This book is a new interpretation of Schelling's path-breaking 1809 treatise on freedom, the last major work published during his lifetime. The treatise is at the heart of the current Schelling renaissance—indeed, Heidegger calls it "one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy." It is also one of the most demanding and complex texts in German Idealism. By tracing the problem of ground through Schelling's treatise, this book provides a unified reading of the text, while unlocking (...) the meaning of its most challenging passages through clear, detailed analysis. This analysis shows how Schelling's implicit distinction between senses of ground is the key to his project of constructing a system that can satisfy reason while accommodating objects that seem to defy rational explanation—including evil, the origins of nature, and absolute freedom. This allows Schelling to unite reason and mystery, providing a rich model for philosophizing about freedom and evil today. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show the real nature of Universal Grammar. Universal grammar is separate part of human mind which makes language learning possible and generative. Universal grammar is the symbolic and systematic rules inside our mind. These rules help us to classify, analyze, differentiate, assimilate, understand and recognize human language. This paper determines the real nature of philosophical grammar and discusses the modular and non-modular approach of it. I shall examine the critical approaches of Wittgenstein and Chomsky and their (...) comparison to investigate the philosophical grammar. (shrink)

Statements such as “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful” sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used (“beautiful”, “elegant”, “dynamic”, etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive (...) to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including “beautiful” appeared more contradictory than those including “elegant” and “dynamic”, pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers’ consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty. (shrink)

Aesthetic chills occur in artistic, scientific and religious context. We introduce a theoretical framework relating them to humans’ vital need for cognition. We discuss the implications of such a framework and the plausibility of our hypothesis. Numerous references to chills are introduced.

This paper defends the view that one's own mental states are metaphysically privileged vis-à-vis the mental states of others, even if only subjectively so. This is an instance of a more general view called Subjectivism, according to which reality is only subjectively the way it is. After characterizing Subjectivism in analogy to two relatively familiar views in the metaphysics of modality and time, I compare the Subjectivist View of the Mental with Egocentric Presentism, a version of Subjectivism recently advocated by (...) Caspar Hare. I argue that the Subjectivist View of the Mental goes a considerable way towards solving certain long-standing philosophical puzzles having to do with the unity of consciousness, the contents of self-awareness and the intransmissibility of experiential knowledge through testimony. (shrink)

Bissell offers a new interpretation and clarification of Rand's definition of art, maintaining that an artwork, like language, functions as a "tool of cognition," and that it does so more specifically as a special kind of microcosm which presents an imaginary world. In particular, he argues that architecture and music are aesthetic microcosms and tools of cognition that re-create reality and embody fundamental abstractions and, thus, contrary to assertions by certain Objectivist writers, are forms of art consistent with Rand's definition (...) and concept. (shrink)

Abstract Bentham favored a free press as an instrument of public control of the state, in the interest of the general happiness. Kant favored free public discussion as an instrument for the development and expression of autonomous rationality. But a free press embodied in the property rights of the owners of the press may well fail to achieve either Benthamite or Kantian goals. Such goals lead to a personal right to communicate rather than to a corporate right to press freedom.

Why is pain the opposite of pleasure? Several theories of pleasure and pain have substantial difficulty explaining this basic feature. Theories according to which pleasure and pain are individual sensations or features of sensations have particular difficulty, since it is difficult to understand how pairs of sensations could be opposites. Some philosophers argue that the pain is the opposite of pleasure because pain and pleasure are fundamentally a matter of desire and aversion, and desire and aversion are clear opposites. I (...) argue that the structure of desire and aversion does not correspond to that of pleasure and pain. I propose that pleasure and pain are opposites because pleasure is good and pain is bad, and good and bad are clear opposites. I show that this view explains the structure of opposition of pleasure and pain, and I answer several objections. (shrink)

Mencius’ aesthetics unfolded around the ideal personality in his mind. Such an ideal personality belonged to a great man who was sublime, practical and honorable, and it was presented as the beauty of magnificence or the beauty of masculinity. Mencius put forward many propositions such as the completed goodness that is brightly displayed is called greatness, nourishing one’s grand qi 气 (the great morale personality), only after a man is a sage can he completely suits himself to his own form, (...) the saints only apprehended before me that of which my mind approves along with other men, being conscious of sincerity on self-examination, and flowing abroad, above and beneath, like that of Heaven and Earth, all of which described an ideal personality through the course of its formation and its psychological experience. As a prominent school before the Qin dynasty, Mencius’ aesthetics greatly developed the Confucian teaching of internal sage. It shared many similarities with Zhuangzi’s thought and was also an aesthetic mode opposed to the latter. Both kinds of aesthetics were prominent: Mencius’ teaching was like imposingly towering and muscularly overflowing majestic mountains; Zhuangzi’s thought was like gracefully flowing water with an air of femininity. In real life though, Mencius’ teaching has greater practical significance in addressing the unbearable lightness of being, a disease of modernity. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

Abstract: Kant declares the judgment of beauty to be neither ‘objective’ nor ‘merely subjective’. This essay takes up the question of what this might mean and whether it can be taken seriously. It is often supposed that Kant's denials of ‘objectivity’ to the judgment of beauty express a rejection of realism about beauty. I suggest that Kant's thought is not to be understood in these terms—that it does not properly belong in the arena of debates about the constituents of ‘reality’—motivating (...) the suggestion by first considering a pair of opposing views on the question of whether Kant can be understood to develop a real alternative to realism about beauty at all. (shrink)

It is commonplace today to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity. Consider the headlines from COP24, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Poland in December 2018. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres opened the proceedings by calling climate change “the most important issue we face” (PBS 2018). The Secretary-General’s remarks paraphrase the opening line of the U.N.’s climate change web page, which announces that “[c]limate Change is the defining issue of our time and we (...) are at a defining moment” (United Nations n.d.). Such statements about the singular significance of climate change—the most important, the defining issue—are often followed by proclamations about what hangs in the balance, and this was the case at COP24. There, the celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned that “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizons,” amounting to, in his words, “disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years” (PBS 2018). (shrink)

Although the free-will reply to divine hiddenness is often associated with Kant, the argument typically presented in the literature is not the strongest Kantian response. Kant’s central claim is not that knowledge of God would preclude the possibility of transgression, but rather that it would preclude one’s viewing adherence to the moral law as a genuine sacrifice of self-interest. After explaining why the Kantian reply to hiddenness is superior to standard formulations, I argue that, despite Kant’s general skepticism about theodicy, (...) his insights pertaining to hiddenness also provide the foundation for a new theodicy that merits serious attention. (shrink)

Elitist readers, such as John Rawls, see Nietzsche as concerned only with the flourishing of a few great contributors to culture; egalitarian readers, such as Stanley Cavell, see Nietzschean culture as a universal affair involving every individual’s self-cultivation. This paper offers a compromise, reading Nietzsche as a ‘cultural elitist’ for whom culture demands that a few great individuals be supported in a voluntary, rather than state-mandated way. Rawls, it claims, is therefore misguided in worrying that Nietzsche’s elitism is a threat (...) to justice. The paper focuses on Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator, the key text in the elitist-egalitarian debate. (shrink)

Proposes a new way of understanding the nature of metaphysics, focusing on nonreductionist emergence theory, both in ancient and modern philosophy, as well as in contemporary philosophy of science.

This article addresses the question of the mechanisms of the emergence of structure and meaning in the biological and physical sciences. It proceeds from an examination of the concept of intentionality and proposes a model of intentional behavior on the basis of results of computer simulations of structural and functional self-organization. Current attempts to endow intuitive aspects of meaningful complexity with operational content are analyzed and the metaphor of DNA as a computer program (the `genetic program') is critically examined in (...) relation to an alternative metaphor of DNA as data. It is argued that relatively simple networks of boolean automata can classify and recognize patterns of binary strings on the basis of non-programmed, self-generated criteria, but lack a capacity for self-observation and interpretation. To overcome this problem it is necessary to clarify the relationships between the goals and underlying mechanisms of a process and between a system and its environment. It will be shown that memory devices that record the histories of interactions are essential for models of conscious and unconscious intentional behavior and that the possibility of infinitely sophisticated - and therefore unprogrammable - machines cannot be avoided. It will be argued that the notion of infinite sophistication allows the ideas of self-organization and physical determinism to be reconciled. These models will be used to suggest how the voluntary aspect of decision-making in general can emerge out of functional self-organizing processes. The conclusion will introduce the notion of `underdetermination' of theories, which imposes an intrinsic limitation on models of complex natural systems - a limitation that, at the same time, may be precisely what makes possible mutual understanding and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Al-Shāfi’ī has been unreservedly credited as one of the designers, if not the “master architect,” of uṣūl al-fiqh. His most important scholarly work, Al-Risālah, clearly demonstrates his cognitive creativity in this field. One of the methodologies for the decision of cases under Islamic law that Al-Shāfi’ī championed is qiyās, which he equated with ijtihād. His balanced approach invites further enquiry into the extensive use of qiyās in general and in criminal law in particular. The extent to which qiyās can be (...) applied to Islamic criminal law depends upon the degree or typology of qiyās being used, taking into account the Islamic theory of criminology. This article will analyse the position of al-Shāfi’ī in this regard. It will critically examine al-Shāfi’ī’s complex views on the use of qiyās as a method for establishing culpability under Islamic criminal law. It will then explore how his position corresponds to the human rights paradigm in the contemporary age. This article concludes that, while the use of qiyās in criminal law, especially in law of retaliation and predetermined punishments in accordance with al-Shāfi’ī’s approach is tantamount to incriminating a person based on less than certainty, it also represents the most promising way of protecting the right of victim. (shrink)

This paper compares Kant's positions on space, time, the relational character of noumena, and the relational character of the self, with the somewhat similar accounts of those things in two philosophers of the Kyoto school: Keiji Nishitani and Nishida Kitaro. I will argue that the philosophers of the Kyoto school had a more coherent and better integrated account of those ideas, that was open to Kant. I think that the comparison both clarifies Kant's position on these topics, and elucidates the (...) topics. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the awesome, almost spiritual feeling I experience as an?extreme spectator? while watching Kelly Slater ride the monstrous waves of Pipeline. Drawing on the aesthetics of Kant and Schopenhauer, I examine the experience of the sublime and how it, in conjunction with the perceived kinetic melody of Slater's movements and his karmic connection to the environment in which he thrives, gives rise to the deeply felt awe of the extreme spectator. My intention is to use Slater's (...) case as a paradigm that can be applied to many other athletic performances which share the characteristics discussed in the paper. (shrink)

This article puts forward a revisionary reading of Hegel's reception in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, in suggesting that the stance of the British Hegelians is very close to the sort of non-metaphysical or category theory interpretations that have been in vogue amongst contemporary commentators. It is shown that the British Hegelians arrived at this position as a way of responding to the hostile existentialist reaction to Hegel begun by Schelling in the 1840s, which led them to (...) abandon the standard Neoplatonic reading of his idealism, and arrive at the sort of non- metaphysical account which is most fully developed by J M E McTaggart in his interpretation of Hegel's Logic. (shrink)

This article seeks to address current debates comparing polls and opinion mining as empirically based figuration models of public opinion in the light of in-depth intellectual debates on the role and nature of public opinion that began after the French Revolution and the controversy over public opinion spurred by the invention of polls. Issues of historical quantification and re-conceptualisation of public opinion are addressed in four parts. The first summarises the history of the rise and fall of the concept of (...) public opinion. The second re-examines the key controversies in the debates on the theoretical, empirical and social implications and consequences of the invention of polling. The third part scrutinises the datafication of public opinion that started with polling industry and continues in the age of big data and data mining. The final section discusses the controversial potentials of opinion-mining technology and suggests ways in which social scientists could critically respond to the big data and opinion-mining challenges in order to reintegrate the ideas of publicness, the public and public sphere into public opinion research. (shrink)

This essay links Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of fine art to his description of Christian love. It does so by carefully showing how Marion's overall project is closely related to Kant's well-known account of the relationship between aesthetics and morality. While Kant and Marion both believe that aesthetic experience can lay the groundwork for moral action, their contrasting views of morality lead them to very different articulations of such a relationship. While Kant sees encounters with fine art as preparing individuals for (...) the particular kinds of disinterested judgments characteristic of moral decision-making, Marion sees artwork as preparing the subject for the openness toward intuitive excess that is necessary for love. (shrink)

This paper proposes to analyse the process that makes paths of action meaningful. It argues that this process is one of ‘figuration’. The term ‘figuration’ intends to outline how the experience of moral meaning is one that already positively marks out a field and to identify and analyse the mechanisms used for such marking and selection. It is my contention that these mechanisms predate the persuasion to a moral path; they are the process through which this path is constructed as (...) meaningful. This thesis is elucidated through an analysis of the tactics of meaning in Kant’s moral theory. Kant turns to aesthetics as a means of corroboration for his moral theory, but he also attempts to limit the scope of the interactions between his aesthetic and moral theory. For instance, when he writes on the topic of form in aesthetic taste or outlines the technical specifications of aesthetic judgment, it is arguably the arcane peculiarities of his system that are met. For this reason, Kant insists on the merely analogical relations between beauty and morality. However, it is also possible to see how certain aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory execute wider, and potentially more important, functions for his practical philosophy, such as providing meaningful orientation for the ascetic moral attitude of his duty-ethics. In this respect, certain figures of Kant’s aesthetic theory may well be viewed as complementing the dependence in his moral philosophy, in the important sections on moral pedagogy and methodology, on appeals to heroic models and stories as ways of shaping and inculcating the moral disposition. This paper considers these aspects of interaction between Kant’s aesthetic and moral philosophies as both 1) a problem for the consistency of his philosophy given his avowed exclusion of aesthetic and religious elements of meaning in his duty-ethics; and 2) as a case study for the new, schematic analysis of ‘moral figuration’ outlined in the paper. (shrink)

The target article by Lindquist et al. considers discrete emotions. This commentary argues that these are but a minor part of human emotional abilities, unifying us with animals. Uniquely human emotions are aesthetic emotions related to the need for the knowledge of “high” cognition, including emotions of the beautiful, cognitive dissonances, and musical emotions. This commentary touches on their cognitive functions and origins.

In this paper I compare and contrast Rawls’s notion of reflective equilibrium with Wellman‘s notion of conductive argument. In the course of so doing I will address two key questions: Are conduc-tive argument and reflective equilibrium best understood as modes of reasoning or types of argument? and What relationship, if any, is there between them?

Drawing from four Arendtian themes-plurality, the public realm, power, and perspective appreciation-I argue for citizenship as a "politics of enlarged mentality." This term suggests an alternative conception of citizenship that surpasses the limits of both the liberal and civic republican traditions. Unlike the masculinized liberal ideal of the citizen and contrary to the gendered universality that defines the civic republican traditions, a politics based on enlarged mentality combines context sensitivity with principled judgments.

Emmanuel Levinas’s doubts about the ethical value of artistic beauty have been widely acknowledged by the vast majority of Levinas’s commentators. However, though it is true that in “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas persistently rebukes artistic beauty for its nonethicality, it is undeniable that he at least upholds the value of artistic criticism and modern literature. In this article I intend to relate Levinas’s exploration of the possibility of spiritual–ethical teaching in literature to Immanuel Kant’s reflections on the relation between (...) the feeling of beauty, that of sublimity, and sensible feeling in his third Critique. This up-close comparative examination fosters understanding of Levinas’s religious and philosophical approach to the sublime elements in some literary works, especially those of Fyodor Dostoevsky. (shrink)

This paper argues against evolutionary accounts of aesthetics by defending the idea that our fundamental aesthetic categories have undergone great changes in the last two millennia, in particular, during an “artistic revolution” that lasted from 1680 to 1830. This revolution was made possible by the development of a number of technologies of art that created a separate cultural space for this new invention. The attempt to extend this revolution to include the aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment is aided by (...) a new set of technologies that help make an aesthetic object out of natural environments. This even morerecent development is further evidence against an evolutionary explanation of art. (shrink)

Ecotourism has been defined in a number of possibly incompatible ways, such as travel to especially wonderful natural sites, as aform of educational travel, and as sustainable tourism. These various understandings of ecotourism can be used to ground a number of different kinds of natural area policies. In particular they can ground a number of policies concerning the management of the many National Parks in the United States. In this paper, in order to assess these policies, I distinguish several different (...) understandings of “ecotourism” and discuss the kinds of park management programs that might be based on them. In the course of this discussion, I examine the history of tourism in Europe in order to develop other notions of ecotourism, including two based on the idea of pilgrimage. To clarify this last idea of ecotourism, I examine religious pilgrimage and several ideas of nature taken from the Romantic Movement in Europe and the Transcendentalist movement in the United States, as seen in the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, and Ansel Adams. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje nagrinėjama pojūčio logika, Deleuze’o aptarta jau knygose Kanto kritikos filosofija ir Skirtis ir kartotė. Šiuo atveju pojūčio logika analizuojama pasitelkiant meno kaip eksperimentavimo plotmę, parodant, kad menas, ypač modernusis, pats būdamas nulemtas tam tikrų pojūčio logikos principų, tuo pačiu tampa vienu geriausių būdų šias sąlygas atskleisti. Deleuze’as meną apibrėžia kaip pojūčių kūrimą, padarant nematomą jėgą matoma. Tapsmo arba genezės plotmė kasdienei patirčiai yra neprieinama, negalima reprezentuoti, tačiau menininkų kuriami pojūčiai tam tikru būdu vaizduoja nereprezentuojamybę. Francio Bacono tapyba Deleuze’o (...) yra traktuojama kaip vienas geriausių reprezentacijos, buvusios svarbiausia klasikinio meno problema, įveikos būdų ir yra aptariama pasitelkiant kitų šiuolaikinio meno krypčių, tokių kaip abstrakti tapyba ir abstraktus ekspresionizmas, analizę. Diagramos, įvedančios chaosą ir turinčios suardyti klišes bei išlaisvinti pojūtį, naudojimo būdas apibrėžia kiekvienos tapybos krypties specifiką ir pojūčio sukūrimo sėkmę. Tokie Baconui būdingi tapybos aspektai kaip haptinės erdvės sukūrimas, analoginės kalbos naudojimas ir spalvos moduliacija nusakomi kaip geriausios pojūčio išgavimą lemiančios sąlygos. Bacono kuriamos Figūros, kurios nebėra siejamos su jokiu atpažįstamu objektu, geriausiai išlaiko pojūtį, nes jėga turi būti įtempta ant kūno idant atskleistų virtualios plotmės virsmą aktualia. (shrink)

This essay argues that nano-images would be best understood with an aesthetical approach rather than with an epistemological critique. For this aim, I propose a ‘techno-aesthetical’ approach: an enquiry into the way instruments and machines transform the logic of the sensible itself and not just the way by which it represents something else. Unlike critical epistemology, which remains self-evidently grounded on a representationalist philosophy, the approach developed here presents the advantage of providing a clear-cut distinction between image-as-representation and other modes (...) of existence of images, such as the one of ‘ imaginaction ’ that I draw from a comparison between far-field and near-field microscopies. Once this regime of imaginaction is distinguished from representation, I focus on nanotechnological percepts and argue that they follow a transmodal logic. I then draw the implications of this enquiry in terms of a new sensible condition that changes the way we think of non-living objects. Finally, I conclude that if techno-aesthetics dares to posit and articulate sensibility beyond the privileged sphere of subject/object relationships, it simultaneously engages us to consider the political character of our responsibilities towards the design of nano-engineered sensorial spaces. (shrink)

In the search for the foundations of cognition philosophers often encounter a familiar problem - the problem of content. The problem of content is essentially the problem of how content, whether experiential or intentional, is possible. In practice providing a response to this problem involves providing an account of how an active self-consciousness is able to conceive/perceive, or in some way be consciousness ofx. The unique nature of this problem imposes significant constraints on the field of explanatory possibilities. Since the (...) x which is to be accounted for is essentially the possibility of absolutely any x there is no y which is not also an x. Hence, nothing remains outside of the explanandum which can be appealed to in order to account for it without, to some extent, presupposing that which needs to be explained. In many of the theories we will examine overcoming this problem involves appealing to a transcendental “structure of awareness” which more often than not is composed of “universal-like” transcendental “entities” of indeterminate nature and ontological status. A major appeal of transcendental entities is that they can at least appear to provide a way of supplying the power of objective “determinateness” necessary to account for the possibility of determination without themselves being determinates. The general strategy of appealing to such transcendental “entities” has, however, for some time been suspiciously regarded as it is unclear how such an appeal is able to avoid the aforementioned presupposition of content. But if the appeal to transcendental cognizing intermediates is to be ‘ dismissed we may be left to face up to the fact that content simply “happens”- that the process of determination, of “judgment”, is a mysterious talent that can neither be taught nor understood. Through a critical examination of both Western and Eastern philosophical approaches to the problem of content this dissertation identifies and describes, insofar as is possible, “that” through which content is rendered possible. In so doing it draws attention to previously neglected points of contact between major philosophical traditions and clarifies the central issues surrounding the problem. The dissertation supports the conclusion that, although there is a need to acknowledge a particular role for a transcendental “self- consciousness” in providing a coherent response to the problem of content, the attempt to articulate a mechanism through which this role is fulfilled most likely misguided. Although it appears to be possible both to know something about this “self-consciousness”, and even to know it more directly, it cannot be understood in the usual sense. (shrink)

Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature as follows: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the US, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional (...) justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future. Human rights scholars need a broader, extrajuridical meaning for “transitional justice” if we hope to capture its power. (shrink)

The question posed is whether the optimization methods of calculus that are often used in social and scientific analyses offer an appropriate analytical approach to analyze problems that are immersed in systemic complexity and its consequences. This paper refers to the portfolio of such complex problems belonging to social and scientific forces. We refer to such a complex combination by the term ‘socio-scientific’. In the study of socio-scientific complexity, dynamic preferences, intricate decisions, and uncertain behavior, endogenous relations and systemic perturbations (...) abound. The arguments presented in this paper establish that the methodological approach of optimization and steady-state equilibrium turns out to be nicety rather than objectivity in the presence of complexity. Complex situations of the socio-scientific universe cause perturbations in the variables; there explaining complexity formed by the social embedding of variables. Indeed, human individuals, institutions and governments, and society at large are complex interrelated entities. Therefore, complex interrelations caused by social embedding remain submerged in social perturbations. However, interactions arising from social embedding also generate endogenous and complex relations. The contribution of this paper is in the area of endogenous learning in the wellbeing objective criterion function. The interrelationships between the emergent cognitive variables now cause interactive embedding, complexity, and social perturbations. Yet such perturbations are not altogether uncontrollable. They can be and need to be controlled for the purposes of social explanation—hence demanding predictability—even as the complex nature of evolutionary systemic learning proceeds. The controllability problem of extreme perturbations leads us to formalize a mathematical methodology to study controllable perturbations while avoiding extreme forms of perturbations in socio-scientific theory. (shrink)

The German filmmaker Werner Herzog controversially associates “truth” and “reality” in film with Kant’s notion of the sublime by explicitly treating the sublime as a key element in developing his notion of ecstatic truth. I critically examine Herzog’s interpretation of Kant’s sublime and the relations he establishes between the sublime and his own key aesthetic notion of ecstatic truth. I examine how the sublime in Herzog’s films arises from encounters with the overwhelming force and power of nature experienced by his (...) characters in the feature films and participants in the documentaries. I question whether Kant’s conception of the sublime is the one that best aligns with Herzog’s aesthetic aims and I contrast Kant’s transcendental sublime with what I describe as the physiological sublime of Edmund Burke. I draw some conclusions about the moral dimension of the sublime in the context of the relationship between humans and nature within the frame of contemporary ecological concerns. (shrink)