Most published discussions in contemporary metaethics include some textual exegesis of the relevant contemporary authors, but little or none of the historical authors who provide the underpinnings of their general approach. The latter is usually relegated to the historical, or dismissed as expository. Sometimes this can be a useful division of labor. But it can also lead to grave confusion about the views under discussion, and even about whose views are, in fact, under discussion. Elijah Millgram’s article, “Does the (...) Categorical Imperative Give Rise to a Contradiction in the Will?” is a case in point. In it, he takes the New Kantians to task for various flaws in their interpretation of Kant’s moral theory, to be detailed shortly. He concludes with a question and a suggestion. In order to properly dissect the first, “universal law” formulation of the Categorical Imperative, he argues, we first need to understand “why an agent wills the universalization of his maxim” (549). He also suggests that in order to answer this question, we must recur to what Kant himself actually says (550). His question is a good one, and his advice on how to go about answering it is sound. But to take Millgram’s advice is to call this division of labor into question, at least for this case. For it demands close and sustained exegesis, not only of his argument against the New Kantians, but also – in order to assess whether and where they go wrong – of Kant’s text itself. (shrink)

Political realists have argued that ‘the political’ is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive concepts, distinctive methodology, and distinctive ‘source of normativity’. I here explore the metanormative commitments of realism (of the radical realist branch, in particular) and question the viability of exploring the ontology of the normative altogether. I argue that the escape into the metanormative realm was something of a wrong turn within the realism debates – an intellectual error. My central argument, building on recent metatheoretical work (...) on normativity, is meant to discredit the sheer possibility of metanormative distinctness. If realists can neither prove metanormative, nor traditional, nor methodological distinctness, there is a valid question as to its standing. I speculate, perhaps realism is little more than a new semantic label for ‘continental’ practices of social analysis as they leak into the analytic tradition. But then again it can be argued that most contemporary continental thought, and certainly much of what passes as critical theory these days, is thoroughly moralist, anti-positivist, and postmodern, and those sentiments are not shared by radical realists, who are, or so I’ll argue, far more faithful to the modernist tradition of social theory. (shrink)

Both European and Anglo-American philosophical traditions of Kant scholarship draw a sharp distinction between Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies. They cite KrV, A 14.23 –28; KrV, A 15.01– 09; KrV, B 28.22 – 28; KrV, B 29.01 –12 as evidence that the analyses of intuition, understanding and reason proffered in the first Critique apply to cognition only, and therefore do not significantly illuminate his analyses of inclination, desire, or respect for the moral law in the Groundwork, second Critique, Metaphysics of (...) Morals, or Religion. This paper is part of a larger project that takes issue with this near-universal consensus, and with the canonical interpretation of KrV, A 14.23– 28; KrV, A 15.01 –09; KrV,B 28.22 –28; KrV, B 29.01 – 12. Many of the most important terms in Kant’s mature moral philosophy – such as “action,” “reason,” “freedom,” “will,” “categorical,” “imperative,” “ought,” “maxim,” “duty,” “inclination,” “end,” and “idea” – are introduced, and sometimes elaborated at length, in the first Critique; and often appear in the Groundwork with little or no further elaboration. This suggests that Kant intended the analysis of self and rationality in the first Critique to serve as a formal foundation for his subsequent analysis of practical deliberation and moral motivation in the Groundwork. Here I argue specifically that Kant’s use of the first-/third-person asymmetry in his analysis of action in the first Critique’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy is necessary to his account of moral motivation and moral intention in the Groundwork; and that the structure of pure apperception he offers in the Transcendental Deduction resolves this asymmetry. (shrink)

In this study, we want to analyze the relation between two Romanian internationally-renowned men of culture: Mircea Eliade (often considered one of the greatest historians of religion of all times) and Nicolae Steinhardt (whose name and memory have been mentioned by Pope John the Second in his visit in Romania). Though they had about the same age (a difference of 5 years), they had little connections in the interwar period (a few meetings and, later, Steinhardt’s volume The Way of… (...) the Young [În genul… tinerilor] from 1934, where he parodies Eliade, among others). A strong influence (which changed destinies) occurred during 1958-1960, when Steinhardt was imprisoned for having read and spread writings of Romanians found in exile, including the novel Midsummer Night (The Forbidden Forest) [Noaptea de Sânziene (Pădurea interzisă)] by Eliade. After the release in 1964, Steinhardt was continuously watched by the communist Securitate and reports have been written about him, where his main guilt was his friendship with Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu, Virgil Ierunca, Monica Lovinescu, et al. Beyond these biographical intersections between Eliade and Steinhardt, there are also connections with regard to the Romanian culture, literary ideas, and visions on religious life. Steinhardt brings appreciations to the scholar in Chicago for the fact that he presents the beauty of the Romanian culture in the Western desecrated world and considers Eliade – and he’s one of the few who does this – influenced in his thinking by Christian ideals (in this direction, memorable are Steinhardt’s appreciations of the role played by Eliade in the Western culture, especially with his volume From Zamolxis to Genghis-Kahn [De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han], but also with his fiction, marking a direct reference to the novella A Fourteen Year Old Photograph [O fotografie veche de 14 ani]). (shrink)

This research investigated therapist's experiences of how working outdoors in nature impacts on the therapeutic relationship. Although outdoor therapy has emerged as a significant practice (McLeod, 2013; Mind, 2013), very little research had been done on what impact it might have on the therapeutic relationship. Given the importance of the therapeutic relationship (Norcross, 2011), this was identified as an area worth investigating.

In this paper I offer a discussion of chapter 3 of Adrian Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, which is titled “Leibniz: Metaphysics in the Service of Theodicy.” Here Moore discusses the philosophy of Leibniz and comes to a damning conclusion. My main aim is to suggest that such a conclusion might be a little premature. I begin by outlining Moore’s discussion of Leibniz and then raise some problems for the objections that Moore presents. I follow this by (...) raising a Moore-inspired problem of my own and offer a possible response. The response is based on a little-known essay of Leibniz’s called “Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream” and leads me to consider Leibniz’s deepest motivations for engaging in philosophical reflection. (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)

[A. W. Moore] Criteria of ineffability are presented which, it is claimed, preclude the possibility of truths that are ineffable, but not the possibility of other things that are ineffable—not even the possibility of other things that are non-trivially ineffable. Specifically, they do not preclude the possibility of states of understanding that are ineffable. This, it is argued, allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and those who adopt the new (...) reading recently championed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others. By maintaining that what the nonsense in the Tractatus is supposed to convey is ineffable understanding, rather than ineffable truth, we can do considerable justice to each of these readings. We can also do considerable justice to the Tractatus. /// [Peter Sullivan] Moore proposes to cut between 'traditional' and 'new' approaches to the Tractatus, suggesting that Wittgenstein's intention is to convey, through the knowing use of nonsense, ineffable understanding. I argue, first, that there is indeed room for a proposal of Moore's general kind. Secondly, though, I question whether Moore's actual proposal is not more in tune with Wittgenstein's later thought than with the attitude of the Tractatus. (shrink)

In a recent reply to our article, “What is Interpretability?,” Prasetya argues against our position that artificial neural networks are explainable. It is claimed that our indefeasibility thesis—that adding complexity to an explanation of a phenomenon does not make the phenomenon any less explainable—is false. More precisely, Prasetya argues that unificationist explanations are defeasible to increasing complexity, and thus, we may not be able to provide such explanations of highly complex AI models. The reply highlights an important lacuna in our (...) original paper, the omission of the unificationist account of explanation, and affords us the opportunity to respond. Here, we argue that artificial neural networks are explainable in a way that should satisfy unificationists and that interpretability methods present ways in which ML theories can achieve unification. (shrink)

An understanding of the factors behind the evolution of multicellularity is one of today’s frontiers in evolutionary biology. This is because multicellular organisms are made of one subset of cells with the capacity to transmit genes to the next generation and another subset responsible for maintaining the functionality of the organism, but incapable of transmitting genes to the next generation. The question arises: why do somatic cells sacrifice their lives for the sake of germline cells? How is germ/soma separation maintained? (...) One conventional answer refers to inclusive fitness theory, according to which somatic cells sacrifice themselves altruistically, because in so doing they enhance the transmission of their genes by virtue of their genetic relatedness to germline cells. In the present article we will argue that this explanation ignores the key role of policing mechanisms in maintaining the germ/soma divide. Based on the pervasiveness of the latter, we argue that the role of altruistic mechanisms in the evolution of multicellularity is limited and that our understanding of this evolution must be enriched through the consideration of coercion mechanisms. (shrink)

Adrian Piper argues that the Humean conception can be made to work only if it is placed in the context of a wider and genuinely universal conception of the self, whose origins are to be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This conception comprises the basic canons of classical logic, which provide both a model of motivation and a model of rationality. These supply necessary conditions both for the coherence and integrity of the self and also for unified (...) agency. The Kantian conception solves certain intractable problems in decision theory by integrating it into classical predicate logic, and provides answers to longstanding controversies in metaethics concerning moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engenders. In addition, it sheds light on certain kinds of moral behavior – for example, the whistleblower – that the Humean conception is at a loss to explain. (shrink)

The purpose of this discussion is twofold. First, I want to shed some light on Kant's concept of personhood as rational agency, by situating it in the context of the first Critique's conception of the self as defined by its rational dispositions. I hope to suggest that this concept of personhood cannot be simply grafted onto an essentially Humean conception of the self that is inherently inimical to it, as I believe Rawls, Gewirth, and others have tried to do. Instead (...) I will try to show how deeply embedded this concept of personhood is in Kant's conception of the self as rationally unified consciousness. Second, I want to deploy this embedded concept of personhood as the basis for an analysis of the phenomenon of xenophobia. (shrink)

This chapter offers an indirect defence of the Evansian conception of egocentric space, by showing how it resolves a puzzle concerning the unity of egocentric spatial perception. The chapter outlines several common assumptions about egocentric perspectival structure and argues that a subject’s experience, both within and across her sensory modalities, may involve multiple structures of this kind. This raises the question of how perspectival unity is achieved, such that these perspectival structures form a complex whole, rather than merely disunified set (...) of individually, distinctively structured experiences. The shortcomings of variety of accounts are considered: switch accounts ; sensory accounts; transformation accounts; and ultimate accounts. These shortcomings are addressed by a further kind of account provided by the Evansian conception – an agentive account – according to which egocentrically structured experiences present the world in relation to parts of a single thing, the body as a dynamic unity. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that folk knowledge attribution practices regarding some epistemological thought experiments differ significantly from the consensus found in the philosophical literature. More specifically, laypersons are likely to ascribe knowledge in the so-called Authentic Evidence Gettier-style cases, while most philosophers deny knowledge in these cases. The intuitions shared by philosophers are often used as evidence in favor (or against) certain philosophical analyses of the notion of knowledge. However, the fact that these intuitions are not universal, (...) as non-philosophers do not sympathize with verdicts made by philosophers, is problematic and requires some explanation. Recently, a promising theoretical approach emerged that could be used to explain away unexpected folk knowledge attributions. According to the protagonist projection hypothesis, when subjects answer questions about some hypothetical scenario, their judgments might result from adopting the cognitive perspective of the protagonist in the given scenario. Previous experimental findings suggest protagonist projection might be responsible for problematic knowledge attributions in Gettier-style cases. This paper reports data collected in an experiment which focused on five different Authentic Evidence Gettier-style scenarios and investigated the impact of protagonist projection on folk knowledge ascriptions in such cases. The results bring some support to the protagonist projection hypothesis, but do not allow to explain away a substantial number of problematic folk knowledge attributions. (shrink)

The recent publications reported in 2022 reveal the possibility of obtaining mouse embryos without the need for egg or sperm. These ‘artificial embryos’ can recapitulate some stages of development ex utero – from neurulation to organogenesis – without implantation. Synthetic mouse embryos might serve as a valuable model to gain further insights into early developmental stages. Indeed, it is expected for these models to be replicated by employing human cells. This promising research raises ethical issues and expands the horizon of (...) ethics in regard to the development of the human embryo. From this point of view, we state some of the new open venues for bioethical research. (shrink)

Multicellular organisms contain numerous symbiotic microorganisms, collectively called microbiomes. Recently, microbiomic research has shown that these microorganisms are responsible for the proper functioning of many of the systems (digestive, immune, nervous, etc.) of multicellular organisms. This has inclined some scholars to argue that it is about time to reconceptualise the organism and to develop a concept that would place the greatest emphasis on the vital role of microorganisms in the life of plants and animals. We believe that, unfortunately, there is (...) a problem with this suggestion, since there is no such thing as a universal concept of the organism which could constitute a basis for all biological sciences. Rather, the opposite is true: numerous alternative definitions exist. Therefore, comprehending how microbiomics is changing our understanding of organisms may be a very complex matter. In this paper we will demonstrate that this pluralism proves that claims about a change in our understanding of organisms can be treated as both true and untrue. Mainly, we assert that the existing concepts differ substantially, and that only some of them have to be reconsidered in order to incorporate the discoveries of microbiomics, while others are already flexible enough to do so. Taking into account the plurality of conceptualisations within different branches of modern biology, we will conduct our discussion using the developmental and the cooperation–conflict concepts of the organism. Then we will explain our results by referring to the recent philosophical debate on the nature of the concept of the organism within biology. (shrink)

This article presents a new approach to studying aesthetics by weaving together a thread of ideas based on investigating the problematics of the philosophy of art from a behavioral paradigm in order to exceed the margins of aesthetics. I claim that it makes no sense to ask if something is art, but rather we should be looking out into the manners in which art subsists, consists, and insists itself. Several notions of what I call behavioral aesthetics are proposed such as (...) observation, aesthetic experience and aesthetic conditioning, behavioral materialism, out-comes, behavioral memory and replication or acquisition, interaction and intra-action, emotional engineering, artificial instincts, aesthetic dissonance, and the problem of measurement. The proposed goal of behavioral aesthetics consists in studying the process of individuation as constitutive of art with the methods of Bernard Stiegler’s general organology and genealogy of the sensible. The article presents a behavioral stance as a borderline mode for approaching the genealogy of aesthetics. I mostly refer to Tania Bruguera’s Behavior Art School and Wright Judson’s Behavioral Art, and the paradigm of new materialism, notably agential realism of Karan Barad. (shrink)

I wish to defend the claim that given the content and structure of any moral theory we are likely to find palatable, there is no way of uniquely breaking down that theory into either consequentialist or deontological elements. Indeed, once we examine the actual structure of any such theory more closely, we see that it can be classified in either way arbitrarily. Hence if we ignore the metaethical pronouncements often made by adherents of the consequentialist-deontological distinction, we are quickly led (...) to the conclusion that this distinction contributes nothing of consequence to an understanding of moral theory. I will try to show that there are basically two reasons for this. First, what we mean by the terms endemic to the consequentialist-deontological distinction have no unique references to particular states of affairs in actual cases of moral decision making. Hence we may justify any such concrete moral decision by reference to typically consequentialist or deontological reasoning indifferently. Second, scrutiny of actual and viable moral theories reveals a much finer-grained structure than the consequentialist-deontological taxonomy can capture. And it is this structure, rather than simple attention to consequences or principles, that determines practical moral decision making. We would thus do better to develop the richer vocabulary of causes and constituents, goals and effects, states and events (mental, social, or physical). So in the end, the consequentialist-deontological distinction is irrelevant at the normative level of actual moral reasoning, whereas at the metaethical level it crudely schematizes two opposing types of dummy theory, neither of which is convincing, upon reflection, to any practicing moral philosopher. (shrink)

The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Kant's theory (...) of time-awareness also involves projection – but for him, the projection of temporal passage is necessary to any coherent experience at all, and for this reason events in the world cannot be represented except as exhibiting real tensed change. Consequently we cannot intelligibly suppose the world we know to be without the passage of time. This fact would permit a modest transcendental argument the conclusion of which is that we are entitled to describe the world in terms of temporal passage. (shrink)

Aesthetics is thought of as not only a theory of art or beauty, but also includes sensibility, experience, judgment, and relationships. This paper is a study of Bernard Stiegler’s notion of Aesthetic War (stasis) and symbolic misery. Symbolic violence is ensued through a loss of individuation and participation in the creation of symbols. As a struggle between market values against spirit values human life and consciousness within neoliberal hyperindustrial society has become calculable, which prevents people from creating affective and meaningful (...) attachments to symbols in relation to our retentional apparatuses, technology and memory. Such tension can be thought of as a dissonance between overlapping domains of social life, private and public. New Media is a reflection of aesthetic dissonance, an experience such as being bored and entertained at the same time, between antagonistic experiences, values, and behavior. Moreover, new media is at once a medium of customizing aesthetic experience individually as well as the threat and practice of prioritizing calculability and modeling of consumer behavior in favor of capitalistic effectiveness, which results in the simultaneous categorization of an individual as a data point, putting those who do not fit an algorithm’s premises at a disadvantage. (shrink)

According to the No-Luck-Thesis knowledge possession is incompatible with luck – one cannot know that p if the truth of one’s belief that p is a matter of luck. Recently, this widespread opinion was challenged by Peter Baumann, who argues that in certain situations agents do possess knowledge even though their beliefs are true by luck. This paper aims at providing empirical data for evaluating Baumann’s hypothesis. The experiment was designed to compare non-philosophers’ judgments concerning knowledge and luck in one (...) case that Baumann takes to be in favor of his claim and other cases where, according to him, absence of knowledge coincides with luck. The results show that the cases do not differ in a significant way between each other with respect to verdicts regarding knowledge and luck. In all cases subjects were more reluctant to judge that the ‘Gettierized’ belief is knowledge and more likely to judge that it is true by luck in comparison to a belief that is an uncontroversial instance of knowledge. However, the negative relationship between knowledge and luck ascriptions predicted by the No-Luck-Thesis was almost absent. The data raise some doubts about the No-Luck-Thesis, but the reasons for doubt are different than what Baumann expected. (shrink)

The recent literature on Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi centres around Jay Garfield’s (2009) and Graham Priest’s (2010) interpretation. It is an open discussion to what extent their interpretation is an adequate model of the logic for the catuskoti, and the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā. Priest and Garfield try to make sense of the contradictions within the catuskoti by appeal to a series of lattices – orderings of truth-values, supposed to model the path to enlightenment. They use Anderson & Belnaps's (1975) framework of First Degree Entailment. (...) Cotnoir (2015) has argued that the lattices of Priest and Garfield cannot ground the logic of the catuskoti. The concern is simple: on the one hand, FDE brings with it the failure of classical principles such as modus ponens. On the other hand, we frequently encounter Nāgārjuna using classical principles in other arguments in the MMK. There is a problem of validity. If FDE is Nāgārjuna’s logic of choice, he is facing what is commonly called the classical recapture problem: how to make sense of cases where classical principles like modus pones are valid? One cannot just add principles like modus ponens as assumptions, because in the background paraconsistent logic this does not rule out their negations. In this essay, I shall explore and critically evaluate Cotnoir’s proposal. In detail, I shall reveal that his framework suffers collapse of the kotis. Furthermore, I shall argue that the Collapse Argument has been misguided from the outset. The last chapter suggests a formulation of the catuskoti in classical Boolean Algebra, extended by the notion of an external negation as an illocutionary act. I will focus on purely formal considerations, leaving doctrinal matters to the scholarly discourse – as far as this is possible. (shrink)

Nowadays, in the context of the growing migration of the Muslim population in Europe, caused by the wars in Syria and other areas, the question is increasingly being asked whether there is a danger of „Islamization of Europe” following the „clash of civilizations”. The last formula is not new. It created a real dispute in the past. But the discussions must also take into account other questions that are currently being asked: is there still a Christian Europe? Is it possible (...) to speak of an intrinsic conflict between Christianity and Islam, which erupts at certain periods of time? In this study we will focus on the topic of „clash of civilizations”, the impact that this formula had in the world at the end of the twentieth century and the connotations it has for our times. The topic of research starts from the realities that no one can dispute, globally emphasizing the problems that affect people: conflicts in various territories, difficult economic situations in certain regions of the world, reaching financial crises and important social changes, in which the majority populations have to live with minorities that, most of the time, they do not know and do not accept. (shrink)

According to contextualism, vast majority of natural-language expressions are context-sensitive. When testing whether this claim is reflected in Folk intuitions, some interesting methodological questions were raised such as: which experimental design is more appropriate for testing contextualism – the within- or the between-subject design? The main thesis of this paper is that the between-subject design should be preferred. The first experiment aims at assessing the difference between the results obtained for within-subjects measurements (where all participants assess all contexts) and between-subject (...) measurements (where respondents evaluating different contexts are distinct groups). It is shown that the within-subject design provides data that seems to support contextualism. However, I present an alternative, invariantist interpretation of these results, therefore showing that the within-subject design does not allow to empirically distinguish between contextualism and invariantism. The second experiment further elaborates the issue of how perceiving the contrast between contexts can affect subjects’ judgments – I show that certain kinds of contexts may elicit opposite intuitions when contrasted with different contexts. (shrink)

We need modal imagination in order to extend our conception of reality - and, in particular, of human beings - beyond our immediate experience in the indexical present; and we need to do this in order to preserve the significance of human interaction. To make this leap of imagination successfully is to achieve not only insight but also an impartial perspective on our own and others' inner states. This perspective is a necessary condition of experiencing compassion for others. This is (...) the primary thesis I will try to defend in this discussion. (shrink)

THE MAIN OBJECTIVES of the following discussions are, first, to show the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property and, second, to show its exegetical inconsistency with the most plausible and consistent interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the self and its relation to the state in Ethical Life. I begin with the latter objective, by distinguishing three basic conceptions of the self that can be gleaned from various passages in the Philosophy of Right. I suggest viable (...) connections between each of these three conceptions and three respective interpretations of what I call the Hegelian requirement, i.e., that the individual be able to identify his personal interests and values with those of the state [141, 147, 147r, 151, 155].1 This can be understood as the requirement that the individual be capable of transcending certain limits of individuality in the service of broader and more inclusive political goals. I argue that Hegel’s theory of Personality and the requirements of Ethical Life in the state commit him to a conception of the self as capable of achieving such selftranscendence through action, despite appearances to the contrary that suggest that self-transcendence is to be primarily achieved through acquisition of various kinds. I then try to demonstrate the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property. I argue that the fallacies inherent in his exposition of this theory can be explained by his presupposing a conception of the self which both is inadequate to meet the criteria of Hegel’s theories of Personality and Ethical Life and also, therefore, fails the Hegelian requirement. (shrink)

The Syncretism, specific of old and new religious currents, is a phenomenon closely linked to millenarian movements and the emergence of so-called prophets that say that transmit divine messages being dependent at the same time, important social changes, economic political and, not least, religious. In the history of religions, syncretism is determined by several factors, among which are the changes in social, political, economic, and new philosophical and religious synthesis, the term acquiring a cosmopolitan sense. Syncretism occurs when two or (...) more social groups with different religions, contact, assimilating their members and various other religious characteristics specific groups and, for the most part, are foreign to their own beliefs. Religious syncretism has grown particularly intense during the first four centuries of the Christian era, but its traces can envision more or less pronounced in all religious history of humanity, with respect to the merger of two or more deities or acceptance of new forms and often contradictory in different parts of religious worship of pagan deities specifically different. (shrink)

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). 1 These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about (...) particular works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant’s view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant’s view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects. (shrink)

Much recent cognitive neuroscientific work on body knowledge is representationalist: “body schema” and “body images”, for example, are cerebral representations of the body (de Vignemont 2009). A framework assumption is that representation of the body plays an important role in cognition. The question is whether this representationalist assumption is compatible with the variety of broadly situated or embodied approaches recently popular in the cognitive neurosciences: approaches in which cognition is taken to have a ‘direct’ relation to the body and to (...) the environment. A “direct” relation is one where the boundaries between the body and the head, or between the environment and the animal are not theoretically important in the understanding of cognition. These boundaries do not play a theoretically privileged role in cognitive explanations of behavior. But representationalism appears to put a representational veil between the locus of cognition and that which is represented, making cognitive relations to the body and to the environment be indirect, with a high associated computational load. For this reason, direct approaches have tried to minimize the use of internal representations (Suchman 1987; Barwise 1987; Agre and Chapman 1987; Brooks 1992; Thelen and Smith 1994; van Gelder 1995; Port and van Gelder 1995; Clark 1997, 1999; Rupert 2009, p. 180). Does a cognitive neuroscience committed to direct relations rule out a representationalist approach to body knowledge? Or is direct representationalism possible? (shrink)

One of the insights of dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993 among many others) is that interpretation is sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general feature of meaning composition? If it is a more general feature of meaning composition, is it a processing (...) ‘preference’ or should it be captured as a ‘harder’ constraint on the type of meanings and operations over meanings involved in natural language interpretation? This squib draws attention to the symmetrical A-too B-too construction (found in a variety of languages, e.g., Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) in this context. It argues that any semantic analysis of its main ‘symmetrical-meaning’ characteristic should also allow for subtler interactions between this construction and items that are clearly sensitive to evaluation-order effects, e.g., anaphoric adjectives like next and other. We suggest that the notion of postsupposition embedded in a broader dynamic framework is better able to account for both the symmetric nature of this construction, its non-symmetric variant A-too, and its interaction with items that are evaluation-order sensitive. We briefly compare this proposal with a couple of possible alternative accounts. (shrink)

My modest aim in this paper is to prove certain relations between some type of hyper-intensional operators, namely context shifting operators, and compositionality in natural languages. Various authors (e.g. von Fintel & Matthewson 2008; Stalnaker 2014) have argued that context-shifting operators are incompatible with compositionality. In fact, some of them understand Kaplan’s (1989) famous ban on context-shifting operators as a constraint on compositionality. Others, (e.g. Rabern 2013) take contextshifting operators to be compatible with compositionality but, unfortunately, do not provide a (...) proof, or an argument in favor of their position. The aim of this paper is to do precisely that. Additionally, I provide a new proof that compositionality for propositional content (intension) is a proper generalization of compositionality for character (hyper-intensions). (shrink)

In an earlier discussion, I argued that Kant's moral theory satisfies some of the basic criteria for being a genuine theory: it includes testable hypotheses, nomological higher-and lower-level laws, theoretical constructs, internal principles, and bridge principles. I tried to show that Kant's moral theory is an ideal, descriptive deductive-nomological theory that explains the behavior of a fully rational being and generates testable hypotheses about the moral behavior of actual agents whom we initially assume to conform to its theoretical constructs. I (...) argued that the moral "ought" is best understood as the "ought" of tentative prediction expressed in the range of uses of the German sollen; and that the degree to which such a theory is well-confirmed is a function of the degree to which we actually judge individual human agents, on a case-by-case basis, to be motivated by rationality, stupidity, or moral corruption in their actions. I assume that a similar case could be made for other major contenders, such as Utilitarianism or Aristotelianism. But there still remains unanswered the question of which of these theories is the best among the available alternatives. To answer this question, further criteria of selection must be invoked. Among these are structural elegance and explanatory simplicity, but even these do not exhaust the desiderata for an adequate moral theory. More pressing in the case of moral theory is the requirement that the theory enable us to understand all the available data of moral experience; that the theory be sufficiently inclusive that in the formulation of its descriptive laws and practical principles, it be capable of identifying as morally significant all the behavior to which moral praise, condemnation, or acquittal is a relevant and appropriate response. (shrink)

The aim of this discussion is twofold.* First, I shall scrutinize certain prevailing rationales for enlisting for military service and show that these justifications are inadequate to meet the military’s recruiting needs. Larger numbers of enlistees who are fully equipped, both in technical skills and morale, for combat readiness are in great demand, but the arguments used to recruit potential enlistees are self-defeating. I shall show how and why they attract volunteers who are rendered singularly unfit to meet these demands (...) by those very arguments themselves. (shrink)

Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism, as well as realist responses to those attacks, unduly conflate distinctively political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctively political normativity depends on assuming moralism (...) as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgments are moral judgments, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgments are moral judgments. (shrink)

The process of decision making is predictable and irrational according to Daniel Ariely and other economic behaviorists, historians, and philosophers such as Daniel Kahneman or Yuval Noah Harari. Decisions made anteriorly can be, but don’t have to be, present in the actions of a person. Stories and shared belief in myths, especially those that arise from a system of human norms and values and are based on a belief in a “supernatural” order (religion) are important. Because of this, mass cooperation (...) amongst strangers is possible. (shrink)

Most moral theories share certain features in common with other theories. They consist of a set of propositions that are universal, general, and hence impartial. The propositions that constitute a typical moral theory are (1) universal, in that they apply to all subjects designated as within their scope. They are (2) general, in that they include no proper names or definite descriptions. They are therefore (3) impartial, in that they accord no special privilege to any particular agent's situation which cannot (...) be justified under (2) and (3). These three features do not distinguish moral theories from other theories, nor indeed from most general categorical propositions we assert. Yet, in recent years, these features of moral theories have been the target of a certain concerted and sustained criticism, namely, that to be committed to such a moral theory, or to aspire to act in accordance with its requirements, results in what has come to be known as moral alienation. Moral alienation, according to this criticism, consists in (i) viewing one's ground projects from an impersonal, "moral point of view" engendered by one's acceptance of the theory; (ii) being prepared to sacrifice these projects to the requirements of moral principle; and (iii) making such a sacrifice specifically and self-consciously in order to conform to these requirements. Moral alienation is said to manifest itself in one (or both) of two ways, depending on the nature of the project thus susceptible to sacrifice. One may be alienated from oneself, if the project consists of tastes, convictions, or aspirations that are centrally definitive of one's self. In this case one's commitment to the project can be at best conditional on its congruence with one's moral theory. It is claimed that this must make for a rather tepid and unenthusiastic commitment indeed. Alternatively, one may be alienated from others, if the project is an interpersonal relationship such as a friendship, marriage, or collegial relationship. In this case one's responses to the other are motivated by one's awareness of what one's moral theory requires. It is claimed that this obstructs a genuine and unmediated emotional response to the other as such. My aim here will be to argue that this very compelling criticism - call it the moral-alienation criticism - is nevertheless misdirected. The real culprit is not any particular moral theory, but rather a certain familiar personality type that may or may not adopt it. (shrink)

I want to argue that self-deception is a species of a more general phenomenon, which I shall call pseudorationality, which in turn is necessitated by what I shall describe as our highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation. By "literal self-preservation," I mean preservation of the rational intelligibility of the self, in the face of recalcitrant facts that invariably threaten it.

Kant’s three Analogies of Experience, in his Critique of Pure Reason, represent a highly condensed attempt to establish the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian physics. His strategy is to show that the organization of experience in terms of a world of enduring substances undergoing mutual causal interaction is a necessary condition of the temporal ordering even of one’s own subjective states, and thus of coherent experience itself. In his Third Analogy—an examination of the necessary conditions of judgments of simultaneous existence—he argues (...) that certain conceptual presuppositions consistent with Newtonian physics are necessary to time-awareness. His argument, however, appears to be undermined by conventionalism in natural science generally, and by the conventionality of simultaneity in particular. In this paper I discuss Kant’s claims in light of contemporary relativity theory. I suggest that, while his project is obsolete in major respects, there may still be useful insights into time-awareness to be drawn from his work. (shrink)

Although it might seem to elicit only a marginal interest for philosophical inquiry, in 20th century continental philosophy the experience of solitude and loneliness were shown to have unexpected importance and gravity. For philosophers such as M. Heidegger, H. Arendt, H.-G. Gadamer or P. Sloterdijk, solitude and loneliness are to be seen, on the one hand, as an ontological determination of our Being and, on the other, as a cause for some of the most worrisome problems of our times such, (...) as the birth of totalitarianism or the phenomenon of self-alienation wide-spread in the Western bureaucratic societies. But none of the philosophers dealing with these matters offers us a clear positive understanding of what solitude and loneliness actually are nor what the task of philosophy should be with regard to these experiences even though they give us to understand that philosophy has one. The present paper tarries upon this question, approaching it from the other end though an investigation of the status of alterity in Heidegger and Gadamer’s philosophy. (shrink)

Recording devices are generally taken to present problems for the standard Kaplanian semantics for indexicals. In this paper, I argue that the remote utterance view offers the best way for the Kaplanian semantics to handle the recalcitrant data that comes from the use of recording devices. Following Sidelle I argue that recording devices allow agents to perform utterances at a distance. Using the essential, but widely ignored, distinction between tokens and utterances, I develop the view beyond the initial sketch given (...) by Sidelle, and I answer the main objections raised against the view. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 gives a succinct presentation of Kaplanian semantics and of the problem raised by the use recording devices, Section 2 presents the remote utterance view and Section 3 answers the objections put forward against the view and further develops it. I conclude that the remote utterance view can handle the data that comes from the use of recording devices with only modest modifications of the Kaplanian semantics. (shrink)

My intellectual journey in philosophy proceeded along two mountainous paths that coincided at their base, but forked less than halfway up the incline. The first is that of my philosophical development, a steep but steady and continuous ascent. It began in my family, and accelerated in high school, art school, college, and graduate school. Those foundations propelled my philosophical research into the nature of rationality and its relation to the structure of the self, a long-term project focused on the Kantian (...) and Humean metaethical traditions in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It would have been impossible to bring this project to completion without the anchor, compass, and conceptual mapping provided by my prior, longstanding involvement in the practice and theory of Vedic philosophy. The second path is that of my professional route through the field of academic philosophy, which branched onto a rocky detour in graduate school, followed by a short but steep ascent, followed next by a much steeper, sustained descent off that road, into the ravine, down in flames, and out of the profession. In order to reach the summit of the first path, I had to reach the nadir of the second. It was the right decision. My yoga practice cushioned my landing. (shrink)

A characterization of transcendental arguments is proffered, whereby they yield conclusions about how things are via intermediate conclusions about how we must think that they are. A variant kind of argument is then introduced. Arguments of this variant kind are dubbed ‘conative’ transcendental arguments: these yield conclusions about how it is desirable for things to be via intermediate conclusions about how we must desire that they are. The prospects for conative transcendental arguments are considered. It is argued that, although they (...) can never be of practical use, they may nevertheless be of use in dissolving certain applications of the debate—initiated by Bernard Williams—about whether anyone can have an ‘external’ reason to do anything, that is to say a reason that is not grounded in some desire of the person’s, in a suitably broad sense of ‘desire’. The relevance of conative transcendental arguments to this debate is that they highlight desires that we cannot help having and with respect to which the debate lacks any suitable focus. In the final section of the essay five conative transcendental arguments deriving from the work of five moral philosophers are briefly considered. (shrink)

In our dealings with young children, we often get them to do or think things by arranging their environments in certain ways; by dissembling, simplifying, or ambiguating the facts in answer to their queries; by carefully selecting the states of affairs, behavior of others, and utterances to which they shall be privy. We rightly justify these practices by pointing out a child's malleability, and the necessity of paying close attention to formative influences during its years of growth. This filtering of (...) influences is necessary, we point out, if children are ever to reach a degree of maturity and inner stability that will enable them to understand and cope adequately with the complexities, contradictions, and difficulties of the world from which we now seek to shield them. Thus a child's eventual state of competence, maturity, and autonomy adequately justifies our current practices of manipulation and selection of his environment: such practices are rightly held to be ultimately in the child's best interests as an adult. There is no future state of things with reference to which the Utilitarian night justify his policy of secrecy and manipulation, and in light of which this policy night eventually be dispensed with and commonly validated, in retrospect, as a means to the worthwhile goal of moral maturity. That is, there is no point at which the attitude of the Utilitarian to the rest of the community can develop past the analogous attitude of the parent towards the child; no point at which the Utilitarian might eventually bear to others a relationship of mutual acknowledgement and respect as mature, autonomous, moral adults. The consistent Utilitarian, then, largely regards himself as if he were the only adult in a community of children. (shrink)

This chapter takes the form of a discussion between the editors of this volume and Daniel Little regarding the relationship between methodological individualism and methodological localism. The focus is on Little’s view that methodological individualism is incompatible with the assumption that actors are socially constituted and socially situated as well as on other topics such as micro-foundations, the micro–macro link, ontological individualism, causal explanation, rationality, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, and Durkheim.

The two kinds of discrimination I want to talk about are political discrimination and cognitive discrimination. By political discrimination, I mean what we ordinarily understand by the term "discrimination" in political contexts: A manifest attitude in which a particular property of a person which is irrelevant to judgments of that person's intrinsic value or competence, for example his race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or religious or ethnic affiliation, is seen as a source of disvalue or incompetence; in general, as a (...) source of inferiority.By cognitive discrimination, I mean what we ordinarily understand by the term "discrimination" in cognitive contexts: A manifest capacity to distinguish veridically between one property and another, and to respond appropriately to each. I want to explore the relation between these two kinds of discrimination, and to argue that the first type of discrimination depends upon a failure of the second. (shrink)

The history of economic thought witnessed several prominent economists who took seriously models and concepts in physics for the elucidation and prediction of economic phenomena. Econophysics is an emerging discipline at the intersection of heterodox economics and the physics of complex systems, with practitioners typically engaged in two overlapping but distinct methodological programs. The first is to export mathematical methods used in physics for the purposes of studying economic phenomena. The second is to export mechanisms in physics into economics. A (...) conclusion is drawn that physics transfer is often justified at the level of mathematical transfer but unjustified at the level of mechanistic transfer. (shrink)

Commentary on: Olaf Blanke, Thomas Metzinger, Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 7-13, ISSN 1364-6613, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003.