We believe we know our bodies intimately—that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Paul Ferdinand Schilder), and queer theory, Salamon advances an alternative theory of normative and non-normative gender, proving the value and vitality of trans experience for (...) thinking about embodiment. Salamon suggests that the difference between transgendered and normatively gendered bodies is not, in the end, material. Rather, she argues that the production of gender itself relies on a disjunction between the "felt sense" of the body and an understanding of the body's corporeal contours, and that this process need not be viewed as pathological in nature. Examining the relationship between material and phantasmatic accounts of bodily being, Salamon emphasizes the productive tensions that make the body both present and absent in our consciousness and work to confirm and unsettle gendered certainties. She questions traditional theories that explain how the body comes to be—and comes to be made one's own—and she offers a new framework for thinking about what "counts" as a body. The result is a groundbreaking investigation into the phenomenological life of gender. (shrink)

The paper examines the difference between János Bolyai’s and Lobachevskii’s notion of non-Euclidean parallelism. The examination starts with the summary of a widespread view of historians of mathematics on János Bolyai’s notion of non-Euclidean parallelism used in the first paragraph of his Appendix. After this a novel position of the location and meaning of Bolyai’s term “parallela” in his Appendix is put forward. After that János Bolyai’s Hungarian manuscript, the Commentary on Lobachevskii’s Geometrische Untersuchungen is elaborated in order to see (...) how Bolyai and Lobachevskii’s notions of parallelism differ. The careful examination of the Commentary reveals a seeming incoherence of Bolyai’s translation, and finally the explanation of this incoherence offered by the Received View and that of the novel position will be compared and assessed. L’article examine la différence entre la notion du parallélisme non-Euclidean de János Bolyai et celle de Lobachevskii. Tout d’abord le travail s’occupe de l’opinion répendue parmi les historiens de géometrie (le « Received View » ), selon laquelle János Bolyai précise la notion du parallélisme non-Euclidean dans le premier paragraph de l’Appendix. Ensuite une pointe de vue toute neuve sera présentée concernant la place et le sens du terminus technicus,,paralella” de Bolyai dans l’Appendix. Enfin on va analyser les Commentaires (un manuscrit hongrois) de János Bolyai sur le livre Geometrische Untersuchungen de Lobachevskii àfin de voir jusqu’à quel point la notion de parallelisme de Bolyai se diffère de celle de Lobachevskii. L’analyse bien fondue des Commentaires va nous relever un apparent incohérence de la traduction de Bolyai. On examine et on compare l’opinion répendue dans le vaste public avec la nouvelle interpretation de l’Appendix, et on discute les explications probables de cet incohérence. (shrink)

This essay considers what is critical in critical phenomenology, and asks what features critical and phenomenological methods share. I suggest three fundamentally significant resonances between the critical and phenomenological enterprises. First is the suggestion that critique, like phenomenology, is an attempt to move beyond a dualism of inside and outside in order to extend into outer regions of what is known. Second is the insistence that what at first appears to be a purely negative endeavor, a finding of limit, is (...) incomplete if, upon finding that limit, it comes to a stop. Just as the reduction is not a means to banish or negate the world, but rather the condition through which it can more fully emerge, critique cannot be merely a cataloguing of the limitations of the present situation. Third is the openness to the possibilities of the world, a wonder or curiosity, that is revealed through the work of description in phenomenology, or Foucault’s characterization of philosophy not as an unmasking, but a making visible of what is visible. Finally I consider critical phenomenology’s futures: How is a newly enlivened kind of scholarship emerging from these two forms of thinking, both of which have been dismissed as outmoded or irrelevant? The new work currently emerging in phenomenology, with its emphasis on its own reflexive self-consideration and decolonization, offers hope that it might yet be capacious enough to simultaneously encompass the revelation of its limitations as well as the expansion of its reach. (shrink)

Philosophy begins and ends in disagreement. Philosophers disagree among themselves in innumerable ways, and this pervasive and permanent dissent is a sign of their inability to solve philosophical problems and establish substantive truths. This raises the question: What should I do with my philosophical beliefs in light of philosophy's epistemic failure? In this open-access book, János Tozsér develops four possible answers into comprehensive metaphilosophical visions and argues that we cannot find peace either by committing ourselves to one of these visions (...) or by abandoning our philosophical beliefs. Tozsér calls this disheartening insight "the experience of breakdown", making the case that philosophy's truth-seeking and justificatory tools are unsuitable for establishing truths. Shedding light on the epistemic status of our philosophical beliefs, Tozsér adopts a broad approach to assess the metaphilosophical visions used by philosophers to interpret their own activity and determine their epistemic self-esteem. Open access was funded by the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungary. (shrink)

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau-Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilization of “grip” is a signal of impending loss, and is (...) offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure-footed mastery. I read Merleau-Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner's Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip. Finally, the paper turns to Harriet McBryde Johnson's memoir Too Late to Die Young as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise. (shrink)

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau-Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilisation of “grip” is a signal of impending loss and (...) is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure-footed mastery. I read Merleau-Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise. (shrink)

This paper systematises the works of György Márkus into two or possibly three periods. These emphasise the underlying consistency of purpose and interpreting theoretical interests throughout the oeuvre. despite the changing and socio-political forms and language games, all three share common features. These stages move from this initial critique of Orthodox Marxism employing the intellectual rigor of analytical and a philosophical anthropology to an investigation of the internal contradictions in Marx’s mature economic writings. to a final post-marxist phase after he (...) left Hungary dominated by continual philosophical themes and a social democratic political perspective. (shrink)

In all kinds of implementations of computing, whether technological or biological, some material carrier for the information exists, so in real-world implementations, the propagation speed of information cannot exceed the speed of its carrier. Because of this limitation, one must also consider the transfer time between computing units for any implementation. We need a different mathematical method to consider this limitation: classic mathematics can only describe infinitely fast and small computing system implementations. The difference between mathematical handling methods leads to (...) different descriptions of the computing features of the systems. The proposed handling also explains why biological implementations can have lifelong learning and technological ones cannot. Our conclusion about learning matches published experimental evidence, both in biological and technological computing. (shrink)

János Kornai, a distinguished Hungarian economist, began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then became a critic of the communist political and economic system. He lost family members in the Holocaust, contributed to the ideological preparation for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and became an influential theorist of the post-Soviet economic transition. He has been a journalist, a researcher prohibited from teaching in his home country, and a tenured professor at Harvard. By Force of Thought traces Kornai's (...) lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research.Disenchanted with communism, Kornai published Overcentralization, the first book written by someone living behind the Iron Curtain to be openly critical of Soviet-style economics. Although it was attacked in Hungary, it was hailed by Western economists. The Kornai-Lipták theory on two-level planning captured the attention of mathematical economists. Kornai went on to publish the controversial Anti-Equilibrium, a critique of the general equilibrium theory underpinning mainstream economic analyses of markets, Economics of Shortage, The Road to a Free Economy, and the summary of his lifetime research, The Socialist System. An intellectual emissary between East and West, Kornai commuted between Harvard and Budapest for many years.Kornai's memoir describes his research--including his present-day evaluation of his past work--as well as the social and political environments in which he did his work. The difficulties faced by a critic of central planning in a communist country are made especially vivid by material from newly opened secret police files and informers' reports on his activities. By Force of Thought will be an essential resource for students of economic thought, socialist systems, and postsocialist transition, and for readers interested in Eastern European intellectual life before, during, and after communism. (shrink)

Peter Millican and Branden Thornhill-Miller have recently argued that contradictions between different religious belief systems, in conjunction with the host of defeaters based on empirical research concerning alleged sources of evidence for ‘perceived supernatural agency’, render all ‘first-order’, that is actual, religious traditions positively irrational, and a source of discord on a global scale. However, since the authors recognise that the ‘secularisation thesis’ appears to be incorrect, and that empirical research provides evidence that religious belief also has beneficial individual and (...) social effects, they put forward a hypothesis of a ‘second-order religious belief ’, with Universalist overtones and thus free of intergroup conflict, and free of irrationality, since supported (solely) by the Fine-Tuning Argument. While granting most of their arguments based on empirical research and embracing the new paradigm of the atheism/religion debate implicit in their paper, I contend that Millican’s and Thornhill-Miller’s proposal is unlikely to appeal to religious believers, because it misconstrues the nature and grounds of religious belief. I suggest that their hypothesis may be refined by taking into account a view of axiologically grounded religious belief that I refer to as ‘agatheism’, since it identifies God or the Ultimate Reality with the ultimate good (to agathon). (shrink)

This article argues that the existence of horrendous evil calls into question not just the plausibility of the most popular theodicies on offer, notably sceptical theism, but the coherence of any agatheology–that is, any theology which identifies God or the ultimate reality with the ultimate good or with a maximally good being. The article contends that the only way an agatheologian can ‘save the face of God’ after Auschwitz and Kolyma is by endorsing a non-interventionist interpretation of the Divine providence (...) which will amount to naturalisation of the discourse on evil by localising entirely in nature the causes of evil and the possible ways of its prevention. ‘Theodicy of justice as fairness’ is then presented as consistent with such naturalistic account of evils and yet compatible with a religious worldview. It justifies the Divine non-intervention by suggesting that it would not be just or fair for God to intervene on only some occasions to avert evil, if God is apparently prevented from intervening in all such cases. Since for Agatheos it is metaphysically impossible to do what is unjust or unfair, God never intervenes to avert evil. (shrink)

The paper is a response to recent criticisms of agatheism, a new pluralistic interpretation of religious belief put forward by Janusz Salamon with the aim of accommodating the epistemological challenge of religious diversity. Agatheism is an axiologically grounded religious belief which identifies God, the Absolute or the ultimate reality religiously conceived with the ultimate good as the ultimate end of all human agency and thus an explanation of its irreducibly teleological character and a source of its meaning. Janusz (...) class='Hi'>Salamon argues that this grounding of religious belief in the human axiological consciousness makes it immune to falsification by any future science. Replying to the concerns of the critics about about irrationality of doxastic commitment to a particular religious tradition, Janusz Salamon argues that to the extent the fundamental agatheistic religious belief is presupposed in such tradition as its doxastic core, its belief system - if internally coherent and aligned with a worldview that is consistent with undisputed scientific findings - may be considered rational, despite there being a plurality of such belief systems. (shrink)

In ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Berlin wavered between two readings of the concept of positive liberty. In the first one, ‘positive liberty’ is a distinct concept, different from that of ‘negative liberty’. Those who advocate liberty in the negative sense and those who advocate it in the positive sense do not disagree on which interpretation of the same thing – ‘liberty’ – is the correct one; they speak about different things. Both defend valid ideals, although those ideals may not be (...) simultaneously achievable. In the second reading, negative and positive liberty are competing interpretations of the same concept, the defenders of negative liberty being involved in a substantive disagreement with the advocates of positive liberty on what the same term – ‘liberty’ – really means. On this understanding, negative and positive liberty cannot both be valid ideals: one of them (negative liberty) is a genuine value, the other (positive liberty) being nothing but the perversion of it. My article aims to uncover the roots of this ambiguity in unresolved difficulties in Berlin’s account of the history of the ideas of negative and positive liberty and, more importantly, in his conception of value pluralism. (shrink)

This essay tries to review the main elements of the concept of public reason as presented by John Rawls with reference to his latest book (The Law of Peoples with The Idea of Public Reason Revisited) and simultaneously brings up the arguments for and against this concept that have been put forward by the literature. Many of the arguments presented here are not new, but what this essay aims at is a reassessment of the debate by confronting many of the (...) interpretations and points of view raised around the concept of public reason. Based on the argumentation that if ‘right’ precedes this leaves room for the (different existences of) ‘good’ I propose that public reason ought to be conceived more as a political concept and less of a comprehensive account of morality. (shrink)

Dedication. A version of this paper has been discussed in 2007, in Dunabogdány (Hungary), on the occasion of an informal meeting, organized by Jeff Bernard. It was the last occasion I had the chance to meet him, one of my closest friends during many years, to whose memory I dedicate this essay.

In “The Origin of Species,” Darwin describes a hypothetical example illustrating that large, slowly reproducing mammals such as the elephant can reach very large numbers if population growth is not affected by regulating factors. The elephant example has since been cited in various forms in a wide variety of books, ranging from educational material to encyclopedias. However, Darwin’s text was changed over the six editions of the book, although some errors in the mathematics persisted throughout. In addition, full details of (...) the problem remained hidden in his correspondence with readers of the Origin. As a result, Darwin’s example is very often misinterpreted, misunderstood or presented as if it were a fact. We show that the population growth of Darwin’s elephant population can be modeled by the Leslie matrix method, which we generalize here to males as well. Darwin’s most often cited figure, about 19 million elephants after 750 years is not a typical outcome, actually a very unlikely result under more realistic, although still hypothetical situations. We provide a recursion formula suggesting that Darwin’s original model corresponds to a tribonacci series, a proof showing that sex ratio is constant over all age classes, and a derivation of a generating function of the sequence. (shrink)

Does the alleged religious experience of a mystic constitute a reliable source of knowledge about the object of his or her experience? Or does it rationally justify a move from such experience to meaningful beliefs about God or the Absolute which is supposed to be the object of that experience? And are religious beliefs in need of being grounded in religious experience in order to be rationally justified? Although it seems pretty obvious that a great many adherents of all religions (...) find reasons for their beliefs in their religious traditions rather than in their personal religious experiences, one could note that usually these traditions present religious experiences of their founder figures as constituting evidence for their authenticity and truthfulness ; the supposed mystical experiences of some adherents of a given religious tradition are often treated by their co-believers as an important evidence which increases credibility of their own religious convictions. (shrink)

Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. Malidoma Patrick Someé. New York: G.P Putnam's Sons, 1994. 311pp. $22.95 (cloth).

Contributors to this collection examine the Turners’ most important theoretical contributions to anthropology, from their work on pilgrimages, liminality, and communitas to insights from their fieldwork. They illustrate the Turners’ enduring theoretical contributions and their profound effects on the anthropological perspective.

W maju 1998 roku odbyła się w Monachium międzynarodowa konferencja poświęcona zagadnieniu racjonalności teizmu. Temat to szeroko dyskutowany w ostatnich czasach, stąd wydawać by się mogło, że zorganizowanie jeszcze jednej sesji, która przyciągnęłaby uwagę środowiska filozofów religii, będzie przedsięwzięciem wyjątkowo trudnym. Tymczasem monachijska debata zasłużyła sobie na miano wydarzenia. O jej atrakcyjności zadecydował fakt, że została pomyślana jako próba ożywienia dialogu pomiędzy filozofami nawiązującymi do tradycji kontynentalnej z przedstawicielami filozofii analitycznej. Tego rodzaju ekumeniczne inicjatywy nalezą w tej dziedzinie do rzadkości. (...) Ten swoisty izolacjonizm ma wiele przyczyn, a kością niezgody jest między innymi stosunek do Kanta. Postkantowska kontynentalna filozofia religii, kładąca nacisk na epistemologię i fenomenologię doświadczenia religijnego, postrzega anglosaski renesans badań nad klasycznymi problemami teodycealnymi jako nawrót do przedkrytycznego dogmatyzmu. Z kolei niektórzy analityczni filozofowie religii zdają się uprawiać swą dyscyplinę w taki sposób, jak gdyby kopernikański przewrót Kanta uważali za niebyły, a czasem nazywają expressis verbis epoką nowożytną okresem błędów i wypaczeń. Epistemologiczne zagadnienie racjonalności religii należy do kręgu zainteresowań obydwu wymienionych tradycji, stad możliwe jest tu połączenie wysiłków w celu uporządkowania tematyki i oceny aktualnego stanu refleksji. (shrink)

Linguistic Modelling of Scenarios proposes a paradigm change from the 'systemic VIEW' to 'systems SCIENCE', so as to extend the methodology of conventional science of physics into the domains hitherto beyond the reach of this kind of treatment. The book: I. Identifies the problematic issues in current approaches to the 'systemic or structural view' of parts of the world as opposed to the 'quantitative/qualitative views' of conventional science of physics and the arts whereby introducing the 'third culture'. II. Locates the (...) position of the structural view in the context of 'human intellectual endeavour'. III. Discusses the fundamental questions raised by modelling aspects of human behaviour. IV. Introduces the basic ideas and the symbolism of linguistic modelling which are then applied to turning descriptions of scenarios as a story or narrative into reasoning schemes. V. Describes a methodology of 'problem solving' of which design thinking and the operation of purposive systems are seen as essential ingredients. Problem solving is a universal activity of living in particular human beings through innovation, invention and creativity. Lack of this activity leads to death! Problem solving is regarded as pivotal point which may propel the spread of the modified structural view into social, technical, cultural and educational awareness. VI. Shows the location of aspects of conventional science within the scheme of systems science whereby achieving a 'continuity of the scientific endeavour'. VII. Outlines a teaching scheme for 'linguistic modelling'. Janos Korn explains how a view can be converted into a science which can lead to a possibility of 'organised speculation' or simulation of behaviour, exploring the effects of variation of parameters on performance, and the occurrence of outcomes of operations, beneficial or not, of dynamic structures. Static and dynamic structures are expressed in more rigorous and computable terms so that the results of analysis and design of human activity scenarios could be exposed to at least thought experiments. Linguistic Modelling of Scenarios is an informative read for any professionals, teachers and students of engineering, social science, management, business and production. (shrink)

Entangled states provide the necessary tools for conceptual tests of quantum mechanics and other alternative theories. These tests include local hidden variables theories, pre- and postselective quantum mechanics, QND measurements, complementarity, and tests of quantum mechanics itself against, e.g., the so-called causal communication constraint. We show how to produce various nonlocal entangled states of multiple cavity fields that are useful for these tests, using cavity QED techniques. First, we discuss the generation of the Bell basis states in two entangled cavities, (...) when there is at most one photon in either of the cavities, and then a straightforward generalization to similar N-cavity states. We then show how to produce a nonlocal entangled state when there is precisely one photon hiding in three cavities. These states can be produced by sending appropriately prepared atoms through the cavities. As applications we briefly review two proposals: one to test quantum mechanics against the causal communication constraint using a two-cavity entangled state and the other to test pre- and postselective quantum mechanics using a three-cavity entangled state. The outcome of the latter experiment can be discussed from the viewpoint of the consistent histories interpretation of quantum mechanics and therefore provides an opportunity to subject quantum cosmological ideas to laboratory tests. Finally, we point out the relation between these schemes and the schemes suggested for quantum computing, teleportation, and quantum copying. (shrink)