This book identifies the organizing concepts of physical and biological phenomena by an analysis of the foundations of mathematics and physics.

In his early lecture note Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus (1759) a young supporter of metaphysical optimism called Immanuel Kant tested the Leibnizian optimism by posing some counter-arguments against it only to falsify them. His counter-arguments were very inventive and they feature often in modern scholarship on Leibniz. In this paper I will present Kant’s main arguments and evaluate them. I will argue that Kant’s understanding on Leibnizian optimism is little misguided and for this reason his own positive counter-argument (...) despite its ingeniousness is problematic. His second solution to the problem is comparable to the doctrine of metaphysical optimism, but fails also for the same reason as the first one. -/- . (shrink)

A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects, distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It is however one of the main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space for "stuff" like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always ask "how many?," but with stuff the question has to be "how much?" Laycock's fascinating exploration also addresses key logical and linguistic questions about the (...) way we categorize the many and the much. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Armstrong and Stanley argue that despite being initially compelling, a Russellian account of singular thought has deep difficulties. I defend a certain sort of Russellian account of singular thought against their arguments. In the process, I spell out a notion of propositional constituency that is independently motivated and has many attractive features.

The ideas of process philosophy in general, and Alfred North Whitehead in particular, will soon come into greater use and wider familiarity. This emergence of his ideas into wider use will be a great aid to education and to the reforming of our institutions and practices around the very different educational requirements of the sort of world that sits just beyond the horizon of our present vision. There will be discontinuities in the world to come, but there will also be (...) continuities. Whitehead’s ideas about time and possibility, and their practical applications, place us in a position to do better than guess and conjecture about what is coming. (shrink)

Historians have thoroughly documented the development of mercury-based silver refining in Spanish America in the late sixteenth century, and its use for over 300 years on an industrial scale unknown in Europe. However, we currently lack any consensus about the significance of this technology in the global history of knowledge. This article critically reassesses the invention and improvement of this refining method with the aim of addressing two interrelated issues. Firstly, how experiential knowledge and practical skills in silver refining were (...) deliberately harnessed to solve a specific technical problem. Secondly, how economic incentives and patronage set the stage for empirical practices and a collaborative culture that facilitated the widespread use of this novel technique. In so doing, this article places silver refining within the theoretical constructs and historiography of useful knowledge, and bridges narratives that have remained largely isolated. (shrink)

자신의 저술에서 민주주의를 옹호하거나 민주주의자를 자처한 적이 전혀 없음에도 불구하고 루소의 정치철학이 현대 민주주의의 정치원칙를 제공했다는데는 아무도 이의를 제기하지 않는다. 그렇다면 그 정치철학의 어떤 요인이 루소를 현대 민주주의 확립에 있어 가장 영향력 있는 사상가로 꼽히게 만드는가? 본고에서 연구자들은 루소 사상과 민주주의 연관성, 그리고 일반의지론에 대한 기존 연구들의 성과와 한계를 살펴본 후, 루소가 제시하는 “정치적 권리의 올바른 원칙”으로서의 “일반의지” 개념이 고전고대의 정치사상, 특히 아리스토텔레스의 『정치학』을 넘어 민주주의 정치철학의 현대적 전회에 어떤 기여를 하였는지 논한다.BR공화주의 관점에서 볼 때 아리스토텔레스와 루소는 연속성을 가졌다고 생각되어 (...) 왔다. 하지만 본 연구자들은 아리스토텔레스의 『정치학』과 루소의 『사회계약론』을 목차별로 비교·분석한 결과, “민주정(民主政)”에 관해 루소는 그 개념, 내용 및 역사적 평가를 아리스토텔레스와 거의 공유했음에도 불구하고, “일반의지”개념을 축으로 하여, 국가통치의 기조를 덕치주의에서 법치주의 또는 입헌주의로, 통치의 인적 기반을 ‘폴리스적 동물’에서, ‘자유롭고 평등한 인간으로서 주권자 시민’으로 혁명적으로 전형(轉形)하여, 태생적·지연적 인연이 아니라, 주권자 시민들이 이성적으로 동의한 정치적 권리에 근거하여 정립한 헌법적 원칙들에 의거하여 공화국 건국과 통치의 프로젝트를 제시했다는 특이점을 밝혀냈다. 바로 이 헌법기반의 공화국이야말로 현대적 국민국가의 정상적 통치모델로 간주되는 입헌민주주의에 다름 아니며, 결과적으로 루소는, ‘주민’ 또는 ‘인민’의 자연적 필요에 따라 자연발생적으로 성립되는 폴리스의 생태를 논한 현대 이전의 전형적 국가통치론으로서 아리스토텔레스적 개념의 정치학에서 벗어나, 자신의 이성적 국가능력을 자각하여 건국의 협약 당사자로 나선 ‘주권자 시민’이 국가 통치의 담당자라는 입론을 바탕으로 탈(脫)아리스토텔레스적 현대 정치학을 정립하였다. (shrink)

This paper contains two traditions of diagrammatic studies namely one, the Euler–Venn–Peirce diagram and the other, following tradition of Aristotle, the square of oppositions. We put together both the traditions to study representations of singular propositions, their negations and the inter relationship between the two. Along with classical negation we have incorporated negation of another kind viz. absence. We have also considered the changes that take place in the context of open universe.

This article is a critical notice of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright's *The Reason's Proper Study* (OUP). It focuses particularly on their attempts (crucial to their neo-logicist project) to say what a singular term is. I identify problems for their account but include some constructive suggestions about how it might be improved.

In discussing cruelty toward human beings, I argue that disregarding the singularity of any human being is necessary for treating her or him cruelly. The cruelty of Peter the Great, relying upon the intolerance of any human singular individuality, serves me as a paradigm-case to illustrate that. The cruelty of Procrustes and that of Stalin rely upon similar grounds. Relating to a person’s singularity is sufficient to prevent cruelty toward that person. In contrast, a liberal state of mind (...) or solidarity is insufficient to prevent cruelty and, under some circumstances, may even cause it. (shrink)

A singular thought about an object o is one that is directly about o in a characteristic way—grasp of that thought requires having some special epistemic relation to the object o, and the thought is ontologically dependent on o. One account of the nature of singular thought exploits a Russellian Structured Account of Propositions, according to which contents are represented by means of structured n-tuples of objects, properties, and functions. A proposition is singular, according to this framework, if and only (...) if it contains an object as a constituent. One advantage of the framework of Russellian Structured propositions is that it promises to provide a metaphysical basis for the notion of a singular thought about an object, grounding it in terms of constituency. In this paper, we argue that the attempt to ground the peculiar features of singular thoughts in terms of metaphysical constituency fails, and draw some consequences of our discussion for other debates. (shrink)

We address some questions raised in the paper by Magidor and Sinapova. An application to weak form of normality for strongly compact is given.

The focus of this paper will be on singular thoughts. In the first section I will present Jeshion’s cognitivism; a view that holds that one should characterize singular thoughts by their cognitive roles. In the second section I will argue that, contrary to Jeshion’s claims, results from studies of object tracking in cognitive psychology do not support cognitivism. In the third section I will discuss Jeshion’s easy transmission of singular thought and argue that it ignores a relevant distinction between general (...) and specific understanding of names. Finally, the last section will argue that conscious attention should replace Jeshion’s significance condition as a necessary condition for one to have a singular thought. The paper will show that we need to take seriously the acquaintance requirement for singular thoughts, as even the easy transmission of singular thoughts with the use of names will be called into question. (shrink)

The radical evolutionary step that divides human decision-making from that of nonhumans is the ability to excite the reward process for its own sake, in imagination. Combined with hyperbolic over-valuation of the present, this ability is a potential threat to both the individual's long term survival and the natural selection of high intelligence. Human belief is intrinsically or under-founded, which may or may not be adaptive.

Aristotle’s categorical syllogistic is the first formal deductive system in the history of formal sciences. Most parts or elements of the system are validated by modern (first-order) mathematical logic, but the system is quite limited in scope, as it is incapable of analyzing inferences other than the ‘figure syllogisms’ consisting of a couple of_ a-e-i-o_ premises and an _a-e-i-o_ conclusion, containing three ‘moderately’ universal terms – terms that express neither a highest genus nor a lowest species – each of which (...) is common to a different couple of propositions out of the three. Logicians in the following ages dealt with various questions concerning the addition of various (novel) logical forms into this limited system, among which are singular predications, i.e. categorical propositions with a singular term as subject, and the most common choice has been interpreting singular predications as _universal _predications. This paper tries to take a strictly formal perspective on the system of categorical syllogisms, and argues in detail for a much simpler and fairly effective assimilation or translation scheme for singular predications. The key to the proposed scheme is the preservation of the supposed inferential relation between opposite singular predications, namely _contradiction_. It is argued that the resulting _singularized _syllogistic moods, which are also validated by first-order logic (under its standard renderings of _a-e-i-o_ and singular predications), promote in turn the mentioned type of treatment, since they call for the employment of two of the four subaltern moods of the system, disregarded by Aristotle, which are _formally _there. (shrink)

This book aims to provide a solution to the semantic paradoxes. It argues for a unified solution to the paradoxes generated by our concepts of denotation, predicate extension, and truth. The solution makes two main claims. The first is that our semantic expressions 'denotes', 'extension' and 'true' are context-sensitive. The second, inspired by a brief, tantalizing remark of Godel's, is that these expressions are significant everywhere except for certain singularities, in analogy with division by zero. A formal theory of singularities (...) is presented and applied to a wide variety of versions of the definability paradoxes, Russell's paradox, and the Liar paradox. Keith Simmons argues that the singularity theory satisfies the following desiderata: it recognizes that the proper setting of the semantic paradoxes is natural language, not regimented formal languages; it minimizes any revision to our semantic concepts; it respects as far as possible Tarski's intuition that natural languages are universal; it responds adequately to the threat of revenge paradoxes; and it preserves classical logic and semantics. Simmons draws out the consequences of the singularity theory for deflationary views of our semantic concepts, and concludes that if we accept the singularity theory, we must reject deflationism. (shrink)

Singular reference is the relation that a singular term has to a corresponding individual. For example, "Obama" singularly refer to the current US president. Descriptivism holds that all singular terms refer by means of a concept associated to the term. The current trend is against this. This book explains in detail why anti-descriptivism became dominant in spite of its weaknesses and how these weaknesses can be overcome by appropriately reviving descriptivism.

In philosophy, “singular thought” refers to our capacity to represent entities as individuals, rather than as possessors of properties. Philosophers who defend singularism argue that perception allows us to mentally latch onto objects and persons directly, without conceptualizing them as being of a certain sort. Singularists assume that singular thought forms a unified psychological kind, regardless of the nature of the individuals represented. Empirical findings on the special psychological role of persons as opposed to inanimates threaten singularism. They raise the (...) possibility that tracking individuals specifically as persons might require conceptualizing them in certain ways, for example, as persons. In this paper, we take such a possibility seriously but ultimately reject it. Instead, we propose to revise a prominent singularist theory, the theory of mental files, in order to accommodate data on the psychological distinctiveness of persons: We advocate the postulation of perceptual person-files. Perceptual tracking via person-files is different from object-tracking but also from descriptive classification under the sortal concept PERSON. (shrink)

The aim is to uncover the foundations of quine's distinction between definite singular terms and general terms in predicative position, And hence of the general schema of predication, 'fx'. While each term in such a predication specifies its own item, The items so specified exhibit a typical difference exemplified in the basic case by the difference between spatio-Temporal particulars and properties of such particulars. A generally consequential difference of role is that while both terms are applied to the item of (...) lower type, Only the definite singular term has the function of identifying it. (shrink)

Introduction -- Creation and the other -- Originality and invention -- Inventive language and the literary event -- Singularity -- Reading and responding -- Performance -- Form, meaning, context -- Responsibility and ethics -- An everyday impossibility.

This book elaborates the author's original metaphysics, panenmentalism, focusing on novel aspects of the singularity of any person. Among these aspects, integrated in a systematic view, are: love and singularity; private, intersubjective, and public accessibility; multiple personality; freedom of will; akrasia; a way out of the empiricist-rationalist conundrum; the possibility of God; and some major moral questions.

What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”. The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can (...) far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines. This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence 1 designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards. The argument for a speed explosion was set out by the artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomonoff in his 1985 article “The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence”.1 Eliezer Yudkowsky gives a succinct version of the argument in his 1996 article “Staring at the Singularity”: “Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.. (shrink)

One of the goals of a certain brand of philosopher has been to give an account of language and linguistic phenomena by means of showing how sentences are to be translated into a "logically perspicuous notation" (or an "ideal language"—to use passe terminology). The usual reason given by such philosophers for this activity is that such a notational system will somehow illustrate the "logical form" of these sentences. There are many candidates for this notational system: (almost) ordinary first-order predicate logic (...) (see Quine [1960]), higher-order predicate logic (see Parsons [1968, 1970]), intensional logic (see Montague [1969, 1970a, 1970b, 1971]), and transformational grammar (see Harrnan [1971]), to mention some of the more popular ones. I do not propose to discuss the general question of the correctness of this approach to the philosophy of language, nor do I wish to adjudicate among the notational systems mentioned here. Rather, I want to focus on one problem which must be faced by all such systems—a problem that must be discussed before one decides upon a notational system and tries to demontrate that it in fact can account for all linguistic phenomena. The general problem is to determine what we shall allow as linguistic data; in this paper I shall restrict my attention to this general problem as it appears when we try to account for certain words with non-singular reference, in particular, the words that are classified by the count/ mass and sortal/non-sortal distinctions. (shrink)

This paper looks at emergence in physical theories and argues that an appropriate way to understand socalled “emergent protectorates” is via the explanatory apparatus of the renormalization group. It is argued that mathematical singularities play a crucial role in our understanding of at least some well-defined emergent features of the world.

ArgumentOne of the first high-altitude observatories was a hotel. Established in 1823, the chalet on Mount Faulhorn became a highpoint of nineteenth-century science. In this paper, I take this mountain as my entry point into the examination of the special attraction that mountains exerted on scientists. I argue that Mount Faulhorn stood for three different conceptions of the usefulness of the mountain in science: (1) in observation networks, stations were usually chosen for pragmatic rather than scientific reasons, but mountains representedsingularspots (...) in such networks, which deserved special attention; (2) the mountain also was amicrocosmwhere altitude differences were thought to capture essential features of latitude differences; (3) the mountain was sometimes no more than amacro-toolfor the pursuit of science, just a middle ground between the heaven and the earth. (shrink)

This paper explains why spacetime singularities do not constitute a breakdown of physical laws, and points out that the difference between the metrics at singularities and those outside of singularities is factual, rather than nomological.

According to many actualists, propositions, singular propositions in particular, are structurally complex, that is, roughly, (i) they have, in some sense, an internal structure that corresponds rather directly to the syntactic structure of the sentences that express them, and (ii) the metaphysical components, or constituents, of that structure are the semantic values — the meanings — of the corresponding syntactic components of those sentences. Given that reference is "direct", i.e., that the meaning of a name is its denotation, an apparent (...) consequence of this view is that any proposition expressed by a sentence containing a name that denotes a contingent being S is itself contingent — notably, the proposition [S does not exist]. Assuming that an entity must exist to have a property, necessarily, [S does not exist] must exist in order to be true. It seems to follow that, necessarily, [S does not exist] is not true and, hence, that S is not contingent after all. Past approaches to the problem — notably, those of Prior and Adams — lead to highly undesirable consequences for quantified modal logic. In this paper, several solutions to this puzzle are developed that preserve actualism, the structured view of propositions, the direct theory of reference, and the intuition that [S does not exist] is indeed possible without the adverse consequences for QML of previous solutions. (shrink)

The Terri Schiavo case, the latest high-profile “right-to-die” case in the United States, whose denouement saturated the US mediasphere at the end of March 2005, is a particularly complex problem in the Deleuzean sense. Its solution, which took more than 15 years, actualized lines from legal, medical, biological, political … multiplicities. The ellipses indicate the impossibility of completely delimiting the forces at work in any case (the virtual as endless differentiation) just as it indicates the necessity of cutting through them (...) in making any one solution work (actualization as differenciation). Thus that actualization, a creative resolution of the problem, brought some aspects of the virtual into distinctness, while others faded into momentary obscurity.1 The elements functioning most intensely in the Schiavo case cut across the fields of right, medical discipline and biopower, hence at the intersection of sexuality and racism, as Foucault explains.2 The turn to a liberal notion of the right to privacy as the right to die is never simple, for we remain trapped at the intersection of discipline and biopower if we ground that right in sovereign rights of personal autonomy and bodily integrity. The challenge to a Deleuzean jurisprudence is to creatively transform that right to show its basis in de-personalization. In other words, only in an extraordinary, ethical, situation, living along the fault line.. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, believers have had to reconcile their beliefs with science. This has always proved difficult. If an all-perfect God created the universe and its physical laws, why would he have to step in to perform miracles and answer prayers? If, as all the evidence indicates, the universe, including humans and their brains, is matter and nothing more, how can we possibly live forever? Theologians try hard, but never come up with satisfactory answers.

What is involved in having a singular thought about an ordinary object? On the leading epistemic view, one has this capacity if and only if one has belief-forming dispositions which would reliably enable one to get its properties right (Dickie, 2015). I first argue that Dickie’s official view entails surprising and unpalatable claims about either rationality or singular thought, before offering a precisification. Once we have reached that level of abstraction, it becomes difficult to see what is distinctively epistemic about (...) the framework. If we are to tease out the delicate connection between singular thought and knowledge, we should suspend the assumption that there is a homogeneous core, present in all cases of such thought, and that it is from there that its (univocal) epistemic character derives. (shrink)

Neo-Fregeans take their argument for arithmetical realism to depend on the availability of certain, so-called broadly syntactic tests for whether a given expression functions as a singular term. The broadly syntactic tests proposed in the neo-Fregean tradition are the so-called inferential test and the Aristotelian test. If these tests are to subserve the neo-Fregean argument, they must be at least adequate, in the sense of correctly classifying paradigm cases of singular terms and non-singular terms. In this paper, I pursue two (...) main goals. On the one hand, I show that the tests’ current state-of-the-art formulations are inadequate and, hence, cannot subserve the neo-Fregean argument. On the other hand, I propose revisions that are adequate and, hence, can subserve this argument. (shrink)

In the Preface to Part Four of the Ethics, Spinoza offers the reader an exemplar of human nature. However, Spinoza does not conceive of human nature as a universal in which each human being participates, simply by virtue of being human. Rather, each human being is conceived as singular. Thriving individual lives assume thriving communities composed of (somewhat) like-minded and (somewhat) like-embodied individuals. The model, or exemplar, then, may be considered to play the role of an enabling fiction in his (...) educational and moral philosophy. The approach taken here is to explore Spinoza’s notions of singularity, similarity, and exemplarity in relation to the distinctive human capacity to educate the senses and the passions and to cultivate reason, and thereby to flourish. The final section of the paper reads the education of Victor Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ through the lens of Spinoza’s philosophy of affect. (shrink)

I consider two competing approaches to metasemantics: productivism, whereby endowment with semantic significance emerges directly from conditions surrounding the production or employment of the items semantically endowed; and interpretationism, whereby endowment with semantic significance emerges directly from conditions surrounding the interpretive consumption of such items. Focusing on the version of interpretationism developed by Lewis and his followers, I present a novel argument to the conclusion that such an approach cannot secure determinacy for singular reference. I then draw a larger moral (...) for metasemantics and its relation to truth-conditional semantics. (shrink)

Despite the problematic political positions he adopted during his life span, the work of Carl Schmitt contains a fascinating argument in favour of `the political', which is understood as a plural symbolic space composed of friends and enemies who reciprocally recognise each other. Schmitt's struggle for the political is a struggle for a public spirit which accounts for this plurality. One of the terrains on which Schmitt wages this struggle is that of historical meaning. The image of history is crucial (...) for the political, as it is one level on which the relation between enemies is symbolised. In this paper, Schmitt's polemic for a political conception of history, which gives the enemy and the defeated their due place as political subjects, will be reconstructed. Central to Schmitt's endeavour is the attempt to think historical singularity, against the notion of repetition in history, against the understanding of history as a reservoir of `lessons' and against ideologies of progress. Through his polemic, a profane and sober image of history appears which stresses singularity, relative contingency and openness, and the pluralisation of social temporalities. The enigmatic notion of the katechon will play a crucial role in providing a very minimal but crucial form of historical meaning for such a political conception of history. (shrink)

We study the notion of tightly stationary sets which was introduced by Foreman and Magidor in [8]. We obtain two consistency results showing that certain sequences of regular cardinals${\langle {\kappa _n}\rangle _{n < \omega }}$can have the property that in some generic extension, every ground-model sequence of fixed-cofinality stationary sets${S_n} \subseteq {\kappa _n}$is tightly stationary. The results are obtained using variations of the short-extenders forcing method.

Is singular causation best understood within a dispositionalist framework? Although a positive answer has not yet been wholly developed, different philosophers have made some positive contributions suggesting that it is. Against these suggestions, I claim that any possible account of singular causation in terms of real, irreducible, dispositions conveys unsolvable flaws in its very metaphysical foundations.

This paper assumes that the purpose of ethics is to open up a space for the possibility of moral conduct in the flow of everyday life. If this is the case then we can legitimately ask: "How then do we do ethics"? To attempt an answer to this important question, the paper presents some suggestions from the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. With Levinas, it is argued that ethics happens in the singularity of the face of the (...) Other before me "here and now". Ethics matters in my everyday contact with the Other that disturbs my egological existence and claims my response. But what about all other Others, not here now but nevertheless simultaneously already present? What about their equal claim on me? With Levinas and Derrida, the paper attempts to articulate the notion of singular justice as the simultaneous demand of all others requiring my response. In singular justice, the paper attempts to show how the demands of ethics (the singular) and the demands of justice (all other Others) can become the impossible possibility for a "justice where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest". Furthermore, the paper attempts to argue that singular justice is our calling - or more precisely my calling - to do the right thing, here and now. Finally, by way of explication, the paper discusses a case of software piracy to try to show how singular justice can help us not to think about ethics, which is important, but to (almost) do it - which is very important. (shrink)

In his posthumously published Broken Hegemonies, Reiner Schürmann shows how the ‘tragic denial’ of the differend – between the universal and the singular, natality and mortality, institution and destitution – gives rise to hegemonies. When ‘the sovereign fantasm’ that grounds and anchors the hegemony expires, the hegemony gets withered away. Taking Schürmann’s insights as point of departure, this paper attempts to think of singularisation to come in messianic sense, as truly anarchic thought worthy of our time, that is, to think (...) without hegemonies. Such a messianic/eschatological tragic-anarchic thought can’t be understood as the dialectical operation of the universal’s antagonism to the particular. Beyond the dialectical opposition of the universal and the particular, differend of the singularisation to come can only be understood as the unheard of an-arché, that is, living without ‘why’. (shrink)

Though it has gone unnoticed so far in Beauvoir Studies, the term “singularity” is a technical one for Simone de Beauvoir. In the first half of the essay I discuss two reasons why this term has been obscured. First, as is well known Beauvoir has not been read in the context of the history of philosophy until recently. Second, in The Ethics of Ambiguity at least, singularité is translated both inconsistently and quite misleadingly. In the second half of the (...) essay I attempt to demonstrate the importance of this term in The Ethics. The will to disclose being is the will to disclose the singularity of the other, whether human, land, sky or painting. Ambiguity, which Beauvoir distinguishes from absurdity in Camus, is an image suggesting this necessarily mutual disclosure of singularity. (shrink)