” so to speak in mastering Hartshorne’s massive oeuvre. The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination by Donald Wayne Viney and George W. Shields, both former students of Hartshorne and experts in process philosophy themselves, have authored a welcome contribution to an introductory literature that will most certainly elevate awareness of Hartshorne’s importance to its rightful place alongside that of Whitehead. The book is successful in its aims of “giving a reasonably comprehensive account of Hartshorne’s philosophy with an eye of presenting his best arguments...” (the “correcting what we see as misunderstandings of his views appearing in the critical literature” part may have been best left out) and “updating Hartshorne scholarship” (viii). There are ten chapters in total, appendix essays, the aforementioned bibliography, endnotes, and name and subject indexes.The Preface situates the mind of Charles Hartshorne as spanning the twentieth century and engaging metaphysics even when it was unfashionable to do so. Hartshorne thought about a wide-ranging and diverse range of subjects in both philosophy and science, aesthetics, metaphysics, applied philosophy, and theology. He never questioned modern science or evolution and believed that while metaphysics and empirical science have different methods each ensures its own way to objectivity. One learns that Hartshorne’s process metaphysics is also called “neo-classical” philosophy or speculative philosophy. His thought “gave full weight to the dynamic, relational, processive temporal and creative, affective dimensions of the universe” (vi). Hartshorne was known as much for his “panentheism,” or view that God transcends nature but also may be found immanently within it, as he was for his critique of traditional or scholastic classical theology—especially in his logic of theism where he recreates a modal version of the ontological argument. [End Page 94]Chapter 1, “The Career and Personality of Charles Hartshorne,” discusses just that. What seemed most important to me was the discussion of Hartshorne’s formative background of reading novels and poetry by Emerson, Melville, or Camus as a way of intensely living, his studying under William Ernest Hocking, and his Sheldon Traveling Fellowship where he studied for a time with Husserl and read and reviewed Heidegger. Probably the most important biographical details are that Hartshorne was given the assignment of editing the Peirce papers along with Paul Weiss as a Research Fellow while at Harvard University and he also met and graded for Whitehead, who along with C.S. Peirce, would become the twin pillars of all his thinking as a “Peircean and Whiteheadian” (11). From Peirce, we learn that Hartshorne took “possibility is best conceived of as a continuum with no least member” and from Whitehead, “actuality is discrete and discontinuous (atomistic), composed of momentary flashes of experiences” (11). For Hartshorne process and relativity are metaphysically basic.Chapter 2 begins with Hartshorne’s idea that, “Nature comes to us as constituted by feelings, not as constituted by lifeless, insentient matter” (28). Reality has an affective tone in which there is a layered complexity of feeling and social relation. In other words, contra Locke or Hume, feeling is objectively part of an objective affective continuum and is not nominalistically “painted on bare sense impressions” (46). Such might be described as a doctrine of “panexperientialism”— “the view that the basic constituents of reality are flashes of experience” (46). Experience and feeling stretch in their continuity to meet the bounds of nature. Chapter two continues with a wonderful discussion of Hartshorne’s aesthetics: “beauty is the mean between extremes” (48).Chapter 3 provides a... (shrink)

It is common to assume of an “objectivist” stage of Zubiri, prior to his meeting with Heidegger in Freiburg. However, if we analyze Zubiri’s philosophy before his stay in Freiburg, we already find a “metaphysical” orientation, and not merely an objectivist one. This orientation is intrinsically related to the early appearance of the notion of “reality” in his courses. The appearance of his concept of reality is at least partially motivated by Zubiri’s early reading of Heidegger’s habilitation thesis (...) on Duns Scotus. Zubiri discovered in Heidegger the possibility of trying to carry out a phenomenological characterization of reality, which took him beyond the conception, basically idealistic, of being as a “position” or as a “belief.” With Heidegger, Zubiri was able to sustain that reality is not something extra animam. However, Zubiri could not follow Heidegger in his conceptualization of reality based on human existence, and with this he began his own path in philosophy. A path that, in a certain sense, breaks with all phenomenology, because reality is located at a moment prior to the meaning of things for a subject or for a human existent. And yet, a path that continues the phenomenological claim of a descriptive fidelity to the things themselves. (shrink)

This book is the 6th book in a series of Socratic explorations of some of the Great Books. The books in this series are intended to be short, clear, and non-technical, thus fully understandable by beginners. Through such Socratic dialogues, Peter Kreeft introduces the basic questions in the fundamental divisions of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, logic, and method. In Socrates Meets Hume, Kreeft presents a Socratic examination of enquiry concerning human understanding in relation to the skepticism of (...) Hume, posing questions that challenge the concepts that Hume proposed. Kreeft states that Hume is the "most formidable, serious, difficult-to-refute skeptic in the history of human thought." Kreeft invites you to take part in the process of refuting Hume's skeptical arguments, with the aid of Socrates. Based on an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and Hume that takes place in the afterlife, this profound and witty book makes an entertaining and informative exploration of modern philosophy. (shrink)

The centrepiece of Earman’s provocatively titled book Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles is a probabilistic interpretation of Hume’s famous ‘maxim’ concerning the credibility of miracle reports, followed by a trenchant critique of the maxim when thus interpreted. He argues that the first part of this maxim, once its obscurity is removed, is simply trivial, while the second part is nonsensical. His subsequent discussion culminates with a forthright challenge to any would-be defender of Hume to ‘point (...) to some thesis which is both philosophically interesting and which Hume has made plausible’. My main aim here is to answer this challenge, by demonstrating a preferable interpretation of Hume’s maxim, according to which its first half is both plausible and non-trivial, while its second half sketches a useful, albeit approximate, corollary. I conclude by contesting Earman’s negative views on the originality and philosophical significance of Hume’s justly famous essay. (shrink)

Este artigo trata sobre as possíveis aproximações entre a filosofia de Heidegger e a filosofia de Heidegger. Essas aproximações são desenvolvidas em função do mundo cotidiano. Busca-se esclarecer quais são as dificuldades envolvidas no estudo de ambos os autores, quando a intenção visa diretamente o ser humano, sendo esses elementos identificados com cotidiano. Na primeira e na segunda parte apresentam-se os dois autores e na terceira parte é realizada uma interface através da filosofia de Tugendhat. Nela se destaca (...) a crítica à Heidegger e a adoção de uma posição naturalista. Conclui-se que tanto Heidegger quanto Hume possuem âmbitos subjacentes que determinam a suas análises do cotidiano. Estes âmbitos subjacentes se diferenciam e configuram a dificuldade fundamental nas tentativas de reunir elementos dos dois autores. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Digital technology is transforming life and is beginning to have a profound effect on individual psychic life and the wider social milieu. This article seeks to understand the nature of the new technology and its implications for personal life, culture, and education. The scene is set by comparing the introduction of printing to the revolution inaugurated by digital technology. This new age is often called “postmodern,” and some of the characteristics of the age suggested by Lyotard, Baudrillard, McLuhan, and others (...) are identified. The cultural impact of technology, according to Heidegger, is outlined, together with the interpretation in terms of digital technology proposed by Dreyfus and Spinosa. This is illustrated with examples and compared with the position of other thinkers. Finally, the consequences for education, including universities, are presented, and some proposals for approaches to education in terms of meaning, embodiment, and teacher-student relationship are considered. (shrink)

IT IS A REMARKABLE TRIBUTE TO HUME that of all past philosophical views, his critique of causality is nearly unique in being considered as true today as when he first proposed it over two centuries ago. Arthur Fine, for example, states, "I think we ought to follow Hume's prescription on induction with regard to the external world," while Quine flatly claims that "the Humean predicament is the human predicament." Despite the glaring fact that Hume's skepticism was induced (...) by the severe limitations of scientific knowledge and the paucity of causal explanations at the time, most philosophers continue to believe that his analysis of causality conforms to our present level of scientific understanding. Yet just a glance at the difference in scientific knowledge should rattle that presumption. (shrink)

Ramsey Eric Ramsey, The Long Path to Nearness: A Contribution to a Corporeal Philosophy of Communication and the Groundwork for an Ethics of Relief (reviewed by Patricia Huntington).

How should we determine the distribution of psychological traits—such as Theory of Mind, episodic memory, and metacognition—throughout the Animal kingdom? Researchers have long worried about the distorting effects of anthropomorphic bias on this comparative project. A purported corrective against this bias was offered as a cornerstone of comparative psychology by C. Lloyd Morgan in his famous “Canon”. Also dangerous, however, is a distinct bias that loads the deck against animal mentality: our tendency to tie the competence criteria for cognitive capacities (...) to an exaggerated sense of typical human performance. I dub this error “anthropofabulation”, since it combines anthropocentrism with confabulation about our own prowess. Anthropofabulation has long distorted the debate about animal minds, but it is a bias that has been little discussed and against which the Canon provides no protection. Luckily, there is a venerable corrective against anthropofabulation: a principle offered long ago by David Hume, which I call “Hume’s Dictum”. In this paper, I argue that Hume’s Dictum deserves a privileged place next to Morgan’s Canon in the methodology of comparative psychology, illustrating my point through a discussion of the debate over Theory of Mind in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This article explores the consecutive modifications that phenomenology underwent in the works of Heidegger and Levinas. In particular, it discusses their importance for contemporary attempts to expand — and transcend — phenomenology in philosophy and the social sciences. Heidegger and Levinas responded to the problem of subjectivity — and intersubjectivity — in diametrically opposed ways and consequently the exposition of their thoughts involves focusing on conceptual dichotomies like finitude and infinity, time and eternity. Ultimately, it is argued that (...) the very conceptions of the human being that the two thinkers furnish under the guise of Dasein and Autrui reveal the impasses associated with western metaphysics and pave the path for the development of more adequate theorizations of subjectivity, radical otherness and communal being. (shrink)

As is well known, the Humean account of causal inference gives a central location to inference habits. Some of these habits one can discipline. Thus, one can so discipline oneself as to reason in accordance with the “rules by which to judge of causes and effects”, that is, one can discipline oneself to think scientifically, rather than, say, in accordance with the rules of prejudice, or of superstition. All such judgments, even those of science, are, however, upon the Humean account (...) fallible. Some, or rather very many, have raised the issue about how any such causal judgment or inference is justified. That is, how can such inference habits be justified, shown to be reasonable. Hume meets this challenge by arguing that there are some habits all men do and must have. Because we must have them we ought to have them. They are, therefore, justified. (shrink)

Paper presented to the Twenty-seventh Hume Society Conference, 26 July 2000, Williamsburg, Virginia. -/- At the time I thought there was a stronger link between Maclaurin and Hume, but in discussions at and after the meeting, decided Hume was not taking his mechanics out of Maclaurin’s Account. Although I still have found Maclaurin useful in interpreting Hume -- see Sapadin 1997 for a discussion of popular Newtonianism in Hume's day -- I suspect my draft suffers (...) somewhat from ambivalence. There are still similarities, and possible avenues of influence, arguing that Hume was not ignorant of the new mechanics, but it also becomes clear that he did not understand it: although he adopts the Newtonian measure of force, he misapplies it. (shrink)

Hume begins his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by providing a discussion on what an ideal dialogue ought to look like. Many considerations that Hume raises coincide with similar concerns in contemporary social epistemology. This paper examines three aspects of Hume’s social epistemology: epistemic peerhood, inquiry norms and the possibility of rational persuasion. Interestingly, however, I will argue that the conversation between Philo, Cleanthes and Demea falls short of meeting Hume’s articulated standard of what an ideal dialogue (...) ought to look like. From this analysis, I defend the less popular view that Demea’s decision to leave the conversation (in Part XI) was entirely reasonable and suggest an explanation for why Hume decided to make Cleanthes the ‘hero’ of the Dialogues. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s sustained reflection on Greek thought has been increasingly recognized as a decisive feature of his own philosophical development. At the same time, this important philosophical meeting has generated considerable controversy and disagreement concerning the radical originality of Heidegger’s view of the Greeks and their place in his groundbreaking thinking. In Heidegger and the Greeks, an international group of distinguished philosophers sheds light on the issues raised by Heidegger’s encounter and engagement with the Greeks. The (...) careful and nuanced essays brought together here shed light on how core philosophical concepts such as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and ethics are understood today. For readers at all levels, this volume is an invitation to continue the important dialogue with Greek thinking that was started and stimulated by Heidegger. Contributors are Claudia Baracchi, Walter A. Brogan, Günter Figal, Gregory Fried, Francisco J. Gonzalez, Drew A. Hyland, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, William J. Richardson, John Sallis, Dennis J. Schmidt, and Peter Warnek. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:36. HUME'S SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE SELF* 1_. Although the appendix in which Hume confesses disillusionment with the Treatise theory of personal identity is very puzzling and confusing, there have been few serious attempts to explicate it. Wade L. Robison's recent paper, "Hume on Personal Identity," goes a long way toward making up for this lack, and I concur with much of what Robison says. Nonetheless, (...) I think further light can be shed on Hume's thinking, and I will attempt to do so in what follows. 1_. Hume reports that a review of his discussion of personal identity reveals problems so severe and difficult that he does not "know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent." After summarizing the arguments that led him to the Treatise view of personal identity, he offers this explanation of the discovery inconsistency : In short, there are two principles which I cannot render consistent, nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, vis. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. (636)¿ The trouble with this explanation is that there appears to be no inconsistency at all between these two principles. Many commentators have simply passed over this fact, perhaps because Hume's theory of self-identity has seemed so preposterous that they have felt it obvious that he would be unhappy with it. * This paper grew out of my contribution to a colloquium at the 1974 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I would like to express my thanks to Norman Melchert, whose paper stimulated my werk on this topic. 37. Others -- such as Norman Kemp Smith and John Passmore, in addition to Robison -- have claimed that Hume was incorrect in placing the inconsistency and have suggested more suitable candidates for the source of Hume's doubts. This failure to take the author at his word about what disturbed him may appear too presumptuous a move for a commentator to make, but the appendix provides strong evidence that Hume was quite confused and could easily have misstated or misidentified his problem. For example, Hume begins by saying that he will offer the arguments "on both sides" -- that is, the arguments that led him to adopt this theory of personal identity and those now causing him to doubt it. In fact, however, while he gives a neat summary of the arguments for the Treatise theory, he says nothing about the grounds for his new doubts. In addition, the statement of the two principles is introduced by the words "in short," as if Hume were providing a mere summary of what he had just said. The preceding passage, however, makes no mention of and is in no way concerned with the two principles. What is offered as a summary is no summary at all. Added to the apparent consistency of the two principles, these facts provide strong grounds for thinking Hume was quite confused. As such, they support those commentators who have felt forced to look elsewhere for the source of Hume's dissatisfaction. Robison' s most concise statements of his own interpretation of the problem are as follows: Hume's explanation of why we think we have an idea of the self depends upon there being a self... But he has argued that we can have no idea of such a self so that we cannot conceive it as existing, let alone guarantee its existence. (190)...we all think we have an idea of the self... Hume has to explain this fact, and...the sort of explanation he used appeals to the existence of an active self distinct from any bundle of perceptions and propensities... (192) Robison is correct, I think, on the basic point: the inconsistency is between Hume's bundle analysis of the self and his explanation of why we mistakenly believe there is a per- 38. sistent self. I differ with him, however, on two points. First, I think that his contrast between an active mind and a set of propensities is incorrect. That the Humean self has propensities is itself sufficient to generate Hume's problem... (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate as to whether there is a major difference between Hume's accounts of morality in the Treatise and the second Enquiry. This has tended to focus on the role of sympathy in each case, but more recently the greater emphasis on humanity in the Enquiry as compared with the Treatise has been used to support a non-reconciliation view of the relation between these accounts. So far as humanity's role in relation to the moral sentiments is (...) concerned, I question whether it can provide the moral point of view associated with moral approval and disapproval. Considered as a motive to action, I question whether humanity always results in the kinds of action which would meet with general approbation. I also stress the limitations of humanity when viewed from the impartial perspective associated with the moral point of view. I further attempt to show that there is no real contradiction between Hume's claim in the Treatise that sympathy is ‘the chief source of moral distinctions’ and his claim in the Enquiry that the sentiments dependent on humanity ‘are the origin of morals’. I therefore conclude in favour of a reconciliatory view of the two accounts. (shrink)

Hume is normally—and in my view, correctly—taken to be a legal conventionalist. However, the nature of Hume's conventionalism has not been well understood. Scholars have often interpreted David Hume as being largely indifferent to the specifics of the laws, so long as they accomplish their basic task of protecting people's property. I argue that this is not correct. Hume thinks certain systems of law will accomplish their purpose, of coordinating people's behaviour for the benefit of all, (...) better than others. He introduces two concepts, which I call generality and convenience, to designate those features of the law that allow it to best accomplish its purpose. Of the two, generality is the more important. The ability to implement a system of what Hume calls “general laws” is a feature common to those governments he considers “civilized” rather than “barbarous.” A set of more specific criteria may be extracted from Hume's texts, which laws must meet if they are to be considered general. Many of the criteria Hume identifies later become associated with theorists of the so-called “rule of law.” Hume's conventionalism can thus be read an important development beyond that of Hobbes, one that lays a foundation upon which later theorists such as A.V. Dicey are able to build. (shrink)

Many attempts have been made to solve Hume's problem. However, the assumptions leading to the problem have remained largely unnoticed. Moreover, since Goodman introduced the predicate "grue", philosophers without relevant mathematical education have been confused. In addition, various delusive arguments from convergence have been presented. In this book, it is maintained that knowledge has to be feasible and relevant and that several solutions fail to meet that demand. It is argued that the crucial presupposition of the problem of induction (...) is that clairvoyance is impossible and that this presupposition is unproven. Generalized Goodman predicates are introduced. To criticize arguments from convergence, the notion of "undecided game" is introduced. A relationship between Zeno's paradox and the problem of induction is revealed. A distinction between "do not know" and "cannot know" is consistently held. It is concluded that, as yet, we do not know the future and that it is impossible to prove that it is impossible to know the future. This book should be useful to professionals in epistemology and philosophy of science, and might be of interest to logicians and mathematicians. (shrink)

The article presents a new interpretation of Hume’s treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the “Appendix” to the Treatise. Hume’s project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. The belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the “vulgar” who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as (...) to think of their perceptions. The author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the “Appendix.” He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the “Appendix” must meet. (shrink)

Between 1927 and 1936, Martin Heidegger devoted almost one thousand pages of close textual commentary to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This article aims to shed new light on the relationship between Kant and Heidegger by providing a fresh analysis of two central texts: Heidegger’s 1927/8 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I argue that to make sense of Heidegger’s reading of Kant, (...) one must resolve two questions. First, how does Heidegger’s Kant understand the concept of the transcendental? Second, what role does the concept of a horizon play in Heidegger’s reconstruction of the Critique? I answer the first question by drawing on Cassam’s model of a self-directed transcendental argument, and the second by examining the relationship between Kant’s doctrine that ‘pure, general logic’ abstracts from all semantic content and Hume’s attack on metaphysics. I close by sketching the implications of my results for Heidegger’s own thought. Ultimately, I conclude that Heidegger’s commentary on the Critical system is defined, above all, by a single issue: the nature of the ‘form’ of intentionality. (shrink)

Arguing that criticisms have--from the very start--rested on misreadings, Fogelin begins by providing a narrative of the way Hume’s argument actually unfolds. What Hume’s critics (and even some of his defenders) have failed to see is that Hume’s primary argument depends on fixing the appropriate standards of evaluating testimony presented on behalf of a miracle. Given the definition of a miracle, Hume quite reasonably argues that the standards for evaluating such testimony must be extremely high. (...) class='Hi'>Hume then argues that, as a matter of fact, no testimony on behalf of a religious miracle has even come close to meeting the appropriate standards for acceptance. (publisher, edited). (shrink)

Environmental ethics in its modem classical expression by Aldo Leopold appears to fall afoul of Hume’s prohibition against deriving ought-statements from is-statements since it is presented as a logical consequence of the science of ecology. Hume’s is/ought dichotomy is reviewed in its historical theoretical context. A general formulation bridging is and ought, in Hume’s terms, meeting his own criteria for sound practical argument, is found. It is then shown that Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is expressible as a (...) special case of this general formulation. Hence Leopold’s land ethic, despite its direct passage from descriptive scientific premises to prescriptive normative conclusions, is not in violation of any logical strictures which Hume would impose upon axiological reasoning. (shrink)

The first argument that Hume offers against believing in miracle stories in Part 2 of his essay on miracles relies on social context in a way that makes it difficult to follow. Hume says that there’s never been a miracle story that’s well enough attested with respect to certain criteria of testimonial strength. A little later in the essay, he cites recent miracle stories coming from that Saint Médard cemetery as meeting the criteria to an exceptionally high degree, (...) but even so, he claims that we can dismiss the stories out of hand. The hidden background assumption is that his Protestant readers wouldn’t have been tempted to believe in miracle stories coming from an oppressed Catholic sect. Other examples in Part 2 of the essay work in the same way. Hume praises to the skies the quality of the evidence for an earlier Jansenist miracle, for a miracle involving the restoration of a leg through holy water at a Catholic cathedral, and a miracle at a temple of Serapis knowing that his readers won’t be inclined to believe in any of them. The point is that these miracles are better attested than the miracle stories in the Bible, and if we shouldn’t believe in the better attested stories, then we shouldn’t believe in the worse. This can seem like an appeal to prejudice, but really Hume is doing something subtler. He knows that it’s easier to criticize the irrational beliefs of others, but sees that once we turn the same standards that we use on others on our own beliefs, epistemic progress is possible. (shrink)

According to Husserl, Hume’s empirical method was deeply flawed—like all empiricists, Hume did not, and could not adequately justify his method, much less his findings. Instead, Hume gives us a “circular” and “irrational” “psychological explanation” of “mediate judgments of fact,” i.e. of inductive inferences. Yet Husserl was certain that he could justify both his own method and his own findings with an appeal to the phenomenological, pre-theoretical, pre-naturalistic “epoché”. However, whether or not Husserl’s notion of an epoché (...) is justified, or even viable, is not our focus here. Rather, our issue is with Hume, particularly: How could Hume have responded? In this paper, I show that in Book I of the Treatise, Hume did—however implicitly—appeal to a “pre-theoretical” notion of belief, which meets Husserl’s demands for a pre-theoretical grounding, i.e. a justificatory grounding. And so, his method is, at least in this respect, justified. But this belief is by no means “prenaturalistic.” Rather, it is a function of empirical data. In particular, it is a product of the “constant and coherent” impressions that seem to naturally obtain of experience. As a result, Hume’s method, which, in agreement with Husserl, we may characterize as psychology, does admit of a certain degree of regularity, but an empirical regularity. And according to Hume, contra Husserl’s complaints, this is the best that we can hope for; regularity will have to suffice, not certainty. However, it must be noted up front that this justification is implicit—Hume is not nearly as forthright as he could have been. Thus, making his position more explicit is the task of this paper. I am not presenting my own position, where I offer my own arguments. Instead, I present textual evidence, contextualized with ample explication. It is my hope that by doing so, Hume may more effectively make his case. (shrink)

Why do we have a moral duty to fulfill promises? Hume offers what today is called a practice theory of the obligation of promises: he explains it by appeal to a social convention. His view has inspired more recent practice theories. All practice theories, including Hume’s, are assumed by contemporary philosophers to have a certain normative structure, in which the obligation to fulfill a promise is warranted or justified by a more fundamental moral purpose that is served by (...) the social practice of promising or adherence to it. Recent practice theories do have this structure, but, I argue, Hume’s own does not. Hume’s account, while it does trace the origin of promises to convention, is instead a causal explanation of the moral sentiments we have toward fulfillment and violation of promises, sentiments he regards as normative in themselves and not susceptible of further warrant. He explains how a collectively-invented social practice becomes morally obligatory for us to conform to, without deriving its moral authority from a more basic principle. I discuss one objection often made to practice theories that, in its application to Hume, presupposes the incorrect interpretation, and show that while it is telling for Hume’s descendants, for Hume it misses the mark. Instead I make a different challenge to Hume, and suggest how he might meet it. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young’s classic paper on the phenomenology of pregnancy chronicles the alienating tendencies of technology-ridden maternal care, as the mother’s subjective knowledge of the pregnancy gets overridden by the objective knowledge provided by medical personnel and technological apparatuses. Following Fredrik Svenaeus, the authors argue that maternal care is not necessarily alienating by looking specifically at the proper attention paid by sonographers in maternal care when performing ultrasound examinations. Using Martin Heidegger’s philosophy as a theoretical lens, the authors argue (...) that sonographers who cultivate technical mastery, build patient rapport, explain the process and significance of the ultrasound, and understand the patient’s world are able to provide excellent patient care. The authors utilize Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics to show how sonographers can frame the ultrasound in a way that acknowledges both the subjective knowledge of the mother and the objective data obtained by the sonographer through the use of technology. Ultimately, the authors argue that the common practice of framing the ultrasound as the chance to “meet the baby” is inappropriate, as it exacerbates the tendency to regard objective knowledge as the only legitimate knowledge in medical contexts. They recommend a more balanced approach that elicits a fusion of horizons between the patient’s subjective knowledge and the objective data that is obtained by the sonographer via the ultrasound, thus respecting and bolstering patient autonomy. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a historically and philosophically adequate interpretation of the earliest of Martin Heidegger's writings, works spanning his student years of 1910--1919. Heidegger conceived his project during his student years as a vital retrieval of what he understood as a unique medieval spirituality and religiosity integrated both with the conceptual rigor of a truly new and progressive Scholasticism that had replaced its reliance on the Aristotelian doctrine of logic and categories with the (...) more flexible theory of logic and sciences of the neo-Kantian and phenomenological movements. This Heideggerian neo-Scholasticism would, he believed, be able to address and to incorporate the constant revolutions in thought of the contemporary sciences. Seen against the background of the intellectual situation of the first two decades of the twentieth century, these works appear as an innovative, albeit flawed, synthesis of medieval scholasticism with current trends in epistemology and logic and as tailored to meet at once the needs of both academic philosophy and Roman Catholic theology. While some commentators and biographers have explored particular issues contributing to Heidegger's thought and goals at this time, no single source has brought together a full appreciation of the complexities his philosophical position within his contemporary situation. This dissertation hopes to be a first step in rectifying this deficiency in the scholarship on the young Heidegger's student years by providing a historically rich and nuanced reading of the complexity of the neo-Scholastic movement at the turn of the twentieth century, the problems that beset German academic philosophy even as the practitioners of the neoKantian and phenomenological schools vied for prominence within the field, and the social difficulties lying before a Catholic seeking entrance into the ranks of the university. These elements must be addressed as a necessary precondition for a full appreciation of Heidegger's early ambitions and the works that grew out of his personal project. (shrink)

I argue that the vulgar belief in continued and distinct existences, as Hume describes it in Treatise 1.4.2, “Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses,” is defeasibly justified. Prior to and apart from the rebutting defeater that Hume brings forward as an argument from perceptual relativity in paragraphs 44 and 45, the vulgar belief is perfectly in order, philosophically speaking. For Hume, a belief is defeasibly justified if and only if it is produced by permanent, irresistible, and (...) universal principles of the imagination. The vulgar belief meets these conditions and thus is defeasibly justified—even though it suffers eventual defeat. (shrink)

Abstract: For William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can ‘generate’ the appropriate sequence of world-time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the ‘derivative’ status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world-time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is (...) to succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane ‘tasks’, the contents of world-time nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into world-time the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling-off. I argue, instead, that world-time nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite ‘irrational’ but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or ‘iterative’ I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the ‘existential’ level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling-off of the world-time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time. (shrink)

Two arguments in Hume’s essay on miracles are reductios ad Catholicism: if you believe in the miracles in the Bible, then you ought to believe in Catholic miracles as well. Hume’s intended readers hated Catholicism and would sooner reject miracles than follow the pope. Hume argues that Jansenist miracle stories meet the standards of trustworthiness as well as any miracles in history. He knows that his Protestant believers don’t believe the stories, and he hopes to persuade his (...) readers to reject any testimony that falls short of that standard. In the ‘Contrary Religions Argument,’ Hume argues that contrary religions should undermine our belief in the trustworthiness of miracle reports. The main contrary religion Hume has in mind is Catholicism, since most miracles stories are Catholic, and Hume’s readers would have rejected them out of hand. He then concludes that if most religiously motivated testimony for miracles is false such testimony is generally unreliable, including testimony for Biblical miracles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:76. A REFUTATION OF HUME'S THEORY OF CAUSALITY1 Given Hume's conceptions of space and time, which I take to be fundamental to his theory of causality, it is not always possible to meet all of those conditions definitive of the cause-effect relation, i.e., those "general rules, by which we may know when" objects really 2 are "causes or effects to each other" (T. 173). To show this, (...) it will be necessary, first, to give a very brief exposition of Hume's conceptions of space and time, with regard chiefly to their implications for the nature of motion. Then, after briefly summarizing his views on the nature of the cause-effect relation, I shall proceed immediately to my objection. It should be noted first, however, that, if one instance of a cause-effect relation can be found to which Hume's analysis will not apply, that, presumably, would be sufficient to refute his theory. I shall not here repeat all of Hume's arguments for the indivisibility of space and time. Suffice it to say, he takes it to be fairly obvious that each must consist of a finite number of indivisible points or moments, each of which is distinct, and therefore separate, from every other, and, in the case of time, none of which ever "co-exist." Only one of his arguments for the indivisibility of space need concern us here. The argument is brief: The infinite divisibility of space implies that of time, as is evident from the nature of motion. If the latter, therefore, be impossible, the former must be equally so. (T. 31) The argument here seems, roughly, to be this: the motion of an object can be described only by giving its positions at various times (the nature of motion). If, therefore, an object, such as a ball moving along a line AB, can be assigned an infinite number of positions taken between A and B (the infinite divisibility of space), 77. the time taken to traverse AB must also be infinite, i.e., must consist of an infinite number of instants. But the finite time taken to traverse the distance AB is not infinitely divisible; therefore, neither is the line AB. This argument, of course, relies upon the assumption that, in traversing the line AB, the ball will occupy each of the points (whether finite or infinite) of which it consists. The argument can also be turned around so as to derive the finite divisibility of time from that of space. Here, too, it must be assumed that the ball occupies each of those instants which constitute the time taken to traverse the line AB. It thus seems clear that, on Hume's view, the ball's motion can be neither more nor less divisible than the space and time it takes to move. x In its motion from A to B, then, the ball will occupy first one, then another of the points lying between A and B until finally it has occupied them all and has moved from A to B. But, in saying that it will occupy first one and then another, we are saying nothing more than that it successively occupies a series of points, and, insofar as its occupation of these different points is successive, it takes time. We are in a position, then, to define motion (at least motion along a straight line) as "the successive occupation of adjacent, linearly ordered points or places." Now, this is very different from the usual conception of motion. The ball's motion between any two adjacent points is not a moving from one to the other. It is simply its being in the one place at one instant and its being in the other place at the next. It is not a continuous motion, but the occupation of discrete places at different times. It is, as it were, a series of instantaneous leaps. This interpretation, if it is accurate, may also serve to account for Hume's ill-understood propensity for 78. referring to cause and effect as objects rather than as events. Events must, on Hume's view of time at least, be essentially static. Unlike those... (shrink)

A series of intervals -- Calculating on absence -- An inherited dis-inheritance -- Absence as pure possibility -- (Not) meeting Heidegger -- La chance de la rencontre -- (Mis)chances -- War and its other -- Conrad and the asymmetrical duel -- (Not) meeting without name.

In this paper I attempt to further the case, made in recent years by Eva Gothlin, that readers interested in a philosophical return to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex have good reason to heed Beauvoir's appropriation of central concepts from Heidegger's Being and Time. I speculate about why readers have been hesitant to acknowledge Heidegger's influence on Beauvoir and show that her infrequent though, I argue, important use of the Heideggarian neologism Mitsein in The Second Sex makes (...) inadequate sense apart from an appreciation of the fundamental role played by her appropriation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic in that book. I suggest a way to square Beauvoir's Hegelian claim that human beings are fundamentally at odds with one another with her Heideggerian view that we are also all ontologically with one another. Finally, I sketch out a way of interpreting Beauvoir's employment of certain concepts from Hegel and Heidegger in the service of understanding, hence beginning to overcome, women's oppression. (shrink)

In this essay an ‘objective’ account of intrinsic value is proposed and partly defended. It is claimed that a kind of value exists which is, or may reasonably be supposed to be, a property of certain objects. The presence of such value is not to be wholly accounted for as the ‘projection’ of certain human feelings elicited by the object thought to be of value, nor by the object's meeting certain operative human conventions prescribing what is to be admired, nor (...) by its being conformable, in some way, to human needs or desires. Hume, of course, would have none of this. It is hoped to show that if one adopts Hume's account, then his attempt to show that there nevertheless will be convergence in the long run as to what is of aesthetic value is forced and unsuccessful. By contrast, on the ‘objective’ account convergence is to be expected. This, of course, only shows the superiority of the ‘objective’ account so long as there is an expectation of long-term convergence. This is not an expectation of most contemporary value ‘subjectivists’, and therefore the argument will not be directly relevant to their positions. (shrink)

This paper uses neo-Fregean-style abstraction principles to develop the integers from the natural numbers (assuming Hume’s principle), the rational numbers from the integers, and the real numbers from the rationals. The first two are first-order abstractions that treat pairs of numbers: (DIF) INT(a,b)=INT(c,d) ≡ (a+d)=(b+c). (QUOT) Q(m,n)=Q(p,q) ≡ (n=0 & q=0) ∨ (n≠0 & q≠0 & m⋅q=n⋅p). The development of the real numbers is an adaption of the Dedekind program involving “cuts” of rational numbers. Let P be a property (...) (of rational numbers) and r a rational number. Say that r is an upper bound of P, written P≤r, if for any rational number s, if Ps then either s<r or s=r. In other words, P≤r if r is greater than or equal to any rational number that P applies to. Consider the Cut Abstraction Principle: (CP) ∀P∀Q(C(P)=C(Q) ≡ ∀r(P≤r ≡ Q≤r)). In other words, the cut of P is identical to the cut of Q if and only if P and Q share all of their upper bounds. The axioms of second-order real analysis can be derived from (CP), just as the axioms of second-order Peano arithmetic can be derived from Hume’s principle. The paper raises some of the philosophical issues connected with the neo-Fregean program, using the above abstraction principles as case studies. (shrink)