This paper attempts to define the concept of placebo as it is used in the clinical context The author claims that X is a placebo if and only if X has such a property dp, that whenever in a therapeutic situation T a stimulus S appears, then in attending conditions A, it will cause a beneficial reaction R in the patient. Formally, the same structure may be used to define any pharmacologically active drug. The main difference between the drug and (...) a placebo is in the range of possible substitutions for X and the property d. For the active drug there is only one possible substitution for X and property d and it can be scientifically explained why, and how the drug works. In the case of a placebo a set of possible substitutions for X and d is open, and so far it is impossible to offer any scientifically valid explanation of the action mechanism of placebo. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 譚傑志(Joseph Tham) 教授在其 “Bioethics: Cross-Cultural Explorations”(Tham 2022, 13) —文中回顧了生命倫理學在發展過程中的世俗化歷程、聯合國教科文組織生命倫理學和人權主席(UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights) 專案“生命倫理學、多元文化和宗教”在過去12年中的開展情況、以及最近這些年在生命倫理學領域中涉及文化多元性較為突出的問題。譚教授為生命倫理學領域中跨文化交流做出了卓越的貢獻，特別是其擔任上述項目負責人 以來。生命倫理學領域中的很多主題，如代孕、墮胎、基因編輯等，既複雜乂敏感；可以想像，推動生命倫理學領域中跨文化交流是一件富挑戰的事情。正如譚教授所言：“……在不同宗教之間尋求共識或思想融合是一個相當宏 大，甚至有些不現實的目標。”儘管如此，譚教授依然以極大的耐心和熱情通過改進專案中的對話機制，不斷地推動跨文化交流取得實質性進展和一系列學術成果。在這個過程中，如何讓不同文化和宗教背景的學者就某個主題進 行有意義的對話成為關鍵。譚教授探索出的“主旨論文+跨文化回應”模式，即一位元學者基於自身的文化或宗教背景撰寫針對特定主題的主旨論文，由另一位不同文化背景的學者撰寫回應論文，為不同的文化和宗教搭建了對話 的橋樑。(撮要取自內文首段) I am grateful for Professor Joseph Tham's efforts to improve cross-cultural dialogue on bioethics by continually updating the dialogue mechanisms in the “Bioethics, Multiculturalism and Religion Project,” conducted by the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights. The dialogue helps moral strangers to discuss their local cultures and to enter and learn about (...) other cultures and religions. Through this process, moral strangers may find that they hold similar values. The dialogues have also shown us the importance of cross-culture differences. Although we can foster consensus or convergence on some issues, it should be noted that the differences in cultures and religions are not the second-best option when agreement cannot be reached. Such differences constitute the cultural diversity of the world and have their own values. Respecting these differences is just as important as seeking consensus or convergence. (shrink)

It is interesting, that with the notable exception of the Cologne-based geneticist Benno Müller-Hill, German historians of medicine have not bothered a great deal with looking into German medical history during the Third Reich. We owe Pennsylvania State University's Robert N Proctor a great deal of gratitude for uncovering more and more of this history, and for making it accessible in a highly readable format. Proctor has established himself rapidly as the pre-eminent US American historian of science on all aspects (...) of Nazi medical research and health policy. In this most recent book Proctor looks at Nazism's pioneering contributions in public health research and policy, as well as in environmental health, occupational health, and preventive medicine. This book holds some disturbing lessons for those who hold the view that basically good people will undertake ethical research, and support good health …. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the possibility of a moral sanctuary existing in the field of business. It seeks to add to the discussion begun by Professors Konrad and Roberts in recent studies. After some preliminary discussion on the nature of a moral sanctuary, the paper contends that from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective it is impossible for sanctuary from moral rules to exist in any area of life, including business. Even games are regulated by principles of Justice and (...) Do No Harm. And the claim that ethics is too complicated to be figured out by the average business person simply does not make sense. In business as in any other human activity human values must be respected. (shrink)

A complex world like ours demands for the teachers and professors to command intercultural competences in order to avoid the instrumentalization of the alterities. It is precisely the professionals of education who, given their social function, have the responsibility of forming the citizens of the future in attitudes and behaviours adjusted to plural communities. This article presents the first part of a research project carried out by researchers from Barcelona, Marseille, Rabat and Beirut on the complex world of the respect (...) necessary to face prejudices and stereotypes. (shrink)

Nomina Sacra : Versuch einer Geschichte der christlichen Kürzung. Von Ludwig Traube, o. ö. Professor der Philologie an der Universitat, München. . Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 1907. Pp. x + 295. M. 15.Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen. Von Ludwig Traube. Herausgegeben von Franz Boll. Erster Band. Zur Paläographie und Handschriftenkunde. Herausgegeben von Paul Lehmann. Mit biographischer Einleitung von Franz Boll. Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 1909. Pp. lxxv+263.

_ X-Men_ is one of the most popular comic book franchises ever, with successful spin-offs that include several feature films, cartoon series, bestselling video games, and merchandise. This is the first look at the deeper issues of the X-Men universe and the choices facing its powerful "mutants," such as identity, human ethics versus mutant morality, and self-sacrifice. J. Jeremy Wisnewski is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hartwick College and the editor of Family Guy and Philosophy and The Office and (...) Philosophy. Rebecca Housel is a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, where she teaches about writing and pop culture. For William Irwin's biography, please see below. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:104 COMMENTARY ON PROFESSOR TWEYMAN ' S 'HUME ON EVIL' Philo concludes his long and celebrated debate with Cleanthes on the problem of evil (Parts X and Xl of Hume's Dialogues) with the assertion that the "true conclusion" to be drawn from the "mixed phenomena" in the world is that "the original source" of whatever order we find in the world is "indifferent" to matters of good and (...) evil. From what Philo says immediately thereafter it is clear that by the phrase "The true conclusion is..." he does not mean 'The truth is...' but rather something like 'The conclusion best supported by the available evidence is....' (D 212) Now according to both Nelson Pike and Stanley Tweyman, the claim made by Philo in these passages involves him in a shift or departure from the procedure he adopted in earlier dialogues when he examined the design argument set forth by Cleanthes. It is claimed that whereas in the earlier dialogues Philo emphatically professed a sceptical outlook — "the view requiring that one embrace no metaphysical position of one's own" (to quote Nelson Pike ) — in the quoted passage he seems to abandon this scepticism in favor of embracing what amounts to being a metaphysical position in natural theology. Pike thinks that this alleged shift is only an apparent one, that the central import of these passages is sceptical rather than metaphysical, and that here, as elsewhere in the earlier dialogues, Philo's sole purpose in offering a more plausible counter-hypothesis is to show that Cleanthes' hypothesis is false. Tweyman, on the other hand, argues that the shift is a very real one and that Hume does indeed "intend Philo's conclusion in Part XI to be a truth in natural theology [.]... Philo is 105 not arguing as a sceptic; rather he is employing the hypothetico-deductive method for testing Cleanthes' 2 hypothesis. " Let me say at once that I agree with Tweyman, as against Pike, that in these passages Philo does claim to put forward a truth Jji natural theology, and I also agree with just about everything that Tweyman says in his paper concerning the proper interpretation of Philo's views in Parts X and XI leading up to this conclusion. I follow the lead of those scholars who, at least since Kemp Smith, have argued that Philo's whole purpose in demonstrating such "truths" is to discredit natural theology in the eyes of a true Christian believer by dramatizing the enormous gulf between the very attenuated form of theism ("diaphonous deism" one scholar calls it), which is the most one can hope to get out of Cleanthes' experimental approach to religion, and the claim of Christian theism to which Cleanthes aspires. But I do not accept the view that Philo's claim in these dialogues represents any sort of sudden departure (and certainly not a "fundamental methodological difference") from his critical stance against the design argument in earlier dialogues. What I hope to show below is that not only does this view distort what Philo does in the earlier dialogues, but it also distracts our attention from the true nature of Hume's achievement in Parts X and XI of the Dialogues. (Incidentally, I will assume throughout the sequel that Kemp Smith's identification of Hume with Philo is essentially correct. ) It would indeed be extremely paradoxical, in the face of Philo's famous (or notorious) peroration at the end of Part VIII proclaiming the "complete triumph of the sceptic" in regard to "all religious 106 systems," to raise any doubts about Philo's acceptance of the sceptical import of his own earlier arguments. But this still leaves unsettled the question as to what sort of scepticism it is whose triumph Philo proclaims at this point and whether it is inconsistent with the conclusion he reaches at the end of his discussion of evil. One would have hoped that at this late stage in the scholarship on the Dialogues, if there is one issue on which all of us could agree it is that Philo at no time in the Dialogues takes the (easy) Pyrrhonian line against Cleanthes' "hypothesis of experimental theism." I mention this because at several places... (shrink)

As I have explored elsewhere, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild, which my former students and I re-founded in 2012, is a team of community members who engage in theoretical discussion, support group self-cultivation, and community activism. To further promote the guild as a catalyst for progressive social change, the present article connects it to both the popular cultural phenomenon of the “X-Men” – to make the guild more appealing to students and laypeople – and to the cutting-edge contemporary French philosophy of (...) Étienne Balibar – to make the guild more appealing to professors and culture workers. Moreover, the article connects these low- and high-brow phenomena to each other as well, thereby illustrating the political relevance of the lower, as well as a weakness in the higher, pursuant to social justice activism today. (shrink)

Ao pesquisar a realidade educacional contemporânea é preciso conceber que os desafios que atingem a práxis pedagógica em sala de aula se apresentam de forma multifacetada e complexa. Pensar a atuação docente se mostra cada vez mais desafiadora e prescinde de problematizações que auxiliem no enfrentamento das dificuldades. Assim, a presente pesquisa trata da temática acerca do diálogo como um princípio ético na prática pedagógica em sala de aula, com ênfase na concepção dos docentes da Escola X. Tratando-se de uma (...) pesquisa de cunho analítico-hermenêutico, é adotada a metodologia da observação participante, realizada om observações diretas, em atividades cotidianas, na escola indicada, nas quais buscou-se evidenciar o conceito de diálogo de Paulo Freire (1981) e de sua função primordial na relação professor/aluno. Assim, o problema de pesquisa localizou-se na seguinte questão: é possível exercer o diálogo como um princípio ético na concepção dos docentes da Escola X? Assim, com justificativa no fomento ao debate acerca de princípios éticos na prática pedagógica, presentes nos escritos de Elli Benincá (2010) que devem ser assumidos pelos docentes em seu fazer diário, pode-se observar que embora desejável na teoria, o diálogo nem sempre é exercido na pratica cotidiana em sala de aula. No entanto, entendemos que sua compreensão conceitual e seu efetivo exercício por parte dos docentes, de forma a preservar princípios éticos, pode propiciar um sentimento de esperança ao crer no diálogo como possibilidade de superar o modelo "bancário" de educação, transformando a sala de aula em um lugar de troca de saberes e de emancipação individual e coletiva. (shrink)

Few if any philosophical schools have championed family values as persistently as the early Confucians, and a great deal can be learned by attending to what they had to say on the subject. In the Confucian tradition, human morality and the personal realization it inspires are grounded in the cultivation of family feeling. One may even go so far as to say that, for China, family reverence was a necessary condition for developing any of the other human qualities of excellence. (...) On the basis of the present translation of the Xiaojing (Classic of Family Reverence) and supplemental passages found in other early philosophical writings, Professors Rosemont and Ames articulate a specifically Confucian conception of "role ethics" that, in its emphasis on a relational conception of the person, is markedly different from most early and contemporary dominant Western moral theories. This Confucian role ethics takes as its inspiration the perceived necessity of family feeling as the entry point in the development of moral competence and as a guide to the religious life as well. In the lengthy introduction, two senior scholars offer their perspective on the historical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of the Xiaojing. Together with this introduction, a lexicon of key terms presents a context for the Xiaojing and provides guidelines for interpreting the text historically in China as well as suggesting its contemporary significance for all societies. The inclusion of the Chinese text adds yet another dimension to this important study. The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence is sure to appeal to specialists of comparative and Chinese philosophy and to all readers interested in the enduring importance of the family. (shrink)

During an April 12, 1860, Senate debate, Senator Jefferson Davis spoke against a bill to fund Black education in Washington, D.C. Davis argued that the United States government was founded “by white men for white men” and “not for negroes.” According to Davis, the inequality of the white and black races was “stamped from the beginning.”Davis’s phrase forms the basis of Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award–winning study, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. (...) Kendi currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and as the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Stamped from the Beginning has won a large... (shrink)

David Balme's major critical edition of Aristotle's largest and perhaps least studied treatise is based on a collation of the 26 known extant manuscripts and a study of the early Latin translations. Begun in 1975, with his work towards the Loeb editio minor of books VII–X, this edition of all ten books, including a very full apparatus criticus, was largely complete by 1989 when Professor Balme died, but it needed extensive work to put it in publishable form. This work (...) has been carried out by Allan Gotthelf, Balme's friend and associate. Volume I of the edition contains the complete text of the Historia Animalium, the critical apparatus, and Balme's introduction to the manuscripts, expanded and updated with the assistance of Friederike Berger, and in consultation with the editors of forthcoming editions of the extant medieval translations. A substantial index to the text has been provided by Liliane Bodson in collaboration with Professor Gotthelf. (shrink)

The problem of evil has traditionally been formulated as a claim about the incompatibility of the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’. Hume, for example, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , part x, claims that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are incompatible. In his esssy ‘Hume on Evil’, Nelson Pike argues that it has not been shown that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are incompatible because it (...) has not been shown that God could not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting suffering he could prevent. 1 Moreover, according to Pike, the theist who is convinced that God must have a morally sufficient reason for permitting suffering he can prevent will claim that the statements ‘God exists’ and ‘There occur instances of suffering’ are not incompatible. He will claim this even though he cannot specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits suffering he can prevent. The theist will thus maintain that God exists even given the occurrence of suffering in the world. 2 Robert Richman, in his essay ‘The Argument from Evil’, argues that Pike is too generous to the theist. According to Richman, only if the theist can specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits suffering he can prevent will the theist be rationally justified in maintaining that God exists in the face of suffering in the world. Richman supports his position by reformulating the argument from evil in terms of what he calls ‘the logic of our moral judgmentsr’. 3 Richman thinks that his formulation of the argument from evil is successful against the theist who cannot specify the morally sufficient reason why God permits evil he can prevent. In this paper, I shall argue that Richman's argument is not successful against the typical theist, i.e. the person who accepts the existence of God on the basis of faith or a priori arguments. 4. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:New Perspectives on Advaita Vedānta: Essays in Commemoration of Professor Richard De Smet, SJGodabarisha MishraNew Perspectives on Advaita Vedā nta: Essays in Commemoration of Professor Richard De Smet, SJ. Edited by Bradley J. Malkovsky. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp. x + 187.New Perspectives on Advaita Vedānta: Essays in Commemoration of Professor Richard De Smet, SJ., intended as a tribute to Professor Richard De Smet (1916-1997) (...) on his eightieth birthday, turned out to be a posthumous memorial volume due to his sad demise. It comprises eight essays apart from an Introduction by the editor, Bradley J. Malkovsky, who provides an overview of De Smet's life and works. Select scholars of international eminence who are acquainted with the intellectual acumen of De Smet have contributed to this volume, thereby honoring and perpetuating the memory of this Jesuit priest-professor, who significantly contributed to the understanding and interpretation of the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara. The introductory essay offers a detailed picture of the scholarly pursuits of De Smet, whose philosophical journey spanned six decades. He spent much of his life seriously exploring avenues for translating intercultural philosophical dialogue into reality. This essay throws much light on the lesser-known areas of De Smet's life—religious, political, and philosophical as well as academic.Though born in Belgium, De Smet preferred to live in India, and he was one of the very few Christian priests who strove to discover the unity in Hindu and Christian [End Page 610] spirituality, through and beyond the theology of both religions. In his early years he studied Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and Bonaventure, and this helped him to understand the philosophy of Śaṅkara at a deeper level. He felt that Śaṅkara's Advaita is a theology based on revelation rather than pure philosophy upheld through personal experience or independent reason. In pursuing his interest in interreligious dialogue, De Smet worked actively toward dispelling the notion that the Church is blindly dogmatic and has no intellectual face worth the name. He traveled much and had intellectual interaction with many celebrated Hindu monks and academicians on theological and philosophical issues. He introduced Upaniṣadic studies in many Christian Ashrams and spoke to Catholic parishes on the rich heritage of Indian spirituality. To establish a genuine space for his approach to doing Indian philosophy he founded the Association of Christian Philosophers of India in 1975 and for a long time served as its chairman. He authored six books and a number of essays, and his ongoing project dealing with the encounter of Vedānta and Christian theology since Roberto de Nobili remains unfulfilled due to his demise.De Smet considered the system of Śa71E45;kara to be the most profound metaphysical system in Indian philosophy. He was convinced of the similarity between Aquinas and Śaṅkara to the extent of believing that Christian personalism presupposed a nondualist metaphysics. For him, Pure Brahman is more than a vast ocean of pure consciousness; it is also capable of love, causation, and grace—but in such a way that its simplicity, plenitude, and transcendence are not compromised. He felt that even Para Brahman, which may transcend the ordinary human mode of personhood, is not totally impersonal. The supreme reality freely chooses to be a world creator, and so forth, without undergoing any change. Śaṅkara does not deny the existence of the world when he uses negations in describing the world. De Smet feels that Śaṅkara was a radical valuationist who measured everything in relation to the absolute value, the Brahman (p. 16).If personalism, the concept of love, and also to some extent the theory of creation as presented by De Smet are to be very strictly viewed, then there is no alternative but to conclude that he was only engaged in doing some type of theistic Vedānta, like Viśiṣṭādvaita, but not Advaita. De Smet seemed to be stretching Advaita a little too far in trying to see its total affinity with theology and striving to accommodate personalism and so forth through his reading of and commitment to Christianity. Para Brahman in an. Śaṅkara's Advaita is not... (shrink)

In his book Attention , Professor Alan White says ‘When you see X , it follows that if X is Y , you see Y whether you realise it or not.’ If, in passing through Paris, I saw a tall complex iron structure and that structure is the Eiffel Tower, then I saw the Eiffel Tower whether I realised it or not. I accept this, but because recent philosophical writings and discussions have cast doubt on the validity of the (...) inference-pattern I saw x ; x is y ; so I saw y and certain related patterns, it is clear that we cannot be content with this unvarnished statement. Various entertaining examples are produced to show that some instances of this pattern are invalid and therefore that the pattern itself is invalid. If I saw Jones at noon and at noon Jones was bribing Smith then, it is alleged, I cannot conclude that I saw Jones bribing Smith. Similarly, it is said, from the facts that I saw a man in the far distance and that that man was my father, I cannot conclude that I saw my father in the far distance; from the facts that I saw a foot and that that foot was Lloyd George's I cannot conclude that I saw Lloyd George. (shrink)

William Louis Poteat , a North Carolina intellectual of the Progressive Era, gained a reputation as a leading liberal in southern higher education. This book, which was recognized by a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities publication grant, is useful for historians of science because it illustrates how scientific ideas, particularly Darwinism, were diffused into a rural and isolated society.From his student years to the end of his life, Poteat was intimately connected with a Southern Baptist college, Wake Forest. He (...) matriculated at Wake Forest and became a tutor there in 1878. Although almost entirely self‐taught in the sciences, he became a popular and respected professor of biology. As his knowledge of science came from reading contemporary papers and monographs rather than from traditional study, he developed a perspective more modern than that of most of his peers. He rose through the ranks, ultimately becoming president of Wake Forest in 1905.Relatively early in his career, Poteat began the work that earned him a place in southern history by writing articles and giving lectures on the ways in which science and religion were related. By the end of his first decade as a faculty member, he had become convinced of the importance of Darwin's theory of evolution and had decided that it posed no threat to traditional Christianity. In supporting this view, Poteat followed the lead of mainstream European and Northern American churches, which had no problem reconciling evolution with the Book of Genesis and its description of creation occurring in seven days. After all, who knew what a day meant in the mind of God? Many Southern Protestants, however, rejected this position.Randal Hall sees Poteat as an advocate of a liberal social philosophy fully in accord with the social gospel of the Progressive age. As a leading proponent for change in his state, Poteat “personified North Carolina Progressivism” , and his defense of Darwin was of a piece with his philosophy. But it is unclear whether Poteat's admiration for Darwin stemmed from an understanding of science or an obsession with eugenics, an obsession that in time came to dominate his thinking.Poteat vigorously used his position as president of the Southern Baptist Education Association to promote theories of eugenics. Although Darwin did not actively promote racism, followers of his thought such as Poteat could easily educe racist ideas from it. They could argue, for example, that individuals should speed up the process of producing superior humans by helping nature along through the process of selective breeding. Concerned with the large number of Americans who were institutionalized, and the even greater number who were barely educated, Poteat maintained that the government should control the right to reproduce and sterilize the unfit, including the “self‐centered, the coarse‐fibered, and the discourteous” . He thought that civilization would crumble unless such procedures were put in place, because there would be an “overproduction of under‐men” . Indeed, following this same line of thought, he opposed war because it foolishly wasted “our best blood” . He called for federal legislation to govern marriage and divorce, requiring applicants to meet his moral requirements and to pass a rigorous medical examination. Even in conservative North Carolina, these ideas provoked astonishment. A leading Raleigh newspaper accused Poteat of wanting to be the “boss of a human stock farm” .Although Randal Hall's book is primarily a biography of William Louis Poteat—and secondarily a history of Wake Forest as it evolved from a tiny Baptist school into a major college—it is also a study of the split personalities of Southern Progressives. On the one hand, they rejected rule by educated leaders; on the other, they wanted government to control the most intimate aspects of life, such as reproduction. Poteat thought that all these things should be overseen by a “genteel Christian community led by a liberal elite” . The complexity and cognitive dissonance of Southern Progressives are well illustrated in this book. (shrink)

Those who want to interpret the quantifier ? (3 x) (. . .x. . .)'as having no existence commitment often fail to distinguish between this objective and that of merely changing the values of the variables. The confusion vitiates solutions of the singular existence anomalies which purport to be based on a non?existential interpretation of the quantifier. An example of one who makes the distinction but still interprets the particular quantifier non?existentially is offered by Czeslaw Lejewski. Objection to the classical (...) interpretation of the quantifiers often runs hand in hand with aversion to extensional logic. However, it is at least arguable that such an aversion is the result of underestimating the resources of extensional logic. These points arc discussed in the wake of Professor Marcus's recent paper in this journal ?Interpreting Quantification? (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Adviser: Professor Stefan Baumrin In the first chapter I introduce the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics and argue that metaethics, properly conceived, is a part of cognitive science. For example, the debate between rationalism and sentimentalism can be informed by recent empirical work in psychology and the neurosciences. In the second chapter I argue that the traditional view that one’s theory of semantics determines what one’s theory of justification must be is mistaken. Though it has been the case (...) that there are ‘typical’ combinations of semantic and justificational theories this is by no means forced on one. In the third chapter I examine two current kinds of expressivism; that of Blackburn and Copp. Each gives us an example of different combinations of semantic and justificatory theory. In Blackburn’s case he combines a use theory of meaning with a classic emotivist theory of justification, In Copp’s case it is a neo-Gricean philosophy of language with a realist’s theory of justification. I find both of these wanting as they ultimately collapse into relativistic subjectivism. In the fourth and fifth chapter I turn to developing Emotive Realism. The basic idea behind this view is that when someone says ‘x is wrong/right’ that person has (a) expressed a moral emotion about x and at the same time (b) expressed the belief that the emotion in (a) is the correct one to have. The belief expressed in (b) will be true or false depending on one’s theory of justification. In the fourth chapter I argue that we need separate semantic theories for thoughts and sentences. In the fifth chapter I fill in the details of Emotive Realism as I see it. (shrink)

Professor D'Arcy W. Thompson has recently revived a conjecture of Lauth on Geoponica, XIII, 8, 1, which runs as follows: εις οκ σονται ν χωρ ν νθιονἢ ρτεμσιον ἢ βρτονον περ τν πα$$υλιν υτεσς. τος δ ντας λσεις ν . The conjecture is that ντας is the Egyptian hontasu, ‘lizard.’ That this would make sense is obvious; but the usage of the Geop. itself, to say nothing of other authors, indicates that the word is simply what it appears to (...) be, namely the pres. part, of εμ. Thus we find in X, 46 τ ςκα σκληκας ¿ π¿ισειν μλλων φυτεειν μπξς σκλλ τν κλδ¿ν, τ¿ς δ ντας ναιρες ν κ.τ.λ. Here the explanation ‘lizards’ would hardly be reasonable; still more cogent, however, is XII, 8, 2–3, ¿κ σονται … τς δ οσας κμπας διαθερς, where no such conjecture is possible. Not dissimilar is XII, 19, 9, τς τε γρ οσας ψλλας θερεικα λλας οκ γενσθαι. All these extracts are taken from authors of the second and third centuries A.D., though we have no means of knowing how closely their actual wording is followed; it is therefore in point to cite a passage of Galen, the opening paragraph of the tractate περ αρσεων Medicine, he says, has for its aim health, and a physician must know how to bring about health if absent and preserve it if present . καλεται δ, he continues, τ μν ργαζμενα τν μ οσαν γειατν τε καβοηθματα, τ δ φυλττοντα τν οσαν γιειν διαιτματα. In other words, ὢν can be used in much the same sense as παρν. This is no novelty of Roman times, for we may compare, for instance, Soph. Ant. 1109, ο ' ντες ο τ'πντες, and El, 305 τς οσας … κα τς ποσας λπδας. (shrink)

Professor Linsay has called my attention to the need for an examination of these compounds, with a view to ascertaining whether they are ever used in the Singular by Latin writers, or always in the Plural. From a scholium, probably by Donatus, on Aen. X. 173: insula inexhaustis Chalybum generosa metallis, has come a gloss which appears in the Ansileubus Glossary in two forms: FR 205 Frofra : insula Tirreno mari in quo ferrifodina exercentur, RU 77 Rufa: insula Tirreni (...) maris in qua ferrifodina exercetur. (shrink)

In 1826, the Pasha of Egypt offered to the King Charles X an unusual present: a living giraffe. While offering remarkable animals was a common practice among monarchs, the choice of a giraffe was somewhat extraordinary since it was the first representative of its kind to set foot in France. The Royal Menagerie of the Paris Muséum national d'histoire naturelle was asked to oversee the transportation of this precious mammal and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, one of its professors, was sent to (...) Marseilles to fetch it on foot all the way back to the capital. The whereabouts of this exotic procession stirred passions throughout the country, generating a fashion craze "à la girafe." The so-called Pasha's giraffe, King's giraffe or French giraffe is also -- and perhaps more importantly -- Geoffroy's giraffe. The giraffe episode is representative of Geoffroy's larger scientific career. Because of its Egyptian flavor, its adventurous aspect, its political and diplomatic undertones, as well as the popular attention and educational opportunities it afforded, that mission was ideally suited for the flamboyant naturalist. So close were the animal's and the French zoologist's fates, that they passed away a couple months apart and both fell into relative oblivion. But even dead and dissected, Geoffroy's giraffe could not easily be dissociated from its companion. The afterlife of its "saintly" relics mirrors the popular and scholarly revival of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, portrayed by some as a forgotten "prophet.". (shrink)

(2) All X’s have to be Y’s is to be brought out by glossing the latter as a stronger, nomological generalization involving counterfactural claims, thus: (3) All X’s are Y’s and further if any z that is not an X were an X, then z would be a Y. Professor Rescher points out that while (1) is equivalent to its contrapositive..

In Mental Acts Professor Peter Geach asserts that “‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term … ” In Reference and Generality Geach interjects the following note: “I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether x and y are ‘the same’, or whether x remains ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term ‘the same F’.” Here, as in Mental (...) Acts, he goes on to say that not any general term will serve to complete ‘the same’ constructions; only substantival terms will suffice for this purpose. Finally, in his article, “ldentity,” Geach asserts that “When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this … is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance—or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought.” (We should not, incidently, conclude from this last remark that Geach thinks all and only count nouns are substantival terms. (shrink)

John F. X. Knasas has issued a series of philosophical and exegetical critiques of what he presents as the Cartesian subjectivism of “transcendental Thomism” in general and Bernard Lonergan in particular. But Professor Knasas’s spontaneous assumptions about knowing, objectivity, and reality are those of Descartes and Kant, not St. Thomas. He thus misinterprets St. Thomas and Fr. Lonergan and misconstrues the nature of knowing. The roots of the differences between Professor Knasas and Fr. Lonergan are exposed by contrasting (...) two radically opposed accounts of knowing, two correlative meanings of the term ‘real’, and two correspondingly divergent interpretations of St. Thomas. In the process, Professor Knasas’s repeated misrepresentation of Fr. Lonergan is corrected. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE As reflexões que apresento tematizam a formação de professoras para a educação básica em sua relação com questões de escrita. Sua elaboração emergiu do trabalho de formação no Curso de Pedagogia em articulação com a pesquisa “educação e linguagens – a escrita e os professores”, na Universidade de Santa Cruz do Sul. Sua origem decorre também de problematizações quanto à escrita, aos métodos e compreensões dessa aprendizagem importante para a educação, concebida (...) como ação dialógica intencional, que desenvolvemos seguindo interações organizadas de maneira que vivenciando seu itinerário aprendemos a ser-conhecer quem somos e ao mundo. Observações iniciais mostram que a escrita, independentemente do nível de ensino, configurou-se como um ‘problema’ que persiste, redundando em lamentações recorrentes na passagem dos estudantes pelas salas de aula. Considerando isto, tenho trabalhado, juntamente com bolsistas de pesquisa, com oficinas de escrita como estratégias de pesquisa e de aprendizagem. As oficinas foram planejadas e desenvolvidas com a participação de professoras em formação, segundo a metodologia sociopoética (GAUTHIER, 2001). Alguns resultados mostram que as aprendizagens da escrita, ainda hoje, se mantêm atreladas a atividades artificializadas pelas práticas pedagógicas, sendo que as mesmas inviabilizam uma articulação da escrita com os modos de ser e viver. Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE Palavras-chave : formação de professoras, educação básica, linguagens, escrita, aprendizagem. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Musa Lapidaria: A Selection of Latin Verse InscriptionsJane Bailey ThigpenCourtney, E[dward], ed. Musa Lapidaria: A Selection of Latin Verse Inscriptions. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. Pp. x 1 457. 4 maps. Cloth, $41.95; paper, $27.95. (American Classical Studies, 36)Latin verse inscriptions have often been mined for philological, metrical, grammatical, and socio-historical data, but neglected as poetry worthy of study in and of itself. This oversight limits literary study to (...) the generally upper-class, cultured milieu of literary texts. Epigraphical verse, in contrast, allows the study of material from all levels of society and expertise—from highly literary to barely literate. Musa Lapidaria shows how rewarding in-depth literary study of epigraphical material can be. Although the book was written with graduate students and young professors in mind, it can also be read profitably (and enjoyably) by preparatory-level teachers and advanced undergraduates.Of the nearly twenty-three hundred inscriptions collected by Buecheler and Lommatsch in the Carmina Latina Epigraphica (the verse complement to CIL), most are highly formulaic and lack individuality and intrinsic literary worth. A few of these poems, however, are creative endeavors. In Musa Lapidaria, E. Courtney has picked some of the best from CLE and added thirty-four choice specimens from other epigraphical sources. He translates his collection of 204 inscriptions into literal but elegant prose and adds a commentary which provides bibliography for each inscription as well as a line-by-line analysis of significant linguistic, metrical, literary and historical features. As the commentary is written for literary non-specialists rather than epigraphers, the author only briefly describes the physical characteristics of inscriptions and archaeological features when pertinent and includes no pictures.The collection spans the centuries, running from the early Republic to a [End Page 152] fifth-century inscription on the Golden Gate of Constantinople. Although Courtney includes many inscriptions from late antiquity, he refrains from including those which are openly Christian. Republican inscriptions include Saturnian verse, the Scipio epitaphs, and a few other notable epitaphs. Imperial inscriptions are organized by topic: 1) emperors and notables, matters of state and public buildings; 2) baths and springs, private buildings, works of art, and furniture; 3) literary, educational, and philosophical connections; 4) inns, travel, and tourism; 5) erotic; 6) municipal politics and institutions; 7) games, public performances and performers; 8) trades and professions; 9) religion (mostly Hercules, Hermes, Aesculapius, Athena, the Vestals, Silvanus, and Priapus, hunt trophies to Liber Pater or Diana, and examples of late syncretism); 10) epitaphs, including several for horses and dogs.The resulting melange is a colorful, earthy slice of life. The reader encounters, among other things: graffiti from the pyramids, dinner etiquette from Pompeii, poetic complaints about the lack of chamber pots at an inn, a hash of elegiac “door-poem” cliches actually written on a door, an ad for a snake charmer, a clay theatre ticket, a braggart soldier who could have stepped off the Plautine stage, and lurid descriptions of peculiar deaths—including an accident with a play javelin à la Antiphon and an attack by witches.The inscriptions themselves show a broad range of literary styles and expertise. The offering of Republican verse runs from the austere, well-wrought dignity of upper-class Saturnian and elegiac epitaphs to the chatty wit of a Saturnian dedication by a collegium of cooks, who, as Courtney says, “know their Plautus, and play up to their traditional comic type-casting as pretentious boasters” (205) but are less competent in their handling of meter. The Imperial material runs from the coarse wit and vulgar Latin of obscene Pompeiian graffiti to the highly polished, elusive style of a second-century North African epitaph (199A) which spends most of its 110 verses describing the three-storey mausoleum—complete with weathercock—which it adorned. (If anyone wants to read the longest extant Latin epitaph, this is it.) Five epitaphs are bi-lingual (Greek/Latin): 112, 159, 160, 170b, 180. Courtney omits the famous epitaph of Allia Potestas because it has already received a thorough commentary by N. Horsfall, ZPE 61 (1985) 251.The commentary deals with all of this disparate material thoroughly and well, and is particularly informative regarding material... (shrink)

From this it is evident that despite the controversies of the last decades, there is no genuine opposition between symbolic logicians and Aristotelian logicians on the question of the legitimacy of the deduction of "some x is y" from "all x is y." Symbolic logicians have held that the Aristotelians mistakenly deduce the former from the latter; Aristotelians have said that the symbolic logicians mistakenly divorce the latter from the former. But in fact neither makes a mistake. Each side employs (...) a special meaning of "all." For the Aristotelian, "all" refers to a "general," an actual totality of existents; for the symbolic logician, "all" refers to a universal, a meaning. The general "all" as the Aristotelian sees, allows for the deduction of "some," where "some" means an "existent some." From "All professors at Yale are men," "some professors at Yale are men" follows. The symbolic logician sees that "all" as a universal does not allow for the deduction of "some" ; he rightly rejects the derivation of "Some gryphons at Yale are men" from "All gryphons at Yale are men." However,--and this the symbolic logician overlooks--from "All gryphons at Yale are men," we can legitimately derive "Some gryphons at Yale are men." There are, in short, two distinct meanings of "some,", of which only one, the Aristotelian, has been recognized even by symbolic logicians. The "some" which follows from the general "all" refers to an actual subdivision of an actual class; the "some" which follows from the universal "all" refers to an intellectually distinguished part of an intention or meaning. From the latter "some" the former, the existent, cannot be legitimately derived. (shrink)

The manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque National de France, arabe 4235 is a fragmentary copy of Abū ‘Alī l-Qālī’s al-Bāri‘ and belonged to a certain Ibrāhīm b. Ḥumām Ibn Aḥmad. Although we know nothing about him, we have information about his father, Ḥumām Ibn Aḥmad al-Uṭrūš, who lived in Cordoba between 357/968 and 421/1030. He was a professor of Language and Poetry and, at the same time, he copied books for living during the crisis of the cordovan Caliphate. A (...) marginal note in f.22b, in a personal codex of Abū ‘Alī l-Qālī allows the author to believe that the manuscript comes from a privileged Cordovan environment. The orthographic and philological care with which the copy was made, as well as the graphic style makes also evident that the manuscript was the work of a language professor and not of an expert copyist. The context of its production and the data provided by a codicological and paleographical analysis, make also clear that the dating of this manuscript should be the end of the IV/X century or the beginning of next century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:354 BOOK REVIEWS (continuously) revisable character, he falls back on an account of theology as rhetoric so as to make the best of a bad job. For persuasion is what we use when we know demonstration is hopeless. As a result, Professor Cunningham's study, which could most usefully have "placed" a variety of theologies of past, present, and, prospectively, future on the spectrum of (onto-) logic, poetic, and (...) rhetoric, concludes instead that theology must regard itself as rhetorical or perish! This inevitably narrows the several services theologies of different kinds can perform for the Church. Imagine how biblical studies would be reduced were the exegete only to treat his text as paraenesis, and never as history or as a symbolic world. Nonetheless, on the way from its (as I find) unsatisfactory startingpoint and to its depressing conclusion, Faithful Persuasion has worthwhile points to make about a number of authors (of various periods) and topics, though it might have made them more persuasively (its author's key term) had the intended audience (middle-brow or academic?) been more clearly viewed in advance. AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. Blackfriars Cambridge, England Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860-1914. By THOMAS FRANKLIN O'MEARA, O.P. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. x + 260. $35.95 (cloth). " In 1925, Baden's Kultusminister, a Protestant, began an address to the Gorresgesellschaft in Heidelberg by describing this era: ' Brave men like Hertling, Schell, Julius Bachem, and Carl Muth, shook the German Catholic world in order to lead it out of its fortress, to lead it again into the midst of the life and activity of the entire people, even when this seemed at first strange and uncomfortable ' " (pp. 159f.). Even to many theologians, the era in question-the last four decades of the nineteenth century through the outbreak of the "Great War"is comparatively unknown. There has been, of course, renewed interest in prominent theological figures like John Henry Newman, but his German-speaking contemporaries are for the most part strangers to the English-speaking world. And this is the first reason why this book is important: it describes a forgotten world of a century or so ago, yet one whose theological problematic was strikingly similar to our own. The " contours " of this period, deftly described in the first part of this book, were both varied and complex. Politically speaking, during the nineteenth century, " Germany " changed from an assortment of BOOK REVIEWS 355 geographically contiguous minor and medium-sized states to an Empire dominated by Prussia. Such a political re.arrangement had ecclesiastical implications: Roman Catholics, who previously had been the majority in places like Bavaria found themselves a persecuted minority during the Kulturkampf under Bismarck. And like many other victims of persecution, Roman Catholics adopted a "fortress mentality"fearful of Berlin, which was influenced by both the Lutheran Reformation and the Enlightenment, and mesmerized by Rome, which was coming under the increasing influence of neoscholasticism in doctrine and ultramontanism in discipline. German Catholic theologians found themselves in a quandary: what direction should they take? Many, like Joseph Kleutgen, took refuge in Rome; a few, like Joseph Schnitzer, found the appeal of Berlin more attractive; still others, however, tried to steer an independent course in dialogue with the culture of their day. The second and major part of this book focuses on five such theologians: Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Alois Schmid, Paul Schanz, Herman Schell, and Carl Braig. Scheeben (1835-88), "the best known and the most read in the first half of the twentieth century " (p. 53), pursued an independent route in seeking a " transcendent synthesis " incorporating both patristic and idealist thought; indeed, his lengthy Mysteries of Christ"ianity continued to enjoy a certain popularity up till the time of Vatican II, though more as a resource for spiritual reading than as a work of systematic theology. Like Newman, Scheeben's thought was sui generis, "and inspired the most divergent evaluations " (p. 65) ; unlike Newman, Scheeben has few disciples today. In contrast to Scheeben, the other four theologians attempted to emerge from the " fortress " of Roman Catholic defensiveness and to engage the historical and philosophical currents of their age. The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Math Anxiety:Making Room to BreatheValerie Allen (bio) and Todd Stambaugh (bio)"Don't do that to me, Professor," the student said, and everybody laughed, for by this late in the semester, the atmosphere was relaxed. The instructor in question had just reached the point in a worked problem when they could move from reasoning about specific numbers to stating a general principle: x≤y≤z, meaning that y—the value we sought—was always (...) going to be greater than or equal to one value (x) and less than or equal to the other (z). The student who had spoken had earned everyone's affection over the weeks, open about their difficulties with math, ready to risk being wrong, and to ask obvious questions that others may have been reluctant to owning. They had hung in there, despite presenting a classic case of math anxiety, a syndrome long recognized in the scholarship of teaching and learning.Among math anxiety's many symptoms, breathing disruption ranks high: hyperventilation (rapid breathing) and hypoventilation (barely or not breathing). When the energy-conserving parasympathetic nervous system is overtaken by the energy-expending sympathetic nervous system, the long exhalations that decelerate the heart rate are replaced by short, panting puffs from the upper lungs. The timed test provides the perfect environment for math anxiety to flourish. Stress diverts cognitive resources needed for procedural execution, so working memory consequently shrinks.Self-rated metrics for math anxiety have been in place for decades (Richardson and Suinn). Relatively trivial interventions can yield nontrivial results: deep breathing exercises and positive affirmations have a beneficial impact, as does writing about one's nerves immediately prior to an exam (Brunyé et al.). More systemic changes require a reorientation in teaching whereby conceptual mistakes are positively rewarded as opportunities for learning; students compose questions instead of answers; students solve problems together rather than perform solo (Boaler).Return now to that opening scenario to watch it become stereotype incarnate: the student was mature, Black, and female; the teacher, younger, white, and male; her comment was triggered by his shift from a specific [End Page 217] set of numbers into symbolic notation. There is robust evidence to demonstrate that certain demographics are consistently underrepresented in the U.S. math community: women and "African-Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Pacific Islanders," according to the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) ("Resources for Minority"). Routinely feeling that they do not belong, such groups are particularly vulnerable to math anxiety.Several remedies for such disparity suggest themselves: appointing more women and people of color in the profession; one-on-one tutorial assistance; research projects about the students' personal environment; privileging pre-test, low-stakes work over timed tests; assigning group rather than individual work. When all is said and done, however, such strategies "have little to do with mathematics content" (Martin 304). Mathematicians still need to be able to conceptualize, describe, and manipulate abstract objects, and there seems to be a suspicion that, at heart, abstraction is gendered masculine and colored white.It is possible that the rhetorical immediacy and context-dependence of Black English has misguidedly reinforced such a perception. For poet June Jordan, Black English "devolves from a culture that abhors all abstraction" (Jordan 367). Psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint asks, "Is there a way to say metamorphosis in Ebonics?" (O'Malley). Yet, despite Black English's avoidance of nominalization and similar verbosities that afflict academic prose, abstract logical reasoning flourishes in vernacular idiom, as linguist William Labov demonstrated half a century ago. Our aim is not to explain the asymptote in Black English but rather to consider a feature characteristic of those very minority cultures historically underrepresented in math—storytelling—and to ask how it may be foregrounded in mathematics, where it is decisively sidelined. Storytelling has been claimed by every culture and ethnic group at some point as the repository of wisdom, practical skills, religious beliefs, and shared identity and values; but when it gets corralled into the category of "fiction," and when it gets opposed to "fact," a narrowed concept of truth dispatches storytelling to kindergarten and recreational math. Word problems may supply scenarios but offer none of a plot's satisfactions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Predication and the "Third Man" Argument ROGER A. SHINER 1.1. IN COMMPm'mO on the 'Third Man' Argument (TMA), Proclus z produces the following line of thought. He argues that. if the relation of resemblance between Form and particular were symmetrical, the argument in question would be valid; the relation is not, however, symmetrical. Where a Form and particular are both alike, have the quality of likeness, the likeness of (...) that which is derived is not the same as the likeness of that from which it is derived, just because of the former's derivatory nature. Consequently, ~k tt~v ala01]x~ bttotoi3c0at ~re[vot~ (sc. xo~ ~Semv), abx~ 8~ xo6~ot~ oSr~xt, 'the sensible particulars resemble the Forms, but they are not in the same relation of resemblance to the particulars' (ibid., 913.29-30). That is to say, the bare relation of similarity may be symmetrical, but the relation of a similar copy to a similar original is not; the copy is 'a copy of' the original, but the original/s not 'a copy of' the copy. This way of defending the Theory of Forms against the TMA I shall for purposes of identification call the 'Ontological Defence'. It lays stress on the ontological difference between Form and particular in order to avoid the fatal implication that the relation between them is symmetrical. If we use the language of predication, the point is as follows: the TMA is valid, if the Forms have a given term predicated of them severally in exactly the same sense as it is predicated of their respective dependent particulars. This, however, is not the case, for the quality in virtue of which a given term is predicated of a given Form differs in ontological status from the quality in virtue of which that term is predicated of that Form's dependent particulars. Thus we see that underlying the Ontological x I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper to Professor Gilbert Ryle, Professor John F. Malcolm and two anonymous readers for this Journal. Since this paper went to press, the following relevant articles have appeared: G. Vlastos, "'Self Predication' in Plato's Later Period," Philosophical Review, LXXVIII (1969), 74-78, and "Plato's 'Third Man' Argument (Parm. 132al-b2): Text and Logic," Philosophical Quarterly, XIX (1969), 289-301; K. W. Rankin, "The Duplicity of Plato's Third Man," Mind, LXXVIII (1969), 178-197; T. O. Smith, "'The Theory of Forms, Relations and Infinite Regress," Dialogue, VIII (1969), 116-123. 2 Proelus, In Platonis Parmenidem, ed. V. Cousin, Paris, 1864; 912.27 ft. [3711 372 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Defence is the following assumption--the fact that the Forms are self-predicating only causes problems for the Theory of Forms, if a given Form F and its corresponding particulars, a set of f things, have 'F' predicated of them univocally, are F in precisely the same sense. My thesis in this paper is that this latter assumption is false, it is, rather, quite sufficient for the Self-Predication Assumption (SPA) to be vicious, if 'F' is predicated of both Form and particular not equivocally. This is not the same as 'univocally', and furthermore it is not possible that Plato could have thought of the predication of a term of both Form and particular as equivocal, the only alternative left to him to escape the TMA. The SPA, therefore, is required for the Theory of Forms to make sense, and leads to an ineradicable defect in that Theory. 1.2. One minor terminological point must be noted before we proceed. There are two versions of the TMA in the Parmenides; the first runs from 131eS-132b2, and the second from 132c11-133a7. The second of these explicitly employs the language of copy-resemblance, 7mpdS~tytm ('paradigm'), 6lxoio)tta ('likeness'), ~tKao0~vat ('resemble') as an explication of ~t~0e~tq ('participation'): the first employs the lan~.,uage of cttx6 ~ xai3xa.., eIvat ('that by which things are...'), which, as Plato has already indicated (Phaedo 100d6-8), is deliberatety noncommittal as to the relation between Forms and particulars. I shall refer to the first argument as TMA(1) and the second... (shrink)

Tradition II Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good Stephen H. Watson Examines concepts of tradition in 20th-century Continental philosophy. In Tradition II, Stephen H. Watson engages post-Kantian Continental philosophy in his continuing investigation into the concept of tradition which he began in his work, Tradition. According to Watson, the problem of tradition became explicit in 20th-century philosophy, and is especially apparent in the work of Heidegger, Gadamer, Husserl, Benjamin, Adorno, Levinas, Kristeva, and Derrida, among others. By formulating a (...) series of dialogues between these philosophers and their predecessors, Watson articulates the issues and concerns surrounding tradition and traditionality. Taking on topics such as the hermeneutics of the self, the rationality of tradition, the pluralistic nature of historical interpretation, and the question of the "other," Watson emphasizes the importance of classical accounts of ethical and political discourse for contemporary philosophy and today’s multicultural world. Watson extends his analysis of tradition to include the problems of meaning and narrative and the nature of the self. He also considers the meaning of the Good and how Good is dispensed in the world. By questioning past philosophical narratives and their influence on modern and postmodern philosophy, Watson brings fresh perspective to the complex meanings of tradition for a pluralistic world. Stephen H. Watson is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism and Tradition: Refiguring Community, Remembrance, and Virtue in Classical German Thought. Studies in Continental Thought—John Sallis, general editor June 2001 320 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index cloth 0-253-33900-6 $35.00 s / £26.50. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:156 BOOK REVIEWS human being with happiness" (p. 34). I would only add that happiness is the reward of any reader who gives this book the attention that it deserves. Center for Thomistic Studies Houston, Texas JOHN F. x. KNASAS Henry VIII and the Conforming Catholics. By PAUL O'GRADY. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1990. Pp. 186. $11.95 (paper). The careers and writings of what this author has called (...) " Conforming Catholics " have been generally neglected by historians of the English Reformation, at least until recently. That is why it is even more remarkable that not only one, but two books should be published in 1990 on this subject. Glyn Redworth's life of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester (Jn Defense of the Church Catholic, London: Basil Blackwell) is primarily a historical and biographical account of this pivotal anti-papal Catholic, with particular emphasis on the period from 1540-1547. This book, while complete and well written, concentrated on the life of Bishop Gardiner almost to the exclusion of his writings, though some of these were mentioned in passing. Paul O'Grady's book suffers from almost the reverse of that problem. In his Introduction, he contends that " intellectual systems, once generated, have a logic of their own." His concentration on the " intellectual system " of anti-papal Catholicism at times overwhelms the historical considerations of the period, and he falls into at least the neglect of what Professor Geoffrey Elton calls " uncertainty as to what actually happened." Dates are plentiful in this consideration, to be sure, but the events selected are limited, and one gets the impression that there is quite a bit more to the story than the author is letting on. Quite a bit of familiarity with the period is assumed by the author on the part of the reader, and much that is quite germane to the topic and useful to following the text is relegated to footnotes. The great contribution of this study is that it raises a number of names to a higher profile, and highlights their writings. Gardiner, though relatively neglected (at least until recently), is one of the few names that surface about which a biography has been written. There has been a significant amount of groundwork done for this book, and merely the listing of titles by these authors is a valuable contribution. But there are problems, some of which are hardly the fault of the author. O'Grady uses the term "Henrician Catholic" in a number of BOOK REVIEWS 157 places, which causes one to wonder, what was the Catholicism of Henry VIII himself? J. J. Scarisbrick, in his magisterial biography of the king, certainly goes over the evidence, and O'Grady adds nothing new. The sources are scanty, and one is forced at times to make a series of assumptions (based on Henry's choice of bishops and councilors, for example) about what Henry actually believed that eventually become a series of assumptions piled on top of other assumptions. Noticeably and significantly absent from the consideration of Henry's management of his ecclesiastics is any attention to Henry's plan for the formation of a strong Tudor monarchy within England, the long standing work of Professor Elton. Foreign policy, another issue in the religious settlement of the period, is mentioned occasionally and briefly (here Professor Redworth's book more than makes up the difference). One cannot attempt to determine the king's theological positions in a vacuum, and although Henry VIII did (and still does) have some reputation as an " amateur theologian " in the period in question, there are few purely theological statements by that monarch. Theology, to all appearances, was just one lever used by Henry in erecting a strong modern state: the imposition of theological and liturgical uniformity was almost always a means to political uniformity, as the Prayer Book Revolts in Cornwall and the West showed in Edward's reign. Another problem arises in determining who, exactly, is an Henrician Catholic? It is fairly simple to differentiate this group from the Reformers -the controversies over the Sacrament and justification by faith do this clearly. But how can they he separated from the Roman Catholics? O'Grady... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ImagesSean P. Murphy (bio)[End Page 142] Click for larger view View full resolutionIMAGE: DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM, 2022 Acrylic paint on wood 8 x 8 x 1 inches[End Page 143] Click for larger view View full resolutionFORMALISM, 2022 Acrylic paint on wood 8 x 8 x 1 inches[End Page 3] Click for larger view View full resolutionNEW HISTORICISM, 2022 Acrylic paint on wood 8 x 8 x 1 inches[End Page 89] (...) Click for larger view View full resolutionDECONSTRUCTION, 2022 Acrylic paint on wood 8 x 8 x 1 inches[End Page 141]Sean P. Murphy Sean P. Murphy, PhD, MSN, PMHNPBC, is a Clinical Assistant Professor teaching in the University of Illinois Chicago's Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner doctoral program. He practices at university health and counseling centers, specializing in sexual and gender minority mental health, emerging adult populations, and trauma. Murphy holds a PhD in Literature, Cultural Theory, and Social Practice and was a tenured professor of English and Humanities prior to entering nursing. He uses visual art as a space to digest and metabolize emotions associated with clinical practice as well as to explore connections between the humanities, literary and critical theories, and science. Email: [email protected] © 2023 Cornell University... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 1, April 2003, pp. 29-41 Hume's Argument for the Temporal Priority of Causes TODD RYAN In a section entitled "Of Probability; and of the idea of cause and effect," Hume embarks on a search for the conceptual components of our idea of causation. Rejecting the possibility of analyzing the idea in terms of the qualities of objects, Hume claims to discover two constituent relations. (...) First, a cause and effect must be contiguous in space and time because "nothing can operate in a time or place, which is ever so little remov'd from those of its existence" (T 1.3.2.6; SBN 75).x Second, a cause must be temporally prior to its effect. Although experience is said to confirm this latter requirement "in most instances," Hume goes on to present an argument purporting to demonstrate that the temporal priority of a cause is an essential feature of every instance of causation.2 Despite the extensive treatment that his analysis of causation has occasioned, Hume's argument for the temporal priority of causes has received comparatively little attention. In this paper I hope to remedy this neglect by providing a more accurate explication of the argument than has previously been offered. Hume does not argue directly for the claim that a cause must be temporally prior to its effect. Rather he offers an alleged reductio ad absurdum of the opposing view that "'tis not absolutely necessary a cause shou'd precede its effect; but that any object or action, in the very first moment of its existence, may exert its productive quality, and give rise to another object or action, perfectly co-temporary with itself (T 1.3.2.7; SBN 76)." This careful summary Todd Ryan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106-3100, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 30 Todd Ryan of the opposing view provides a clear statement of what Hume takes to be at issue, namely whether it is "absolutely necessary" that a cause be temporally prior to its effect. From this it can readily be inferred precisely what would count as a refutation of his own view. Specifically, if it could be shown that some objects can produce their effect perfectly contemporaneously with themselves, then his position would have to be abandoned.3 It is against this latter possibility that Hume directs his argument. He writes: 'Tis an establish'd maxim both in natural and moral philosophy, that an object, which exists for any time in its full perfection without producing another, is not its sole cause; but is assisted by some other principle, which pushes it from its state of inactivity, and makes it exert that energy, of which it was secretly possest. Now if any cause may be perfectly co-temporary with its effect, 'tis certain, according to this maxim, that they must all of them be so; since any one of them, which retards its operation for a single moment, exerts not itself at that very individual time, in which it might have operated; and therefore is no proper cause. The consequence of this wou'd be no less than the destruction of that succession of causes, which we observe in the world; and indeed, the utter annihilation of time. For if one cause were co-temporary with its effect, and this effect with its effect, and so on, 'tis plain there wou'd be no such thing as succession, and all objects must be co-existent (T 1.3.2.7; SBN 76). The general structure of the argument is reasonably clear. According to the "establish'd maxim" (hereafter EM) any object that does not produce an effect as soon as possible is not the "sole cause" of that effect. Assuming then that causes might occur simultaneously with their effects, it follows that every proper cause must be contemporaneous with its effect. But if every effect occurs simultaneously with its cause, then we arrive at the absurd conclusion that there can be no causal (or indeed temporal) succession in the world. Therefore, the original assumption that a cause may be perfectly co-temporary with its effect must be... (shrink)