Absolute needs (as against instrumental needs) are independent of the ends, goals and purposes of personal agents. Against the view that the only needs are instrumental needs, David Wiggins and Garrett Thomson have defended absolute needs on the grounds that the verb ‘need’ has instrumental and absolute senses. While remaining neutral about it, this article does not adopt that approach. Instead, it suggests that there are absolute biological needs. The absolute nature of these needs is (...) defended by appeal to: their objectivity (as against mind-dependence); the universality of the phenomenon of needing across the plant and animal kingdoms; the impossibility that biological needs depend wholly upon the exercise of the abilities characteristic of personal agency; the contention that the possession of biological needs is prior to the possession of the abilities characteristic of personal agency. Finally, three philosophical usages of ‘normative’ are distinguished. On two of these, to describe a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ is to describe it as value-dependent. A description of a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ in the third sense does not entail such value-dependency, though it leaves open the possibility that value depends upon the phenomenon or upon the truth of the claim. It is argued that while survival needs (or claims about them) may well be normative in this third sense, they are normative in neither of the first two. Thus, the idea of absolute need is not inherently normative in either of the first two senses. (shrink)

A number of formal epistemologists have argued that perfect rationality requires probabilistic coherence, a requirement that they often claim applies only to ideal agents. However, in “Rationality as an Absolute Concept,” Roy Sorensen contends that ‘rational’ is an absolute term. Just as Peter Unger argued that being flat requires that a surface be completely free of bumps and blemishes, Sorensen claims that being rational requires being perfectly rational. When we combine these two views, though, they lead to counterintuitive (...) results. If being rational requires being perfectly rational, and only the probabilistically coherent are perfectly rational, then this indicts all ordinary agents as irrational. In this paper, I will attempt to resolve this conflict by arguing that Sorensen is only partly correct. One important sense of ‘rational’, the sanctioning sense of ‘rational’, is an absolute term, but another important sense of ‘rational’, the sense in which someone can have rational capacities, is not. I will, then, show that this distinction has important consequences for theorizing about ideal rationality, developing an account of the relationship between ordinary and ideal rationality. Because the sanctioning sense of ‘rational’ is absolute, it is rationally required to adopt the most rational attitude available, but which attitude is most rational can change depending on whether we are dealing with ideal agents or people more like ourselves. (shrink)

It is a consequence of both Kennedy and McNally’s typology of the scale structures of gradable adjectives and Kennedy’s :1–45, 2007) economy principle that an object is clean just in case its degree of cleanness is maximal. So they jointly predict that the sentence ‘Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one’ :259–288, 2004) is a contradiction. Surely, one can account for the sentence’s assertability by saying that the first instance of ‘clean’ is used (...) loosely: since ‘clean’ pragmatically conveys the property of being close to maximally clean rather than the property of being maximally clean, the sentence as a whole conveys a consistent proposition. I challenge this semantics–pragmatics package by considering the sentence ‘Mary believes that both towels are clean but that the red one is cleaner than the blue one’. We can certainly use this sentence to attribute a coherent belief to Mary: One of its readings says that she believes that the towels are clean by a contextually salient standard ; the other says that she believes that the towels are clean by her own standard. I argue that Kennedy’s semantics–pragmatics package can’t deliver those readings, and propose that we drop the economy principle and account for those readings semantically by assigning to the belief sentence two distinct truth conditions. I consider two ways to deliver those truth-conditions. The first one posits world-variables in the sentence’s logical form and analyzes those truth-conditions as resulting from two binding possibilities of those variables. The second one proposes that the threshold function introduced by the phonologically null morpheme pos is shiftable in belief contexts. (shrink)

I respond to a dilemma for Causal Decision Theory (CDT) under determinism, posed in Adam Elga's paper “Confessions of a Causal Decision Theorist”. The treatment I present highlights (i) the status of laws as predictors, and (ii) the consequences of decision dependence, which arises natively out of Jeffrey Conditioning and CDT's characteristic equation. My argument leverages decision dependence to work around a key assumption of Elga's proof: to wit, that in the two problems he presents, the CDTer must (...) employ subjunctive‐suppositional (rather than evidential) transformations of a shared prior. (shrink)

It is often supposed that, unlike typical axioms of mathematics, the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) is indeterminate. This position is normally defended on the ground that the CH is undecidable in a way that typical axioms are not. Call this kind of undecidability “absolute undecidability”. In this paper, I seek to understand what absolute undecidability could be such that one might hope to establish that (a) CH is absolutely undecidable, (b) typical axioms are not absolutely undecidable, and (c) if (...) a mathematical hypothesis is absolutely undecidable, then it is indeterminate. I shall argue that on no understanding of absolute undecidability could one hope to establish all of (a)–(c). However, I will identify one understanding of absolute undecidability on which one might hope to establish both (a) and (c) to the exclusion of (b). This suggests that a new style of mathematical antirealism deserves attention—one that does not depend on familiar epistemological or ontological concerns. The key idea behind this view is that typical mathematical hypotheses are indeterminate because they are relevantly similar to CH. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Shannon’s information theory has been a popular component of first-order cybernetics. It quantifies information transmitted in terms of the number of times a sent symbol is received as itself, or as another possible symbol. Sent symbols were events and received symbols were outcomes. Garner and Hake reinterpreted Shannon, describing events and outcomes as categories of a stimulus attribute, so as to quantify the information transmitted in the psychologist’s category (or absolute judgment) experiment. There, categories are represented by specific stimuli, (...) and the human subject must assign those stimuli, singly and in random order, to the categories that they represent. Hundreds of computations ensued of information transmitted and its alleged asymptote, the sensory channel capacity. The present paper critically re-examines those estimates. It also reviews estimates of memory capacity from memory experiments. It concludes that absolute judgment is memory-limited and that channel capacities are actually memory capacities. In particular, there are factors that affect absolute judgment that are not explainable within Shannon’s theory, factors such as feedback, practice, motivation, and stimulus range, as well as the anchor effect, sequential dependences, the rise in information transmitted with the increase in number of stimulus dimensions, and the phenomena of masking and stimulus duration dependence. It is recommended that absolute judgments be abandoned, because there are already many direct estimates of memory capacity. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the popular “information transmitted” interpretation of absolute judgments, and to provide an alternative interpretation if one is needed. Design/methodology/approach – The psychologists Garner and Hake and their successors used Shannon’s Information Theory to quantify information transmitted in absolute judgments of sensory stimuli. Here, information theory is briefly reviewed, followed by a description of the absolute judgment experiment, and its information theory analysis. Empirical channel capacities are scrutinized. A (...) remarkable coincidence, the similarity of maximum information transmitted to human memory capacity, is described. Over 60 representative psychology papers on “information transmitted” are inspected for evidence of memory involvement in absolute judgment. Finally, memory is conceptually integrated into absolute judgment through a novel qualitative model that correctly predicts how judgments change with increase in the number of judged stimuli. Findings – Garner and Hake gave conflicting accounts of how absolute judgments represent information transmission. Further, “channel capacity” is an illusion caused by sampling bias and wishful thinking; information transmitted actually peaks and then declines, the peak coinciding with memory capacity. Absolute judgments themselves have numerous idiosyncracies that are incompatible with a Shannon general communication system but which clearly imply memory dependence. Research limitations/implications – Memory capacity limits the correctness of absolute judgments. Memory capacity is already well measured by other means, making redundant the informational analysis of absolute judgments. Originality/value – This paper presents a long-overdue comprehensive critical review of the established interpretation of absolute judgments in terms of “information transmitted”. An inevitable conclusion is reached: that published measurements of information transmitted actually measure memory capacity. A new, qualitative model is offered for the role of memory in absolute judgments. The model is well supported by recently revealed empirical properties of absolute judgments. (shrink)

Rawls in his later philosophy claims that it is sufficient to accept political conception as true or right, depending on what one's worldview allows, on the basis of whatever reasons one can muster, given one's worldview (doctrine). What political liberalism is interested in is a practical agreement on the political conception and not in our reasons for accepting it. There are deep issues (regarding deep values, purpose of life, metaphysics etc.) which cannot be resolved through invoking common reasons (this is (...) the fact of free reason itself), and trying to resolve them would involve us in interminable debates and would hamper the practical task of agreement on the political conception. Given the absolute necessity of a political society which is stable and enduring, it is thus wise to avoid these issues in founding a political society and choosing its basic principles - this is the pragmatic part of Rawls's position. In this paper I argue that this strategy leads Rawls into a paradox: (i) although the intention is to stay independent of comprehensive doctrines, the political conception is in fact totally (and precariously) dependent on comprehensive doctrines (not just on one doctrine but on each and every major doctrine in society). It is dependent on them: for its conceptualisation as an independent idea, for its justification, for the check of its reasonability in relation to the external world, for the formation of identities and value inculcation and hence for the formation of its model citizen; (ii) the very search for independence makes the political conception more dependent on comprehensive doctrines, and by extension makes it potentially more prone to intervention in and tampering with comprehensive doctrines (it is enough to show that it is a strong conceptual possibility to cast doubt on the whole strategy). Thus, for example, the political conception relies on the hope that “firmly held convictions gradually change” and that it would “in fact . . . have the capacity to shape those doctrines toward itself”. The purpose of the Rawlsian conjecture is to give these “hopes” a concrete, practical form by giving advice to proponents of the comprehensive doctrine on how they can do all this and “try to show them that, despite what they might think, they can still endorse a reasonable political conception”. I further argue that this paradox can be overcome by making the core of political liberalism more flexible. (shrink)

Europe has never had a single definition for the term ‘citizen.’ Indeed, over the centuries the significance of this term has undergone far-reaching evolution. In different historical periods, different states, and different European languages, this term has had diverse meanings and has been used in varying contexts. The concept of ‘citizen’ has repeatedly been defined anew depending upon specific political, social, and economic conditions. At various periods, the term ‘citizen’ has related to a wider or narrower portion of a given (...) state’s society. The criteria by which an individual was said to form a part of the body of citizens have also differed. The changes which have taken place in the definition of a ‘citizen’ over the centuries are enormous. This is not to say, however, that there has been no common core to the concept of citizen as it has taken shape over the course of hundreds of years. As far back as ancient times, a member of the state could influence the shaping of that state’s authorities and could participate in government. It is the Aristotelian concept of the citizen – a concept that has influenced all historical models of citizenship since – which is at the root of the citizen understood as a political animal (politikon zoon). In addition, personal freedom has always been a sine qua non for possessing citizen status. Thus, a citizen has always been, and remains, the opposite of a slave. It has also come to be accepted that citizenship implies the primacy of an individual’s rights in a state over an individual’s obligations to that state. The polar opposite of this situation in the historical dimension is subjection to the monarch in an absolute monarchy. Thus the ‘citizen’ also stands in opposition to the ‘subject.’ When speaking of the historical models containing the said ‘citizenship traits’ of a person’s status in the state, we usually refer to the model of the citizen in ancient times, in medieval municipal citizenship, and in modern times, in the fully−formed nation-state. It is difficult to imagine a citizen in an absolute monarchy, and in a world of subjection. Still, it is possible to give rein to one’s imagination and perceive citizens in such a setting; one could even go a step further and call the subject of an absolute monarch a citizen. But is imagination truly necessary in order to conduct such a seemingly obvious reversal of perspective? Published as a chapter in Krzysztof Trzciński (ed.), The State and Development in Africa and Other Regions, Warsaw University & ASPRA, Warsaw 2007, pp. 319-332. (shrink)

Rāmānuja is known as a theistic ācārya who interpreted Brahmasūtras in Viśiṣṭādvaita point of view. He propounded his philosophy by refuting Kevāldvaita system of Śaṅkara. He criticized the existence and knowledge of indeterminate objects and refuted the concept of Nirviśeṣa Brahman. Therefore, Brahman for him is Saviśeṣa. The name Viśiṣṭādvaita itself signifies that it is Qualified Monism. Brahman is qualified by matter and soul. Matter and soul though real are completely dependent on Brahman for their existence. Hegel is a German (...) Philosopher who propounded Absolute Idealism. Hegel solved the problem of reality from a synthetic and positive point of view. Predecessors of Hegel were reflecting on Reality with one sided abstractions. Absolute is ultimately real for him. Hegel’s Absolute is not devoid of all objects and qualities. Absolute is inclusive of all the categories and all things of the world. Absolute is not abstract like Śaṅkara’s Brahman but it goes very much closer to Ramanuja’s Saviśeṣa Brahman. Thus, both these philosopher though differ in some principles which are very peculiar to them, they definitely meet at on one point of ‘Concrete Monism’. Logical method adopted by them to reach towards their goal is also strikingly similar. The aim of this paper is to analyse the concept of monism according to Rāmānuja and Hegel with philosophical point of view. Comparative study of both will throw light on some striking similarities as well as some differences of these great philosophers. (shrink)

The paper is about 'absolute logic': an approach to logic that differs from the standard first-order logic and other known approaches. It should be a new approach the author has created proposing to obtain a general and unifying approach to logic and a faithful model of human mathematical deductive process. In first-order logic there exist two different concepts of term and formula, in place of these two concepts in our approach we have just one notion of expression. In our (...) system the set-builder notation is an expression-building pattern. In our system we can easily express second-order, third order and any-order conditions. The meaning of a sentence will depend solely on the meaning of the symbols it contains, it will not depend on external 'structures'. Our deductive system is based on a very simple definition of proof and provides a good model of human mathematical deductive process. The soundness and consistency of the system are proved. We discuss on the completeness of our deductive systems. We also discuss how our system relates to the most know types of paradoxes, from the discussion no specific vulnerability to paradoxes comes out. The paper provides both the theoretical material and a fully documented example of deduction. (shrink)

According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, religiosity is rooted in feeling (Gefühl). As a result of our engagement with the world, on which we depend and which we can influence, we have both a sense of dependence and of freedom. Schleiermacher speculated that a sense of absolute dependence in reflective beings with self-consciousness (human beings) gave rise to religion. Using insights from contemporary philosophy of biology and cognitive science, I seek to naturalize Schleiermacher's ideas. I moreover show that this (...) naturalization is in line with Schleiermacher's outlook on biology, as he already had evolutionary considerations in mind when he wrote the Christian Faith (1830). While Schleiermacher rejects natural theology in a narrow sense (proofs for the existence of God), his project is natural theological in a broader sense, as it roots religion in experiences that we can examine using naturalistic theories. (shrink)

Essential for the concept of the law of nature is not only spatio-temporal universality, but also functionality in the sense of the dependency on physical conditions of natural entities. In the following it is explained in detail that just the neglect of this functional property is to be understood as the real reason for the occurrence of the Goodman paradox. As a consequence, the behavior of things seems to be completely at the mercy of the temporal change of unique (...) class='Hi'>absolute temporal points. It is exactly this (mis-)understanding that also generated the induction problem. From the intrinsic connection between universality and functionality, however, - that is my claim - the ontological consequence of a nature results, for which the potentiality of lawfulness is coupled to essentially functionally defined time sequences. (shrink)

Soul substance (jīva dravya) is ubiquitous but unseen. Driving force within each one of us, it has been, since time immemorial, a subject matter of research by philosophers, religious leaders and laity. Still, ambiguity and misconceptions prevail as regard its real nature. Some negate the existence of soul and attribute consciousness to the union of four basic substances – earth (prthvī), water (jala), fire (agni), and air (vāyu); death leads to its annihilation. Some believe it to be momentary, devoid of (...) self-existence. Still others consider it a product of illusion (māyā) or ignorance (avidyā) as all objects are manifestations of Brahma; only the one eternally undivided Brahma exists. All such conceptions are based on absolutism like: existence (bhāvaikānta) and non-existence (abhāvaikānta), non-dualism (advaita-ekānta) and separateness (prthaktva-ekānta), and permanence (nityatva-ekānta) and momentariness (ksanika-ekānta). Jaina epistemology goes beyond the superficial and examines objects of knowledge from all possible points of view. It asserts that the entity (dharmī) and its attributes (dharma) are neither absolutely dependent (āpeksika) nor absolutely independent (anāpeksika). Only an entity which has general (sāmānya – concerning the substance, dravya) and particular (viśesa – concerning the mode, paryāya) attributes can be the subject of knowledge. Substance without its modification and modification without its substance cannot be the subject of valid knowledge; only their combination can be the subject of knowledge. (shrink)

Does a nihilist who kills himself betray his own beliefs? An unreflected answer would probably turn out positive, because a nihilist may be defined as a person who embraces all aspects of life and pain itself. But someone who escapes his sorrowful existence by committing suicide seems not to accept his own human condition and therefore cannot die as a nihilist. If this argumentation is right, human life would not be possible outside cultural contexts, for the particularity of nihilism is (...) its large distance to and independence of culture and collectivity. In his autobiographical work "Arbeit und Struktur" Wolfgang Herrndorf portrays his three and a half years of living with brain cancer. At the same time he shows us how his originally humanistic nihilism turns into a more pessimistic one while coping with his disease. Herrndorf, in a manner of speaking, writes his own "myth to live" without being able to rely on the shelter of culture, without a "myth of collectivity". In the face of this, we must assume Herrndorf's ideological transformation from a cooperative nihilism to a pessimistic nihilism, which justifies his own death, was his sole opportunity to mentally survive the three and a half years of pain and dissolution. From this perspective, the example of Wolfgang Herrndorf and his "Arbeit und Struktur" would reveal mankind's absolute dependency on metaphysical significance and its need for individual myths to live. Despite regarding himself as a modern, secular and rationalistic human being, Herrndorf cannot overcome the necessity of the iconological translation of "reality to world". Therefore, the intent of this master's thesis is to show that all living human beings are captives of icons and their metaphysical representation, and that the endless effort of translating whole reality into a single myth to live is part of our conditio humana. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the consequences of two commonsensical premises in semantics and epistemology: (1) natural language is a complex system rooted in the communal life of human beings within a given environment; and (2) linguistic knowledge is essentially dependent on natural language. These premises lead me to emphasize the process-socio-environmental character of linguistic meaning and knowledge, from which I proceed to analyse a number of long-standing philosophical problems, attempting to throw new light upon them on these grounds. In (...) particular, I criticize the use of expressions such as ‘absolute truth’, ‘absolute existence’ and ‘the thing in itself’, arguing that they lead to what I call ‘the ultralinguistic paradox’ (a fatal antinomy). In the same way, I review a number of mainstream topics in philosophical semantics, epistemology and metaphysics, reformulating them in terms much more naturalistic – and less mysterious – than usual. (shrink)

I use Plotinus to present absolute divine simplicity as the consequence of principles about metaphysical and explanatory priority to which most theists are already committed. I employ Phil Corkum’s account of ontological independence as independent status to present a new interpretation of Plotinus on the dependence of everything on the One. On this reading, if something else (whether an internal part or something external) makes you what you are, then you are ontologically dependent on it. I show that (...) this account supports Plotinus’s claim that any entity with parts cannot be fully independent. In particular, I lay out Plotinus’s case for thinking that even a divine self-understanding intellect cannot be fully independent. I then argue that a weaker version of simplicity is not enough for the theist since priority monism meets the conditions of a moderate version of ontological independence just as well as a transcendent but complex ultimate being. (shrink)

Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite (...) is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute. (shrink)

This is my introduction as editor to The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher.

I offer a new reconstruction of Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s idealism. Kant held that we impose categorial form on experience, while sensation provides its matter. Hegel argues that the matter we receive cannot guide our imposition of form on it. Contra recent interpretations, Hegel’s argument does not depend on a conceptualist account of perception or a view of the categories as empirically conditioned. His objection is that given Kant’s dualistic metaphysics, the categories cannot have material conditions for correct application. This (...) leads to subjectivism in the content of experience: the subject is given an implausibly strong role in determining what is the case. Hegel’s own absolute idealism solves this problem. (shrink)

We investigate risk attitudes when the underlying domain of payoffs is finite and the payoffs are, in general, not numerical. In such cases, the traditional notions of absolute risk attitudes, that are designed for convex domains of numerical payoffs, are not applicable. We introduce comparative notions of weak and strong risk attitudes that remain applicable. We examine how they are characterized within the rank-dependent utility model, thus including expected utility as a special case. In particular, we characterize strong comparative (...) risk aversion under rank-dependent utility. This is our main result. From this and other findings, we draw two novel conclusions. First, under expected utility, weak and strong comparative risk aversion are characterized by the same condition over finite domains. By contrast, such is not the case under non-expected utility. Second, under expected utility, weak comparative risk aversion is characterized by the same condition when the utility functions have finite range and when they have convex range. By contrast, such is not the case under non-expected utility. Thus, considering comparative risk aversion over finite domains leads to a better understanding of the divide between expected and non-expected utility, more generally, the structural properties of the main models of decision-making under risk. (shrink)

Religion is basically a consciousness or awareness of God. This means that Religion depends upon a difference between the finite subject or consciousness and the infinite object or God. This difference is maintained because of the way Man relates to God in religion, i.e. through feeling, love, etc. Philosophy is the scientific comprehension of Truth, in which an identity-in-difference is sought between the subject and object or concept and object. This is attained through thinking, and not through feeling. Religion and (...) Philosophy often seem to be at odds in the beginning. This opposition is, however, reconciled by absolute knowledge. The love that is found in Religion is represented by the identity-in-difference principle that is found in Philosophy. The urge that the philosopher feels in the necessity to come to truth or oneness with truth, is the same urge that religion expresses in the feeling of love of God. It is merely a difference in the way they each proceed in fulfilling that need or necessity – one through thinking the other through feeling. The identity and difference of thinking and feeling is another topic that is dealt with by Hegel in his system. (shrink)

The relationship between the One and the Multiple in mystic philosophy is a profound and central theme that explores the nature of existence, the cosmos, and the divine. This theme is present in various mystical traditions, including those of the East and West, and it addresses the paradoxical coexistence of the unity and multiplicity of all things. -/- In mystic philosophy, the **One** often represents the ultimate reality, the source from which all things emanate and to which all things return. (...) It is the absolute, the infinite, and the unchanging. The One is beyond all attributes and is often associated with the divine or the absolute truth. -/- The **Multiple**, on the other hand, represents the manifest world, the diversity of forms, and the realm of change and plurality. It is the world we experience through our senses, the domain of time and space, where differentiation and individuality are apparent. -/- The relationship between the One and the Multiple is not one of opposition but of emanation and unity. The Multiple is seen as a reflection, expression, or manifestation of the One. In this sense, the diversity of the world doesn’t contradict the unity of the One but rather demonstrates it in a myriad of forms. -/- Mystics seek to understand and experience this relationship through various practices and insights. They aim to transcend the illusion of separation and duality to experience the non-dual reality where the One and the Multiple are recognized as inseparable. -/- This concept can be illustrated by the metaphor of the ocean and its waves. The ocean represents the One—vast, deep, and all-encompassing—while the waves represent the Multiple—distinct, diverse, and ever-changing. Each wave is unique, yet it is not separate from the ocean. The wave’s existence is dependent on and made of the same substance as the ocean. In the same way, each individual entity in the Multiple is an expression of the One. -/- In summary, the relationship between the One and the Multiple in mystic philosophy is a dynamic interplay that challenges the conventional understanding of separation. It invites a deeper exploration of reality, where the apparent multiplicity of the world is a direct expression of the singular, underlying essence of all that is. -/- The relationship between the One and the Multiple in the context of mathematical philosophy is a profound topic that touches upon the very foundations of existence and knowledge. It’s a theme that has been explored by philosophers and mathematicians alike, often leading to the contemplation of unity and diversity within the structures of reality. -/- In mathematics, the concept of the One can be seen as the basis of unity from which all numbers derive. It’s the identity element in multiplication, the starting point in counting, and the foundation of dimension in geometry. The One is often associated with the concept of monism in philosophy, which posits that there is a single, underlying substance or principle that constitutes reality. -/- On the other hand, the Multiple represents the infinite variety and diversity of forms and numbers that arise from the One. It’s the embodiment of plurality and the complex interplay of different entities that mathematics seeks to understand and describe. This reflects the philosophical stance of pluralism, which acknowledges the existence of multiple realities or truths. -/- The interplay between the One and the Multiple can be seen in the mathematical concept of sets. A set can be thought of as a unity, a whole composed of distinct elements. Yet, each element within the set also retains its individuality, contributing to the diversity of the set’s composition. This duality is mirrored in the philosophical exploration of the universal and the particular, where the universal represents the One, and the particulars represent the Multiple. -/- In the realm of mathematical philosophy, this relationship often leads to questions about the nature of mathematical objects: Are they discovered as part of an objective reality (the One), or are they constructed by the human mind from a multitude of experiences (the Multiple)? This debate resonates with the philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth and reality. -/- Reflecting on the One and the Multiple can also lead to a deeper understanding of the self and the cosmos. Just as the number one is integral to the existence of all other numbers, the individual self can be seen as a unique expression of the universal whole. Similarly, the cosmos can be viewed as a grand unity composed of a multiplicity of forms and phenomena. -/- Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have a fascinating connection to the philosophical concepts of the One and the Multiple. These theorems, which are pivotal in mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics, articulate the inherent limitations of formal axiomatic systems, particularly those sufficient to express the arithmetic of natural numbers. -/- Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have a fascinating connection to the philosophical concepts of the One and the Multiple. These theorems, which are pivotal in mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics, articulate the inherent limitations of formal axiomatic systems, particularly those sufficient to express the arithmetic of natural numbers⁴. -/- The **first incompleteness theorem** reveals that within any such consistent system, there are propositions that are true but cannot be proven within the system itself. This reflects the idea of the Multiple in that there is an abundance of mathematical truths, a multiplicity that exceeds the unifying framework of any one system. It suggests that the realm of mathematical truth is more extensive than any single formal system can fully capture. -/- The **second incompleteness theorem** extends this by showing that a system cannot prove its own consistency. This relates to the concept of the One, as it implies that a system’s complete self-understanding, its unity and coherence, is unattainable from within. It must look beyond itself, to an external vantage point, to ascertain its consistency. -/- In the context of the One and the Multiple, Gödel’s theorems imply that the One (a consistent formal system) is inherently incomplete and cannot encompass the Multiple (the totality of mathematical truths). This resonates with philosophical discussions about the relationship between unity and plurality. Just as a single philosophical system cannot capture the entirety of truth, a single formal mathematical system cannot encapsulate all mathematical truths. -/- Moreover, Gödel’s work suggests that the pursuit of a single, unified theory of everything in mathematics—a One that encompasses all Multiples—is an inherently Sisyphean task. There will always be more truths (Multiples) than can be derived from any given set of axioms (the One). -/- In essence, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems provide a formal underpinning to the philosophical notion that the One cannot exist without the Multiple, and vice versa. They are interdependent, with the One giving rise to the Multiple, and the Multiple necessitating the One for its expression and comprehension. This interplay is a dance of limitations and possibilities, where the boundaries of logic, mathematics, and philosophy blur into one another. -/- The relationship between the One and the Multiple in the context of the mathematics of zero is a deeply philosophical inquiry that bridges the abstract world of numbers with the existential questions of being and non-being. -/- Zero, in mathematics, is a symbol of absence, a representation of nothingness, yet it holds a pivotal position as a number. It is the void from which all things emerge and to which they return. In the philosophy of mathematics, zero is the paradoxical junction where the One and the Multiple converge and diverge. -/- From the perspective of the One, zero can be seen as the origin—the singular point that precedes the existence of numbers. It is the empty set, the foundation upon which the edifice of mathematics is constructed. As the identity element in addition, zero maintains the integrity of numbers, for adding zero to any number leaves it unchanged, reflecting the immutable nature of the One. -/- Conversely, when we consider the Multiple, zero represents the infinite potentiality of creation. It is the canvas upon which the integers, both positive and negative, express their multitude. Zero is the balance point, the fulcrum around which the symphony of numbers dances. It embodies the plurality of possibilities, the beginning of the number line that stretches infinitely in both directions. -/- Philosophically, zero challenges our understanding of existence. It is both something and nothing—a number that quantifies the absence of quantity. This duality echoes the philosophical struggle to comprehend how the One gives rise to the Multiple. How does the unity of being manifest the diversity of the cosmos? Zero offers a mathematical metaphor for this mystery, as it encapsulates the transition from non-existence to existence, from the undifferentiated One to the differentiated Multiple. -/- In the realm of set theory, zero corresponds to the empty set—a set with no elements. This set is unique in that it is the only set that contains nothing, yet it is the foundation upon which all other sets are built. The empty set is the mathematical embodiment of the One, and all other sets, containing multiple elements, arise from it. -/- Reflecting on zero in the context of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, we find a resonance with the idea that the One (a consistent formal system) cannot capture the entirety of the Multiple (the totality of mathematical truths). Zero, as the foundation of numbers, similarly suggests that from the nothingness of the One, the infinite complexity of the Multiple emerges—yet it can never be fully encompassed or expressed by any single system. -/- In conclusion, the mathematics of zero offers a profound reflection on the relationship between the One and the Multiple. It serves as a bridge between the abstract and the concrete, the known and the unknowable, challenging us to ponder the origins of existence and the nature of reality itself. -/- . (shrink)

The multi premise closure principle states that the logical conjunction of known facts yields again a known fact. For absolute knowledge this principle holds. We show that for fallible knowledge, assuming knowing requires a minimum level of statistical certainty (whatever else it requires), and that there is a sufficient number of known facts above a given level of uncertainty, it does not hold, for simple statistical reasons. We present a modified version, the dependent conjunctive closure principle, that does hold.

Instrumentalists about need believe that all needs are instrumental, i.e., ontologically dependent upon ends, goals or purposes. Absolutists view some needs as non-instrumental. The aims of this article are: clearly to characterize the instrumentalism/absolutism debate that is of concern (mainly §1); to establish that both positions have recent and current adherents (mainly §1); to bring what is, in comparison with prior literature, a relatively high level of precision to the debate, employing some hitherto neglected, but important, insights (passim); to show, (...) on grounds not previously to the fore in the literature, that insofar as instrumentalism’s advocates have provided arguments for the position, these are unsound (§2); to argue against instrumentalism using a new dilemma concerning whether ‘end’, ‘goal’ and ‘purpose’ are interpreted in a mentalistic manner (§3); to elucidate the implications of the needs/need-satisfiers and preconditions/means distinctions for the debate (§4). (shrink)

How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we (...) are not sure of. For example, you might think that it will rain sometime this month, but not be sure that it will. Both what we're sure of and what we think have important normative connections to action. But the connections are quite different. This paper explores these issues with respect to assertion, inquiry, and decision making. We conclude by arguing that there is no theoretically significant notion of ‘full belief’ intermediate in strength between thinking and being sure. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Kant’s discussion of ‘the cosmological argument’ in The Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, Second Part, Second Division, Book 2, Chapter Three, Section Five (‘The Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God’). While there are other places where Kant provides related discussions of ‘the cosmological argument’—e.g. in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, and Religion within the Limits of (...) Reason Alone—I do not attempt to consider any of these further works in this paper. First, I argue that it is not true that cosmological arguments depend upon ontological arguments, and that Kant is simply mistaken when he argues that ‘the cosmological argument’ ‘assumes’ ‘the ontological argument’. Second, I argue that Kant does not provide a compelling critique of cosmological arguments to the conclusion that there is an absolutely necessary being. (shrink)

Although Nicholas of Cusa occasionally discussed how the universe must be understood as the unfolding of the absolutely infinite in time, he left open questions about any distinction between natural time and historical time, how either notion of time might depend upon the nature of divine providence, and how his understanding of divine providence relates to other traditional philosophical views. From texts in which Cusanus discussed these questions, this paper will attempt to make explicit how Cusanus understood divine providence. The (...) paper will also discuss how Nicholas of Cusa’s view of the question of providence might shed light on Renaissance philosophy’s contribution in the historical transition in Western philosophy from an overtly theological or eschatological understanding of historical time to a secularized or naturalized philosophy of history. (shrink)

Intuitively, a classical field theory is background-in- dependent if the structure required to make sense of its equations is itself subject to dynamical evolution, rather than being imposed ab initio. The aim of this paper is to provide an explication of this intuitive notion. Background-independence is not a not formal property of theories: the question whether a theory is background-independent depends upon how the theory is interpreted. Under the approach proposed here, a theory is fully background-independent relative to an interpretation (...) if each physical possibility corresponds to a distinct spacetime geometry; and it falls short of full background-independence to the extent that this condition fails. (shrink)

The science of operations research is one of the modern sciences that have made a great revolution in all areas of life through the methods provided by it, suitable and appropriate to solve most of the problems that were facing researchers, scholars and those interested in the development of societies, and the most beneficiaries of this science were companies and institutions that are looking for scientific methods that help them manage their work so that they achieve the greatest profit and (...) the lowest cost, and one of the important methods that have been used in the management of companies we offer in this research two methods, Dynamic programming method. This method has been used in many practical matters and helped decision-makers in companies to achieve a maximum profit and less cost by formulating the reality of the state of the company and the data provided by decision-makers with a dynamic mathematical model that is solved using methods of solving dynamic models and we will provide in this research an example of this through the issue of choosing the optimal investment for the budget of a company so that it achieves a maximum profit, and the method of programming with integers: the method that provided these companies with solutions with integer values suitable for the nature of its work, through the use of the binary integer in the formulation of the appropriate mathematical model on the one hand, and on the other hand, the use of the binary integer variable helped to convert some nonlinear models that lead to some practical problems into linear models, and it should be noted here that in the previous two methods there is something indeterminable because we must make a decision in choosing or not choosing something, but the optimal solution that we will get remains A specific value because we are building the mathematical model for any realistic issue through the data provided by those responsible for the work and these data are calculated quantities and therefore they are uncertain values because their validity depends on the circumstances surrounding the work environment, they may be exposed to increase or decrease, and therefore the optimal solution on which the company will base its decision is suitable for specific values and any change in them can cause the company an uncalculated loss, so in this research we will use the concepts of neutrosophic science, the branch of science founded by the American scientist Florentin Smarandache in 1995 based on his belief that there is no absolute truth, a science that is interested in the study of ideas and concepts that are neither true nor false, but just in between, and we will take the data (calculated quantities) neutrosophic values that are specified or unspecified values are any set close to the calculated quantities, then the resulting mathematical model is a neutrosophic model and the optimal solution has neutrosophic values and thanks to the indefinite uncertainty that these values have, companies from the development of appropriate plans for all circumstances and thus achieve the greatest profit and the lowest cost, and we will clarify the above through two issues, the issue of optimal designation of a warehouse site, which we will formulate the mathematical model of using the neutrosophic integer programming method - and the issue of capital budget, which we will present in two different forms, we use in the first form the neutrosophic integer programming method and in the second the neutrosophic dynamic programming method. (shrink)

A central tension shaping metaethical inquiry is that normativity appears to be subjective yet real, where it’s difficult to reconcile these aspects. On the one hand, normativity pertains to our actions and attitudes. On the other, normativity appears to be real in a way that precludes it from being a mere figment of those actions and attitudes. In this paper, I argue that normativity is indeed both subjective and real. I do so by way of treating it as a special (...) sort of artifact, where artifacts are mind-dependent yet nevertheless can carve at the joints of reality. In particular, I argue that the properties of being a reason and being valuable for are grounded in attitudes yet are still absolutely structural. (shrink)

Logical consequence is typically construed as a metalinguistic relation between sentences. Deflationism is an account of logic that challenges this orthodoxy. In Williamson’s recent presentation of deflationism, logic’s primary concern is with universal generalizations over absolutely everything. As well as an interesting account of logic in its own right, deflationism has also been recruited to decide between competing logics in resolving semantic paradoxes. This paper defends deflationism from its most important challenge to date, due to Ole Hjortland. It then presents (...) two new problems for the view. Hjortland’s objection is that deflationism cannot discriminate between distinct logics. I show that his example of classical logic and supervaluationism depends on equivocating about whether the language includes a “definitely” operator. Moreover, I prove a result that blocks this line of objection no matter the choice of logics. I end by criticizing deflationism on two fronts. First, it cannot do the work it has been recruited to perform. That is, it cannot help adjudicate between competing logics. This is because a theory of logic cannot be as easily separated from a theory of truth as its proponents claim. Second, deflationism currently has no adequate answer to the following challenge: what does a sentence’s universal generalization have to do with its logical truth? I argue that the most promising, stipulative response on behalf of the deflationist amounts to an unwarranted change of subject. (shrink)

In a recent paper Horsten embarked on a journey along the limits of the domain of the unknowable. Rather than knowability simpliciter, he considered a priori knowability, and by the latter he meant absolute provability, i.e. provability that is not relativized to a formal system. He presented an argument for the conclusion that it is not absolutely provable that there is a natural number of which it is true but absolutely unprovable that it has a certain property. The argument (...) depends on a description principle. I will argue that the latter principle implies the knowability of all arithmetical truths. Therefore, Horsten's argument is either sound but its conclusion is trivial, or his argument is unsound. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Frege’s argument against the relativity of truth contained in his posthumous writing Logic from 1897. Two points are made. The first is that the argument is a performative version of the common objection that truth relativism is incoherent: it is designed to show that the assertion of the relativity of truth involves a performative incoherence, because the absoluteness of truth is a success condition for making assertions. From a modern point of view, (...) the central premise of the argument, that the successful making of assertions depends on the absoluteness of truth, is highly doubtful. The second point is that this premise can be made plausible within the framework of Frege’s conception of truth and assertion: it can be derived from his thesis that, in order to put something forward as true, we do not need the word ‘true’, but only the assertoric force. (shrink)

Schelling scholars face an uphill battle. His confinement to the smallest circles of ‘continental’ thought puts him at the margins of what today counts as philosophy. His eclipse by Fichte and Hegel and inheritance by better-read thinkers like Kierkegaard and Heidegger tend to reduce him to a historical footnote. And the sometimes obscure formulations he uses makes the otherwise difficult writings of fellow post-Kantians seem comparatively more accessible. For those seeking to widen these circles, see through this eclipse and elucidate (...) these formulations, a deeper internal challenge is to make sense of the appearance and disappearance of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s work. The term’s apotheosis is often attributed to the height of German idealism and especially to Schelling’s identity philosophy, outside which he subjects the term to a radical critique. The identity philosophy aims to cognize the absolute ground of the system of knowledge and the system of nature, for which cognition Schelling enlists intellectual intuition. While the identity philosophy falls between a Fichtean debut and a late attack on Hegel, it is difficult to determine its exact parameter. I propose that a necessary condition for doing so is to clarify the explanatory role of intellectual intuition—that is, the specific problem to which it is the intended solution—on which the identity philosophy depends. To this end, I will trace a nexus of problems that Schelling’s use of intellectual intuition is meant to solve. Doing so will not only help to delineate the identity philosophy, but show it to be continuous with Schelling’s earlier and later periods. In §1, I account for the nexus of the problems of grounding, freedom and meaning. These problems demand, respectively, a principle by which cognition forms a system rather than an aggregate, a principle by which a system of cognition is compatible with freedom rather than incompatible and a principle by which a system of freedom can show why there is meaning rather than none. In §2, I reconstruct Schelling’s argument in the identity philosophy for why intellectual intuition can resolve this nexus of problems and, in §3, his arguments during other periods of his thought for why it cannot. I conclude in §4 by suggesting why the identity philosophy is continuous with these periods. Beyond fulfilling the interpretive task of making sense of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s sprawling corpus, my aim is thus to contribute to a unified reading of the latter. (shrink)

In the traditional sense, a work of art creates an illustration of the outside world, or of a certain text or doctrine. Sometimes it is considered that such an illustration is not literal, but is an interpretation of what is visible, or an interpretation of a certain literary or ideological message. It can also be assumed that a work of art creates its own visual world, a separate story or a separate philosophical statement. The Parc de La Villette represents the (...) last of these possibilities: it is a philosophical statement that develops the premises derived from poststructuralist philosophies and the philosophy of deconstruction. The uniqueness of its being status, however, is that it does so not only at the level of the theoretical assumptions, but also through its functioning as an active philosophical work. This means that a park is a happening philosophy. Its activity, however, does not refer only to the present tense, but is also an attempt to penetrate the future, all otherness and impossibility. This kind of activity assumes that the work, in a sense, does not yet fully exist, but is also still produced in the processes of its interpretation. The theoretical foundations of the park included texts by Bernard Tschumi, in which he questioned traditional ways of creating a work of architecture, postulating in return the use of a long series of negations, which were comparable to the crisis of metaphysics characteristic of contemporary philosophy. It is therefore no coincidence that the publication containing Tschumi’s theoretical text on Parc de La Villette was accompanied by an essay by Jacques Derrida developing some of the architect’s concepts. The next step in integrating philosophy into the process of park design was a series of discussions between Peter Eisenman and Derrida, who completely moved the creation of the park into the world of thoughts, without accentuating the need for their realization in the material reality. The main topic of these discussions was the problem of the chôra, which was taken up by later commentators and used to interpret the park as a work in which the philosophy of the beginning is manifested relating to issues of politics, morality and religion. The park was therefore interpreted as a space of invention within the scope of creating new rules of functioning of the community and democracy. Thinking about the political future may, however, exceed the horizon of ordinary expectations. Although philosophical thought is always connected with contemporary problems and metaphysics sometimes intertwines with current politics, yet at the same time the customs of philosophy also include crossing horizons and thinking about absolute otherness and impossibility. Initially, the chôra, différance, Absolute Otherness (tout autre) and the Impossibile were concepts of pure philosophy of atheistic character, but with the further development of the discussion, more and more theological motifs began to emerge. One of the reasons for this phenomenon was the fact that radical negations of all being, which were contemplated in contemporary philosophy (by Heidegger and Derrida, among others), had previously been manifested in negative and apophatic theologies (by Master Eckhart, among others). Also the category of the “Other”, taken from Emmanuel Levinas, was clearly connected with the thought about God. A further reason for connecting the chôra with the theological thought was the interest in the philosophy of deconstruction expressed by some theologians. Caputo in particular managed to persuade Derrida to participate in discussions on the current status of religion. In the late period of Derrida’s writing, further statements on religious topics appeared. All these reasons led to posing a question about the identity of the chôra and God. Although there were no satisfactory conclusions on this issue, the discussion was also important to create an interpretation of the park as a place of worship. The chôra, representing, according to Plato, the preoriginal emptiness is the place of every beginning, but it turns out that it is not neutral to the being created in it. The chôra deposits itself in every being as an irremovable beginning that interferes with its stability. The chôra, therefore, forces us into a palintropical movement, but it also turns out to be a pure compulsion, an erring necessity and a fundamental force from which, in the human perception, motifs useful to the individual and to the community are extracted. All definitions of this force, including its anthropomorphisation, are formulated in such a way that they allow for building private and collective morality upon them. Such definitions are changed depending on variable political situations. It is difficult to determine whether in the processes of changes in the formulation of “God’s names” any essential value is retained, which is not subject to change. The current definitions of the chôra (God?), which can be found, for example, in the philosophy of Caputo, stress that she is a combination of various and contradictory forces. This characteristic inherits much of Plato’s concept, reminds us of Master Eckhart’s views on Gottheit and, at the same time, is not unfamiliar to Tschumi, whose essays were an apologia of contradictions. The current concept of chôra, transferred into the sphere of politics, is the praise of social diversity and the protection of the difference from the forces of order. In the Parc de La Villette, the future community and democracy were elevated as a system of safe existence of individuals in all their singularity. The park is a temple of a future community in which individual beings have nothing in common. (shrink)

In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason Kant famously argues that the moral quality of an an agent’s actions depends on the moral quality of their moral character and since their moral character can be either absolutely good or absolutely bad, all of an agent’s actions share the same moral quality: good or evil (R 6: 22). This claim, which implies that any agent who is not wholly good must therefore be wholly evil, has vexed Kant’s readers. Ordinary moral (...) intuitions suggest that differences in moral character come in degrees, and leaving some room for moral variance seems necessary to any account of moral corruption and improvement. What is not often remarked upon is that Kant’s rigorism about moral character stands in apparent tension with his own account, given that in the same work, of the Stufen, levels or grades, of evil: frailty, impurity, and wickedness. I argue that rigorism is grounded in a philosophical insight which we should not give up and show that we can preserve it while making room for the complexity of moral failure if we understand the first two grades of evil, frailty and impurity, as states of moral immaturity, a condition that precedes the acquisition of a stable moral character. To substantiate the claim, I argue that the idea of the acquisition of character must play a wholly different role in Kant’s practical philosophy than that accorded to it on standard readings. Not merely an “empirical” concern, the acquisition of character must be understood as a genuinely rational accomplishment: the development and determination of our uniquely rational capacities for feeling, necessary for the development of stable moral character. (shrink)

How demanding is the virtuous life? Can virtue exist alongside hints of vice? Is it possible to be virtuous within a vicious society? A line of thinking running through Diogenes and the Stoics is that even a hint of corruption is inimical to virtue, that participating in a vicious society makes it impossible for a person to be virtuous. One response to this difficulty is to claim that virtue is a threshold concept, that context sets a threshold for what is (...) considered virtuous. On this way of thinking, what counts as virtuous in one society may be more demanding than what passes for virtuous in another. This response seems plausible when considering that virtue-theoretic terms like `honest' are gradable adjectives. Many gradable adjectives, like `tall' and `expensive,' have contextual thresholds that shift depending on the situation, and so is tenable that virtue-theoretic adjectives might function with contextual thresholds as well. A major difficulty for this response, however, is that virtue terms are absolute gradable adjectives, a variety of gradable adjectives that do not require a contextual threshold. Absolute gradable adjectives instead draw their truth conditions from their maximal degree, suggesting that Diogenes and the Stoics were correct to think that virtue is incompatible with even a small degree of vice. (shrink)

When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has been, it has had a long (...) and tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and background knowledge. I focus on strategies of triangulation and traceability that establish the integrity of these data and their relevance as anchors for evidential reasoning in archaeology. (shrink)

In this paper I contrast the metaphysical philosophies of Benedict de Spinoza and the ‘sudden enlightenment’ tradition of Chan Buddhism. Spinoza’s expressivist philosophy, in which everything can be conceived via a lineage of finite causes terminating in substance as a metaphysical ground of all things, emphasises the relative sameness of all entities. By contrast, Chan’s philosophy of emptiness, which rests on the dependent co-origination of all entities, renders such comparison fundamentally meaningless. Having no source beyond dependent co-origination to generate a (...) thing’s distinct nature leads to a metaphysics in which, rather than being relatively similar or different, all things are at one and the same time absolutely the same and absolutely distinct. As a result, Spinoza grounds ethics wholly is sameness or similarity, whereas Chan transcends the dichotomy of sameness and difference and offers an environmental ethics grounded simultaneously in absolute sameness and absolute difference. As a result, in Spinoza’s case, the dissimilarity between human beings and the non-human world places limits on our concern for it. In Chan Buddhism, however, insight into the emptiness of all phenomena leads to a concern for all entities in their suchness, regardless of whether they are similar or different to human beings. As such, I argue that Chan is in a better position than Spinoza to develop a robust environmental ethic. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain depends, at least partly, on recognizing its subjectivity (thus, its first-person epistemology). This in turn requires using a first-person experiential method in addition to third-person experimental approaches to study it. This paper is an attempt to spell out what the former approach is and how it can be integrated with the latter. We start our discussion by examining some foundational issues raised by the use of introspection. We argue that such a first-person method in the (...) scientific study of pain (as in the study of any experience) is in fact indispensable by demonstrating that it has in fact been consistently used in conjunction with conventional third-person methodologies, and this for good reasons. We show that, contrary to what appears to be a widespread opinion, there is absolutely no reason to think that the use of such a first-person approach is scientifically and methodologically suspect. We distinguish between two uses of introspective methods in scientific experiments: one draws on the subjects’ introspective reports where any investigator has equal and objective access. The other is where the investigator becomes a subject of his own study and draws on the introspection of his own experiences. We give examples using and/or approximating both strategies that include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities, and brain imaging- psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. We explain what we call the experiential or phenomenological approach that has its origins in the work of Price and Barrell (1980). This approach capitalizes on the scientific prospects and benefits of using the introspection of the investigator. We distinguish between its vertical and horizontal applications. Finally, we conclude that integrating such an approach to standard third-person methodologies can only help us in having a fuller understanding of pain and of conscious experience in general. (shrink)

Stephen Palmquist is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. We invited him to answer the question "What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our "Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion" series. If we regard this as a philosophical (not a scientific) question, then the first step to answering it is to determine what norms or values define excellent philosophy, in general. Once that is established, we can inquire whether the nature (...) of religion brings with it any special features that make the task of doing excellent philosophy of religion unique. Unlike scientific explanations, excellent philosophical explanations must be multi-perspectival. A question that has only one right answer is not philosophical; instead, it is likely to be about facts. While we philosophers should care (deeply!) about any facts relevant to our inquiries, our peculiar way of interpreting facts means that answering a philosophical question cannot be done in one absolutely "right" way. This does not mean there are no right answers to philosophical questions; rather, there are many. But this does not make any answer equally good; for there would then be no such thing as excellent philosophy. The essentially perspectival nature of all genuinely philosophical questions means that the correctness of each purportedly "right" answer must be assessed in terms of its aptness for the perspective the questioner adopts when posing the question. A single question, such as "Does God exist?" can have many good answers, depending on whether the questioner assumes science, morality, aesthetics, or something else as the context. Each different type of inquiry has different boundary-conditions, so a good answer within each context is bound to differ from those in other contexts. Bad philosophy typically lacks depth: like a cyclops, its approach to answering questions is mono-perspectival. But if good philosophy acknowledges perspectives, what makes philosophy excellent? Good philosophy achieves excellence when it approaches a completeness whereby we begin to understand the range of relevant perspectives from which a given question can be asked, and the distinct boundary-conditions for answering it properly from each relevant perspective. Before applying this definition of excellent philosophy to the specific case at hand, we must pause to consider whether anything distinctive characterizes the range of philosophical topics and questions that typically come under the umbrella of philosophy of religion. In particular, does religion have features that make it especially difficult (or for that matter, easy) to think about philosophically, compared to other philosophical topics? Yes and no. (shrink)

This paper argues that participants in the subjectivism/objectivism/hybridism debate, a central issue in recent meaning in life research, conflate two different distinctions marked by the terms objective and subjective, one having to do with the question of whether life's meaningfulness depends on factors internal or external to the agent, the other having to do with the question of whether there is any ‘absolute’ as opposed to ‘relative’ truth about the first question. The paper then argues that a distinctive type (...) of hybridism with respect to the first sense is true. To vindicate this type of hybridism, the paper identifies, by using examples and counterexamples, internal and external necessary conditions for having meaningful lives. In this type of hybridism, internal states that are not directed at external factors, such as autonomy, serenity and contentment, are also taken account of, and, more generally, internal and external factors need not relate to each other at all. Further, although the more a combination of internal and external factors is valuable the more meaningful a life is, not any increase in the value of any relevant internal or external factor enhances meaning. (shrink)

According to a common interpretation, most explicitly defended by Onora O’Neill and Patricia Kitcher, Kant held that epistemic obligations normatively depend on moral obligations. That is, were a rational agent not bound by any moral obligation, then she would not be bound by any epistemic obligation either. By contrast, in this paper, I argue that, according to Kant, some epistemic obligations are normatively independent from moral obligations, and are indeed normatively absolute. This view, which I call epistemicism, has two (...) parts. First, it claims that in the absence of other kinds of obligations, rational agents would still be bound by these epistemic obligations, i. e., that the latter are normatively independent. Second, it claims that, no matter what other obligations are at stake, rational agents are bound by these epistemic obligations, i. e., the normativity of these epistemic obligations is absolute in that it cannot be undercut by any moral or other sort of obligation. The argument turns on an exploratory reading of Kant’s remarks in “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” (1786) about the maxim of “thinking for oneself” as the “supreme touchstone of truth”. In contrast to O’Neill and Kitcher, I argue that if we interpret this maxim as stating the unifying principle of theoretical and practical reason, then we must interpret it as stating an epistemic, and not merely practical imperative. This result, I argue, vindicates epistemicism and illuminates interesting lessons about Kant’s conception of the category of “epistemic” norms. Further, it helps us make headway with Kant’s enigmatic remarks about the unity of practical and theoretical reason in the Groundwork, the first and second Critiques, and the Lectures on Logic. On my proposal, principles of the practical and theoretical uses of reason are unified through a formal epistemic principle. (shrink)

“Why did God create the World?” is one of the traditional questions of theology. In the twentieth century this question was rephrased in a secularized manner as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” While creation - at least in its traditional, temporal, sense - has little place in Spinoza’s system, a variant of the same questions puts Spinoza’s system under significant pressure. According to Spinoza, God, or the substance, has infinitely many modes. This infinity of modes follow from the (...) essence of God. If we ask: “Why must God have modes?,” we seem to be trapped in a real catch. On the one hand, Spinoza’s commitment to thoroughgoing rationalism demands that there must be a reason for the existence of the radical plurality of modes. On the other hand, the asymmetric dependence of modes on the substance seems to imply that the substance does not need the modes, and that it can exist without the modes. But if the substance does not need the modes, then why are there modes at all? Furthermore, Spinoza cannot explain the existence of modes as an arbitrary act of grace on God’s side since Spinoza’s God does not act arbitrarily. Surprisingly, this problem has hardly been addressed in the existing literature on Spinoza’s metaphysics, and it is my primary aim here to draw attention to this problem. In the first part of the paper I will present and explain the problem of justifying the existence of infinite plurality modes in Spinoza’s system. In the second part of the paper I consider the radical solution to the problem according to which modes do not really exist, and show that this solution must be rejected upon consideration. In the third and final part of the paper I will suggest my own solution according to which the essence of God is active and it is this feature of God’s essence which requires the flow of modes from God’s essence. I also suggest that Spinoza considered radical infinity and radical unity to be roughly the same, and that the absolute infinity of what follow from God’s essence is grounded in the absolute infinity of God’s essence itself. (shrink)

I here settle a recent dispute between two rival theories in distributive ethics: Restricted Prioritarianism and the Competing Claims View. Both views mandate that the distribution of benefits and burdens between individuals should be justifiable to each affected party in a way that depends on the strength of each individual’s separately assessed claim to receive a benefit. However, they disagree about what elements constitute the strength of those individuals’ claims. According to restricted prioritarianism, the strength of a claim is determined (...) in ‘prioritarian’ fashion by both what she stands to gain and her absolute level of well-being, while, according to the competing claims view, the strength of a claim is also partly determined by her level of well-being relative to others with conflicting interests. I argue that, suitably modified, the competing claims view is more plausible than restricted prioritarianism. (shrink)

The advance of scientific approaches to life has recorded a plethora of successes as well as failures. Man being at the center of its experiment is tossed toe and fro by the result of its inquiry. Predictions are that in the nearest time, humanity might be living absolutely under the directives of Technology based on Artificial intelligence. At present, Technology based on Artificial Intelligence is quickly finding its way into various areas of life including health and social services. This spread (...) and or interplay connotes the relinquishing of health responsibilities from man to sensor technology as well as dependency on the data and result of this technology. This effort questions this unethical dependency as well as raises moral issues associated with the use of Technology base on artificial intelligence on psychiatric patient. It dabbles into medical values such as; autonomy of the patient cum consent, Kantian universal principle and its implication to implementing the universal usage of technology in mental health care services, and so on. The work of Patricia A. Arean (2016) titled Mobile Technology for Mental Health Assessment gave an in-depth analysis of the available approaches, doting advantages of sensor technology on psychiatric patient. The paper applied the analytic, descriptive and prescriptive method of philosophy to achieve its objective. To this end, it is in the view of this work imperative for the mental-medical community to consider reflectively these issues and the philosophic recommendations provided herein. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of freedom, in particular his claim that natural determinism is compatible with absolute freedom, is widely regarded as puzzling and incoherent. In this paper I argue that what Kant means by ‘freedom’ has been widely misunderstood. Kant uses the definition of freedom found in the republican tradition of political theory, according to which freedom is opposed to dependence, slavery, and related notions – not to determinism or to coercion. Discussing Kant’s accounts of freedom of the will (...) and freedom of the agent in turn, I argue that this insight sheds new light on Kant’s transcendental compatibilism and suggests novel responses to age-old objections. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to outline an interpretation of the philosophical understanding of the concept of the good in pre-Platonic thought. The interpretation is based on those fragments only in which the concept actually appears. As a result of the adopted assumption, the ideas of the first philosophers, i.e. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, were outside the scope of the investigation, as well as those of Xenophanes, Eleatics, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Leucippus. In the case of the first philosophical systems (...) of the pre-Platonic philosophy one notices a connection between the good and the One. It can also be found that understanding of the ‘the Best’ is depended on, and results from, ‘the good’. This is true also in Heraclitus, though, at the same time, he introduces an significant reversal in this respect, for he abolishes the absolute difference between the good and evil, and turns it to a subjective relation. The good has no ontological basis in the Democritus’ system as well, though the good’s connection with truth, accessible for every human being, allows to interpret him as arguing for an objectivistic conception of the good. The objectivity of good has subsequently been denied by the Sophists. (shrink)