This chapter contains sections titled: * Platonism * The Indispensability Argument for Platonism * Challenge to the Truth of Mathematical Statements: Fictionalism * Challenges to the Customary Semantics for Mathematical Discourse * Challenges to the Customary Semantics in General * Theological Objection to Platonism * Conclusion * Notes * References * Further Reading.

In this paper I do two things: (1) I support the claim that there is still some confusion about just what the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument is and the way it employs Quinean meta-ontology and (2) I try to dispel some of this confusion by presenting the argument in a way which reveals its important meta-ontological features, and include these features explicitly as premises. As a means to these ends, I compare Peter van Inwagen’s argument for the existence (...) of properties with Putnam’s presentation of the indispensability argument. Van Inwagen’s argument is a classic exercise in Quinean meta-ontology and yet he claims – despite his argument’s conspicuous similarities to the Quine-Putnam argument – that his own has a substantially different form. I argue, however, that there is no such difference between these two arguments even at a very high level of specificity; I show that there is a detailed generic indispensability argument that captures the single form of both. The arguments are identical in every way except for the kind of objects they argue for – an irrelevant difference for my purposes. Furthermore, Putnam’s and van Inwagen’s presentations make an assumption that is often mistakenly taken to be an important feature of the Quine-Putnam argument. Yet this assumption is only the implicit backdrop against which the argument is typically presented. This last point is brought into sharper relief by the fact that van Inwagen’s list of the four nominalistic responses to his argument is too short. His list is missing an important – and historically popular – fifth option. (shrink)

There is a way of talking that would appear to involve ascriptions of purpose, goal directed activity, and intentional states to groups. Cases are familiar enough: classmates intend to vacation in Switzerland, the department is searching for a metaphysician, the Democrats want to minimize losses in the upcoming elections, and the US intends to improve relations with such and such country. But is this talk to be understood just in terms of the attitudes and actions of the individuals involved? (...) Is the talk, to take an overly simple proposal as an example, a mere summary of familiar individual attitudes of the group members? Or is the ascription of attitudes and actions to groups to be taken more literally, as suggesting that the group for example believes that P, or intends to A, over and above what the members individually think and do? In short, are there groups with minds of their own? Philip Pettit has deployed the “discursive dilemma” to defend the thesis that there are such group minds. In what follows, I explore the relationship between the group allegedly with a mind of its own and the individuals it comprises, and I consider just how this relationship must be understood in order to give Pettit’s argument for group minds its best chance for success. As I understand it, the discursive dilemma has to be used in conjunction with what might be called an indispensability argument for group minds. It is useful to distinguish two forms of this argument. The explanatory version of the indispensability argument is, very schematically, as follows: there is a compelling explanatory theory T concerning the social, certain indispensable elements of T entail the group mind thesis, so the group mind thesis is true. Several questions immediately arise: What sort of theory is T? In what sense is it indispensable? Are there other forms of indispensability? I don’t have definitive answers to these questions. But how we settle them will have implications for the interaction and support the discursive dilemma provides the indispensability argument. In particular, using the discursive dilemma to defend what I characterize below as a practical version of the indispensability argument commits us to the rationality of individual participants in a way that the explanatory version of the indispensability argument does not. My point in the first part of the paper is that if Pettit wants to avoid the weaknesses of the explanatory indispensability argument and pursue the practical version, then he owes us a story about the rationality of individual participation in groups. Pettit also owes us a story about the agency an individual exercises as part of a group. If it takes the actions of individuals to execute the intentions of the group, how are we to understand those actions in order for the group to count as having a mind of its own? How must group intentions figure in the practical or deliberative perspective of individuals who execute those intentions? I will argue that the proponent of the group mind thesis must proceed with some care here, because some natural ways of answering these questions will undermine the thesis. But in the end, I think that these questions are interesting independently of whether Pettit is right to think that groups do have minds of their own. That’s because investigating Pettit’s arguments might lead to new ideas about how the rationality and agency of individuals can be exercised, and suggests new ways of understanding how individuals can act together, irrespective of whether the groups they compose ever have minds of their own. (shrink)

There are two ways of approaching an ontological debate: ontological realism recommends that metaphysicians seek to discover deep ontological facts of the matter, while ontological anti-realism denies that there are such facts; both views sometimes run into difficulties. This paper suggests an approach to ontology that begins with conceptual analysis and takes the results of that analysis as a guide for which metaontological view to hold. It is argued that in some cases, the functions for which we employ a (...) part of our conceptual scheme might give us reasons to posit ontological facts regarding certain objects. The proposed approach recommends ontological realism about an object just in case our conceptual scheme gives us reason to. This yields a mixed overall metaontological view that adopts ontological realism to some issues and ontological anti-realism to others, and that avoids the difficulties that typically arise for the two views. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing features of mathematics is its applicability to empirical science. Every branch of science draws upon large and often diverse portions of mathematics, from the use of Hilbert spaces in quantum mechanics to the use of differential geometry in general relativity. It's not just the physical sciences that avail themselves of the services of mathematics either. Biology, for instance, makes extensive use of difference equations and statistics. The roles mathematics plays in these theories is also (...) varied. Not only does mathematics help with empirical predictions, it allows elegant and economical statement of many theories. Indeed, so important is the language of mathematics to science, that it is hard to imagine how theories such as quantum mechanics and general relativity could even be stated without employing a substantial amount of mathematics. (shrink)

An emphasis on explanatory contribution is central to a recent formulation of the indispensability argument for mathematical realism. Because scientific realism is argued for by means of inference to the best explanation, it has been further argued that being a scientific realist entails a commitment to IA and thus to mathematical realism. It has, however, gone largely unnoticed that the way that IBE is argued to be truth conducive involves citing successful applications of IBE and tracing this success over (...) time. This in turn involves identifying those constituents of scientific theories that are responsible for their predictive success and showing that these constituents are retained across theory change in science. I argue that even if mathematics can be shown to feature in best explanations, the role of mathematics in scientific theories does not satisfy the condition that mathematics is always retained across theory change. According to a scientific realist, this condition needs to be met for making ontological claims on the basis of explanatory contribution. Thus scientific realists are not committed to mathematical realism on the basis of this recent formulation of IA. (shrink)

Enhanced indispensability arguments claim that Scientific Realists are committed to the existence of mathematical entities due to their reliance on Inference to the best explanation. Our central question concerns this purported parity of reasoning: do people who defend the EIA make an appropriate use of the resources of Scientific Realism to achieve platonism? We argue that just because a variety of different inferential strategies can be employed by Scientific Realists does not mean that ontological conclusions concerning which things (...) we should be Scientific Realists about are arrived at by any inferential route which eschews causes, and nor is there any direct pressure for Scientific Realists to change their inferential methods. We suggest that in order to maintain inferential parity with Scientific Realism, proponents of EIA need to give details about how and in what way the presence of mathematical entities directly contribute to explanations. (shrink)

According to the indispensability argument, the fact that we quantify over numbers, sets and functions in our best scientific theories gives us reason for believing that such objects exist. I examine a strategy to dispense with such quantification by simply replacing any given platonistic theory by the set of sentences in the nominalist vocabulary it logically entails. I argue that, as a strategy, this response fails: for there is no guarantee that the nominalist world that go beyond the set (...) of sentences in the nominalist language such theories entail. However, I argue that what such theories show is that mathematics can enable us to express possibilities about the concrete world that may not be expressible in nominalistically acceptable language. While I grant that this may make quantification over abstracta indispensable, I deny that such indispensability is a reason for accepting them into our ontology. I urge that the nominalist should be allowed to quantify over abstracta whilst denying their existence and I explain how this apparently contradictory practice (a practice I call 'weaseling') is in fact coherent, unproblematic and rational. Finally, I examine the view that platonistic theories are simpler or more attractive than their nominalistic reformulations, and thus that abstract ought to be accepted into our ontology for the same sorts of reasons as other theoretical objects. I argue that, at least in the case of numbers, functions and sets, such arguments misunderstand the kind of simplicity and attractiveness we seek. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes intended the so-called ontological "argument" as a self-validating intuition, rather than as a formal proof. The textual evidence for this view is highly compelling, but the strongest support comes from understanding Descartes's diagnosis for why God's existence is not 'immediately' self-evident to everyone and the method of analysis that he develops for making it self-evident. The larger aim of the paper is to use the ontological argument as a case study of Descartes's nonformalist theory of deduction (...) and his method of analysis, showing how he conceives the latter as a form of philosophical therapy. (shrink)

Quine's views on indispensability arguments in mathematics are scrutinised. A weak indispensability argument is distinguished from a strong indispensability thesis. The weak argument is the combination of the criterion of ontological commitment, holism and a mild naturalism. It is used to refute nominalism. Quine's strong indispensability thesis claims that one should consider all and only the mathematical entities that are really indispensable. Quine has little support for this thesis. This is even clearer if one takes into (...) account Maddy's critique of Quine's strong indispensability thesis. Maddy's critique does not refute Quine's weak indispensability argument. We are left with a weak and almost unassailable indispensability argument. (shrink)

The touchstone of these seven original essays is the relationship between polis and praxis - the public-political space and the political action that maintains and is conditioned by that space. The argument flows from Martin Heidegger's lament in his Letter on Humanism that modern philosophers have failed to understand that the essence of "action" is "accomplishment." Dallmayr's lucid essays are a step toward achieving that understanding.Dallmayr assesses and puts into perspective the work of many of the seminal thinkers of the (...) 20th century - Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott - as he takes up such topics as the plausibility of friendship as a model for political relations, the relationship between political praxis and "experience," Heidegger's ontology of freedom, Foucault's treatment of power, and the merits and disadvantages of Habermasian critical theory. The result is a stimulating and original contribution to current political discourse that explores and advocates the manifold possible levels of active political life below and above the level of the State.Fred Dallmayr has established a reputation as a theorist and critic who is equally well attuned to European and American currents of philosophical and political thought. Like Hannah Arendt, he sees the essay as an ideal form for exercises in theorizing en route while venturing beyond traditional categories and philosophical benchmarks. His aim in this book is not a close-knit propositional framework but a set of tentative and partially continuous explorations that are provocative and inviting, like the movements of a musical suite.Fred R. Dallmayr is Packey Dee Professor of Government, University of Notre Dame. (shrink)

The Quine-Putnam indispensability argument runs as follows: We have reason to believe in Fs if Fs are indispensable to our best available science. Mathematical entities are indispensable to our best available science. Therefore, we have reason to believe in mathematical entities.According to the standard understanding, in order to refute the argument the nominalist has to show that mathematical entities are dispensable by providing an at least as good theory of the same phenomena that is not ontologically committed to mathematical (...) entities. Most philosophers who write in this area, including John Burgess, Mark Colyvan, Hartry Field, Penelope Maddy, and Gideon Rosen, accept the standard understanding. Many nominalists who accept the standard understanding propose nominalistic paraphrases or alternatives, claiming that these are either equally good or better than our current scientific theories. Platonists deny that they are either equally good or better. (shrink)

Much recent discussion in the philosophy of mathematics has concerned the indispensability argument—an argument which aims to establish the existence of abstract mathematical objects through appealing to the role that mathematics plays in empirical science. The indispensability argument is standardly attributed to W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam. In this paper, I show that this attribution is mistaken. Quine's argument for the existence of abstract mathematical objects differs from the argument which many philosophers of mathematics ascribe to him. (...) Contrary to appearances, Putnam did not argue for the existence of abstract mathematical objects at all. I close by suggesting that attention to Quine and Putnam's writings reveals some neglected arguments for platonism which may be superior to the indispensability argument. (shrink)

In a recent article M. Colyvan has argued that Quinean forms of scientific realism are faced with an unexpected upshot. Realism concerning a given class of entities, along with this route to realism, can be vindicated by running an indispensability argument to the effect that the entities postulated by our best scientific theories exist. Colyvan observes that among our best scientific theories some are inconsistent, and so concludes that, by resorting to the very same argument, we may incur a (...) commitment to inconsistent entities. Colyvan's argument could be interpreted, and in part is presented, as a reductio of Quinean scientific realism; yet, Colyvan in the end manifests some willingness to bite the bullet, and provides some reasons why we shouldn't feel too uncomfortable with those entities. In this paper we wish to indicate a way out to the scientific realist, by arguing that no indispensability argument of the kind suggested by Colyvan is actually available. To begin with, in order to run such an indispensability argument we should be justified in believing that an inconsistent theory is true; yet, in so far as the logic we accept is a consistent one it is arguable that our epistemic predicament could not be possibly one in which we are justified in so believing. Moreover, also if our logic admitted true contradictions, as Dialetheism does, it is arguable that Colyvan's indispensability argument could not rest on a true premise. As we will try to show, dialetheists do not admit true contradictions for cheap: they do so just as a way out of paradox, namely whenever we are second-level ignorant as to the metaphysical possibility of evidence breaking the parity among two or more inconsistent claims; Colyvan's examples, however, are not of this nature. So, even under the generous assumption that Dialetheism is true, we will conclude that Colyvan's argument doesn't achieve its surprising conclusion. (shrink)

The question of what ontological insights can be gained from the knowledge of physics (keyword: ontic structural realism) cannot obviously be separated from the view of physics as a science from an epistemological perspective. This is also visible in the debate about 'scientific realism'. This debate makes it evident, in the form of the importance of perception as a criterion for the assertion of existence in relation to the 'theoretical entities' of physics, that epistemology itself is 'ontologically laden'. This is (...) in the form of the assumption that things (or entities) in themselves exist as such and such determined ones (independent of cognition, autonomously). This ontological assumption is not only the basis of our naïve understanding of cognition, but also its indispensable premise, insofar as this understanding is a fundamentally passive, 'receptive' one. Accordingly, just as 'perception' is the foundation, ('objective') description is the aim of cognition, that which cognition is about. In this sense, our idea of cognition and our idea of the things are inseparably linked. Without the ontological premise mentioned we just would not know what cognition is, but it is basically just a kind of image that we have in our minds (an assumption that helps us understand 'cognition'). Epistemology not only shares this basic assumption (which it also shares with metaphysics), but it revolves (unlike metaphysics) entirely around it by making the idea and demand of 'certainty' a condition of 'real' knowledge. As 'certainty' is a subjective criterion this entails the 'remodelling' of the real, holistic cognitive situation (to which metaphysics adheres) into a linear subject-object-relation (which results in the strict 'transcendence' of the objects). And it also establishes, due to its 'expertise' in matters of cognition, the 'primacy of epistemology' over all other sciences. Now, on closer inspection, however, the expertise of epistemology seems not all that dependable, because it basically consists only of paradigms which, from the point of view of the holism of the real cognitive situation itself, are nothing more than relatively simplistic interpretations of this situation. However, we do not yet know what another conception of cognition might look like (which is not surprising given the high rank of the phenomenon of cognition in the hierarchy of phenomena according to their complexity). 'Certainty' as a criterion of cognition is thus excluded from the outset, and thus the linear relational model of cognition appears as what it is, a gross distortion of the real, holistic cognitive situation. The significance of this argumentation with regard to physics is that the linear epistemological model of cognition itself is a major obstacle to an adequate epistemological understanding of physics. This is because it is fixed 'a priori' to an object-related concept of cognition, and to 'description' as the only mode of ('real') cognition. But physics (without questioning our naïve notion of cognition on the level of epistemology) simply works past it and its basic assumptions. Its cognitive concept (alias heuristic) is fundamentally different from that of metaphysics. The acceptance of the real, holistic cognitive situation is, in my opinion, the condition for an adequate understanding of physics' heuristic access to objects, its transcendental, generalizing cognitive concept, as well as its ontological relevance and dimension of its own. (shrink)

This article analyzes and criticizes the transcendental arguments Roy Bhaskar uses to justify his transcendental realist ontology. They are compared to Kant's in the Critique of Pure Reason and a detailed reconstruction of those formulated in A Realist Theory of Science is presented. It is argued that these formulations contain certain ambiguities and are beset with other, more serious, problems. First, Bhaskar's descriptions of scientific practices are far more controversial than is presupposed in his arguments. Second, Bhaskar uses the (...) Kantian concept of transcendental necessity in his transcendental arguments which inevitably connects them to certain Kantian doctrines that are inconsistent with his transcendental realist ontology. Some qualifications of his formulations Bhaskar made in his later writings are also considered and another possible interpretation of his transcendental arguments is presented from the point of view of these qualifications. On this interpretation, Bhaskar seeks to naturalize Kantian transcendental arguments by combining a posteriori premises with a priori philosophical reasoning. It is argued that this kind of naturalized version of transcendental arguments is also problematic. Therefore, it is concluded that Bhaskar's transcendental arguments fail to justify his transcendental realist ontology. Nevertheless, it might be possible to justify at least some of Bhaskar's ontological claims from the perspective of meta-philosophical naturalism. It is maintained that this requires naturalization not just of transcendental arguments but of the whole transcendental realist ontology. One possible form of naturalistic argument that might replace Bhaskar's problematic transcendental arguments is sketched. It is, however, admitted that, desirable though the naturalization of Bhaskar's early ontology may be, more work needs to be done to achieve this goal. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIGHT OF THEIR INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION Summary The book consists of two main parts: in the first, on the basis of an analysis of international law, elements of the contemporary conception of human rights and its positive legal protection are identified; in the second - in light of the first part -a philosophical theory of law based on the tradition leading from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas is constructed. The conclusion contains an application (...) of the results of the analysis conducted in the second part. The first part comprises four chapters. The first aims at revealing characteristics of human rights on the basis of an analysis of historical conditioning of the inter-national law of human rights and its development. The historical context displays the practical, vindicative, and critical character of the positive legal protection of human rights. Moreover, the process of change of positive human rights law is distinguished from the process of change of human rights as such. In the second chapter the content of human rights - a topic which is only auxiliary to the conducted analysis - is discussed. Basic typology and catalogues of rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected in the International Covenants of Human Rights are presented. The review of the content of rights aims at a more precise limitation of the field of research. The examination shows a diversity of rights which poses a serious challenge to the coherence of every philosophical theory of human rights. In the third chapter, central in the first part, international law is analyzed with regard to the characteristics of rights and the foundations of them. The analysis of documents shows a number of solutions referring to the anthropological foundations of rights. The inherent dignity of the human person is the source of all human rights. Each human being is recognized as free, and endowed with both reason and conscience. In the propounded conception of man individuals are not rivals but create a community which is a condition for their development. International law characterizes the rights as universal, inherent, inalienable and inviolable. The reconstructed conception also comprises the following basic elements: on the level of the structure of rights, a recognition of their equality, interdependence, and comprehensiveness; in the grounding of these rights, a recognition of the anthropological foundations of law; in the conception of positive law, a recognition of the secondariness of the positive law of human rights to human rights themselves, and a recognition of human rights and justice as the basis for legal order; in the conception of state, a recognition of the well-being of the individual as the fundamental aim of actions undertaken by political institutions, and recogni¬tion of rights which form an impassable boundary to the power of the state, includ¬ing its legislative actions. The characterization of the international legal paradigm serving for the under¬standing of human rights is supplemented by analyses of the structure of their posi¬tive legal protection. Various meanings of the terms "right" and "freedom" are distinguished. Subjective right, as basic structure of the positive legal protection of human rights, is understood as a complex relation formed by various legal situations of the subject of a right which create a functional whole in respect of the subordi-nation of human person to its good. Subordinating person to a good proper for it, expressed usually in a proclamatory norm, is the central element of particular rights around which further elements aiming at the realization of this good are built. In the second part of the book a philosophical theory is developed which allows for the location of a coherent foundation for the presented characterization of human rights and their positive legal protection. This part consists of two chapters. The first includes a review of some - not entirely satisfactory - means of founding of human rights; the second presents philosophical conceptions of law and man which may form a basis for the constructed theory. The review of arguments contained in the first chapter does not aim at a detailed analysis of various specific ways of argumentation encountered in works on this subject but rather at a concise presentation of the main possible lines of argumentation. These analyses also serve to emphasize the positive solutions which are pro¬posed later and to underscore the explanatory power of the elaborated theory. This theory, retaining accurate intuitions contained in the presented types of argumenta¬tion, helps in avoiding their consequences which are difficult to reconcile with the reconstructed paradigm of human rights. Efforts to base human rights on the norms of international law rightly take into account the necessity of determining the content of the rights and their positive legal protection as a means for the realization of man's good. These attempts, how¬ever, do not properly take into account the inherent character of human rights, which are independent of positive law and provide grounds for applying specific legislative measures and not others. Founding human rights on freedom accurately points at the freedom of an indi¬vidual as a constitutive element of some rights; however, absolutization of freedom leads, to a loss of an important element of the contemporary paradigm of under¬standing human rights. This foundation undermines recognition of the fact that human rights may set limits to both the freedom of others and the freedom of the subject of rights itself. Additionally, attempts at the so-called axiological justification of human rights are discussed. This type of justification has a few variants depending on the as¬sumed conception of value. Subjectivistic conceptions have similar advantages and disadvantages to the conceptions basing human rights on freedom; objectivistic conceptions while providing for the universality of human rights place, the fundamental aim of human rights protection beyond the individual human being - in the idealistically existing world of values; finally, conceptions rooting values and human rights in culture, while accurately noting that human rights are learned through the medium of culture, place the source of human rights beyond a concrete individual - in culture and processes which take place in it - which leads to difficulties in finding a basis for the universality of rights. Furthermore, attempts to ground human rights in specific characteristics of the human being are presented. This type of approach points to an important problem of dependence of the content of rights on what man is. However, recognition of specific characteristics of a human being as an ontic foundation of the existence of rights poses a danger to their universality since one has to accept that it is not enough to be a man to be a subject of rights, but a man possessing specific charac¬teristics. The second chapter aims at outlining solutions worked out by Saint Thomas Aquinas. For a fuller understanding of his propositions selected elements of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy are presented. It was them who formulated the founda¬tions for reflection on law and justice in the ontological context. A qualification is made that Stoicism is not be analysed in depth. Although Thomas' concept of law was undoubtedly developed under the influence of the Stoic doctrine as well, it is not in this that one should look for the tools to understand the ontic foundations of human rights and law in general since the Stoic moral philosophy and philosophy of law were developed in the context of a theory of being which assumed monistic and pantheistic premises as foundations, leading to the recognition of a total subor¬dination of the human individual to a larger unity of which man is only a part. The analysis of Plato's and Aristotle's texts concentrates on problems of justice. Plato seems to be the first philosopher who reflected on the formula basic in the history of European thought: to render to each his due. It appears that justice as both a characteristic of man and his acts is understood in the perspective of that which is just, that which is a good for another man - the recipient of the act. The basis for determining what is just is the relation of correspondence between some¬one and something. While in the case of Plato this relation is based on something beyond its terms, namely on ideas, in the case of Aristotle the relation occurs on account of the elements of the relation itself. Something is just when it contributes to the develop¬ment of the recipient of an act realizing that which is just. At the same time, the realization of that which is just is a good for the agent. In the analysis of the just two types of relation are revealed: the relation of due-to-recipient occurring on account of the compatibility of that which is due, with the recipient of the act; and - a "superstructure" - a relation of obligation-of-subject occurring on account of the compatibility of the acting subject with the thing which should be done. The basis for being that which is due is formed by various potentialities of development of man - the recipient of agency; the basis of being that which is an obligation is the possibility of development of the subject of action. Aristotle distinguishes various types of freedom and points to the necessity of taking them into account in the discussion of justice. Among other things, as the core of man's freedom, he considers life for its own sake, which can be seen as his expression of the basic indices of the autotelic character of man - which is funda¬mental for later conceptions of dignity. The freedom which is described by him is not, however, inherent and inalienable; being free is conditioned by a factual possi¬bility of undertaking actions, which are not solely means to the realization of aims set by others. Thomas Aquinas takes over the Aristotelian research perspective both in his conception of man and of law. At the same time, however, he significantly enriches it. In anthropology he develops a conception of personal being. Drawing upon his distinction between existence ("that something is") and essence ("what something is"), he sees the basis for being a person in the dignity of personal being which is a certain way of existence of a rational being more perfect than that of non-personal beings. The person is a being which, by virtue of its act of existence, is individual¬ized in a specific way. It is an aim in itself. Expressing it in a negative way, one may say that it does not exist as a means for the realization of the aims of others and, in this sense, that it is free. As distinct from Aristotelian conclusions, being a person is not conditioned by the specific actions of a being. Dignity is inherent, based on that which is the foundation of the factual existence of every rational being. Although freedom requires that a being is rational, dignity still encompasses all being, all its properties and potentialities. Thus an act conforming with dignity has to take into account a whole human being. Among different types of that which is just, ius, the first place, from the point of view of understanding law, falls to "the just thing itself ("ipsa res justa"), which is right in the full meaning of the word. On the one hand, it is that which is due; on the other hand, it determines the way of acting in the utmost degree, since the course of every act is determined in the fullest extent by its aim. The content of ius may be determined both by elements independent of free decisions - ius naturale - and by free decisions taking into account the state of things - ius positivum. Recognition of the objective structure of being as the basis of law does not entail that it is possible or desirable to determine unequivocally "the only right" patterns of conduct. This concept is very well justified within the system proposed by Saint Thomas. Individualization of being is a significant element of the develop¬ment of a person as a person. It is attained by the realization of individual aims which are not unequivocally determined by circumstances and the nature common to all people. By virtue of free choices made in the sphere of that which is not by its nature unjust, the object of action becomes ius. Since in the realization of the person the individualization of human being is central, Aquinas clearly sees the need for the protection of the sphere of "dominion of will". This sphere itself constitutes ius naturale, something which is due to man independently of the acts of will. Therefore "law should forbid nothing which is not unjust" ("nihil debet lege prohiberi quod licite fieri potest", In 3 Sent., dist. 40, q. I, a. 1, 3). Besides the relation of due-to-recipient, ius also includes the relation of obligation-of-subject which is superimposed on the relation of due-to-recipient. As far as the ontic foundations of obligation are concerned, in explaining why man is subordinated to realization of the good of others, Aquinas generally follows Aristotle in accepting that this basis is the subordination to moral good - to actions conforming with the learned truth about reality. Aquinas' systemic solutions allow, however, to reach deeper and understand why moral development is also a development of the whole human being. This was difficult within Aristotle's system, since he was reluc¬tant to decide whether precedence should be given to intellectual or moral develop¬ment. The inclination to realise good of another appears to be a transcendental characteristic of being, based on its very existence. Morality understood as rational and free subordination to realize the good of another is a specifically personal way of the realization of this inclination. Thus just actions contribute to the actualization of being in the aspect of its existence and therefore to the actualization of being as a whole. Thomas' conception of natural law (lex naturalis) as participation in eternal law (lex aeterna), offers possibilities for grasping that which is just as something which is basically accessible cognition, independently of Revelation and independently of faith in God, and at the same time as something based in eternal law, understood as a design of God's wisdom. Eternal law, embracing all particular actions, is not, from the human perspective, accessible cognition directly. It is enacted in the struc-ture of the created being and - in case of human beings - in free choices taking this structure into account. In the concluding remarks, the results obtained earlier are applied directly to the contemporary conception of human rights. Human rights are understood in the first place as "just things" - concrete goods of man; as that which is due because of subordination, based on dignity, to the personal development of man. That which is just is understood as a relational - actual or potential - state of things, which exists by virtue of existing relations. Evaluations referring to that which is right are true when respective relations of due-to-recipient take place; norms of conduct are true when respective relations of obligation-of-subject take place. Examples of the application of the sketched theory outside the field of human rights are also presented. Procedural consequences of the developed theory are shown, such as the discrimination of two types of legislative procedures which differ significantly in the structure of argumentation: the first aims at recognition of that which is just independently of the will of the legislator, and the second, at making individual or collective "projects" of development compatible. Finally the possibilities of applying the theory to the increasingly important problems of the protection of the environment and the "rights" of animals are mentioned. The central issue is a philosophical conception of man and his freedom and a conception of law. It is also indispensable to turn to a general theory of being. The search for a comprehensive theory of human rights requires attention to the Abso¬lute Being - God - as well. This is important for at least two reasons. First, a conception of the Absolute Being is integral to philosophy of the systemic type -of which the present book is a piece. A conception of the Absolute Being is signifi¬cant for understanding all being, including, first of all, man as a personal being. Second, every theory of human rights which does not comprise the problem of the Absolute may be questioned as to whether solutions adopted in it do not lead, in consequence, to eliminating God from the perspective of the understanding of law. It is desirable that a philosophical theory should deal with this problem directly. A theory which eliminates God from the perspective of the understanding of rights will be unacceptable for all those who, for philosophical reasons or relying on faith, consider God as the author of inherent rights. Nevertheless, a theoretical approach to rights from the perspective of the Absolute Being should only be a possible extension of a philosophical approach which bases rights on something which is cognizable independently of the acceptance of the existence of God so that the theory is also acceptable for those who reject the existence of God or suspend their judgment on this subject. The pursued theory should therefore contain, on the one hand, reference to natural, faith-independent foundations of human rights, but on the other hand, point to a possible extension accounting for the Absolute Being. The analyses contained in this chapter have undoubtedly some historical value since they are based on source texts. Nevertheless, the use of these texts and not critical works was dictated, first of all, by a conviction that analyses embrace a given theory in the aspect selected by the interests of the researcher. Therefore to find out what past thinkers say on the subject characterized in the first part it is simpler to reach to the sources than to adopt the existing critical works. The pre¬sented reconstruction of Aquinas' views on philosophy of law incorporates proposi¬tions of supplementing and developing some of the ideas undertaken by him. Obligation to act in this and not an other way arises because human actions are subordinated to the conformity, on the one hand, of aims realized by these actions and, on the one hand, the order of being determining that which is favourable to man or destroys him. The content of the order of being is, on the one hand, determined by the structure of being independent from man's will and, on the other, by free decisions of man. (shrink)

From this summary account of the deduction we can draw a number of conclusions: In the first place, the guiding thesis used to make sense of the argument was that the argument needed to ground not just the moral law but a cognitive framework within which the moral law is the highest law. This distinction is important since it allows us to distinguish in the practical philosophy (as in the theoretical) a level of transcendental argumentation from a level of (...) metaphysical argumentation: The concern of transcendental philosophy would be to establish the conditions of the possibility of a cognitive framework, whereas the concern of metaphysics (in Kant's sense) is to develop the principles of a given cognitive framework and to derive from them knowledge of objects (see KU, Introduction, Section V). (This distinction turns out to be invaluable in dealing with the problem of the “application” of the moral law.)In the second place, this interpretation allows us to avoid reducing the practical viewpoint to the status of a poor imitation of “real” knowledge, one whose inadequacies must be passed over in embarrassed silence for the sake of rescuing morality. If the argument is correct, practical knowledge is in one sense more firmly grounded than (and even subsumes) theoretical knowledge, even though its grounds do not allow of complete insight.And, finally, we can make at least some cautious generalizations about Kant's understanding of a transcendental argument. Two things in particular seem to characterize the deduction: (1) It is essential that the argument is concerned with a cognitive framework rather than with any specific knowledge within that framework; it is the possibility of knowledge at all that is in question, and it is that fact that requires a special kind of argument. (2) Kant's assumptions about the distinct roots of human knowledge are indispensable to the argument. The distinction between mere speculation (mere thinking, which requires only our rational faculties) and knowledge (which also requires sensibility) is essential: Without that distinction we cannot understand why the argument is necessary in the first place (since, as I argued above, we cannot see how the moral law is synthetic), nor can we understand what it means to ground a cognitive framework: Grounding a cognitive framework for Kant has turned out to involve showing how two irreducibly distinct faculties can cooperate in acts of cognition - here it is the faculty of desire and the pure will which are conceptually irreducible and for which grounds of a possible a priori unity must nevertheless be given. The fact that these two features are so central to the argument would indicate that they should be taken into consideration in any discussion of transcendental arguments framed along Kantian lines. (shrink)

I will offer a defence of Anselm's Ontological Argument, building on some suggestions made by Prior. The defence offered avoids one of the objections commonly levelled against the Ontological Argument. I will not consider whether the use of this objection involves a misinterpretation of the argument as put forward by Anselm. It might, for example, be held that the argument of Proslogion 2 is programmatic, and points forward to Prosiogion 3, and arguments given by Anselm in his Reply to Gaunilo. (...) In particular it might be denied that Anselm holds that what is greater about what exists in reality is just that it exists in reality. While what I have to say will start from points made by Prior, I do not intend to suggest that Prior holds that there is a defence possible for Anselm's argument such as I will offer. What I have to say involves emphasizing modal notions, and treating Anselm's argument as a modal argument. Thus it comes down to defending Anselm's argument in Proslogion 3 in preference to the Proslogion 2 argument. (shrink)

Calls to recognize a right of return are a recurring feature of refugee crises. Particularly when such crises become long-term, advocates of displaced people insist that they be allowed to return to their country of origin. I argue that this right is best understood as the right of refugees to return, not to a prior territory, but to a prior political status. This status is one that sees not just any state, but a refugee's state of origin, take responsibility (...) for safeguarding their welfare. This entitlement I characterize as an institutional right: a right that presupposes, and is a necessary feature of, a particular institution. The institution of which the right of return is an indispensable part is the international political system that sees authority exercised by sovereign states. The institutional argument for a right of refugee return presupposes two basic factual claims about states: they play a central role in safeguarding rights and they pursue exclusionary policies of border control. Importantly, the institutional view presupposes only that states do perform both functions, not that they are justified in doing so. On a purely normative level, the institutional account assumes little more than the moral equality of human beings. (shrink)

Alan Baker’s enhanced indispensability argument supports mathematical platonism through the explanatory role of mathematics in science. Busch and Morrison defend nominalism by denying that scientific realists use inference to the best explanation to directly establish ontological claims. In response to Busch and Morrison, I argue that nominalists can rebut the EIA while still accepting Baker’s form of IBE. Nominalists can plausibly require that defenders of the EIA establish the indispensability of a particular mathematical entity. Next, I argue that (...) IBE cannot establish that any particular mathematical entity is indispensable. Mathematical entities do not compete with each other in the way physical unobservables do. This lack of competition enables alternative formulations of scientific explanations that use different, but compatible, mathematical entities. The compatibility of these explanations prevents IBE from establishing platonism. (shrink)

The subject with which Mark Colyvan's book deals is timely indeed. While discussions of mathematical ontology have been a mainstay in philosophy of mathematics for the last century (at least), for the last thirty years or so this discussion has begun with (and often not left) the Quine/Putnam indispensability argument. Though the argument is widely cited, to my knowledge this is the first book-length project exclusively dedicated to articulating and defending the Quine/Putnam indispensability argument for mathematical platonism. (...) In the first section below, I shall run through a summary of the book (following its chapter layout) with a few critical remarks. In the second section I shall raise a few critical issues organized topically. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

The ontological argument appears in a multiplicity of forms. Over the past ten or twelve years, however, the philosophical community seems to have been concerned principally with those versions of the proof which claim that God is a necessary being. In contemporary literature, Professors Malcolm and Hartshorne have been the chief advocates of this view, both men holding that God must be conceived as a necessary being and that, as a result, his existence is able to be demonstrated a priori (...) . This claim has not gone unchallenged; indeed, numerous writers have argued that neither Malcolm nor Hartshorne has exercised due care in his use of ‘necessary’. That is, critics charge that the arguments of both men have only the appearance of validity, for in their reasonings the defenders of the a priori proof have tacitly assumed that God is a logically necessary being. Whether or not a being can be logically necessary, however, is a quaestio disputata . In fact, until recently the question was not in dispute at all—virtually all ‘competent judges’ agreed that only propositions could be spoken of as logically necessary, and thus that God must be defined as a physically or factually necessary being. But is the statement, ‘a physically necessary being exists’, logically true? Critics of the ontological argument think not; and in support of this view they offer analyses of ‘physical necessity’ which, they feel, not only give meaning to the phrase, but also show that a physically necessary being's existence can be proven only by some kind of a posteriori investigation. (shrink)

Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependenceIt is a truism among philosophers that art is intention-dependent—that is to say, art-making is an activity that depends in some way on the maker's intentions. Not much thought has been given to just what this entails, however. For instance, most philosophers of art assume that intention-dependence entails concept-dependence—i.e. possessing a concept of art is necessary for art-making, so that what prospective artists must intend is to make art. And yet, a mounting body of (...) anthropological and art-historical evidence and philosophical argument suggests that not only is such a criterion unsatisfied by most of the art-historical canon, but it also rests on a false premise: concepts of 'art' are not shared between cultures, nor even in the same culture across time. My dissertation aims to rectify this error by first exploring what our commitment to art's intention-dependence actually entails, and then showing that, properly understood, intention-dependence sets a number of important constraints on theories of art with respect to explanatory desiderata such as the success- and failure-conditions of art-attempts, the cross-cultural identification of art, and the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I begin by situating art's intention-dependence in the philosophical literature on intentional action, arguing that, properly conceived, intention-dependence is a weak criterion which can be satisfied either directly or indirectly. It therefore does not necessarily entail concept-dependence. I then use this distinction to motivate a new treatment of the success- and failure-conditions for art-attempts, arguing that the extant model's emphasis on compliance with 'the manner intended' is far too restrictive to capture actual artistic practices. I go on to show that Ruth Millikan's model of linguistic conventions supplies an independently plausible explanation of art's concept-independent origins in terms of the development of a system of indirectly intention-dependent conventions called an 'artworld'. I argue that this account of artworld development supplies us with the tools we need to distinguish art-kinds from other artifactual kinds. Finally, I turn my attention to methodological issues, arguing that even though 'art' is a social kind with its roots in arbitrary and historically-contingent networks of conventions, the philosophy of art is not merely an exercise in bare conceptual analysis. In fact, there is now a great deal of evidence to show that the ways we think about 'art' are inconsistent, incomplete, imperialistic, and largely unprincipled. Yet I argue that this does not mean that the artworld data have no bearing on theories of art. Instead, I argue that our best reflective understanding of our artworld practices sets the constraints on the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I argue that we have no privileged epistemic access to the ontology of social kinds; our only privilege lies in our ability to determine the proper subject of our inquiries. (shrink)

Much recent work in metaontology challenges the so-called ‘Quinean tradition’ in metaphysics. Especially prominently, Amie Thomasson argues for a highly permissive ontology over ontologies which eliminate many entities. I am concerned with disputing not her ontological claim, but the methodology behind her rejection of eliminativism – I focus on ordinary objects. Thomasson thinks that by endorsing the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment eliminativism goes wrong; a theory eschewing quantification over a kind may nonetheless be committed to its existence. I (...) argue that, contrary to Thomasson's claims, we should retain the Quinean criterion. Her arguments show that many eliminativist positions are flawed, but their flaws lie elsewhere: the Quinean criterion is innocent. Showing why reveals the importance of pragmatism in ontology. In §1 I compare Thomasson's account and the eliminativist views to which it stands in opposition. In §2 I re-construct Thomasson's reasons for rejecting the Quinean criterion. In §3 I defend the Quinean criterion, showing that the eliminativists’ flaws are not consequences of applying the Quinean criterion, before explaining the criterion's importance when properly understood. I conclude that Thomasson, though right to criticise the methodology of ordinary-object eliminativists, is wrong to identify the Quinean criterion as the source of their mistake. (shrink)

The Human Being in History affirms the ontological dignity of the human being, arguing that the challenges posed by the twenty-first century are not just political, economic, and social, but existential and metaphysical. In the face of these challenges, philosophy must show how to confront issues in a new way: not as problems that admit technical resolution, but as questions which involve openness to meaning and which demand the exercise of freedom.

Writing, the exigency of writing: no longer the writing that has always (through a necessity in no way avoidable) been in the service of the speech or thought that is called idealist (that is to say, moralizing), but rather the writing that through its own slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence) seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity, and little by little brings forth possibilities that are entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, deferred, (...) and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question – and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work so that this writing (understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language. – Maurice Blanchot ( The Infinite Conversation , xi) The Compendium * Beginning with the idea and practice of writing, and moving to the subject or self, then to truth and the One, and arriving at the Book and the Work, Blanchot’s words reflect the trajectory of the following work of writing. True to the embeddedness of the subject in the work of writing, the term “Compendium” has been a metonym for me over the past few years as I have thought about the concept of totality alongside its expression in figures such as the One, the Whole, or the All. In the following I aim to share some of the content of this metonym, and to enrich it by making some distinctions. 1 Here the term “Compendium” will refer to a concept of totality that is ontological (pertaining to being, and the copula) and also textual (pertaining to the symbolic, and the signifier-signified relationship). The Compendium is a figure for thinking the world as a Book, in the broadest sense—an approach to reality that is by no means new, but one that is due for renewal. 2 In partial answer to the question of the Compendium we will say that the word ‘Compendium’ stands in for expressions which seek to totalize, or concepts which seek to approach the concept of ‘everything,’ particularly when these expressions are bound up in the question of the Book (both the book as a physical object and the Book as a metaphysical figure: a way of thinking about the work in and of writing). The question of the Compendium is strongly associated with the physical and metaphysical form of the Book, like the mysterious and symbolic books which are opened in the Biblical book of Revelation, the book of life and the book of death, which together constitute an important couplet. 3 Parataxis & Hypotaxis There are two helpful distinctions that will bring us closer to an answer to the question “What is a Compendium?” The first distinction is between two figures in and for writing: parataxis and hypotaxis . Typically paired in contrast to one another as literary techniques, with parataxis indicating a side-by-side placement of textual elements and hypotaxis referring to subordinate arrangements of textual elements, the two figures can be understood as having a philosophical significance in addition to their practical function as devices for writers. For us these two terms will remain between philosophical theory and writing practice, and serve as a perspective for our writing and creation of texts. Here I take texts to refer to anything from the concrete written words in a book, to the ontological text of the world that we experience. Parataxis , as a figural way of thinking about the ontological structure of texts, refers to texts which are tightly woven and interdependent – texts within which each sentence bears the weight of the entire work. Parataxis often involves repetition, great density, and fragility. One of the best examples of this sort of text is Theodor Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus , Aesthetic Theory . In addition to the text itself, the translation history of the book may also help us to better understand parataxis and its relation to hypotaxis . The final published version of Aesthetic Theory , in German, was a text that Adorno intended to revise and rewrite, but this intention was never realized because of his untimely death. Where the German text of Aesthetic Theory certainly exemplifies the concept of parataxis , the first English edition took this densely woven text and carved Adorno’s lengthy paragraphs and lengthy sentences into manageable ‘bite-sized’ pieces of English text. The first translator took further liberty and inserted headings and new paragraph breaks where there were none in the original. Aesthetic Theory was eventually retranslated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and is now available in a form that is much more faithful to the original work. 4 The pertinent idea that this translation history points to is the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis . Where parataxis describes texts which are repetitive, densely woven, and often fragile, hypotaxis describes texts which are hierarchical and in which the primary relation is linear – the latter of which is very similar to the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory . On the other hand, the original German text that Adorno wrote was very dense, often repetitive, and contained long sections of text unbroken by paragraphs or headings. This example of parataxis was then turned towards hypotaxis through the initial translation which took a text that was, in many ways, nonhierarchical and nonlinear, and artificially subjected it to a hierarchy that was not its own (and here I take the word of Fredric Jameson who comments on the two translations in a note at the beginning of his book Late Marxism ). 5 The point here is not about translation, but rather the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis precisely as they are figures for discourse, written or otherwise. The concept of parataxis looks far more postmodern and rhizomic than the concept of hypotaxis which remains very modern and arborescent. This is a more figural way of talking about the distinction. However, if we wanted to take a more precise and analytical approach we could say that on the level of form parataxis involves a relationship between sentences and paragraphs in which each part bears an equally crushing responsibility to present the whole content of the text. As well, on the level of content, parataxis requires that each concept in a work take on the full conceptual weight of the total work. Continuing the analysis, we could say that parataxis describes texts in which there is no (or very little) linear or causal move from antecedent to consequent, whether in content or form. Instead, parataxis describes texts which weave together concepts via conjugations or associations. The concept of hypotaxis , on the other hand, requires that texts submit themselves to hierarchy, one example of which is logical argumentation. The contingency of the conclusion upon premises in hypotaxis is certainly distinct from the repetition, re-presentation, and conjugation of concepts in parataxis , and I think that this is evident in the difference between the writing styles prevalent in contemporary Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. It is not the case that the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis absolutely corresponds with the writing styles of Continental and Analytic philosophy (respectively). There are thinkers who take exception to this pattern, such as Badiou’s more formal approach in the discourse of Continental philosophy to give one example. However, when Analytic philosophy takes its writing lessons from the sciences, and seeks to do philosophy via the clean linear move from antecedent to consequent, then I think that Analytic philosophy writes with hypotaxis in mind. On the other hand, when Continental (particularly German and French) philosophy takes its writing lessons from narrative or poetry then Continental philosophy writes with parataxis in mind. It is not fair to say that all those writing Continental philosophy are looking to narrative and poetry for stylistic direction, just as it is not the case that all those writing Analytic philosophy have mathematics and science as their writing format, however there are some striking ways in which the differing epistemologies of Continental and Analytic philosophy encourage writing with parataxis and hypotaxis in mind (respectively). For some, writing with parataxis or hypotaxis in mind is a conscious decision and a product of stylistic self-consciousness, and for others it is an unconscious discursive and epistemic requirement that must be met in order to be involved in a particular discourse. Before moving on to our second distinction, and then an examination of the question of the Book, it is important to point out that both totality and figurations like the One, the Whole, and the All, come out of very human desires to totalize or to actualize our being-towards-totality. The relationship between identity and totality then can be construed, with Heidegger in mind, as striving toward wholeness, completion, or fulfillment, each of which is a quality of compendia. 6 Compilation & Selection The first distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis pertains to both form and content, and to both the mechanics of writing and the ideas to which writing refers. The second distinction pertains to both as well. In the process of writing and in the process of perception as well, there is a tension between compilation and selection . To begin with, in the work of theory-writing there is compilation, and this is because writing theory requires a broad perspective and certain measure of totalization. On the other hand, writing theory requires that the writer select an idea or a combination of ideas to individuate out of a radical and infinite multiplicity of identities and combinations. The concern here is not primarily for the writing of a theory about a specific idea, like a secondary work or a reference text. But rather the concern is with the writing of grand theories: Marx and Marxism, Derrida and Deconstruction, Husserl and Phenomenology, Sartre and Existentialism, Saussure and Structuralism —each of which strives along a trajectory towards being all-encompassing, whether it intends to or not. Today, we could even say that Speculative Realism has embarked on this journey, and perhaps now we could say that the discourse of Speculative Realism has reached the inevitable point after which a grand theory leaves the hands of its writer or writers and becomes a possession of the collective consciousness of the academy, or (perhaps now) the mass consciousness of the blogosphere—and this is a true pharmakon , a poison and a cure, a blessing and a curse. 7 When we write theory, whether the scope is that of a grand theory or a particular theory, we write in the tension between compilation (making good on the desire to be all encompassing) and selection (being required to decide and discern and to judge what is included in the work and what is deleted or appended or abridged or given over to ellipses). Generally speaking, the work of theory-writing often comes out of a desire to totalize, that is, to develop a theory of everything that is able to apprehend new experiences and ideas while still remaining whole. I grant that this is not a universal desire, and that not everyone who sits down to write a work (or book) of theory does so because of their will-to-totality, but it remains that this drive to totalize does condition a great many writers of theory (especially those who seek to develop grand theories like those mentioned previously). At the beginning of his book of interviews, Between Existentialism and Marxism , Sartre is quoted as saying, after completing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason : “I no longer feel the need to make long digressions in my books, as if I were forever chasing after my own philosophy. It will now be deposited in little coffins, and I will feel completely emptied and at peace—as I felt after Being and Nothingness . A feeling of emptiness: a writer is fortunate if he can attain such a state. For when one has nothing to say, one can say everything .” 8 This is where our two initial distinctions come to bear on the being-towards-totality as it is expressed in the concrete practice of writing: the first being between parataxis and hypotaxis , and the second being between compilation and selection. Where this second distinction is concerned there is a certain paradox at play given that selection is inescapable, and compilation is unachievable. Selection is inescapable (with the figure of the Compendium in mind) because, even when the imperative to compile is followed to excruciating lengths, selection still has the last word. This is why the Compendium is a figure rather than some material thing that can actually be accomplished or actualized. No matter how far one goes along with the will-to-archive and the will-to-compile, it is only ever a question of minimizing selection and never eliminating it. This leads to the second point, which is that total compilation is unachievable. The closest thing to total compilation that we have before us is the ontological and textual fabric of the world. Even in the case of the world, compilation cannot be enacted in a total fashion because of the need to include both the sphere of the actual and the sphere of the possible or potential. This as another way in which compilation is always-already selection, and further evidence that total compilation is practically impossible. Discursive Figuration and Total Writing Rather than figuration referring to a figure of speech or an image, here the term points to a way in which to think about the work of writing, both the work put into writing, and the work that is the result of writing: the finished yet incomplete final piece. As figures or figurations, the Book and the Compendium are ways of thinking about the work of writing and the human desire for the wholeness, completion, and fulfillment that are made manifest in the completed form of the book (whether a published or printed or saved document put to rest by the author). These two figures bear more strongly upon works that seek to be all-encompassing, and works that strive towards expressions of totality such as the One, the Whole, or the All. Moving on to the topic of the subtitle, and on a more prescriptive note, I would say that there is more hope for theory-writing to be found in parataxis than hypotaxis . Part of the reason for this claim is the poststructuralist critique of hierarchies, and yet another part is the compelling line of thinking called “weak thought” (in theology by John D. Caputo, and in philosophy by Gianni Vattimo, among others). 9 The consequences of these two convictions are such that if one is to strongly assert the truth of a grand theory without leaving the realm of hierarchy-critique and weak thought, then one must write paradoxically with parataxis in mind, and in so doing write weakly and non-hierarchically. This does not mean avoiding a sort of topography or topology when writing theory, rather it means avoiding both subjugation and oppression in thought by pursuing a nonviolent sort of ontology. In order to do this, theory writing does not present itself as an exercise in logical analysis where one mechanically moves from a set of premises (via contingency) to the inevitable conclusion (via necessity). Instead, theory approaches the idea of a Compendium. Given that the figural Compendium places parataxis and compilation above hypotaxis and selection, then the question becomes: is placing one part of a binary term before another not just another way of selecting, or another expression of hypotaxis ? Counter to the urge to resign oneself to the reign of selection, with some qualification one can nonetheless write without deciding whether selection and hypotaxis should be subservient to compilation and parataxis (which is to say that writing-without-decision is somewhere between and beyond possibility and impossibility). This dilemma can be disarmed by stating that theory writing is not about primacy, and not about having-decided-beforehand, both stylistically and also where content is concerned. This is the paradox of writing: always striving along a trajectory ( telos ) towards totality via parataxis and compilation, but always being drawn back to finitude and making selections, and placing one idea before another with hypotaxis in mind. In light of this paradox, the question of the Compendium as a figure for discourse and a figural Book has resonance with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Edmund Jabès’ Book of Questions , found in his Writing and Difference . The Question of the Book “Little by little the book will finish me.” 10 Derrida quotes Jabès, and proceeds to outline the reflexive relationship between the author of the book and the book itself, each of which are subjected to the other through a sort of chiasmus, both ontological and textual (not that the two are entirely separable). The Book, for Derrida like Blanchot in the introductory quotation, “infinitely reflects itself” and “develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility”, and in light of this we can draw an association with the painful tension between the practical reality of selection and the ideal trajectory of compilation. 11 This tension in writing, between the will to total compilation and the necessity of abridgment, is an ontological tension between part and whole just as it is a textual tension between signifier and signified. The ontological tension in writing that Derrida expresses in his essay on Jabès is between everything and nothing – a contradiction which Derrida finds in Jabès’ Book of Questions and also in the divine, in God. When one writes between compilation and selection one writes towards totality, and here we can follow Derrida who states that the lapse in signification, presumably in the signifier-signified discrepancy, is a “ rupture with totality itself” and furthermore that this lapse cannot be rectified through deductive reason or even philosophical discourse. 12 This rupture with totality, found in the troubled relation between signifier and signified, can also tell us a lot about the Book and about writing. Given an understanding of writing as an ontological act that strives towards (but never accomplishes) totality, we can see the written book as the manifested and given body of that striving. Perhaps in other disciplines or even other schools of philosophy there is a cultural climate within which the article is prized above the book, but I am fairly confident, especially when referring to the grand theories of Continental thought, that there is a respect for the book as a uniquely meaningful object capable of apprehending totality. Derrida writes, Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. 13 Here the vitality of the literal event is compromised by the deadening weight of the concept, and the figure of the Book assists in this lapse of meaning. The Book is a totalizing object, much like the figure of the Compendium, and yet this totalization lacks its final object of completed totality both because the figural Book is necessarily incomplete, and because the physical book is always-already a product of selection. Instead of achieving its end of being a place where everything takes place, it suffers from the lapse of writing, the discrepancy between event and concept. Derrida continues his exposition on Jabès by bringing to light yet another reflexive relation, a reversal of the relationship between the Book and the world. Derrida writes that, for Jabès, “the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.” 14 In addition to what was stated before, I take figuration to mean that the concepts employed, such as the Book or the Compendium, are not subject to the supposed rigor of analysis that is so prized by Enlightenment or Capitalist realisms. The figure of the Book and the figure of the Compendium cannot be held accountable to standards imported from scientific method, given an understanding that these standards require a concept to be replicable, consistent, falsifiable, measurable, and so on… This is an important point to make, especially in the present atmosphere within which theory must justify itself under conditions that are not its own. Instead of being held to these standards, figuration serves as a way in which to think about writing that leaves thought open to idealistic speculation, imperfect analogies, and most importantly the ever-present gain and loss that occur in the relationship between thought and being. By extension the figural way of addressing writing indulges in enough generalization to accommodate the excess/lack relationship between the ideal form of the Book or the Compendium, and the manifested and given body of a text (as it is practically completed and closed). Here we speak against the hostile atmosphere which would have theory submit itself to hierarchical rigor, rather than Blanchot’s “enigmatic rigor”, by being explicit about the discursive conditions and epistemic conditions under which theory operates. To write with parataxis in mind is, to a certain degree, to write with weakness as one’s methodology (with weak thought being in opposition to hypotaxis and hierarchy as much as weak thought can be in opposition to anything). Rather than asserting the strength of hierarchical theory, and rather than employing antagonistic argumentation with the goal of refutation different discursive and epistemic conditions for theory writing must be cultivated (and these are by no means new). First the critical and theoretical spirit reveals itself as being concerned with the task of complication—especially the complication and critique of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, polarities, paradoxes, parallaxes, hybridities, and especially antinomies. Second, theory positions itself as a sort of showing or revealing, rather than being ultimately focused on coming to full agreement or disagreement. This is where figuration can help theory-writing, both by placing emphasis on teleologies and trajectories (like parataxis and compilation), and by shifting focus away from pure primacy, power, or absolute origin. Figuration then, assists theory writing by placing the concern of theory outside of the concerns of the hard or soft sciences, and into the realm of thought or the idea. To speak of ‘the’ Compendium or ‘the’ Book, here, is to generalize not regarding the perfect form of the Compendium or Book, but to engage speculatively with an abstract idea which remains singular and yet complicated by multiplicity. The question of the Book that Derrida asks through Jabès is a question of everything and nothing, totality and nonbeing, and this question is a concern for writing and a concern for the figure of the Compendium so defined by the tension between compilation and selection, and parataxis and hypotaxis . On the note of nonbeing, we can look to the final page of Derrida’s first essay on Jabès in Writing and Difference and notice the introduction of his neologism, différance (with an ‘a’). Derrida writes: Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance . Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians). 15 This introduction of différance into the equation of the Book, alongside ontological affirmation and negation, hearkens back to the discussion of the symbolic lapse earlier in his essay. Differing and deferring, the Book is always a Book of Life and a figure for the intersection of the vital (life) and the total in writing. In a way, the writer of the Book may be someone who lives life, and in another way the writer of the book-as-object may be someone who engages in the act of writing, both practically (by inscribing words on paper, or typing script on a computer) and ontologically or symbolically (by investing their existence and inexistence into a work worthy of the figural Book). In addition to the writer as writer, the writer also serves as an editor, and the editorial role alongside the idea of the Compendium shows the editor to be one who collects and compiles, while being restrained by eventual selection and decision. Beyond this the editor of works and texts, in both the Book and the world, is engaged in a process of inscribing notation—of annotating (on) the Compendium. Eternal commentary is a feature of the textual Compendium, just as open-ended totality describes the ontological Compendium. The writer as writer does not simply write texts, but rather engages in a profoundly ontological act of inscribing their existence into the world, and the writer as editor does not merely annotate or alter texts as they are, but rather comments upon the text of the world. In/Conclusion So as we create texts, and as we write and create theory, let us be and remain attentive to the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book. These two concurrent metonymies are essential for total writing (grand theories, etc.), and may be forgettable for those concerned with fragmentary or hierarchical writing (which are valid in their own right). From the ontological and symbolic text of the world and phenomenological experience, to concrete texts such as books or mixed media, the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book are important for the actualization of the human will to be all-encompassing. The figure of the Compendium teaches writers of theory that the repetition, density, and fragility of parataxis offers a strong sort of weakness which does not become yet another variety of oppressive and hegemonic thought. Rather than write with hypotaxis in mind, subjugating one thought to another via cause and effect or antecedent and consequent, I would hope that theory-writing could guiltlessly indulge in the dialectical and contradictory conjugation of ideas, and take this as a legitimate methodology. Rather than being ashamed of showing resonances or giving way to abridgment or ellipses, it is my own authorial (but not authoritative) conviction that one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the fact that complete totalization is impossible, and one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the worry of violence, for the Book and the Compendium lack their completed object and are ever incomplete trajectories. NOTES * UPDATED 7/19/13: we've updated the HTML version to reflect the (correct) PDF version. Our apologies to the author—eds. 1. I would like extend thanks to Dr. Peter Schwenger of the University of Western Ontario for his comments on this paper and his hospitality as it was presented as a Theory Session at the Centre for Theory and Criticism on October 26th 2012. I would also like to thank Andrew Weiss for conversation and critique. 2. I should clarify my use of the term ‘figure’ at the outset. Given the use of the term by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Discourse, Figure (and also Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon ), I should state clearly that my use of the term will not correspond to the term ‘figure’ understood as the representation of an object. Instead, my use of the term ‘figure’ and its variations (‘figural’, ‘figurative’, ‘figuration’) will refer to the illustrative or metaphorical use of the Compendium or the Book as models or ways of thinking about writing and discourse. 3. Cf. Revelations 20:12-15. 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London & New York: Continuum Press, 1997). 5. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 1990), ix-x. 6. I have written about this concept of being-towards-totality elsewhere in two pieces of writing: the first is called Notes on the Compendium (an unfinished draft) which addresses some very wide theoretical concerns, being structured as a sort of itinerary or archive, and the second is Dialectics Unbound (Punctum Books, 2013) which outlines a concept of totality without the violence of totalization. While these works are more concerned with ontological totality, here I would like to focus on the idea of the Compendium as a textual totality. 7. Cf. Louis Morelle, “Speculative Realism: After Finitude and Beyond, A vade mecum” in Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism . Issue 3 (Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 241-272. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism . Trans. John Matthews (London & New York: Verso, 1974), 9. 9. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65. 11. Ibid, 65. 12. Ibid, 71. 13. Ibid, 75. 14. Ibid, 76. 15. Ibid, 78. (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)

I argue for modal realism from the following principles:(R1) p just in case there are truth-makers for the proposition that p.(R2) If there are truth-makers for the proposition that p and the proposition that p relevantly entails the proposition that q, then there are truthrmakers for the proposition that q.(M) The proposition that p relevantly entails the proposition that possibly p.(R3) I f there are truth-makers for the proposition that q, then necessarily, if q, there are truth-makers for the (...) proposition that q.All of the above principles are to be read as necessary truths. Also, the propositional variable 'p' is restricted to propositions that necessarily satisfy R1. 'q' is not so restricted.The argument is ontological because I argue that the possibility of modal reaUsm together with R3 entails that modal realism is true. The possibility of modal realism follows from R1, R2 and M. (shrink)

My research takes as its guiding thread the statement from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1805-06, that «cognition is recognition[Erkennen ist Anerkennen]». In this perspective I delineate, first, the consequences of this position for Hegel's epistemology, in particular with reference to the question of skepticism. Then, I show in what sense the recognitive conception of knowledge makes it possible for Hegel to comprehend unitarily, on one hand, cognition as exercise of natural capacities and cognition as (...) class='Hi'>exercise of normative capacities socially articulated, and,on the other hand, theoretical self-consciousness and practical self-consciousness. The gnoseological importance of this solution can be comprehended only if we reconstruct the evolution of Hegel's thought in that span of time in which he most directly tackles the issue of skepsis: that is, from 1797 - the beginning of his Frankfurt period - when he began to occupy himself with gnoseological questions, until the end of his stay in Jena,which begins in 1801 and concludes in 1807 with the writing of the Phenomenology. The analysis of the development of the Hegelian theory of knowledge - worked out in the first part of my study - is dealt with in the context of a reconstruction of the historico-argumentative constellation within which it matured. The constellation of importance for our analysis is represented by the skeptical crisis - triggered by authors such as Schulze, Maimonand Platner - that invested the post-Kantian galaxy, within which the idealist solutions to the problem of cognition matured. Through the analysis of journals and authors with whom Hegel came directly or indirectly into contact - from Platner to Reinhold, Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling, to Hölderlin and Sinclair, concluding with Zeender, Krug, Bouterwek and Werneburg, and among the journals Fülleborn's Beiträge and Niethammer's Journal in particular - it is possible to map the various solutions proposed for the skeptical problem andsee how it is in relation to this problem that the conceptions of self-consciousness evolve and the very concept of "interpersonality" - "intersubjectivity" - emerges for the first time. At the same time, pursuing my objective of broadening the investigation of the phenomenon of recognition, which in my view is not reducible to the field of practical philosophy, I proposea fresh reconstruction of the lexical and conceptual evolution of the various terms -Erkennen, Wiedererkennen, Recognition, Anerkennen - through which the various modalities of the phenomenon of recognition were indicated in the philosophical tradition to which Hegel refers: recognition of objects as perceptive reidentification; reminiscence on the level of theory of memory; recognition of subjects as self-recognition (apperception) and attribution to others of intentionality; logical recognition as recognition of the validity of a proposition; moral recognition, where "recognizing" generally means approving, accepting(more specifically, someone may be "recognized" as an autonomous subject and as a unique,genuine individuality). I focus in particular on the theory of memory as «recognitio» in Wolff and in his school, on the conception of «reconnaissance» in Bonnet, on Kantian«Recognition» and on the theory of «Anerkennen» in Ernst Platner. This investigation serves, on the one hand, to show how the phenomenon of recognition is central for a comprehension of the structure both of the lower and of the higher cognitive faculties. This ought to allow us to understand in what sense Hegel, taking intersubjective recognition as hisleading phenomenon, attempts to reunite the various meanings of recognition within a theory of knowledge on the basis of which «cognition is recognition». On the other hand, my conceptual and lexicographic investigation also serves to bring to light - in a new way with respect to the studies on Anerkennung - a hitherto unknown problematic constellation and the input of certain authors, such as Werneburg and Platner, whose conceptions may haveinfluenced Hegel's approach.The second part and the third of my study - a reconstruction of the pre- phenomenological Jena writings dealing with «Anerkennung» - dwells on the theme of the notion of natural recognition, whose centrality for the Hegelian conception of recognition has not yet been adequately grasped. This reconstruction of the theory of natural recognition gives due weight to the influence of Schelling on Hegel's understanding of «Anerkennung» -while the critical literature has generally concentrated on Fichte. Analyzing the conception of the animal organism developed in particular in the lectures on the philosophy of nature of 1803-04 brings to light how Hegel already individuates the recognitive phenomenon at the level of sexual reproduction: it is from here that he posits the natural prerequisites for the development of consciousness of self. The category of natural recognition will present itself anew in Hegel's analysis of the social ontology of the human world in the philosophy of spirit, where it concerns sexual love, reproduction and child raising: natural recognition is, then, that on the basis of which Hegel develops his theory that cognition is recognition.Recognition, as a «middle» of spirit, is a cognitive phenomenon that is primitive with respectto linguistically structured human intersubjectivity; it is, properly, that cognitive structure which is necessarily presupposed by a self-conscious subjectivity that expresses itself linguistically: linguistic intersubjectivity expresses various modes of recognition, but notevery form of recognition is linguistic. The evolutional theory of cognition as recognition is in fact designed to show how increasingly complex recognitive relations emerge from a basic level of natural interactions to take on a linguistically mediated and universal structure. Withthe notion of spiritual recognition Hegel indicates just that ensemble of normative relations that constitute the infrastructure of action and thus mediate the formation of socially articulated self-conscious knowing of self. In the lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1803-04 and of 1805-06 Hegel thus reconstructs the recognitive structure of the social institutions of right, of labor, and of exchange, showing that, within a politically structured community,dyadic (I-you) interactions are mediated by the universal viewpoint of the "we" incarnated in institutions that can be recognized by citizens as their own and by which citizens can be recognized. (shrink)

According to Quine’s indispensability argument, we ought to believe in just those mathematical entities that we quantify over in our best scientific theories. Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment is part of the standard indispensability argument. However, we suggest that a new indispensability argument can be run using Armstrong’s criterion of ontological commitment rather than Quine’s. According to Armstrong’s criterion, ‘to be is to be a truthmaker (or part of one)’. We supplement this criterion with our own (...) brand of metaphysics, 'Aristotelian (...) realism', in order to identify the truthmakers of mathematics. We consider in particular as a case study the indispensability to physics of real analysis (the theory of the real numbers). We conclude that it is possible to run an indispensability argument without Quinean baggage. (shrink)

The recognition of striking regularities in the physical world plays a major role in the justification of hypotheses and the development of new theories both in the natural sciences and in philosophy. However, while scientists consider only strictly natural hypotheses as explanations for such regularities, philosophers also explore meta-natural hypotheses. One example is mathematical realism, which proposes the existence of abstract mathematical entities as an explanation for the applicability of mathematics in the sciences. Another example is theism, which offers the (...) existence of a supernatural being as an explanation for the design-like appearance of the physical cosmos. Although all meta-natural hypotheses defy empirical testing, there is a strong intuition that some of them are more warranted than others. The goal of this paper is to sharpen this intuition into a clear criterion for the admissibility of meta-natural explanations for empirical facts. Drawing on recent debates about the indispensability of mathematics and teleological arguments for the existence of God, I argue that a meta-natural explanation is admissible just in case the explanation refers to an entity that, though not itself causally efficacious, guarantees the instantiation of a causally efficacious entity that is an actual cause of the regularity. (shrink)

An account of what sort of causal integration is necessary for an agent to exercise agency is offered in support of a soft-line response to Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument against source-compatibilism. I argue that, in cases of manipulation, the manipulative activity affects the identity of the causal process of which it is a part. Specifically, I argue that causal processes involving direct manipulation fail to count as exercises of intentional agency because they involve heteromesial causal deviance. In contrast, standard (...) deterministic causal processes do not involve heteromesial causal deviance and are agency-preserving. The upshot is that there is a relevant difference between a causal process involving direct manipulation by another agent and a deterministic causal process that involves no such intervention. If this is right, then Pereboom’s four-case argument does not pose a threat to source-compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Rudolf Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (ESO) has received a good deal of sympathetic interest over the years from philosophers who are not particularly sympathetic to verificationism, or suspicious of metaphysics in general. Recent work has favorably cited ESO in connection with doubts about the genuine content of debates in the metaphysics of material objects. But, when we look at how Carnap introduces his central notion of a ‘framework’, and the questions he wants to use it to deflate, (...) there seem to be significant differences in his approach and aim from that of contemporary deflationists about the metaphysics of material objects. This paper first looks at some of these differences, and suggests a way of seeing them as arising more from differences in focus and interest than fundamental approach. However, a further question is whether philosophers who may entirely disagree with Carnap about abstract entities, or the substantiveness of the debate between Realists and Idealists – possibly all of his negative conclusions in ESO - can really be seen as heirs to his approach and argument therein. We look first at his discussion of the Realism/Idealism debate, to sort out different aspects of his analysis, and determine to what extent one can disagree with it while not thinking this undermines other analyses using the same general strategy. In the course of this, we are able to distinguish the basic Carnapian analysis of metaphysical disputes, from the question of whether, if the analysis is correct, this actually subverts the disputes. I suggest that, if we put verificationism aside, ESO really provides us with an approach and a type of skeptical challenge more than an argument, and it is open to contemporary philosophers to think that this skeptical challenge can (or can’t) be met, or can be supplemented by further argument, on a case by case basis. (shrink)

One of the more famous criticisms of ontological arguments is that provided by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, and two of the more frequent comments on it are essentially these: Kant points out that existence is no predicate; his criticism contains several puzzling elements which can just as well be neglected, since the first point is enough. It is the intent of this paper to substantiate a protest against such analyses of Kant’s anti–ontological–arguments argument and to develop (...) certain consequences from this for current attempts to rehabilitate ontological arguments. The protest is not that such analyses are simply wrong, but that they are dangerously misleading and represent Kant’s argument as weaker than it in fact is. The substantiation is provided by the examination of the three main elements of Kant’s criticism of ontological arguments: the distinction of real and logical predicates, the analysis of uses of ‘to be’, and the discussion of concepts of possible and of actual things. The consequences for current attempted rehabilitations of ontological arguments center upon the alleged distinction of ‘existence’ and ‘necessary existence’. On the basis of the foregoing substantiation it is shown that this distinction, despite its proponents’ claims, does not make Kant’s criticism inapplicable, that the sense of ‘necessity’ remains a problem, that Kant knew quite well what he was doing in criticizing ontological arguments, and that the necessary existence allegedly proved by ontological arguments is not that which is also alleged to be religiously required. (shrink)

With metaphysical philosophy gaining prominence in the aftermath of the Quine-Carnap debate, not only has it become assumed that the Quinean critique leaves ontological pluralism behind as an untenable approach, but also that the same is true of deflationism more generally. Building on Quine’s criticisms against the analytic-synthetic distinction and the notion of quantifier variance, contemporary metaphysicians like van Inwagen and Sider continue to argue for the untenability of deflationary approaches to metaontology. In this paper I will argue that Quine’s (...) criticisms do not provide sufficient grounds for revitalizing metaphysics, as the aforementioned metaphysicians conceive them as doing, and that they also don’t eliminate all hope for Carnapian pluralism. Furthermore, Carnap’s initial position may even yield the most promising route for the pluralistically inclined. Moreover, pluralism is often conceived as being equivalent with the narrower notion of quantifier variance, often associated with Hirsch and Putnam. As this notion often is attributed not only to Carnap and other pluralists, but also is taken to be an essential feature of deflationism, explicating how their merits in fact don’t necessarily coincide with those of quantifier variance will clarify matters. I will conclude by noting how neither pluralism nor deflationism is committed to quantifier variance, and thus how arguments against the latter don’t entail a refutation of the former. (shrink)

Inference to the best explanation (IBE) is the principle of inference according to which, when faced with a set of competing hypotheses, where each hypothesis is empirically adequate for explaining the phenomena, we should infer the truth of the hypothesis that best explains the phenomena. When our theories correctly display this principle, we call them our ‘best’. In this paper, I examine the explanatory role of mathematics in our best scientific theories. In particular, I will elucidate the enormous utility of (...) mathematical structures. I argue from a reformed indispensability argument that mathematical structures are explanatorily indispensable to our best scientific theories. Therefore, IBE scientific realism entails mathematical realism. I develop a naturalistic, neo-Quinean ontology, which grounds physical and mathematical entities in structures. Mathematical structures are the truthmakers for the entities of our quantificational discourse. I also develop an ‘ontic conception’ of explanation, according to which explanations exist in the world, whether or not we discover and model them. I apply the ontic account to mathematical structures, arguing that these structures are the explanations for particles, forces, and even the conservation laws of physics. As such, mathematical structures provide the fundamental grounding for ontological commitment. I conclude by reviewing the evidence from modern physics for the existence of mathematical structures. (shrink)

In Ordinary Objects, Thomasson pursues an integrated conception of ontology and metaontology. In ontology, she defends the existence of shoes, ships, and other ordinary objects. In metaontology, she defends a deflationary view of ontological inquiry, designed to suck the air out of arguments against ordinary objects. The result is an elegant and insightful defense of a common sense worldview. I am sympathetic—in spirit if not always in letter—with Thomasson’s ontology. But I am skeptical of her deflationary metaontology.

Background: In order to improve ontology quality, tool- and language-related tutorials are not sufficient. Care must be taken to provide optimized curricula for teaching the representational language in the context of a semantically rich upper level ontology. The constraints provided by rigid top and upper level models assure that the ontologies built are not only logically consistent but also adequately represent the domain of discourse and align to explicitly outlined ontological principles. Finally such a curriculum must take into (...) account the pre-existing skills and knowledge of the target audience. -/- Objective: To develop a well-structured curriculum aligned to the particular requirements of life science professionals, in order to enable them to create logically sound, domain adequate and predicable ontologies using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) in Protégè. -/- Methods: Content selection for the curriculum was based on the literature, pre-existing tutorials, and a guideline for good ontology development (i.e ontology design enhancing domain adequacy, sustainability and interoperability) that drew on the authors previous experiences with large ontology development projects. Learning objectives were formulated according to a needs assessment of the targeted learners, who were students trained in life sciences with basic knowledge and practical skills in computer science. As instructional format we choose an approach with a high amount of practical exercises. The curriculum was first implemented with 24 Students and 7 lecturers/ tutors over 5 full days. The curriculum was evaluated by gathering the participants feedback via a questionnaire. -/- Results: Curricular development produced 16 modules of approximately 2 hours each, which covered basic principles of Applied Ontology, description logic syntax and semantics, as well as best design practices outlined in ontology design patterns and variants of the BioTop upper ontology. An opinion survey based on questionnaires indicated that the participants took advantage from the teaching strategies applied, as they indicated good knowledge gain and acknowledged the relevance of the modules. The difficulty was rated slightly lower. -/- Conclusion: The development of teaching material for principled ontology design and best practices is of crucial importance in order to enhance the quality of biomedical ontologies. Here, we present a curriculum for a week long workshop, leveraging on current educational principles, focusing on interactive hands-on exercises, group interactions, and problem-oriented learning. Whereas evaluation clearly showed the success of this approach, in particular regarding student’s satisfaction, the objective measurement of traceable effects on the quality of the generated ontology, although of much higher interest, has just started. (shrink)

Words are indispensable linguistic tools for beings like us. However, there is not much philosophical work done about what words really are. In this paper, I develop a new ontology for words. I argue that words are abstract artifacts that are created to fulfill various kinds of purposes, and words are abstract in the sense that they are not located in space but they have a beginning and may have an end in time given that certain conditions are met. (...) What follows from this two-fold argument is that words, from an ontological point of view, are more like musical works, fictional characters or computer programs, than numbers or sets. (shrink)

The Quine-Putnam indispensability argument urges us to place mathematical entities on the same ontological footing as (other) theoretical entities of empirical science. Recently this argument has attracted much criticism, and in this paper I address one criticism due to Elliott Sober. Sober argues that mathematical theories cannot share the empirical support accrued by our best scientific theories, since mathematical propositions are not being tested in the same way as the clearly empirical propositions of science. In this paper I defend (...) the Quine-Putnam argument against Sober's objections. (shrink)

In Thinking of Others, Ted Cohen argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity--as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation--and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. To be able to see oneself as someone else, whether the someone else is a real person or a fictional character, is to exercise the ability to deal with metaphor and other figurative language. The underlying (...) faculty, Cohen argues, is the same--simply the ability to think of one thing as another when it plainly is not. In an engaging style, Cohen explores this idea by examining various occasions for identifying with others, including reading fiction, enjoying sports, making moral arguments, estimating one's future self, and imagining how one appears to others. Using many literary examples, Cohen argues that we can engage with fictional characters just as intensely as we do with real people, and he looks at some of the ways literature itself takes up the question of interpersonal identification and understanding. An original meditation on the necessity of imagination to moral and aesthetic life, Thinking of Others is an important contribution to philosophy and literary theory. (shrink)

The indispensability argument for abstract mathematical entities has been an important issue in the philosophy of mathematics. The argument relies on several assumptions. Some objections have been made against these assumptions, but there are several serious defects in these objections. Ameliorating these defects leads to a new anti-realistic philosophy of mathematics, mainly: first, in mathematical applications, what really exist and can be used as tools are not abstract mathematical entities, but our inner representations that we create in imagining abstract (...) mathematical entities; second, the thoughts that we create in imagining infinite mathematical entities are bounded by external conditions. (shrink)

A metaphysical system engendered by a third order quantified modal logic S5 plus impredicative comprehension principles is used to isolate a third order predicate D, and by being able to impredicatively take a second order predicate G to hold of an individual just if the individual necessarily has all second order properties which are D we in Section 2 derive the thesis (40) that all properties are D or some individual is G. In Section 3 theorems 1 to 3 (...) suggest a sufficient kinship to Gödelian ontological arguments so as to think of thesis (40) in terms of divine property and Godly being; divine replaces positive with Gödel and others. Thesis (40), the sacred thesis, supports the ontological argument that God exists because some property is not divine. In Section 4 a fixed point analysis is used as diagnosis so that atheists may settle for the minimal fixed point. Theorem 3 shows it consistent to postulate theistic fixed points, and a monotheistic result follows if one assumes theism and that it is divine to be identical with a deity. Theorem 4 (the Monotheorem) states that if Gg and it is divine to be identical with g, then necessarily all objects which are G are identical with g. The impredicative origin of D suggests weakened Gaunilo-like objections that offer related theses for other second order properties and their associated diverse presumptive individual bearers. Nevertheless, in the last section we finesse these Gaunilo-like objections by adopting what we call an apathiatheistic opinion which suggest that the best concepts `God’ allow thorough indifference as to whether God exists or not. (shrink)

The indispensability argument for abstract mathematical entities has been an important issue in the philosophy of mathematics. The argument relies on several assumptions. Some objections have been made against these assumptions, but there are several serious defects in these objections. Ameliorating these defects leads to a new anti-realistic philosophy of mathematics, mainly: first, in mathematical applications, what really exist and can be used as tools are not abstract mathematical entities, but our inner representations that we create in imagining abstract (...) mathematical entities; second, the thoughts that we create in imagining infinite mathematical entities are bounded by external conditions. (shrink)

According to Quine’s indispensability argument, we ought to believe in just those mathematical entities that we quantify over in our best scientific theories. Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment is part of the standard indispensability argument. However, we suggest that a new indispensability argument can be run using Armstrong’s criterion of ontological commitment rather than Quine’s. According to Armstrong’s criterion, ‘to be is to be a truthmaker (or part of one)’. We supplement this criterion with our own (...) brand of metaphysics, 'Aristotelian realism', in order to identify the truthmakers of mathematics. We consider in particular as a case study the indispensability to physics of real analysis (the theory of the real numbers). We conclude that it is possible to run an indispensability argument without Quinean baggage. (shrink)

In this essay, I defend a view I call “Robust Realism” about normativity. According to this view, there are irreducibly, perfectly objective, normative truths, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct. My argument in support of Robust Realism is modeled after arguments from explanatory indispensability common in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics. I argue that irreducibly normative truths, though not explanatorily indispensable, are nevertheless deliberatively indispensable, and that this (...) kind of indispensability is just as respectable as the more familiar explanatory kind. Deliberative indispensability, I argue, justifies belief in normative facts, just like the explanatory indispensability of, say, theoretical entities like electrons justifies belief in electrons. In the introduction I characterize the view I will be arguing for and sketch the main argument of this essay. In chapter 1 I draw the analogy between explanatory and deliberative indispensability, and argue that there is no non-question-begging reason to take the former but not the latter seriously. Here I also present the master-argument of the thesis, and clarify the argumentative work that needs to be done by each of the following chapters. In chapter 2 I address the worries of the antirealist who is willing to reject arguments from explanatory indispensability as well. In other words, in this chapter I try to justify the move from indispensability (of whatever kind) to belief. In chapter 3 I develop an account of deliberation that supports the premises about deliberation needed for my master-argument to go through. In chapter 4 I reject some alternative views, showing that none of them can allow for sincere deliberation. In this chapter, in other words, I support the indispensability premise: I argue that it really is impossible to deliberate sincerely without believing in irreducibly normative truths.. (shrink)