abstract: This project began as an interreligious exercise during Lent, a Christian season of increased spiritual practice. What resulted, in part, is this work, a translation and commentary on the Dhammapada (included here: the introduction and translations of three chapters with chapter commentaries). Like the Sermon on the Mount to Christians and the Bhagavad Gita to Hindus, the Dhammapada is considered the heart of Buddhist teaching. Ultimately, this work is a secondary translation or popular interpretation, akin to Thomas Merton's translations (...) of Chuang Tzu and Coleman Bark's translations of Rumi's poetry. And rather than a scholarly translation, this work is a spiritual and devotional interpretation. Among the choices I have made in this translation include gender-inclusive and affirming language, often opting for they/ them pronouns. In chapter intros, I have included resources, brief commentary, and cultural and academic notes that have helped to shape this translation. Such influencers of this translation include Ella Baker, Kendrick Lamar, Bessel van der Kolk, Lama Rod Owens, and others. The next choice I have made, instead of translating the words dukkha and samsara to sorrow/suffering and reincarnation, respectively, I have often translated these terms to harm cycles and generational suffering. My hope is that these terms capture the original meanings while also creating expansive language to hold possibilities for new understandings within Gautama Buddha's teaching. As the translator of this text, it is important to name my twenty-first-century context, influences, and identity as a person raised mostly in the Upper Midwest of the United States and who has lived in Brooklyn, New York, for the past twenty years. This translation is filtered through the lenses of my lived experience, education, social-familial position, economic status, ethnic-cultural and gender identity (as a cis male of Scandinavian-Hutterite descent, who is identified as white ), and multiple other influences. My sources include peace studies, trauma/resilience studies, liberation theology, and more than fifteen years of experience as a spiritual teacher and minister in the Anabaptist tradition (i.e., the historic peace church) of Christianity. It is through these lived experiences that this translation emerges. And, specifically, what has emerged, at least in part, is a trauma aware, liberationist interpretation of the Dhammapada. (shrink)

Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e. by how much is at stake for that person at that time. In defending this thesis, Stanley introduces readers to a number of strategies for resolving philosophical paradox, making the book essential not just for specialists in epistemology but for all philosophers interested in philosophical methodology. Since (...) a number of his strategies appeal to linguistic evidence, it will be of great interest to linguists as well. (shrink)

Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically (...) mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as "She is a mathematician", where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun "she". But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defense of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies. (shrink)

Puts Schelling in conversation with twentieth-century continental philosophy.

This paper concerns Spinoza’s theory of conatus and an important consequence of this theory concerning how bodies persist through time. I first argue that a conatus is the self-maintaining activity of a mode and not a tendency toward self-preservation or some kind of force. I then argue that it follows from this theory of conatus that bodies persist through time by having temporal parts. I conclude the paper by arguing that attributing a temporal parts metaphysic to Spinoza is not as (...) implausible or anachronistic as it might first seem to be. (shrink)

This paper examines Bataille’s role in the formation of the question of community, as developed by Nancy and Blanchot. The paper aims to situate the problematic status of Bataille’s influence—as both formative but ultimately insufficient—in his relation to Nietzsche and what Bataille understands as the experience of an irrecoverable loss. What it would mean to share such loss, what is at stake in bringing that experience to articulation, and what happens to those who endeavor to do so constitute the recalcitrant (...) elements in Bataille’s thought, which solicit but cannot sustain a renewal of the question of community. (shrink)

Schelling argued that early modern science had discarded the ancient teaching of matter – the world soul (die Weltseele or anima mundi, the unity of soul and body, eternity and time, absolute possibility and existence) – «into the common grave they dug for nature and have brought about the death of all science». In order to put science on a more philosophical tract, Schelling retrieved the work of Giordano Bruno as part of his «handful» of thinkers who in a contemporary (...) context appear on the border between an ancient but still vital sense of philosophy and the emerging scientific study of nature. (shrink)

"Ask two religious people one question, and you'll get three answers!" Why do religious people believe what they shouldn't--not what others think they shouldn't believe, but things that don't accord with their own avowed religious beliefs? This engaging book explores this puzzling feature of human behavior. D. Jason Slone terms this phenomenon "theological incorrectness." He demonstrates that it exists because the mind is built it such a way that it's natural for us to think divergent thoughts simultaneously. Human minds (...) are great at coming up with innovative ideas that help them make sense of the world, he says, but those ideas do not always jibe with official religious beliefs. From this fact we derive the important lesson that what we learn from our environment--religious ideas, for example--does not necessarily cause us to behave in ways consistent with that knowledge. Slone presents the latest discoveries from the cognitive science of religion and shows how they help us to understand exactly why it is that religious people do and think things that they shouldn't. He then applies these insights to three case studies. First he looks at why Theravada Buddhists profess that Buddha was just a man but actually worship him as a god. Then he explores why the early Puritan Calvinists, who believed in predestination, acted instead as if humans had free will by, for example, conducting witch-hunts and seeking converts. Finally, he explains why both Christians and Buddhists believe in luck even though the doctrines of Divine Providence and karma suggest there's no such thing. In seeking answers to profound questions about why people behave the way they do, this fascinating book sheds new light on the workings of the human mind and on the complex relationship between cognition and culture. (shrink)

By most accounts Deleuze's engagement with Marx begins with the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia he co-authored with Félix Guattari. However, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition alludes to a connection between Deleuze's critique of common sense and Marx's theory of fetishism, suggesting a connection between the critique of the image of thought and the critique of capital. By tracing this connection from its emergence in the early texts on noology, or the image of thought, to the development in the critique (...) of state thought in A Thousand Plateaus, it can be argued that what initially appears as an entirely infra-philosophical problem, concerned with the presuppositions of philosophy, is not only a political problem as well, but ultimately bears on the very nature of the conjunction between thought and politics, making possible a re-examination of what is meant by revolutionary thought. It is a transition from noology to noopolitics. In the end it can be argued that revolutionary thought is no longer an eschatology, attempting to discern the signs of the future revolution in the present, but a thought oriented towards everything that exceeds the fetish of society, towards the virtual relations and micropolitical transformations that constitute society but exceed its representation. (shrink)

This is a critical notice of Evolution's Eye by Susan Oyama, focusing on developmental systems theory primarily in relation to the nature-nurture debates and the explanation of behaviour.

Legitimist definitions of 'violence' are those that make explicit reference to the illegality, illegitimacy, or wrongfulness of the acts classified as acts of violence. All acts of violence, according to the legitimist definitions, involve a violation of some kind. I defend the view that legitimist definitions are defective—that notions like “wrongness” and “violation” are not part of the concept of violence. I offer three lines of argument: (1) that legitimist definitions of “violence” reduce the doctrine of nonviolence to a trivial (...) truth; (2) that legitimist definitions cannot accommodate common or easily imaginable cases of violence; (3) that legitimist definitions are defeated by an “open question” objection. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Dealing primarily with implications rather than foundations, and focusing downstream at the expense of upstream prevention, mainstream bioethics is at a toxic watershed. Through an extended analysis of the Environmental Genome Project (EGP), we offer new tools from the philosophy of science and from critical epidemiology to help bioethics to move ahead. Our aim in this paper is not to resolve the moral and conceptual problems we reveal, but rather to outline ways to prevent such problems from arising in (...) future research. (shrink)

Thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Tim Morton have heralded the end of our ideological constructions of nature, warning that popular “ecology” or the “natural” is just the latest opiate of the masses. Attempting to think what I call Nature after Nature, I turn to the Kamakura period Zen master Dōgen Eihei (1200–1253) to explore the possibilities of thinking Nature in its non-ideological self-presentation or what Dōgen called “mountains and rivers (sansui).” I bring Dōgen into dialogue with his great champion, the (...) American poet Gary Snyder (who understands the process of sansui as “the wild”), as well as with thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Kundera, Žižek, Agamben, and Muir. Beyond Nature being any one thing, what Badiou derides as the “cosmological one,” I argue for the reawakening and sobering up to multiple Nature, beyond its appearance as an object to a discerning subject, as the bioregions which give us our interdependent and dynamic being. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 117 - 134 This essay attends to both the critical and poetic work of David Pollard. In so doing, it not only engages the works themselves, but also allows the contours of such an engagement to manifest themselves, both with regards to the works at hand and more broadly. What does reading and thinking with Pollard give us to experience about reading and thinking as such?

As a sign that interest in Schelling is growing beyond its initial reception within more continentally inflected studies, Lara Osteric has collected eleven generally impressive essays that are organized around the chronological development of Schelling’s thinking, and that reassess his place in the history of philosophy.Eric Watkins enters the debate around the decisive influences on Schelling’s early thinking. Conceding the well-known influences of Hölderlin, Fichte, Jacobi, and the Pantheismusstreit, his reactionary Tübingen teachers, and Reinhold’s attempt to provide a firm foundation (...) for Kantian critical philosophy, Watkins argues for... (shrink)

Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 4-5.

In this highly original book, Jason Hill defends a strong form of moral cosmopolitanism and lays the groundwork for a new view of the self. To achieve a radical cosmopolitan identity, he argues it may be necessary to forget aspects of one's racial and ethnic socialization. The idea of forgetting where one came from demands that morally recreated persons disown parts or even all of their cultures if these cultures are oppressive or denigrate human life. Hill draws on existentialism, (...) developmental psychology, and his own experiences as a Caribbean immigrant to the United States to present a philosophy for the new millennium. (shrink)

A general feature of our moral psychology is that we feel that some moral demands are motivated externally. Stanford explains this feature with an evolutionary account, such that moral externalism was selected for its ability to facilitate prosocial interactions. Alternatively, I argue that a cognitive, non-selectionist account of moral externalism is a more parsimonious explanation.

Yves Citton’sRenverser l’insoutenableis both a thorough critique of the current conjuncture and an attempt to construct a politics to reverse it. With respect to the former, Citton outlines the various ways in which the present should be considered unsustainable, ecologically, economically, politically, psychically, and through its various technological mediations. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Citton proposes a politics that can overcome the untenable conditions of the present. Politics takes two figures here, a politics of pressures, of the loves (...) and hates that drive and determine individual and collective life, and a politics of gestures, of habits and comportments that are both immediate and disseminated through various media. Citton’s political proposals suggest a new political approach, one that focuses on the transindividual, on the affects, imaginations and ideas that form the basis for collective and individual existence. It is on this basis that its merits and limitations should be measured. (shrink)

Simondon’s concept of the transindividual has become a central point of reference for contemporary critical philosophy and social philosophy. Despite its importance in the work of such writers as Étienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, Simondon’s works have not been translated into English, and thus no comprehensive study has appeared so far. Muriel Combes’s book presents not only a study of Simondon’s thought, but an examination of what it makes possible in terms of rethinking social relations.

I elaborate and critically evaluate the theses of "environmental pragmatism," especially as captured in a recent collection with that title. While I am hopeful about this new approach, I want nonetheless to make reparations for its shortcomings. The primary difficulty is that environmental pragmatists tend to express only implicitly the metaphysical commitments of, say, William James, and yet the claims of environmental pragmatism would be profoundly strengthened by direct appeal to James's metaphysics. The ecosystem approach is particularly amenable to characterization (...) in terms of pragmatic metaphysics. Thus, I offer the thesis of wild ontology in an effort to enrich the empirical basis of environmental philosophy, and also to help cure environmental ethics of its political impotence. (shrink)

Let B be a p-uniformly convex Banach space, with p≥2. Let T be a linear operator on B, and let Anx denote the ergodic average ∑i.

After a long period of neglect that began in his lifetime, why has Schelling reemerged as an important philosopher, germane to contemporary concerns? In the first part of this essay I offer a brief history of Schelling’s early descent into obscurity and gradual ascent back into the light of philosophical relevance. In the second and final part of the essay, I offer a brief survey of the current Schelling resurgence in the English speaking reception of Continental philosophy.

Eclesiologia mais do que tratar dos aspectos gerais da Igreja, tal como tradi-ção, doutrinas, compreensões teológicas, é falar do seu aspecto fundante, passageiro e eterno. Sobretudo partiremos de um olhar universal e plural dessa Igreja que é vista por Cristo, como um só rebanho, apesar de sua institucio-nalização e da multiplicidade de Igrejas Locais, e por razões de insistirmos em dividi-la, essa que é descrita e concebida nos textos neotestamentários e conciliares como a Igreja una, santa, católica e apostólica. Assim (...) sendo, poderemos refletir a Eclesiologia por meio da sua heterogeneidade a constatar que na sua diversidade há uma unipluralidade na sua essência e estrutura. (shrink)

Rapidly advancing technologies in the field of extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR) have presented a new challenge in accurate neuroprognostication following cardiac arrest. Determination of brain state informs the prognostic picture and allows providers to begin effective communication regarding likelihood of meaningful neurological recovery as defined by patients or family members. The evolving role of sedation during ECPR and its impacts on ethical tension in decision-making is reviewed. Work surrounding the advancing field of neuroprognostication after cardiac arrest and hypothermia is summarized (...) and implications of premature withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments are discussed. Advances that improve predictive value for neurological recovery are utilized in affirming and discussing the implications for end-of-life wishes of individuals in the setting of intensive resuscitative therapies. (shrink)

Despite projected devastating impacts on human communities, the US still lacks comprehensive national policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This vacuum has provided the space for a surge of promising sustainability and climate action planning efforts at the state and local level. Meanwhile, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s (2015) Out of Reach Report, ‘there is no state in the US where a minimum wage worker working full time can afford a one-bedroom apartment at the fair market (...) rent’. We are calling for a reimagining of local climate action planning that encourages policies and programs designed to reduce GHG emissions from the built environment while explicitly and comprehensively addressing the affordability component. With equitable local climate action planning, we can address both environmental and social justice issues. (shrink)

Hans Lipps compares pragmatism (William James and John Dewey) existentialism (Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger) in this 1936 article translated from French. He claims that they aim at the same goals, e.g., a return to lived experience and a rejection of the Cartesian legacy in philosophy. While summarizing the commonalities of each, he engages in a polemic against philosophy then that remains relevant now into the next century.