Pada musim semi, entah kenapa, tidak banyak ikan. Karena tangkapannya sangat tidak stabil, Pekakak mulai berpikir. Lalu membuat beberapa rencana. Dengan otoritas komandonya, dia memanggil Bangau: – Ini adalah musim penangkapan ikan yang sangat sulit. Jika kita ingin kenyang, kita harus membuat usaha patungan. Bangau mengangguk, menambahkan: - Saya setuju; mari kita beternak ikan kakap putih dan ikan mas krusia. Jenis ini berumur panjang dan sangat produktif. Pekakak dan Bangau sepakat untuk berbagi tugas beternak, dan tidak ada diskriminasi yang diizinkan. (...) Namun imbalannya berbeda: Pekakak bertanggung jawab untuk ikan kakap putih dan, dengan demikian, dapat memiliki lebih banyak ikan kakap putih, sedangkan Bangau mendapat ikan mas krusia. Siapapun yang memelihara ikan mana yang lebih banyak akan menikmati 80% dari panen akhir ikan tersebut. Keduanya akan mengevaluasi dan membagi produk ternak pada akhir musim beternak. Ini berarti mengantongi sendiri ikan hasil usaha patungan untuk diri sendiri itu dilarang. (shrink)

Suatu pagi di musim panas, desa burung diselimuti keheningan. Semua orang sibuk mendengarkan pengembara baru. Burung pengembara ini berasal dari keluarga yang tidak jelas; bulunya berwarna-warni, gerak-geriknya lucu, dan ilmunya baru. Dia bercerita seolah-olah sedang memberi ceramah, tepat sekali, warga desa memanggilnya burung Guru – orang yang menjawab setiap pertanyaan aneh warga desa yang rajin belajar. Burung pelatuk telah belajar menangkap cacing di sore hari, sehingga mereka tidak perlu bangun pagi. Burung pipit sekarang tahu cara mencuri beras dari gudang saat (...) sawah mulai kering. Bulbul, sementara itu, telah mengambil kesempatan berkumpul untuk memamerkan kecantikan dan fashion mereka… . (shrink)

Pekakak selama ini tinggal di gua galiannya sendiri di tepi kolam, tapi sekarang dia memutuskan bahwa dia membutuhkan rumah baru. Dia melakukan tur keliling desa untuk melihat bagaimana burung-burung lain membangun rumah mereka. Dia mengunjungi Tuan Pipit, yang tinggal di pohon pinus yang bersiul. Bagian depan bangunannya tampak indah, dan lokasinya yang tinggi memberikan ventilasi yang baik. Tapi, semakin lama dia menginap, dia jadi semakin pusing. Hembusan angin apa pun yang menerpa membuat seluruh struktur bangunan bergetar seolah-olah akan hancur berantakan.

The study of teleology is challenging in many ways, but there is a particular challenge that makes matters worse, distorting the conceptual space that has set the terms of debate. And that is the tendency to think about teleology in terms of certain long-established dichotomies. In this paper, we examine four such dichotomies prevalent in the literature on teleology, the notions that: 1) Teleological explanations are opposed to mechanistic explanations; 2) teleology must arise from processes operating either internal to an (...) organism or external to it; 3) systems are either alive and teleological, or nonliving and not teleological; 4) humans are teleological, on account of our ability to intend, seek, prefer, etc., while other systems without these capacities are not. Here, we use our own view of goal directedness, field theory, to show for each dichotomy that there is an alternative, a view of teleology that either violates these dichotomies or demands revision of them. What this reveals is not only the dangers of dichotomous thinking, but a widespread lack of clarity about what teleology is. (shrink)

_Imagination_ is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons (...) why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it. (shrink)

In 1794, Michael Wenzel Voigt, a professor of rhetoric in present-day Czechia, published the first German translation of Aristotle’s De anima. Voigt’s translation was explicitly intended to rescue Aristotle's views on the soul, and the bold strategy he adopts towards this end is to assert a direct connection between Aristotle’s doctrines and Kant’s Critical philosophy. Thus, he contends that Aristotle’s books on the soul can be read as an “appendix” or even as a “propadeutic” to Kant’s Critical works. Despite Voigt’s (...) rather hamfisted attempt to establish this connection, the conjecture at the core of his project—that a number of key Kantian claims about the mind or soul have a largely overlooked Aristotelian provenance—turns out to be correct, or so I argue in this chapter. Even so, we will see that this connection is not direct but is instead mediated by the reception of Aristotle in the late 17th and early 18th century. Moreover, it is not limited to the views Aristotle expresses in his texts on the soul but extends beyond his psychological and even metaphysical works to include views expressed in his logical and ethical thought. (shrink)

Amalia Holst was an important pedagogical theorist and philosopher who was part of the distinctive intellectual milieu of Hamburg in the late 18th and early 19th century. Holst has enjoyed a fair amount of attention from scholars working on the history of feminism, and she has recently come to the attention of historians of philosophy for her incisive critique of (Rousseau-inspired) educational theories, her vocal advocacy for women’s access to higher education, and for apparently radical lines of thinking in her (...) views on history, religion, and morality. While Holst was something of a public figure in Hamburg—she published two controversial treatises in her lifetime, in addition to a lengthy review of a popular novel—there is relatively little known about her life, with most of what we do know owed to only a sparse handful of sources. It is, therefore, a rather significant development for scholars working on Holst that two letters by her should come to light. These letters are replete with new details of Holst’s life, her intellectual network, and they seem to have been wholly unaccounted for by Holst’s biographers. In this article, I will provide a transcription and translation, with annotations, of the two new letters. (shrink)

It is commonly agreed that so-called echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, associated with social media, are detrimental to liberal democracies. Drawing on John Rawls’s political liberalism, we offer a novel explanation of why social media platforms amplifying echo chambers and epistemic bubbles are likely contributing to the violation of the democratic norms connected to the ideal of public reason. These norms are clarified with reference to the method of (full) reflective equilibrium, which we argue should be cultivated as a civic (...) virtue in the context of political justification. The paper demonstrates how epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are likely to be detrimental to the disposition to follow the method of reflective equilibrium in the political context. Based on this diagnosis the paper highlights the need for interventions that help cultivate reflective equilibrium as a civic virtue and the need for corresponding interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

The intersection of language, stigma, and neuropsychiatry is an integral area of concern for limited english proficiency (LEP) communities, demanding a greater focus in U.S. healthcare systems. Lan...

Although Gilles Deleuze never explicitly developed what might be considered a ‘philosophy of technology’, this article nonetheless attempts to outline the rudiments of a Deleuzian approach to technology by proposing a series of interrelated concepts: (1) prosthesis (technological artefacts are externalised organs); (2) proto-technicity, or originary technicity (but this technicity already exists in Nature, all the way down, and precedes any ‘theory’); (3) exodarwinism (the fact that evolutionary time has bifurcated, and technology evolves in a faster and accelerating time scale); (...) (4) de-specialisation or de-differentiation (what conditions the externalisation of organs is their deterritorialisation); (5) motricity (the link between the brain and the hand/mouth is primarily one of movement); (6) inscription, or graphism (the link between mouth and hand takes place through phonetic writing, when the hand reproduces speech in graphic inscriptions); (7) maker's knowledge (we know the organisations of matter found in nature through the organisations of matter that we ourselves have created); and finally, (8) totipotence (like a stem cell, the body is capable of externalising an almost unlimited number of forms and functions; it is itself an abstract and the source of abstractions). (shrink)

Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation, but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis ofinvention as a mental or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with objects, or what we call mental models (...) and mechanical representations. The strategies by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality by Christina Van DykeAnn W. AstellA Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality. By Christina Van Dyke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xxv + 228. $41.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-886168-3.Building upon Étienne Gilson’s The Mystical Theology of St. Bernard (1940), which identified a systematic structure in the thought of a great contemplative (...) theologian, Jean Leclercq’s paradigm-shifting book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (1960), won a place for medieval monastic theology alongside Scholastic theology, broadening the canon for scholars of medieval theology. That theological canon has long since been further broadened to include the books of women mystics.Van Dyke’s book similarly aims to widen the canon of texts studied under the rubric of medieval philosophy to include contemplative writings by women and men, some of whom are also regarded as mystics. This short, wise, and winning book is “perhaps the first book-length reintegration of the medieval contemplative tradition into discussions of medieval philosophy” (208).Van Dyke urges her fellow philosophers to engage seriously with meditative and mystical writings as a corrective of historically false claims: first, that “women didn’t do philosophy in the Middle Ages” (1); second, that mystical and contemplative writings, by definition, lack philosophical/rational content; third, that Scholastic disputations arose purely within the “isolated bubbles” of the universities and did not reflect ongoing societal and ecclesial “conversations that frequently included women” (2). Beyond this corrective [End Page 707] function, Van Dyke argues that the pairing of contemplative with Scholastic texts enriches the study of medieval philosophy through complementation by reinforcing philosophy’s status as a transformative pursuit of wisdom, highlighting its inherent variety as a field, engaging the historical voices of men and women alike in discussions of topics of common interest, and demonstrating the mutual complementarity of the Scholastic and contemplative philosophical traditions, which have distinctive emphases and provide different angles of approach to given questions and topics.What topics? The adjective “hidden” in the title has a double meaning. It gently points to the medieval contemplative tradition as “hidden” to presentday philosophers who, Van Dyke hopes, will discover its philosophical richness. The adjective also pairs with the adjectival noun “contemplatives” in the subtitle, suggesting the interplay in Van Dyke’s vocabulary, which treats “mystic” (a word often glossed as “hidden to the senses”) and “contemplative” as synonyms, but favors the latter as more directly indicative of willed and embodied cognition. In this choice, she draws encouragement both from Bernard McGinn’s broad definition of mysticism (namely, as a contemplative way of preparing one for the direct experience of God’s presence) and from Nicholas Watson’s description of mystical experience as “phenomenological” and “transcendent” (20); she distances herself from the purely psychological interests of William James and the homogenizing views of Evelyn Underhill.In chapter 1, “Mysticism, Methodology, and Epistemic Justice,” Van Dyke takes her fellow philosophers to task for defining “mysticism” narrowly in a way that excludes “embodied, non-unitive states... visions, auditions, and other somatic experiences” (4). This too-narrow definition, she argues, has worked “‘against the recognition of women’s experiences as properly mystical’” (10), excluded meditative practices belonging to the contemplative path practiced by medieval Christians, and effected “the exclusion of philosophers from most of the ongoing interand intradisciplinary conversations about mysticism” (20).The subtitle of Van Dyke’s book conveniently lists five topics—self-knowledge, reason, love, persons, and immortality—that reflect the major themes of chapters 2 through 6. These short chapters each have a similar arrangement, showcasing both the questions common to Scholastics and contemplatives and the differences in their approaches.Chapter 2, “Self-Knowledge” opens with the observation, “The importance of self-knowledge is a truth universally acknowledged in the contemplative philosophical tradition” (33). According to Van Dyke, university-based discussions about the self tend to inquire “about ‘what’ we are and how we come to know this, while contemplative and mystical discussions tend to focus on ‘who’ we are and to emphasize the significance of self... (shrink)

Czech translation of T. W. Adorno’s Die Aktualität der Philosophie.

Standard reasons-responsiveness theories, such as Fischer’s and Ravizza’s (1998), tell us to look to other possible worlds in order to determine whether an agent is appropriately responsive to reasons. Carolina Sartorio (2018) has given a powerful critique of such counterfactual accounts of reasons-responsiveness, what she calls the “demarcation problem,” and has given an alternative way of characterizing reasons-responsiveness, one that allegedly avoids the demarcation problem. While we agree with Sartorio that the demarcation problem is a serious one for standard counterfactual (...) accounts of reasons-responsiveness, we argue that her own characterization of reasons-responsiveness faces a serious demarcation problem of its own. We conclude by sketching a characterization of reasons-responsiveness that, although inspired by Sartorio’s account, promises to avoid any demarcation problem. (shrink)

St. Thomas Aquinas preaches in his sermon Puer Iesus, "Just as your father begot you bodily, your teacher begot you spiritually." St. Thomas himself has been blessed with prodigious fecundity through the centuries for his teaching in the Holy Spirit. Always, he leads us to think of the Blessed Trinity and all things from God's own view. With new insights into St. Thomas's spiritual teaching in its sources, context, breadth, wisdom, and influences, Thomas Aquinas as Spiritual Teacher presents chapters inspired (...) by an international conference cosponsored by the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Dominican House of Studies. The volume, like its conference, honors Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP, adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, for his dedication to the spiritual teaching of St. Thomas in several decades of service to the Church and the academy. Luis F. Cardinal Ladaria, SJ, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, contributed the volume's foreword. Contributors to this book include: Serge-Thomas Bonino, OP; Romanus Cessario, OP; Therese Scarpelli Cory; Michael A. Dauphinais; Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, OP; Bishop Daniel E. Flores; Wojciech Giertych, OP; Andrew Hofer, OP; Luis F. Cardinal Ladaria, SJ; Dominic Legge, OP; Steven A. Long; Roger W. Nutt; Michael Root; Daria Spezzano; Thomas Weinandy, OFM, Cap.; and Thomas Joseph White, OP-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transformed Lives: Making Sense of Atonement Today by Cynthia S. W. CrysdaleVirginia W. LandgrafTransformed Lives: Making Sense of Atonement Today Cynthia S. W. Crysdale new york: seabury books, 2016. 192 pp. $16.00Cynthia Crysdale aims to show how atonement can have meaning for modern and postmodern Christians who reject the idea that God wills Jesus's violent death. She starts with stories of people who were estranged from God but (...) have been given grace to love God anew. Their subsequent lives are not perfect and involve multiple deaths of the old self and resurrections into the new. Yet there is a reconciliation not present beforehand: not a change in God, who has always loved us, but a change in us. Crysdale seeks to navigate between two undesirable positions: a penal substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, which she thinks posits a violent God, or a rejection of the idea of atonement altogether. She sees atonement as not only moral influence showing an example but a relationship that involves our whole being.Crysdale then presents a historical overview to show that this understanding of atonement is a plausible interpretation of scripture and tradition. Biblical sacrifices were not intended to propitiate an angry deity but to expiate human sin. New Testament writers who saw Jesus's death on the cross in continuity with these sacrifices were not implying that God was punishing Jesus. Jesus's statements about giving his life as a ransom prophesied the subversion of patron–client power relations rather than predicting a transaction whereby Jesus would pay for sin. Subsequent writers who saw Jesus as gaining victory over the devil saw God and Jesus as united against the powers and Jesus as attaining justice by love. Even Anselm, sometimes blamed for the penal substitutionary view, intended to avoid the idea of the crucifixion as God's punishment of Jesus. In the honor code of the time, either satisfaction or punishment was required. Therefore, Jesus's act of making satisfaction is precisely not punishment. Crysdale sees subsequent conflations of satisfaction and punishment as distorting Anselm's original intent and implying that God requires violent punishment of sin. [End Page 208]Crysdale then takes readers on a tour of changes in scientific, historical, and epistemological consciousness in the modern era to ask how theology might be done today. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan, she describes multiple dimensions of conversion that are all instances of grace when they occur. She then interprets the incarnation as indicating God's offer of friendship with humanity and Jesus's death and resurrection as indicating the transformation of power and oppression. Believing that an abstract atonement over the heads of human beings does not exist, she concludes with further stories of lives transformed by an encounter with God, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day.This book is suitable for educated lay adults, advanced undergraduates, or introductory seminary courses. Protestant audiences may find it typically Catholic, even though Crysdale is an Anglican, because it emphasizes changed lives rather than God's act of justification prior to any change in us. Theologically, it does not deal with every possible objection to its thesis. Those concerned with cultures of impunity, where malevolent lawlessness gets its way, may think that rejecting any sense of punishment of sin in the crucifixion throws the baby out with the bathwater. Recently, Fleming Rutledge (in The Crucifixion), drawing on Karl Barth, has made a point of retaining punishment as one meaning of the atonement even while emphasizing that God's wrath is always in the service of God's love. Transformed Lives does not have the last word on the atonement and would not claim to, since Crysdale wants to invite readers to do theology befitting their changing context. However, readers at many levels will benefit from its accessible treatment of its topic and invitation to reflection that befits a loving, reconciling, evil-opposing God.Virginia W. LandgrafAmerican Theological Library AssociationCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Two recent papers by Michael Burke bearing upon the persistence of people and commonplace things illustrate the fact that the quest for synchronic ontological economy is likely to encourage a disturbing diachronic proliferation of entities. This discussion argues that Burke's promise of ontological economy is seriously compromised by the fact that his proposed metaphysic does violence to standard intuitions concerning the persistence of people and commonplace things. In effect, Burke would have us achieve synchronic economy (rejection of coincident entities) by (...) postulating strongly counterintuitive transtemporal claims of numerical diversity. The argument is made that the price of Burkean economy is too high. (shrink)

Accelerating advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have increased concerns about serious risks, including potentially catastrophic risks to humanity. Prevailing trends of AI R&D are leading to increasing humanization of AI, to the emergence of concerning behaviors, and toward possible recursive self-improvement. There has been increasing speculation that these factors increase the risk of an AI takeover of human affairs, and possibly even human extinction. The most extreme of such speculations result at least partly from anthropomorphism, but since AIs are being (...) humanized, it is challenging to disentangle valid from invalid anthropomorphic concerns. This publication identifies eight fundamentally unnatural attributes of digital AI, each of which should differentiate AI behaviors from those of biological organisms, including humans. All have the potential to accelerate AI evolution, which might increase takeover concerns; but surprisingly, most also have the potential to defuse the hypothetical conflicts that dominate takeover speculations. Certain attributes should give future AI long-term foresight and realism that are essentially impossible for humans. I conclude that claims of highly probable hostile takeover and human extinction suffer from excessive anthropomorphism and a lack of skepticism and scientific rigor. Given the evidence presented here, I propose a more plausible but still speculative future scenario: extensively humanized AIs will become vastly more capable than humans of making decisions that benefit humans, and rational people will want AI to assume progressively greater influence over human affairs. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that low-mass primordial black holes cannot constitute a significant fraction of the dark matter in our universe due to their predicted short lifetimes from the conventional Hawking radiation and evaporation process. Assuming physical black holes are nonsingular--likely due to quantum gravity or other high-energy physics--we demonstrate that a large class of nonsingular black holes have finite evaporation temperatures. This can lead to slowly evaporating low-mass black holes or to remnant mass states that circumvent traditional evaporation constraints. (...) As a proof of concept, we explore the limiting curvature hypothesis and the evaporation process of a nonsingular black hole solution in two-dimensional dilaton gravity. We identify generic features of the radiation profile and compare them with known regular black holes, such as the Bardeen solution in four dimensions. Remnant masses are proportional to the fundamental length scale, and we argue that slowly evaporating low-mass nonsingular black holes, or remnants, are viable dark matter candidates. (shrink)

This is the second of five chapters on good, and starts by making the point that it is around the question of the intrinsically good that the chief controversies about the nature of goodness or value revolve, for most theories of value may be divided into those that treat it as a quality and those that treat it as a relation between that which has value and something else ; Ross says that it seems clear that any view that treats (...) goodness as a relation between that which is good and something else denies that anything is intrinsically good. The chapter first discusses R. B. Perry's relational view of value—in the sense of good, and other theories that also identify goodness with some relation, either as a relation between that which is good and some or all of its elements, or as a relation between some or all of its elements, or as a relation between it or some or all of its elements and something else. Next, the psychological theories of good are discussed; these, as a rule, hold that a thing being good means either that some person or persons have some feelings towards it, or some person or persons think it to be good; this is an objective view of good. The rest of the chapter looks at both R. B. Perry's and G. E. Moore's arguments on these theories, at Ross's own views, at badness as incompatible with goodness or as an element of a good thing, at W. M. Urban's work on the question of values, and at B. Croce's arguments on value judgements. Ross concludes that the arguments in favour of thinking of value as an objective are no more successful than those in favour of treating it as a relation, and presents a lengthy validation of his conclusion, based largely on discussion of beauty and goodness. (shrink)

The existence of non-standard models of first-order Peano-Arithmetic (PA) threatens to undermine the claim of the moderate mathematical realist that non-mysterious access to the natural number structure is possible on the basis of our best arithmetical theories. The move to logics stronger than FOL is denied to the moderate realist on the grounds that it merely shifts the indeterminacy “one level up” into the meta-theory by, illegitimately, assuming the determinacy of the notions needed to formulate such logics. This paper argues (...) that the challenge can be met. We show how the quantifier “there are infinitely many” can be uniquely determined in a naturalistically acceptable fashion and thus be used in the formulation of a theory of arithmetic. We compare the approach pursued here with Field’s justification of the same device and the popular strategy of invoking a second-order formalism, and argue that it is more robust than either of the alternative proposals. (shrink)

Individuals high in depressive symptom severity show probability bias: they believe negative events are relatively probable, and positive events relatively improbable, compared to those with less severe symptoms. However, this has only ever been demonstrated using self-report measures, in which participants explicitly estimate events’ probabilities: this leaves open the risk that “probability bias” is merely an artefact of response bias. We tested the veracity of probability bias using an indirect behavioural measure, based on a sentence-reading task. Study 1 tested 112 (...) Turkish students; Study 2 tested 117 international users of online groups for people with depressive and anxiety disorders. As predicted, participants with higher depressive symptom scores responded relatively quickly to sentences stating negative events might occur, and relatively slowly to sentences stating positive events might occur, compared to those with lower scores. This effect was only marginal in Study 1, but reached significance in Study 2. However, contrary to predictions, this effect was not moderated by the probability level stated in the sentence. This makes our findings difficult to interpret, and we must present these studies as a failure to convincingly demonstrate depression-related probability bias. We hope this stimulates more work on the nature and veracity of probability bias. (shrink)

There has been in recent years a huge surge of interest in the so-called extended Wigner’s friend scenario (EWFS). In short, a series of theorems (with some variation in detail) puts pressure on the ability of different agents in the scenario to account for each of the others’ measured outcomes: the outcomes cannot be assigned single well-defined values while also satisfying other reasonable physical assumptions. These theorems have been interpreted as showing that there can be no absolute, third-person, ‘God’s eye’ (...) description of our reality. The focus of this paper is the strongest of these no-go theorems, the ‘local friendliness’ theorem of Bong et al. (2020, _Nature Physics_, _16_, 1199–1205), which gives earnest consideration to the possibility of a measurement that unitarily reverses an entire lab system, including a conscious agent, thereby erasing the agent’s memory. The purpose of this paper is to begin the philosophical conversation regarding key questions concerning this process: Are the events in the lab merely ‘erased’, or do they in some sense not exist at all? What would it be like to be unitarily reversed? Should an agent care about any experiences they have inside the lab before they are reversed? This analysis employs a parallel case of memory erasure, to which this case can be contrasted, arising in the context of drug-induced amnesia as a result of administering anaesthesia during medical procedures (Carbonell, 2014, _Bioethics_, _28_(5), 245–254). I argue that the consequences of unitarily reversing an agent are much more dramatic than simply memory erasure—the set of events themselves, and the personal timeline of the agent, leave no record at all inside or outside the lab. I consider the ramifications of this for the picture of reality that arises from the EWFS. (shrink)

One of the most suggestive points of contact between the thought of the Japanese philosopher and psychiatrist Kimura Bin and the phenomenology of Renaud Barbaras is the parallel between the way the concepts of life as a movement (of becoming) and as an event (of individuation) function in Barbaras’s work, and the way that Kimura employs the terms bios (the individuated life of the organism) and zoē (life as the shared power in all living things). This conceptual frame enables both (...) thinkers to give an account of life as an event that itself is caught up in the ongoing activity of the world. The article shows that bringing Kimura’s work together with Barbaras’s allows us to apprehend something that neither alone could fully grasp: the character of human life as an unfolding event that, as continuous with the life of the world, can be more fully effectuated as a movement of self-realization. (shrink)

This article responds to Yafeng Shan and Jon Williamson’s 2022 volume Evidential Pluralism in the Social Sciences, focusing on the applicability of Evidential Pluralism in the field of case study research through the use of examples from political science. The article argues that Shan and Williamson’s guidance on (a) what evidence one needs to establish causation in singular case studies and (b) what one may conclude at the population level once one has done so is lacking in some important respects. (...) Therefore, this article will speak to the wider community of social scientists and methodologists who are sympathetic to using a plurality of evidence in case study research, but who still want guidance of how to do so in a philosophically grounded manner. (shrink)

This article argues that the notion that state and religion should be strictly separated, resulting in a condition that is often captured by the metaphor of the “public-private divide,” is both unfounded and dangerous. It is unfounded in the sense that at least in modern functional democracies, the state and religion are not actually separated but are in fact constantly interacting and affecting one another. It is dangerous in the sense that if church and state could truly be separated, it (...) would pose an existential threat to modern democratic-constitutional governance. (shrink)

In this lucidly written, soundly researched monograph, Alex Bellamy vividly portrays the complex, often bewildering, spectrum of forces and factions involved in Syria’s tragic experiences during th...

Reiner Schürmann, known for his readings of Heidegger and Eckhart, was also known for his philosophy of ontological anarché. The transition from metaphysical theory to post-metaphysical practice, for him, meant the transition from theoria, which looks at phenomena monomorphically in accordance with principles (archai), to a praxis that is an-archic and thinks in recognition of polymorphic singularities. Here, I seek to clarify Schürmann’s notion of ontological anarchy and the praxis following it. I inquire into its political implications and relation to (...) political anarchism. What is the connection between his “radical phenomenology” of ontological anarché and what he called anarchic praxis? (shrink)

Cet article propose une réinterprétation du système des arts de Hegel. Il montre que ce système contient deux affirmations apparemment contradictoires. D’une part, Hegel soutient que les différents arts ont leurs propres potentialités et accomplissements, irréductibles les uns aux autres. D’autre part, il affirme que ces potentialités et accomplissements ne peuvent être compris que dans le cadre d’une conception d’ensemble de l’art pris en totalité. Loin de d’intégrer l’art comme un tout dans son système, Hegel combine une conception des différents (...) arts comme pratiques autonomes avec l’idée que les différents arts (en tant qu’accomplissements de ce qu’est l’art) sont des contributions au sein de contextes historico-culturels dans lesquels individus et groupes interagissent avec eux. Selon Hegel, les différents arts entrent dans des échanges dynamiques les uns avec les autres sur la base de leur enjeu commun, à savoir de fournir des impulsions productives au mouvement autonome des pratiques historico-culturelles. Les réflexions de Hegel sur l’art offrent ainsi une perspective sur l’unité hétérogène des arts. (shrink)

ExcerptTo invoke the term “morality” in the same sentence as Carl Schmitt will undoubtedly baffle some of his critics. Indeed, his more strident ones will probably be greatly offended by any such juxtaposition of Schmitt and morality. His name is still too often associated with a theory of—even despicable admiration for—the exercise of amoral political power, or an equally repugnant supple amoral opportunism emanating from a kind of nihilistic existentialism.