This collection of 16 essays brings 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson's work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice.

All Thoughts Are Equal is both an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an exercise in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his "non-standard" approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking--including the nonhuman--are equal. John Ó Maoilearca examines how philosophy might appear when viewed with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. He (...) does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film (Lars von Trier's documentary The Five Obstructions) as an example of the non-standard method. Von Trier's film is a meditation on the creative limits set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how these limits can push our experience of film--and of ourselves--beyond what is normally deemed "the perfect human." All Thoughts Are Equal adopts film's constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle's radically new style of philosophy is best presented through our most nonhuman form of thought--that found in cinema. (shrink)

Deleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory ([1896] 1994), but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a (very) unBergsonian ontological one. In this article, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an ‘attitude of the body’ – something that projects an actual, corporeal and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that ‘a director (...) makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again’, so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one ‘single point’ throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a ‘vanishing image’, only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is an embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body – one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about ‘attitude’ as well as ‘gesture’ and ‘mime’. We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, 2003). This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s ‘one film’ and Bergson’s singular ‘vanishing image’, respectively. Is the ‘one’ being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema. (shrink)

Deleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a unBergsonian ontological one. In this essay, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an “attitude of the body”—something that projects an actual, corporeal, and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that “a director makes only one movie in (...) his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again,” so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one “single point” throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a “vanishing image,” only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body —one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about “attitude” as well as “gesture” and “mime.” We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions. This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s “one film” and Bergson’s singular “vanishing image” respectively. Is the “one” being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema. (shrink)

This essay interrogates recent materialist monisms, be they based on contingency, eliminativism, or objective phenomenology, on account of their metaphilosophical ramifications. It is argued that certain dualities must be retained, at least nominally, in order to have any explanatory purchase and escape velocity from philosophical circularity. Dyads such as “spirit” and “matter,” “manifest” and “scientific,” “living” and “dead,” or even “illusion” and “reality” are given an immanentist reading that treats them as equal parts of the Real. Following this revisionary metaphysics (...) that reviews the meaning of such terms as optical realities, the matter–spirit couple is specifically used to explain why reality cannot appear as just one thing, even if only in virtue of the illusion of at least two things. The consequences for philosophical monisms of all types, and for anthropocentric thought in general, are then examined in the light of the ethical effects of recent attempts to explain every thing through one medium alone. (shrink)

This essay argues that a radical, non-standard, philosophical concept of the human is one that is consistently used both towards itself and others: it is an amplified concept that applies itself non-philosophically, that is, generically. Our purpose here, consequently, is to outline how Laruelle's work can be seen as performing something other than an inflation or deflation of either side of one fixed philosophical dyad ; rather, it can be seen as unilateralising the couple, that is, expanding the meaning of (...) the two alongside the One Real that resists any lone philosophical version's attempt to commandeer that meaning. It is the performative mutation that counts, not the terms of the dyad. As such, this essay also contends that what Laruelle explicitly does with philosophy – namely its de-authorisation and democratisation – is also what must be done, by implication, in a non-standard philosophical radicalisation of the human. Nonstandard philosophy does not know what the human is, but this negative capability is precisely what allows it to expand, performatively, the meaning of the human in its ongoing search to discover what the human may be. (shrink)

Originally published as the Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy, this book offers the definitive guide to contemporary Continental thought. It covers all the most pressing and important themes and categories in the field - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Twelve specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, valuably, how the (...) various topics intersect. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including an A to Z of key terms and concepts, a chronology, and a guide to practical research in the field, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in and studying Continental Philosophy. (shrink)

This essay connects the mystical concept of “supernothing” with Bergson’s notion of the image of nothingness as a movement in the making. I do this also with respect to the film The Empty Man (David Prior, 2020) – which explicitly cites Gorgias’s four-part embargo on nothing (it exists, it cannot be known, communicated, or understood): nothingness is re-rendered as movement, in particular, the transmission and reception of images in the brain. Indeed, this is precisely Bergson’s theory of the brain too (...) – as the receiver and transmitter of images, a communication of movements. This “nihilistic” approach to the brain (it does not store images, it has no positive content) is not a valorisation of the ego as void à la Metzinger, but the real, processual rethinking of what nothingness and nihilism might mean – with a full, moving “supernothing” at its heart. Though there is a mystical and a film-philosophical account referenced in this renewal of nothingness, it will not lead to any exotic or hyperbolic excess (the brain as supernatural agent), but rather a very “ordinary” account that we will describe in terms of “supernormalisation”: an “unlearning” or mundanising of the supernatural: an extraction of the supernatural by natural means. (shrink)

We address three fundamental questions: What does it mean for an entity to be living? What is the role of inter-organismic collaboration in evolution? What is a biological individual? Our central argument is that life arises when lineage-forming entities collaborate in metabolism. By conceiving of metabolism as a collaborative process performed by functional wholes, which are associations of a variety of lineage-forming entities, we avoid the standard tension between reproduction and metabolism in discussions of life – a tension particularly evident (...) in discussions of whether viruses are alive. Our perspective assumes no sharp distinction between life and non-life, and does not equate life exclusively with cellular or organismal status. We reach this conclusion through an analysis of the capabilities of a spectrum of biological entities, in which we include the pivotal case of viruses as well as prions, plasmids, organelles, intracellular and extracellular symbionts, unicellular and multicellular life-forms. The usual criterion for classifying many of the entities of our continuum as non-living is autonomy. This emphasis on autonomy is problematic, however, because even paradigmatic biological individuals, such as large animals, are dependent on symbiotic associations with many other organisms. These composite individuals constitute the metabolic wholes on which selection acts. Finally, our account treats cooperation and competition not as polar opposites but as points on a continuum of collaboration. We suggest that competitive relations are a transitional state, with multi-lineage metabolic wholes eventually outcompeting selfish competitors, and that this process sometimes leads to the emergence of new types or levels of wholes. Our view of life as a continuum of variably structured collaborative systems leaves open the possibility that a variety of forms of organized matter – from chemical systems to ecosystems – might be usefully understood as living entities. (shrink)

Persian Religion in the Achaemenid Period. Edited by Wouter F. M. Henkelman and Céline Redard. Classica et Orientalia, vol. 16. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. Pp. 496, illus. €98.

Let me first explain what I am not attacking in this paper. I am not attacking, for instance, the right of free speech or any of the other specific rights listed in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights or the United Nations' Charter. I am, rather, attacking any specific right's being called a ‘human right’. I mean to show that any such designation is not only fraudulent but, in case anyone might want to say that there can be noble lies, (...) grossly wicked, amounting indeed to genocide. (shrink)

This book explores patient safety themes in developed, developing and transitioning countries. A foundation premise is the concept of 'reverse innovation' as mutual learning from the chapters challenges traditional assumptions about the construction and location of knowledge. This edited collection can be seen to facilitate global learning. This book will, hopefully, form a bridge for those countries seeking to enhance their patient safety policies. Contributors to this book challenge many supposed generalisations about human societies, including consideration of how medical care (...) is mediated within those societies and how patient safety is assured or compromised. By introducing major theories from the developing world in the book, readers are encouraged to reflect on their impact on the patient safety and the health quality debate. The development of practical patient safety policies for wider use is also encouraged. The volume presents a ground breaking perspective by exploring fundamental issues relating to patient safety through different academic disciplines. It develops the possibility of a new patient safety and health quality synthesis and discourse relevant to all concerned with patient safety and health quality in a global context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Missing Shade of Blue Re-viewed John 0. Nelson It is obviously important for Hume's purposes in the Treatise to maintain that simple ideas are always founded in precedent, resembling impressions;1 andhe explicitly, overandover, doesso, evensometimes being so carried away by this first principle ofhis science of man (T 7) or so careless as to say that not just all simple ideas but all ideas are founded in (...) precedent, resembling impressions. At the same time, as often noted, Hume explicitly maintains that it is possible for there to be a simple idea having no precedent, corresponding impression. He argues: There is however one contradictory phaenomenon, which may prove, that 'tis not absolutely impossible for ideas to go before their correspondent impressions... Suppose... a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue... Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, beplac'd before him... Now Iask, whether 'tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himselfthe idea ofthat particular shade, tho' it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there arefew but will be ofopinion that he can; and this may serve as a proof, that the simple ideas are not always derived from the correspondent impressions. (T 5) Nowjust prior to this concession (as Cummins calls it ), Hume has said that the full examination ofthis question [the causal relationship between ideas and impression] is the subject of the present treatise; and therefore we shall here content ourselves with establishing one general proposition, That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent. (T 4) Volume XV Number 2 353 JOHN O. NELSON And just after the same concession, that a simple idea may be raised up which does not have a prior, correspondent impression, Hume says that it still remains true, that all our simple ideas proceed either mediately or immediately, from their correspondent impressions (T 7). Thus we have Hume explicitly asserting, it seems, both that all simple ideas have precedent correspondent impressions and that they do not. But this, on the face ofit, is an arrant contradiction! Can Hume have Homerically nodded? We have been quoting from the Treatise, but Hume makes the very same contradictory-seeming claims in the Enquiryl A thinker of Hume's acumen might nod for a page or two's quarter hour but not for all of nine years! Moreover, in both places Hume refers to the phenomenon of the impression-less idea ofblue as a contradictory phenomenon, indicating clearly enough that he was himself aware of there seeming to be an inconsistency here in his contentions. What can possibly be going on? Is Hume deliberately being paradoxical? Perhaps trying, for sensation's sake, to shock the reader and so increase sales of his work, as some commentators in the past might have wished to say? But this would be at the expense ofhis own contentions and principles and not the reader's, and not even Hume's bitterest foes and most malicious critics — so far as I know — have ever proposed that Hume would, figuratively speaking, like Oedipus, gouge out his own eyes, even in order to increase sales of the Treatise, nor does it make the slightest sense to think he would. The mystery deepens when we remember that Hume has said, in defining the program of the Treatise, that his intention is to establish the one general proposition that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondentto them (T4). What astrange way, we want to exclaim, to show that all our simple ideas are derived from correspondent simple impressions by almost immediately afterwards arguing that it is possible to have an idea that has had no correspondent, precedent impression! Such an egregious nonsequitur mightbe expected ofan absolutely incompetent beginner in philosophy, but we are speaking of David Hume, generally recognized as the profoundest and most acute of... (shrink)

Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood, Ashʻarism, and Political Sunnism. By Jeffry R. Halverson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. vii + 188. $75.

This essay offers some lessons from the history of the United States Constitution for constitutions for emerging democracies in Eastern Europe. The United States Constitution declined in efficacy over time because special interests eroded its restraints on rent-seeking. This essay seeks to consider solutions to prevent constitutional decline. It suggests that since special interests will try to dissolve constitutional restraints, the original constitution should itself contain trigger rulers imposing new restraints when certain events occur that suggest the old restraints are (...) weakening. Thus in this essay I suggest creating constitutional provisions to spring into effect when the consequences of constitutional decline become apparent in the polity.Cet article met en avant quelques leçons puisées dans l’histoire de la constitution américaine pour les constitutions des démocraties naissantes de l’Europe Orientale. La constitution des Etats-Unis a perdu de son efficacité au fil du temps parce que les intérêts particuliers ont entamé les contraintes qui pesaient sur les activités de recherche de rente. Cet article essaye d’envisager des solutions pour contrecarrer le déclin constitutionnel. Il suggère que, puisque les intérêts particuliers essayent de dissoudre les contraintes constitutionnelles, la constitution devrait inclure, à l’origine même, des règles d’activation imposant de nouvelles contraintes quand certains évènements qui surviennent révèlent l’insuffisance des contraintes antérieures. Ainsi, dans cet article, l’auteur suggère la création de dispositions constitutionnelles qui sont activées quand les conséquences du déclin constitutionnel sont apparentes au niveau politique. (shrink)

In this essay I try, first, to show that Lockean passages in Book I can be given a Berkeleian interpretation. I take two passages that have, in particular, been cited as allowing only a Lockean interpretation and show how they can be more coherently construed as Berkeleian in their intended meaning. In the process of this demonstration I show that only a Berkeleian interpretation is tenable for Book I. Second, I defend the Berkeleian interpretation against several charges; for instance, a (...) charge of textual inconsistency. I do, however, acknowledge in the process that in the Enquiry and subsequently Hume abandons Berkeley for Locke. I then offer an explanation of why he did and lastly I try to show that though Hume is thereby committed to an inconsistency he provides a way for justifying his (and our) conversational commitment to that inconsistency. (shrink)

Following the above scheme of demonstration, the first part of the present discussion will be devoted to a refutation of the arguments that support scepticism on the point under discussion. The second part of the discussion will then be devoted to proving that we do know remote existences.

Is inheritable genetic modification the new dividing line in gene therapy? The editors of this searching investigation, representing clinical medicine, public health and biomedical ethics, have established a distinguished team of scientists and scholars to address the issues from the perspectives of biological and social science, law and ethics, including an intriguing Foreword from Peter Singer. Their purpose is to consider how society might deal with the ethical concerns raised by inheritable genetic modification, and to re-examine prevailing views about whether (...) these procedures will ever be ethically and socially justifiable. The book also provides background to define the field, and discusses the biological and technological potential for inheritable genetic modification, its limitations, and its connection with gene therapy, cloning, and other reproductive interventions. For scientists, bioethicists, clinicians, counsellors and public commentators, this is an essential contribution to one of the critical debates in current genetics. (shrink)

"The ontology of the 1899 paper may then be summed up as follows," says Mr. Hochberg. "There are two kinds of entities, existents and non-existents.... All existent entities are made up ultimately of simple concepts which are non-existent. Also, all other non-existent entities are likewise reducible to simple concepts. The category of existent entities includes simple objects, like yellow1, and complex objects, like Paul, as well as existential propositions. In addition to simple concepts, the category of nonexistent entities includes non-existential (...) propositions, and complex concepts like the concept of Paul." By "simple object," Hochberg means any complex of concepts in which a single adjectival concept, like red or yellow, is tied together by some ontological relation, R, involving containment, with the concepts existence and now. Any such composite, denoted by the words, e.g., R2, R2, etc. or by the words "red1," "yellow1," etc., is a particular, since it has temporal existence. Every complex composed of simple objects and only such complexes are likewise particulars, in contrast to simple or complex concepts, which are universals. Thus, as Hochberg interprets him, Moore in "The Nature of Judgment" denies existence to universals, while maintaining that particulars, and only particulars, exist. (shrink)

Metagenomics is an emerging microbial systems science that is based on the large-scale analysis of the DNA of microbial communities in their natural environments. Studies of metagenomes are revealing the vast scope of biodiversity in a wide range of environments, as well as new functional capacities of individual cells and communities, and the complex evolutionary relationships between them. Our examination of this science focuses on the ontological implications of these studies of metagenomes and metaorganisms, and what they mean for common (...) sense and philosophical understandings of multicellularity, individuality and organism. We show how metagenomics requires us to think in different ways about what human beings are and what their relation to the microbial world is. Metagenomics could also transform the way in which evolutionary processes are understood, with the most basic relationship between cells from both similar and different organisms being far more cooperative and less antagonistic than is widely assumed. In addition to raising fundamental questions about biological ontology, metagenomics generates possibilities for powerful technologies addressed to issues of climate, health and conservation. We conclude with reflections about process-oriented versus entity-oriented analysis in light of current trends towards systems approaches. (shrink)

In the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights a quite large number of things are said to be ‘human rights’ and though in that Declaration the term ‘inalienable’ is not used to describe the rights in question it has been so used by commentators—at least with respect to some of the rights enumerated. I shall forgo asking the prior question as to whether any such thing as a human right exists and ask simply whether any such thing as an (...) inalienable right exists. My intention will be to show that it does not. (shrink)