Colonization occurs in many fields, from the scientific to the philosophical, and involves all forms of life including flora, fauna and micro-organisms. All these forms of life can colonize or be c...

This article begins by accepting that strategic ignorance, or agnotology, underpins academic practice and perpetuates the systemic disadvantage experienced on a global level by non-White and Indige...

Prior research has demonstrated a strong relationship between team performance and team members’ team efficacy beliefs and perceptions of social integration. Performing well increases the feelings of collective ability that comprise team efficacy and the feelings of psychological connectedness that make up social integration, while performing poorly erodes them. In this article, we draw from the social cognitive base of ethical leadership theory to argue that ethical leadership moderates the relationship between team performance and team efficacy beliefs, and between team (...) performance and social integration, such that these important team attitudes are buffered against the negative effects of poor performance when leaders act ethically. Alternatively, when leaders act less ethically, team efficacy and social integration break down following poor performance. We test our hypotheses in a field study of U.S. military teams actively engaged in competition. The data support our arguments. We find that ethical leadership weakens the relationships among team performance and team efficacy and social integration, respectively, such that ethical leaders preserve team efficacy and social integration when their teams do not perform well. (shrink)

It is well known that saturation of ideals is closely related to the “antichain-catching” phenomenon from Foreman–Magidor–Shelah [10]. We consider several antichain-catching properties that are weaker than saturation, and prove:If${\cal I}$is a normal ideal on$\omega _2 $which satisfiesstationary antichain catching, then there is an inner model with a Woodin cardinal;For any$n \in \omega $, it is consistent relative to large cardinals that there is a normal ideal${\cal I}$on$\omega _n $which satisfiesprojective antichain catching, yet${\cal I}$is not saturated. This provides a negative (...) answer to Open Question number 13 from Foreman’s chapter in the Handbook of Set Theory. (shrink)

Aside from making a few weak, and hopefully widely shared claims about the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, we will offer an argument for the protection of privacy based on individual self-interest and prudence. In large part, this argument will parallel considerations that arise in a prisoner’s dilemma game. After briefly sketching an account of the value of privacy, transparency, and accountability, along with the salient features of a prisoner’s dilemma games, a game-theory analysis will be offered. In a (...) game where both players want privacy and to avoid transparency and the associated accountability, the dominant action will be to foist accountability and transparency on the other player while attempting to retain one’s own privacy. Simply put, if both players have the ability or power to make the other more accountable and transparent, they will do so for the same reasons that player’s defect in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Ultimately this will lead to a sub-optimal outcome of too much accountability and transparency. While there are several plausible solutions to prisoner dilemma games, we will offer both technical, as well as, law and policy solutions. We need to change the payoffs of the game so that is it in everyone’s interest to balance privacy and accountability rather than foisting transparency on others. (shrink)

This paper proposes that contained within Martin Buber's works one can find useful support for, and insights into, an educational philosophy that stretches across, and incorporates, both the human and non-human worlds. Through a re-examination of his seminal essay Education2, and with reference to specific incidents in his autobiography (e.g. the horse, his family, the theatre and the tree) and to central tenets of his theology (e.g. the shekina, the Eternal Thou and teshuvah) we shall present a more coherent (...) understanding of Buber's notion of relationship which is developmental in nature and posits intrinsic, necessary and unavoidable relational ties to both the human and non-human worlds. This understanding of Buber's view of relationship as a developmental process will add new meaning to his central ideas of 'bursting asunder' the educational relationship and the educator who is cast 'in imitatio Dei absconditi sed non ignoti'.3 Ultimately this paper wants to suggest that, for Buber, the infant is unable to become fully adult without being immersed in relationship and then coming to full awareness of it, and it is the educator who can play a pivotal role in supporting the development of this adult relationality through encounters with both individual humans and the larger non-human world. (shrink)

Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 2012 under title Moral theological method in the theological ethics of Martin Luther and Arthur Rich, with particular reference to their economic ethics.

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 1-4.

Volume 24, Issue 7, July 2024, Page 6-12.

Self-interest has long been recognized as a powerful human motive. Yet, much remains to be understood about the thinking behind self-interested pursuits. Drawing from multiple literatures, we propose that situations high in opportunity for self-interested gain trigger a type of moral cognition called moral disengagement that allows the individual to more easily disengage internalized moral standards. We also theorize two countervailing forces—situational harm to others and dispositional conscientiousness—that may weaken the effects of personal gain on morally disengaged reasoning. We test (...) our hypotheses in two studies using qualitative and quantitative data and complementary research methods and design. We demonstrate that when personal gain incentives are relatively moderate, reminders of harm to others can reduce the likelihood that employees will morally disengage. Furthermore, when strong personal gain incentives are present in a situation, highly conscientious individuals are less apt than their counterparts to engage in morally disengaged reasoning. (shrink)

This essay is written in two sections. The first, following a short introduction, is made up of three scenarios drawn from the life and work of Martin Buber. As well as demonstrating his obvious interest in human relationships with the other-than-human, each scenario describes an encounter between either Buber himself or a stand-in character and a member of the other-than-human world. Together, these scenes not only suggest that I/Thou encounters are possible with the other-than-human, and that they are important (...) for the development of the human I, but also outline characteristics that make such encounters possible. The second section focuses on Buber's description of the “great actor” in order to offer a way teachers might engage their own students with the other-than-human world. Just as the actor embodies both the character and his or her own person in a dramatic role, so the teacher might embody the I/Thou relationship with the natural world, becoming Teacher/Tree, and exemplifying that relationship with the students. (shrink)

Whether one’s attention lies with the big wilderness outside or the wild people and places that survive amidst our ecologically impoverished cities and towns, a thorough and rigorous reflection on wildness remains as a task for environmental philosophy. The political and literary movements concerned with the wilderness have sparked passion, insight, and moments of brilliance, but by and large leave us today at best confused, and at worst naïve, with respect to our thinking of wildness. The attempts at philosophical rigor (...) from the ‘fields’ of so-called ‘environmental philosophy’ or ‘environmental ethics’ certainly bring one nofurther toward understanding the experiences of, say, 500 miles of tundra, or the power and push of a river, or the density of a rainforest, or a kiss. Keeping the illumination of direct experience in mind, this paper will attempt a phenomenology of wildness, using the work of 20th century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of chiasm describes a perceptual relationship of intertwining, of intimacy and opacity, between Self and Other, in which the Other’s presence guides one’s own perceptions. Reflection around this chiasmic exchange may help us to understand the peculiar perceptual experience with what we call the wild, and perhaps to understand it as a sort of chiasmic wildness. This chiasmic wildness would not be incarcerated in wilderness areas or wild animals, but would exist in our embodied relationships with other people, animals, plants, and places. This paper is offered as an attempt at reflection, as what Martin Heidegger called a Holzweg: wandering down a path that may lead nowhere, but that must be followed beyond where one stands today. (shrink)

The passage above comes from the opening pages of Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Edmund Husserl. It proposes a risky interpretive principle. The main feature of this principle is that the seminal aspects of a thinker’s work are so close to him that he is incapable of articulating them himself. Nevertheless, these aspects pervade the work, give it its style, its sense and its direction, and therefore belong to it essentially. As Martin Heidegger writes, in a passage quoted by Merleau-Ponty: " (...) The greater the work of a thinker – which in no way coincides with the breadth and number of writings – the richer is what is un-thought in this work, which means, that which emerges in and through this work as having not yet been thought. 2 " The goal of Merleau-Ponty’s essay, he says, is “to evoke this un-thought-of element in Husserl’s thought”. 3. (shrink)

William Dembski claims to have established a decision process to determine when highly unlikely events observed in the natural world are due to Intelligent Design. This article argues that, as no implementable randomness test is superior to a universal Martin-Löf test, this test should be used to replace Dembski's decision process. Furthermore, Dembski's decision process is flawed, as natural explanations are eliminated before chance. Dembski also introduces a fourth law of thermodynamics, his “law of conservation of information,” to argue (...) that information cannot increase by natural processes. However, this article, using algorithmic information theory, shows that this law is no more than the second law of thermodynamics. The article concludes that any discussions on the possibilities of design interventions in nature should be articulated in terms of the algorithmic information theory approach to randomness and its robust decision process. (shrink)

Most historical accounts of "the West" take it for granted that the guiding principles of the Western tradition—reason, progress, and freedom—have been passed down directly from ancient Greece to modern Europe, evolving in isolation from all non-Western cultures. Today, many political analysts and cultural critics maintain that the Western tradition is fast approaching its end, for better or worse, as it becomes more and more integrated with non-Western cultures in an increasingly globalized world. But what if we are witnessing something (...) else entirely—not the "end" of the West but rather another historical mutation of the idea of the West itself? This groundbreaking work shows that whether the West is hailed as the source of all historical progress or scorned as the root of all cultural imperialism, it remains a deeply problematic concept that is intrinsically connected to an ethnocentric view of the world. In a critical reading of the continental philosophers Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida as well as the postcolonial thinkers Said, Mohanty, Bhabha, and Trinh, Sean Meighoo strikes at the intellectual foundations of Western exceptionalism until its ideological supports show through. Deconstructing the concept of the West in his provocative interpretations of Martin Bernal's controversial publication Black Athena and the Beatles' second film Help!, Meighoo poses a formidable question to philosophers, writers, political analysts, and cultural critics alike: Can we mount an effective critique of Western ethnocentrism without reinforcing the very idea of the West? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Voices by John SallisSean KirklandSALLIS, John. Nietzsche’s Voices. Edited by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 202 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper and eBook, $35.00George Bataille, perhaps the twentieth century’s most fundamentally Nietzschean thinker, suggests that a book should not be viewed as an independently existing entity to be assessed on its own terms. Rather, a book is, according to Bataille, always one brick placed by the (...) author in an already standing wall, resting upon and constituted partly by its relationship to its predecessors. John Sallis has placed an extremely rich new brick into the already extensive wall of Nietzsche scholarship, situated on the one hand between many important continentally-inflected book-length studies, by the likes of Heidegger, Klossowski, Deleuze, Kofman, Derrida, Irigaray, and Krell, and on the other those influential monographs from more traditional or analytic readers, such as Kaufmann, Danto, Hollingdale, Schacht, and Nehamas. Indeed, Sallis’s closest interlocutor is perhaps David B. Allison, whose indispensable Reading the New Nietzsche finds its way into this intermediate space as well. Sallis’s work wins its originality neither by imposing on Nietzsche’s works any fashionable theoretical frameworks or methods nor by insisting that those works conform to any purportedly established philosophical requirements or forms, mining them for comfortingly recognizable positions or claims. Rather, he engages the text utterly on its own terms with extreme sensitivity and insists on placing every line, every claim, every concept, and every argument within the encompassing textual whole, which is to say within the essay or book in which it appears and further within the context of the whole Nietzschean corpus—and for Sallis, Nietzsche’s many “voices” sing in harmony with one another over the course of his largely consistent seventeen-year philosophical career.Nietzsche’s Voices is the eleventh volume in Indiana University Press’s ongoing series The Collected Writings of John Sallis. Sallis being one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Martin Heidegger, his Collected Writings seem to be conceived somewhat on the model of that thinker’s Gesamtausgabe, gathering together not only all of Sallis’s published books but also a number of unpublished manuscripts and shorter texts, complete transcriptions of his lecture courses and seminars over the years, and indeed even some informal addresses and interviews. Richard Rojcewicz reports in his editor’s afterword that these are lecture notes for a course that took place over two semesters at Duquesne University during the 1971–72 academic year.After a brief introductory discussion of the challenge of reading Nietzsche’s unorthodox texts rigorously as philosophical works, the second chapter is devoted to a philosophical consideration of the importance of biography, especially as concerns a thinker who insists generally on the necessity of a close relationship between life and thought. The third chapter presents an extensive reading of The Birth of Tragedy and some of the contemporary unpublished materials. The early essays “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” and “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life” are treated in chapters 4 and 5. The sixth and seventh chapters turn to Nietzsche’s “free spirit” works, first addressing [End Page 726] the critique of all received moral values and the call to invent wholly new kinds of values, in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, and then turning to The Gay Science for Nietzsche’s analysis of the loss of any ultimate foundation for morality, knowledge, and even being itself in our late-modern historical moment. The eighth and final chapter comprises over half the book’s total length, offering a very detailed reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work Nietzsche himself saw as central to his entire corpus, indeed even central to the “history of humanity” insofar as it “splits it into two halves.”The book is full of penetrating insights into the Nietzschean text, and often Sallis’s close attentiveness and holistic approach succeed in resolving previously vexing interpretive problems. In the interest of brevity, I limit myself here to two examples.(1) In the Birth, Nietzsche famously traces the emergence of tragedy back to an almost miraculous marriage of two opposing... (shrink)

The central focus of this article is to share several experiential activities we have designed in our teaching careers that we use to help education students, primarily undergraduates and teacher candidates, access philosophical ideas and enter philosophical discussions. The examples shared below come from our attempts to help students reach key concepts and abstract ideas in some well-known educational philosophical discussions, through engaging in experiences relating to them. They are based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, John Dewey’s scientific method, (...) and Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. The focus for this article is not so much on the specific content or philosophical interpretation of these works but instead on the activities themselves as a means towards better understanding the concept of experiential learning itself. The three examples we present serve to show ways in which well-designed and thoroughly-considered experiences can serve as a bridge to difficult and abstract material while also honoring a more expansive range of learning styles. (shrink)

El propósito de este escrito radica en precisar los sentidos de los existenciarios Existenz y Jemeinigkeit, presentes en la Analítica del Dasein, que Martin Heidegger desarrolla en Sein und Zeit. Estos, aun cuando no sean el inicio del citado despliegue teórico, son troncales para entender la reflexión sobre el ser del ente humano que allí se expone. Además, mostraremos cómo aparecen conceptualizadas ambas nociones en la lección del semestre de verano de 1925 tituladas Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. (...) Asimismo, destacaremos como Heidegger interpreta a la Existenz de Sein und Zeit en Brief über den Humanismus. Cabe aclarar que la labor exegética de la obra magna de 1927 se efectuará basándonos también en estos dos últimos escritos, es decir, en Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs y en Brief über den Humanismus. (shrink)

The title of Andy Clark's book is, among other things, a reference to one of the central terms in Martin Heidegger's early work: "Dasein" (being there) is the word that Heidegger uses to refer to beings like ourselves. Clark is no Heidegger scholar, but the reference is deliberate; among the predecessors to his book he lists not only Heidegger himself, but also the American Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus and the French Heideggerean phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This triumvirate has played an (...) increasingly important role in recent years among the "alternative" cognitive science set, owing largely to the influence of Dreyfus's 1979 book What Computers Can't Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979), which enlisted Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontean arguments in the fight against classical symbolic processing approaches to artificial intelligence. Clark's book fits squarely in this "alternative" tradition, and it is an important contribution to the existing literature. It surveys a large array of results in cognitive scientifically oriented fields ranging from robotics to developmental psychology, and it argues convincingly that these results should encourage us to embrace a radical new research paradigm in the cognitive sciences. The central claim is that mainstream cognitive scientists should, like their more revolutionary colleagues, learn to substitute for "the disembodied, atemporal intellectualist vision of mind ... the image of mind as a controller of embodied action" (p. 7). As a clear and brightly written account of this alternative movement in cognitive science, and perhaps even as a kind of mission statement for the new paradigm, Clark's book is one of the finest I have read. It is limited, however, by the fact that the interesting and well-described empirical work that forms the center of his presentation does not always provide sufficient resources for addressing the equally important philosophical problems lurking. (shrink)

In the 1930s, Martin Heidegger began what would become a lifelong engagement with the work of Ernst Jünger. Part of Heidegger’s interest in Jünger was a result of Jünger’s Nietzsche-inspired cultural diagnosis; in Heidegger’s words, Jünger “makes all previous writings about Nietzsche inessential.” On the other hand, Heidegger was critical of what he deemed Jünger’s “bedazzlement” before the thought of Nietzsche. In this essay, I explore the sources of Heidegger’s interest and his criticism of Jünger’s work. To do this, (...) I focus on elements of their correspondence, but mainly on Jünger’s essay “Über die Linie” of 1950 and Heidegger’s response, “Über ‘die Linie’” of 1955. In so doing, I hope to uncover their shared concern for the fate of Europe at the hands of a nihilism of which World War II was, to them, but an expression. (shrink)

A complete English translation of the correspondence between the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the novelist and essayist Ernst Jünger, together with a translation of Jünger’s essay Across the Line.

PDF with introduction and front and back materials. Abstract: A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book unfolds a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others (...) such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. -/- “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History -/- “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

Although the words “nature” and “ecology” have to be qualified in discussing either Daoism or Heidegger, the author argues that a different and potentially helpful approach to questions of nature, ecology, and environmental ethics can be articulated from the works of Martin Heidegger and the early Daoist philosophers Laozi (Lao-Tzu) and Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu). Despite very different cultural contexts and philosophical strategies, they bring into play the spontaneity and event-character of nature while unfolding a sense of how to be responsive (...) to the world through a practice of “non-coercive-activity” (wuwei) and “letting be” (Gelassenheit). Significant ecological implications can be drawn from the recognition of nature reinterpreted as dao (way) and as Sein (being). The openness and receptiveness of experiencing the world as being-under-way suggests what might be called a “pluralistic holism,” involving the recognition of both the interconnectedness and the unique singularity of things, and the possibility of being responsive to the phenomena themselves in their mutuality as wellas in their particular givenness. (shrink)

This study examines the idea of consciousness as a phenomenal reality in the writings of legendary civil rights figures, Howard W. Thurman and Huey P. Newton. Thurman is best known for his 1949 title, Jesus and the Disinherited, which is said to have inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, while Newton is best known for his work with The Black Panthers.

El Tratado de la Unión Europea firmado en Maastricht en 1992 introdujo cambios revolucionarios en las competencias de la Comunidad, pues, por vez primera, se admite que la acción de la Comunidad implicará «una contribución a una enseñanza y a una formación de calidad, así como el desarrollo de las culturas de los Estados miembros». La evolución de esta nueva situación no ha sido satisfactoria por los problemas de fondo de la Unión Europea y por las dificultades que hoy entraña (...) toda acción verdaderamente educativa. El artículo analiza los intentos que se realizaron a partir del 1992 para introducir una profunda dimensión europea de la educación, con las implicaciones axiológicas que ello comporta, y cómo estos intentos se encontraron ante diversos obstáculos poderosos que les han reducido a un estado de hibernación. A partir de fines del 1999 se consolida una nueva tendencia funcionalista en la política de la educación europea, que ha sido refinada en estos dos años, encontrándonos ahora, por mucho que sean limitados sus horizontes, ante unas pautas de trabajo que pienso serán beneficiosas para introducir mayores cotas de racionalidad en la política educativa de los Estados miembros. (shrink)

Este trabajo discute si hoy todavía es posible admitir que hay principios a priori que no pueden ser abandonados por la física. La historia indica que ciertas “imposibilidades” filosóficas (como el movimiento, el vacuo y la acción directa a distancia) fueron sucesivamente abandonadas por la física. En el siglo XX, la mecánica cuántica rechazó al determinismo y al principio de simetría. La opinión más común entre los científicos es la de que cuando hay un conflicto entre física y filosofía hay (...) que despreciar a los principios a priori. Sin embargo, hay todavía casos en los cuales es posible negar la posibilidad de determinados objetos físicos que entran en conflicto con nuestros conceptos espaciales. El autor defiende que existen principios a priori válidos en la física, y que su abandono es una deficiencia de determinadas teorías físicas modernas. Tal postura no tiene por consecuencia la negación de tales teorías, pero impone la tarea de complementarlas o interpretarlas de un novo modo para que sean compatibles con los principios filosóficos. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo busca reconstruir los principios metodológicos de la “arqueología de la política” que Foucault introduce hacia el final de L’archéologie du savoir aunque nunca desarrolla de manera explícita. La exposición se organiza en tres ejes. En primer lugar, explora los puntos de cruce y las posibles diferencias entre la arqueología del saber y la arqueología de la política. En segundo lugar, examina el lugar que podrían ocupar los “programas” y las “racionalidades de gobierno” en la arqueología de la (...) política. Por último, propone a la razón de Estado, el liberalismo y el neoliberalismo como posibles campos de investigación para el desarrollo de esa arqueología. Con ello se pretende obtener una “grilla de inteligibilidad” cuyo punto de partida no sean las categorías universales habitualmente utilizadas por el análisis jurídico-político procedente de los siglos XVI y XVII, sino las prácticas de los gobernantes y los gobernados.This article proposes to reconstruct the methodological principles of the “archaeology of politics” mentioned by Foucault at the end of L’archéologie du savoir, although never explicitly continued. The text is organized in three complementary axes. First, it explores the crossing points and possible differences between the archaeology of knowledge and the archaeology of politics. Second, it investigates the place that “programs” and “government rationalities” might take in the archeology of politics. Finally, it porposes the reason of State, liberalism and neoliberalism as possible research fields for the development of said archeology. Therefore, this article seeks to obtain a “grid of intelligibility” whose basis are not the universal categories usually used by legal-political analysis from the 16th and 17th centuries, but the practices of the governing and governed. (shrink)

RESUMENLa inteligencia artificial se suele definir como el estudio de cómo programar ordenadores que sean capaces de llevar a cabo aquellas cosas que la mente puede hacer. En este estudio vamos a centrarnos en los programas clásicos de inteligencia artificial y trataremos de ver qué tipo de conocimiento poseen los ordenadores, si lo poseen.PALABRAS CLAVEINTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL-CONOCIMIENTO ARTIFICIAL-HABITACIÓN CHINAABSTRACTArtificial intelligence is somtiemes defined as the study of how to program computers to enable them to do the sorts of things that (...) minds can do. In this study we are going to focus on classic artificial intelligence programs and we will try to determine what kind of knowledge computers have, if any.KEYWORDSARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-ARTIFICIAL KNOWLEDGE- CHINESE ROOM. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze by Anthony Sean NealKordell DixonPhilosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze Anthony Sean Neal. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle begins with a clear and concise establishment of its aim: to analyze and expand upon those figures mentioned when discussing the academic project of studying black (...) people. Neal broadens the account of black scholars examining racialized existence by centering his work on the modern era and its initiator W. E. B Du Bois. Neal develops an ethnic reflective canon that documents the long history of black thinkers attempting to define their blackness and advance the conception of freedom. This book does an excellent job of capturing the genealogical structure of the struggle for freedom. Within the work, Neal denotes that all relevant figures in this tradition are freedom gazers. These gazers are spectators of a radically imagined future liberated from the oppressive systems that encumber the persecuted. Du Bois's approach to freedom gazing uses academic training to examine his blackness and inevitably to solve the "race problem." What Neal provides the reader is a road map of the intellectual work of black scholars. This road map details the common themes among black thinkers and how these themes relate to Du Bois. Neal's intricate network of philosophers uses their experience and their expertise to write about what is necessary for black people to obtain freedom. Neal composes a complex and remarkable catalog of black scholars that demonstrates the interconnectedness and progression of black thought on oppression and liberation.In the second chapter, Neal elucidates why Du Bois is chosen as the inaugurator of the modern era. As a formally educated black man, Du Bois questions his experience and what tethers him to oppression. Neal uses Du Bois as a focal point, not because Du Bois is the first black person to document their struggle with their racialized existence, but because he believes that Du Bois is the first scholar to analyze the black experience completely. The holistic nature of Du Bois's study of the existential conflict that race can manifest within its subjects allows Du Bois's analysis to be used as a tool to unify other works that discuss race and the struggle for freedom. Neal expresses how other scholars such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Anna Julia Cooper all had work that takes up a similar task as Du Bois's but lacks the fullness of Du Bois's study. Here, Neal does not articulate clearly [End Page 87] how these figures are inadequate with respect to their work. It could be argued that each scholar named could be said to have accomplished a task similar to that of Du Bois. However, how these figures are studied throughout different disciplines gives the impression that their examination of race and freedom is much more focused on one specific field. This point speaks to how we interpret the work of these scholars and not to these scholars' work itself. Neal proceeds to describe Du Bois as a freedom gazer and explains how Du Bois's imagining of black persons as freed would allot a perceptual framework that motivates them to proclaim their right to mental and physical freedom. Further, Neal establishes that Du Bois's position as a freedom gazer allows him to expand the ethnic reflective canon. This canon includes Ida B. Wells, whose journalism on the lynching of black people during the Reconstruction era made headway on what social sciences could contribute to the struggle against injustice. Anna Julia Cooper is included in this canon; her radically imagined future was thought to be achieved through education. Wells and Cooper proceeded and directly influenced the work of Du Bois, creating a lineage of radical social thought. Neal maps his transition through the intellectual work of black scholars by using conceptions of peace, rebellion, revolution, and freedom as relational markers. The reader can identify the relationships among the varied work of freedom gazers despite the vast range of their spatiotemporal placement.In the third chapter, Neal examines the subjects Hubert Harrison, William H... (shrink)

Jean-Luc MARION, De surcroît. Études sur les phénomènes saturés ; Magda KING, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time ; Andreas MICHEL, Die französische Heidegger-Rezeption und ihre sprachlichen Konsequenzen ; Alfred DENKER, Historical Dictionary of Heidegger’s Philosophy ; John B. BROUGH & Lester EMBREE, The Many Faces of Time ; Daniel O. DAHLSTROM, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth ; Cristina LAFONT, Heidegger, Language, And World-Disclosure ; Eliane ESCOUBAS & Bernhard WALDENFELS, Phénoménologie française et phénoménologie allemande ; Eckard WOLZ-GOTTWALD, Transformation der Phänomenologie. (...) Zur Mystik bei Husserl und Heidegger ; Martin HEIDEGGER, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity ; Arkadiusz CHRUDZIMSKI, Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden ; Jocelyn BENOIST, L’apriori conceptuel. Bolzano, Husserl, Schlick ; Dennis King KEENAN, Death and Responsibility. The “Work” of Levinas ; Dan ZAHAVI, Self-awareness, Temporality, and Alterity. Central Topics in Phenomenology ; Sonya SIKKA, Forms of Transcendence. Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology ; Alfred DENKER, Omdat filosoferen leven is. Een archeologie van Martin Heideggers Sein und Zeit; Seán HAND, The Levinas Reader ; ; Ion MINCÃ, Informatica şi teoria cunoaşterii. O paradigmã fenomenologicã a domeniului hardware ; John van BUREN, The Young Heidegger. Rumor of the Hidden King. (shrink)

I begin by examining a recent debate between John McDowell and Christopher Peacocke over whether the content of perceptual experience is non-conceptual. Although I am sympathetic to Peacocke’s claim that perceptual content is non-conceptual, I suggest a number of ways in which his arguments fail to make that case. This failure stems from an over-emphasis on the "fine-grainedness" of perceptual content - a feature that is relatively unimportant to its non-conceptual structure. I go on to describe two other features of (...) perceptual experience that are more likely to be relevant to the claim that perceptual content is non-conceptual. These features are 1) the dependence of a perceived object on the perceptual context in which it is perceived and 2) the dependence of a perceived property on the object it is perceived to be a property of. (shrink)

A number of authors have argued recently that the content of perceptual experience can, and even must, be characterized in conceptual terms. Their claim, more precisely, is that every perceptual experience is such that, of necessity, its content is constituted entirely by concepts possessed by the subject having the experience. This is a surprising result. For it seems reasonable to think that a subject’s experiences could be richer and more fine-grained than his conceptual repertoire; that a subject might be able, (...) for example, to discriminate in experience more shades of colors than he has color concepts. The key move in their argument, therefore, is to articulate the conceptual content of experience using demonstrative, instead of general, concepts. For instance, these authors argue that the content of my perceptual experience of a particular shade of green is properly characterized in terms of the concept expressed by the linguistic utterance “that shade”. Even if I don’t possess a general concept for the shade I’m seeing—a concept of the kind typically expressed using color names like ‘chartreuse’ or ‘lime’—nevertheless, these authors argue, the content of the experience can still be characterized conceptually using a demonstrative concept that I do possess. (shrink)

There you are at the opera house. The soprano has just hit her high note – a glassshattering high C that fills the hall – and she holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds the note for such a long time that after a while a funny thing happens: you no longer seem only to hear it, the note as it is currently sounding, that glass-shattering high C that is loud and (...) high and pure. In addition, you also seem to hear something more. It is difficult to express precisely what this extra feature is. One is tempted to say, however, that the note now sounds like it has been going on for a very long time. Perhaps it even sounds like a note that has been going on for too long. In any event, what you hear no longer seems to be limited to the pitch, timbre, loudness, and other strictly audible qualities of the note. You seem in addition to experience, even to hear, something about its temporal extent. (shrink)

According to Russellianism (or Millianism), the two sentences ‘Ralph believes George Eliot is a novelist’ and ‘Ralph believes Mary Ann Evans is a novelist’ cannot diverge in truth-value, since they express the same proposition. The problem for the Russellian (or Millian) is that a puzzle of Kaplan’s seems to show that they can diverge in truth-value and that therefore, since the Russellian holds that they express the same proposition, the Russellian view is contradictory. I argue that the standard Russellian appeal (...) to “ways of thinking” or “propositional guises” is not necessary to solve the puzzle. Rather than this retrograde concession to Fregeanism, appeal should be made to second-order belief. The puzzle is solved, and the contradiction avoided, by maintaining that both sentences are indeed true in addition to the sentence ‘Ralph (mistakenly) believes that he does not believe Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot is a novelist’. (shrink)

Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the (...) problem of ‘suspended judgement with continued belief’. I argue that this criticism fails to take account of a crucial presupposition of Quine’s about the connection between thought and language. The aim of the paper is to defend the spirit of Quine’s account of attitudes by offering solutions to these two problems. (shrink)

If the notion of free will is to be retained by philosophers, psychiatrists and psychologists, then it will be a free will which is essentially non-conscious. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that a conscious free will (in the sense of consciousness initiating action) is incompatible with the evidence of neuroscience, and the phenomenology described in the literature of normal creativity, psychotic passivity, and the neurological syndrome of the alien limb or hand. In particular the work of Libet (...) and others who have directly stimulated the brain and measured activity from its surface leads to the conclusion that subjective states (be they sensory or intentional) are preceded by predictive neural activity. Subjective phenomenology is temporally distinct from the initiation of “voluntary” action. In addition it will be argued that free will is more than a belief and that it comprises a perceptual sensorimotor component. Free will is conceptualized as a three component phenomenon consisting of a perceptual, non-linguistic experience of freedom, an experiential belief which is linguistic, and related to a specified action in time, and an abstract belief which is linguistic but remote from any particular action and akin to philosophical discourse (the abstract belief or otherwise, in free will). A theoretical explanation of some of the pathological phenomenology of possession of action is offered in terms of temporal considerations. The direction of action within mental/virtual space is hypothesized to be a function of the temporal sequence of its initiation and awareness of the latter “reaching” consciousness. It is suggested that perturbation of this temporal sequence may lead to the misattribution of host-as-alien-initiated action. Work of this kind, which is beyond subjective introspection, is necessary if we are to develop adequate models to use in conjunction with modern investigation techniques. (shrink)