Matthias Smalbrugge compares modern images to plays without a script: while they appear to refer to a deeper identity or reality, it is ultimately the image itself that truly matters. He argues that our modern society of images is the product of a destructive tendency in the Christian notion of the image in general, and Augustine of Hippo's in particular. This insight enables him to decode our current 'scripts' of image. As we live in an increasingly visual culture, we (...) are constantly confronted with images that seem to exist without a deeper identity or reality - but did this referential character really get lost over time? Smalbrugge first explores the roots of the modern image by analysing imagery, what it represents, and its moral state within the framework of Platonic philosophy. He then moves to the Augustinian heritage, in particular the Soliloquies, the Confessions and the Trinity, where he finds valuable insights into images and memory. He explores within the trinitarian framework the crossroads of a theology of grace and a theology based on Neoplatonic views. Smalbrugge ultimately answers two questions: what happened to the referential character of the image, and can it be recovered? (shrink)

Consumerism will be understood as a ‘folk religion’, as a contemporary everyday way to make sense of and deal with transcendence. Contrary to longstanding critiques I will argue that consumerism also carries an ethical potential that comes into conflict with the results of the capitalist order of production.

The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger: The Emergence of an Augustinian Phenomenology, edited with an Introduction by Craig J. N. de Paulo Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Details: Preface by John Macquarrie and distinguished contributors include Robert Dodaro, O.S.A., Peg Birmingham, Theodore Kisiel, Daniel Dahlstrom, George Pattison, James K. A. Smith, Wayne Hankey and Matthias Fritsch. (Advance Praise by James J. O’Donnell, Jaroslav Pelikan and Joseph Margolis and reviewed in the American Catholic Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 82, Spring (...) 2008, issue no. 2, in article form.) Bishop de Paulo is the founder of "Augustinian phenomenology," a field within phenomenology that merges the Christian existential thought of Augustine with the methodology of Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

I argue that Neo-Fregean accounts of arithmetical language and arithmetical knowledge tacitly rely on a thesis I call [Success by Default]—the thesis that, in the absence of reasons to the contrary, we are justified in thinking that certain stipulations are successful. Since Neo-Fregeans have yet to supply an adequate defense of [Success by Default], I conclude that there is an important gap in Neo-Fregean accounts of arithmetical language and knowledge. I end the paper by offering a naturalistic remedy.

I argue for an account of vagueness according to which the root of vagueness lies not in the type of semantic-value that is best associated with an expression, but in the type of linguistic practice that renders the expression meaningful. I suggest, in particular, that conventions about how to use sentences involving attributions of vague predicates to borderline cases prevail to a lesser degree than conventions about how to use sentences involving attributions of vague predicates to clear cases.

The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to potential past events that might have determined them. Superdeterminism refers to the view that a local, and determinist, account of Bell inequalities violations is possible, by rejecting this assumption of statistical independence. We examine and clarify various problems with superdeterminism, looking in particular at its (...) consequences on the nature of scientific laws and scientific reasoning. We argue that the view requires a neo-Humean account of at least some laws, and creates a significant problem for the use of statistical independence in other parts of physics and science more generally. (shrink)

There is little doubt that a second-order axiomatization of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory plus the axiom of choice (ZFC) is desirable. One advantage of such an axiomatization is that it permits us to express the principles underlying the first-order schemata of separation and replacement. Another is its almost-categoricity: M is a model of second-order ZFC if and only if it is isomorphic to a model of the form Vκ, ∈ ∩ (Vκ × Vκ) , for κ a strongly inaccessible ordinal.

This article provides theoretical foundations to the widespread intuition that an individual duty to reduce one's carbon emissions should not be overly demanding, and should leave some space to personal life-projects. It does so by looking into the moral structure of aggregative problems such as climate change, and argues that contributing to climate change is less wrong than causing the same amount of harm in paradigm cases of harm-doing. It follows that strong agent-relative reasons, such as consideration of the agent's (...) most important life-projects, are likely sometimes to outweigh the reasons for refraining from contributing to climate change, especially when there is no alternative course of action. This, however, does not mean that individual carbon-emitters are off the hook, since a lot can be done to reduce carbon emissions without jeopardising one's most important life-projects. (shrink)

According to Epicurus, philosophy’s sole task is to ensure the well-being of the soul. Human souls are often riddled with diseases; the most serious are the fear of the gods and the fear of death. Thus, the Epicureans offered several arguments designed to demonstrate that, for instance, “death is nothing to us,” and should therefore not be feared. Since their creation there has been much discussion, both in antiquity and by contemporary philosophers, about these arguments. In this thesis, I argue (...) that Epicurean philosophical arguments are patient-relative; they necessarily adapt themselves so as to be therapeutically effective for their intended audience. The end result is that when we evaluate Epicurean philosophical arguments, we must do so in light of the audience for whom they were intended. (shrink)

When I take a sip from the coffee in my cup, I can taste that it is sweet. When I hold the cup with my hands, I can feel that it is hot. Why does the experience of feeling that the cup is hot give me justification for believing that the cup is hot?And why does the experience of tasting that the coffee is sweet give me justification for believing that the coffee is sweet?In general terms: Why is it that (...) a sense experience that P is a source of justification—a reason—for believing that P? Call this the Question. I will discuss various answers to the Question, and defend the one I myself favor. (shrink)

This paper argues that ceteris paribus (cp) laws exist based on a Lewisian best system analysis of lawhood (BSA). Furthermore, it shows that a BSA faces a second trivialization problem besides the one identified by Lewis. The first point concerns an argument against cp laws by Earman and Roberts. The second point aims to help making some assumptions of the BSA explicit. To address the second trivialization problem, a restriction in terms of natural logical constants is proposed that allows one (...) to describe regularities, as specified by basic generics (e.g. ‘birds can fly’) and universals (e.g. ‘all birds can fly’). It is argued that cp laws rather than strict laws might be a part of the the best system of such a regularity-based BSA, since sets of cp laws can be both (a) simpler and (b) stronger when reconstructed as generic non-material conditionals. Yet, if sets of cp laws might be a part of the best system of a BSA and thus qualify as proper laws of nature, it seems reasonable to conclude that at least some cp laws qualify as proper laws of nature. (shrink)

Renaturer la culture, reculturer la nature, par l'histoire : tel est le propos de ce livre. Il commence, en première partie, par la question du sujet, en montrant que l'exaltation du sujet individuel moderne a entraîné une décosmisation qui à terme est mortelle, car aucun être ne peut vivre sans un monde commun (kosmos). Nous devons donc recosmiser notre existence. La seconde partie montre que l'arrêt sur objet propre à la modernité aboutit à dépouiller les choses de leur sens, faisant (...) notamment du langage une aporie. Nous avons à remettre les mots et les choses dans le fil de leur histoire commune (leur croître-ensemble : concrescence), c'est-à-dire à les reconcrétiser. La troisième partie montre enfin que réembrayer la nature et la culture passe nécessairement par la question du rapport entre histoire et subjectivité, ce à tous les degrés de l'être, allant, par l'évolution, de la vie la plus primitive jusqu'à la conscience la plus humaine. Recosmiser, reconcrétiser, réembrayer : devant ces trois urgences, la pensée occidentale est aujourd'hui plombée par ce qui hier a fait sa force : la structure mère sujet-verbe-complément, qui à partir de la langue a orienté notre logique (avec le modèle sujet-prédicat), notre métaphysique (avec l'identité de l'être) et de là notre science (avec l'en-soi de l'objet), toutes fondées sur le double principe d'identité et de tiers exclu, c'est-à-dire sur la forclusion du symbolique. Des exemples tels que la langue japonaise, dont la structure mère était d'un autre genre, ou que le tétralemme développé par les penseurs indiens, qui inclut systématiquement le tiers, nous montrent la voie : dépasser les apories de la modernité ne se fera pas sans l'appoint, logique et ontologique à la fois, des grandes civilisations de l'Asie. On ambitionne ainsi de faire mentir le fameux adage de Kipling, Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. (shrink)

The overuse of water resources in the upper reaches of the Tarim (Xinjiang, China) jeopardizes the ecosystem of the huyang (Populus diversifolia) in the middle reaches of the river, which has led the authorities to displace the population of Caohu (Luntai-xian) in the name of environmental security. This paper discusses the ethical basis of such operations by comparing different approaches, and concludes that establishing a genuine environmental ethics implies an ontological revolution: one that will replace the ‘being towards death’ (Sein (...) zum Tode) of the modern ontological topos of ‘individual body: individual person’, with the ‘being towards life’ (sei e no sonzai) of what Watsuji defined as ‘the structural moment of human existence’, in which being cannot be dissociated from context and history. This ontological revolution, which links human subjecthood with the environment itself, is by the same token the condition of sustainability, which is the most basic human security of all. (shrink)

In the leadership literature of the past 100 years or so, rhetoric has been a topic for a long time and ethics was introduced some 30 years ago. However, the three topics, leadership, rhetoric, and ethics, have not been connected. This is astonishing because when ethical leadership made its comeback, scholars acknowledged the debt that ethical leadership owes to Aristotelian ideas. For Aristotle, leadership, ethics, and rhetoric were inseparable: without ethics, there could neither be good leadership nor rhetoric, and rhetoric (...) was the bridge from leader to follower and back. Aristotle is known as the practical philosopher and we argue that closing this major lacuna in leadership theory, would be beneficial for practice too and would help prevent Theranos-like scandals. The lacuna lies in what some call a Machiavellian view of leadership and rhetoric: both are regarded as amoral tools to achieve given ends. Aristotle would bristle at that idea. Both, leadership and rhetoric, to be good, must aim at the noble. The noble is not dictated by a heroic despot nor by a selfless saint but is understood by a leader because s/he is a socially embedded individual. We argue that leadership should be understood as personal development, that organisational rules must not inhibit virtue, that leadership is more about listening than talking, that synthesising that which is heard is central, and finally, that the common, not the collective, good is the goal of leadership. (shrink)

Adam Smith’s is often falsely portrayed as having argued that radical selfishness is a force for the good and that this “invisible hand’ is his market mechanism. This paper argues that Smith’s real market mechanism, the sympathy manoeuvre, is a viable alternative to Schumpeterian and mainstream models of innovation in economics and also could help build a firmer theoretical basis for other approaches such as Responsible Innovation. To Smith all human activity was social and must be understood and explained in (...) terms of the sentiments involved. Discovery, for instance, is driven by three sentiments (wonder, surprise, admiration), economic activities by sympathetic imagination, the need for exchange, the need to better one’s position in life, and the need for gratitude. Through sympathetic imagination, his famous model of the impartial spectator, Smith elegantly connects the individual and society. Smith’s innovation process is thus an exercise in social construction and not a destructive process based on radical selfishness. The paper argues that this social innovation process is a viable alternative to the extant approaches that are essentially asocial and amoral (economism) or ideologically normative (Responsible Innovation). (shrink)

What is Leucippus and Democritus’ theory of the beginning of life? How, if at all, did Leucippus and Democritus distinguish different kinds of living things? These questions are challenging in part because these Atomists claim that all living beings – including plants – have a share of reason and understanding. We answer these questions by examining the extant evidence concerning their views on embryology, the soul and respiration, and sense perception, thereby giving an overview of life and lifeforms in early (...) Greek atomism. We show, first, that the generation of all living beings happens through the combining of miniature copies of their parents’ atomic structures. Second, we argue that the Atomists take respiration to mark the beginning of life. Yet they do not consider respiration nor being ensouled to distinguish humans, animals, and plants from each other. Finally, because Leucippus and Democritus make little distinction between sense perception and thought, these too cannot sharply distinguish between different kinds of living beings. We conclude that Leucippus and Democritus advocated a less anthropocentric and more holistic view of the cosmos. (shrink)

This paper attempts to upgrade Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadism to the contemporary work- and war-driven displacement of peoples in/to Europe. Starting from Augustin Ioan and his 2005 book Poverism, where he brought up the concept of living along trajectories (of migration), the two authors of the paper question the all-powerful status of place as envisioned by Heidegger at the conjunction between dwelling and being at home in one place. Along such trajectories that unite a point of departure (...) and a tentative of arrival destination, contemporary migrants never leave their first home for good, nor do they ever arrive completely in a certain location. Even the alternative to displacement, the concept of homey feeling, was never studied outside the policies of major chain hotels, where it is provided a simulacra of arriving situations for frequent travelers. (shrink)

The present study aims to investigate the psychological mechanisms beneath the change in the facial expression of some of the beheaded characters in Caravaggio’s works, starting from The Head of Medusa, from the artist’s youth, and reaching David with the Head of Goliath, a mature workpiece, searching the continuity between them through a series of self-portraits/ self-insertions of the artist in his work. The psychodynamic analysis is limited by the constitution of its practice to the study of the process of (...) image production and the artistic imaginary, rather than to the investigation of man or the artist out of reach by means of figurative and symbolic language. This approach aims to highlight the drives of the unconscious, the structures of censorship and the technique of operating of the defensive mechanisms that ultimately could contribute to the production of such masterful images that are both seductive and confusing. The study incorporates and continues the contribution of authors such as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit who applied Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction theory in the analysis of Caravaggio’s works, but also the mirror stage of Lacan and the masterful study of Winnicott regarding the reflection of the baby in the mimics of his mother, an unconscious unclear image that will stand forever for the perception of the self. The change of the affective resonance, expressiveness and emotional relating to violence is natural in the course of human evolution. While not even the artist Caravaggio can elude it, his work can illustrate by deflection these transforma­tions of the dynamics of the mind, it can raise new questions and open new perspectives of understanding the artistic drive. (shrink)

Non pas Pourquoi la fiction?, ni A quoi pense la fiction?, ni même Que fait la fiction?, mais : Comment fait la fiction? Comment la fiction fait-elle pour défendre ou illustrer une morale, alors qu'elle se définit par son indépendance à l'égard du monde dit réel? Peut-être, d'ailleurs, n'est-ce qu'en tant qu'elle est défictionnalisée que la fiction peut promouvoir ou publier une morale. Mais il est, pourtant, des morales qui contiennent une part constitutive de fiction, et qui, en quelque sorte, (...) appellent la fiction : ainsi de la morale intuitive de Victor Hugo, ou de la morale de la liberté de Sartre. La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Hugo, Tolstoï, Sartre : à première vue, les auteurs convoqués ne sont pas tous faits pour s'entendre. C'est bien pour cela qu'ils sont ici réunis. Car la fiction et la morale ne sont pas plus immuables l'une que l'autre, et c'est dans leurs intermittences, dans leurs fluctuations, dans leurs variations qu'il convient d'étudier leurs noces improbables. (shrink)

This article provides arguments to show that there is a form of syntax specific to the bodily movements of certain martial arts. This syntax of bodily mouvements is different from that usually identified in multimodal conversational analysis which consists of the addition of bodily extensions to speech turns Keevallik (Res Lang Soc Interact 46(1):1–21, 2013) and (Res Lang Soc Interact 51(1):1–21, 2018). Based on an analysis of video extracts from two martial arts (Aikido and Kenpo), the article shows that martial (...) arts movements, accomplished within a martial intercorporeality, acquire syntactic characteristics that make it possible to anticipate trajectories accomplished simultaneously, before and during body contact. The article presents the four movement-units common to these two martial arts and the way participants combine them, in a sequentiality of simultaneity. (shrink)

Die Studie prüft, inwieweit Kants Geschichtsdenken auf Elemente christlicher Eschatologie zurückgreift und welche Probleme damit einhergehen. Nach einer methodischen Auseinandersetzung mit Löwith und Blumenberg interpretiert sie Texte Kants, die selten in Ausführlichkeit behandelt werden; sie stellt diese Texte in einen größeren geistesgeschichtlichen Kontext und hinterfragt dabei das Geschichtsdenken der Moderne und der Gegenwart kritisch.

One of the most common arguments in favour of the state's authority is that without the coordinating hand of political institutions, we could not achieve important moral benefits. I argue that if we understand authority correctly, then coordination cannot even in principle establish that coordinators have political authority.

Defeaters can prevent a perceptual belief from being justified. For example, when you know that red light is shining at the table before you, you would typically not be justified in believing that the table is red. However, can defeaters also destroy a perceptual experience as a source of justification? If the answer is ‘no’, the red light defeater blocks doxastic justification without destroying propositional justification. You have some-things-considered, but not all-things-considered, justification for believing that the table is red. If (...) the answer is ‘yes’, the red light defeater blocks doxastic justification by destroying propositional justification. You have neither all-things-considered nor some-things-considered justification for believing that the table is red. According to dogmatism, the justificational force of perceptual experiences is indestructible. According to conservatism about sense experience, a perceptual experience ceases to have justificational force if there is evidence against its reliability. Finally, according to meta-evidentialism, a perceptual experience is blocked from being a source of justification is there is no evidence of its reliability. I argue that, of these three theories, meta-evidentialism is the most plausible. (shrink)

While each Form is what it is to be F, some Forms also instantiate F (or “self-instantiate”). Here I consider whether the explanation for a Form’s instantiating F should be the Form’s participating in itself. First, I motivate the need for an explanation of self-instantiation. Second, I consider the advantages and disadvantages of self-participation alongside an alternative explanation—that the Form’s being what it is to be F is a sufficient explanation of its instantiation of F. The result is not a (...) conclusive case for self-participation, but only some initial considerations in favor of it. (shrink)