Despite extensive discussion of naïve realism in the wider philosophical literature, those influenced by the phenomenological movement who work in the philosophy of perception have hardly weighed in on the matter. It is thus interesting to discover that Edmund Husserl’s close philosophical interlocutor and friend, the early twentieth-century phenomenologist Johannes Daubert, held the naive realist view. This article presents Daubert’s views on the fundamental nature of perceptual experience and shows how they differ radically from those of Husserl’s. The author argues, (...) in conclusion, that Daubert’s views are superior to those of Husserl’s specifically in the way that they deal with the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. (shrink)

I argue for the following claims: (1) A core Husserlian account of perceptual constancy needs to be given in terms of indicative future-oriented conditionals but can be complemented by a counterfactual account; (2) thus conceived, constancy is a necessary aspect of content. I speak about a “core Husserlian” account so as to capture certain ideas that Michael Madary has presented as the core of Edmund Husserl's approach to perceptual constancy, viz., that “perception is partly constituted by the continuous interplay of (...) intention and fulfilment” and that this “gives us a way to understand the relationship between different appearances of the same object” (See Madary, M. (2012) “Husserl on Perceptual Constancy.” European Journal of Philosophy 20(1): 145–165.). I take myself to be developing, and perhaps correcting, Madary's view as I discuss the role of the core Husserlian ideas, and counterfactuals, in accounting for shape and color constancy, respectively. I bridge constancy and fulfilment-conditional content by appealing to the Husserlian notion of constitution, which captures the process in which objectivity and, correlatively, intentional experience, are built up in the experiential flow. (shrink)

Personal indexicals are often taken to refer to the agent of an expression’s context, but deviant uses (e.g. ‘I’m parked out back’) complicate matters. I argue that personal indexicals refer to the extended self of the agent, where the extended self is a mereological chimera incorporating whatever determines our behavioral capacities. To ascertain the persistence conditions of personal identity, I propose a method for selecting a level of description and a set of functional properties at that level that remain constant (...) over a lifetime. I argue for functional constancy, and against continuity, as the central determinant of diachronic identity. (shrink)

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are four primary (...) mechanisms through which the epistemic schema of ableism distorts communication between nondisabled physicians and disabled patients: testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing. Measures against epistemic injustices in general and against schema-based medical errors in particular are ultimately issues of justice that must be better addressed at all levels of health care practice. (shrink)

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.

While there seems to be much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, some theorists recently express scepticism about unconscious perception. We explore here two kinds of such scepticism: Megan Peters and Hakwan Lau's experimental work regarding the well-known problem of the criterion -- which seems to show that many purported instances of unconscious perception go unreported but are weakly conscious -- and Ian Phillips' theoretical consideration, which he calls the 'problem of attribution' -- the worry that many (...) purported examples of unconscious perception are not perceptual, but rather merely informational and subpersonal. We argue that these concerns do not undermine the evidence for unconscious perception and that this sceptical approach results in a dilemma for the sceptic, who must either deny that there is unconscious mentality generally or explain why perceptual states are unique in the mind such that they cannot occur unconsciously. Both options, we argue, are problematic. (shrink)

Binding specificity is a centrally important concept in molecular biology, yet it has received little philosophical attention. Here I aim to remedy this by analyzing binding specificity as a causal property. I focus on the concept’s role in drug design, where it is highly prized and hence directly studied. From a causal perspective, understanding why binding specificity is a valuable property of drugs contributes to an understanding of causal selection—of how and why scientists distinguish between causes, not just causes from (...) noncauses. In particular, the specificity of drugs is precisely what underwrites their value as experimental interventions on biological processes. (shrink)

In this paper, we developed an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for detect the absence or presence of lung cancer in human body. Symptoms were used to diagnose the lung cancer, these symptoms such as Yellow fingers, Anxiety, Chronic Disease, Fatigue, Allergy, Wheezing, Coughing, Shortness of Breath, Swallowing Difficulty and Chest pain. They were used and other information about the person as input variables for our ANN. Our ANN established, trained, and validated using data set, which its title is “survey lung (...) cancer”. Model evaluation showed that the ANN model is able to detect the absence or presence of lung cancer with 96.67 % accuracy. (shrink)

According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population (...) contexts. (shrink)

MMA fighting in a competition is not necessarily wrong and is often, as far as we can tell, permissible. Our argument has two premises. First, if an act does not infringe on anyone’s moral right or violate another side-constraint, then it is morally permissible. Second, MMA-violence does not infringe on anyone’s moral right or violate another side-constraint. The first premise rested on two assumptions. First, if a person does a wrong act, then he wrongs someone. Second, if one person wrongs (...) a second, then the first infringes on the second’s right. We then looked at Nicholas Dixon’s powerful Kantian argument that MMA fighting is wrong. (shrink)

This article explores Fanon's thought on dance, beginning with his explicit treatment of it in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. It then broadens to consider his theorization of Black embodiment in racist and colonized societies, considering how these analyses can be reformulated as a phenomenology of dance. This will suggest possibilities for fruitful encounters between the two domains in which (a) dance can be valorized while (b) opening up sites of resignification and resistance for Black (...) persons and communities-including a revalorization of Black embodiment as a kind of empowering danced experience. (shrink)

Part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves,” this essay concerns the third Move, “grace.” The etymology of the word “grace” reveals the entwined meanings of pleasing quality and authoritative power, which may be combined as “beautiful force.” I examine the treatments of grace in German philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who understands it as playful, naive transformation of matter; and in American philosopher John Dewey, for whom (...) it represents rhythmic organism/environment reversal. I conclude by showing how “grace” can be used in analyzing various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

Building on my previous exploration of the role of dance in the contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, first published in French in 2011, the present essay turns to another book originally published in the same year, The Intervals of Cinema. Having previously established that the core of Rancière’s philosophical method is an analysis of philosophical homonyms into figurative dancing conceptual partners, I begin by applying that method to the first chapter of (...) Intervals, “Cinematic Vertigo: Hitchcock to Vertov and Back.” There I identify two series of such dancing partners, as follows: Hitchcock’s image-controlling, capitalist vertiginous fall, and Vertov’s movement-equalizing, communist balanced dance. I then critique the implicit marginalizing of women and female bodies in the films and chapter, including Hitchcock’s protagonist’s best friend and ex-fiancé, and Vertov’s cosmetologists and switchboard operators. Finally, I offer a corrective from the proto-feminist life of my grandmother, a onetime cosmetologist, switchboard operator, and Glamour Shots amateur model, my grandmother, Louise Nunnelley, or “Mamaw.” Such are the unacknowledged material basis of Rancière’s radical democratic philosophy, the specifically-embodied and positioned female dancers who continue to get lost in his figurative dance. (shrink)

Although they were never to meet and corresponded only briefly, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft shared a mutual admiration and a strong intellectual bond. Macaulay’s work had a profound and lasting effect on Wollstonecraft, and she developed and expanded on many of Macaulay’s ideas. While she often took these in a different direction, there remains a great synergy between their ideas to the extent that we can understand Wollstonecraft’s own feminist arguments by approaching them through the frameworks and ideas that (...) Macaulay provided. These included the principles of classical republicanism, particularly in its understanding of the values of freedom, equality and virtue, and an understanding of reason as grounded in immutable principles that apply equally to both sexes. On the question of women’s freedom and social equality with men, I argue that though Macaulay sets up the problem in far richer and more detailed philosophical terms, in the end it is Wollstonecraft that has the more compelling account of its far-reaching social implications and of how this might be addressed. (shrink)

This article surveys the state of the literature on Hume’s epistemology, focusing on treatments of what has come to be known as the ‘Kemp Smith problem’, that is, the problem of reconciling Hume’s scepticism with his naturalism. It first surveys the literature on this issue with regard to the Treatise, moving on to briefly compare the Treatise and the Enquiry in virtue of their epistemological frameworks, before finally examining the literature with regard to the first Enquiry.

In this chapter, I will offer a strategic new interpretation of Hannah Arendt's conception of forgiveness. In brief, I propose understanding Arendt as suggesting—not that evil is objectively banal, or a mere failure of imagination—but instead that it is maximally forgiveness-facilitating to understand the seemingly unforgivable as merely a failure of imagination. In other words, we must so expand our imaginative powers (what Arendt terms “enlarged mentality”) by creatively imagining others as merely insufficiently unimaginative, all in order to reimagine them (...) as beings whom we are willing and able to forgive. It is in this sense that I understand forgiveness for Arendt as a kind of “magic.” That is, forgiveness involves the imaginatively-funded creation of a new reality by merely naming it, like the phenomenon of “magic thinking,” wherein one believes one’s thoughts or speech are immediately realized in the world. The magic of forgiveness, in other words, is an incantation or performative speech act, based on the forgiver’s choice to “make believe,” or pretend-into-being, that the forgiven person is forgivable qua thoughtless. (shrink)

Dance receives relatively little attention in the history of philosophy. My strategy for connecting that history to dance consists in tracing a genealogy of its dance-relevant moments. In preparation, I perform a phenomenological analysis of my own eighteen years of dance experience, in order to generate a small cluster of central concepts or “Moves” for elucidating dance. At this genealogical-phenomenological intersection, I find what I term “positure” most helpfully treated in Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; “gesture” similarly in Condillac, Mead and (...) Kristeva; “grace” in Avicenna, Schiller and Dewey; and “resilience” in Fanon, (Judith) Butler and Deleuze. With these analyses in place, I apply the four Moves in analyzing various forms of dancing (including salsa dancing and the pollen dance of the honeybee) and coordinate them to outline a comprehensive philosophy of dance. This philosophy points to certain conditions for an ideally flourishing, dancing society. And these conditions create the possibility for a coalition of sympathetic discourses (including critical race theory, queer theory, disability studies and democratic theory) united in pursuit of political virtue. The development of a philosophy of dance offers a deeper understanding of the intellectual values of a practice often identified with bodily immediacy and therefore judged uninteresting. It also reinvigorates philosophy with the dynamism and bodily relevance of the practice of dancing. Most important, it demonstrates the meaningful intersection of aesthetics and political ethics, by exploring how aesthetic practices underlie and inspire human flourishing. (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.

The chapter examines Russian political theorist Aleksandr Dugin’s (b. 1962) challenge to the Western liberal order. Even though Dugin’s project is in many ways a theoretical epitome of Russia’s contemporary attempt to profile itself as a regional great power with a political and cultural identity distinct from the liberal West, Dugin can also be read in a wider context as one of the currently most prominent representatives of the culturally and intellectually oriented international New Right. The chapter introduces Dugin’s role (...) on the Russian right-wing political scene and his international networks, Russian neo-Eurasianism as his ideological footing, and his more recent “fourth political theory” as an attempt to formulate a new ideological alternative to liberalism as well as the two other main twentieth-century ideologies, communism and fascism. Dugin’s fourth ideology, essentially meant as an alternative to a unipolar post–Cold War global hegemony of victorious liberalism, draws inspiration from the German conservative revolutionary movement of the Weimar era. In particular, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of history, with its thesis of the end of modernity and another beginning of Western thought, and Carl Schmitt’s pluralistic model of geopolitics are highlighted as key elements of Dugin’s eclectic political thought, which is most appropriately characterized as a form of radical conservatism. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show that the restoration model of pleasure as we find it in Plato’s Gorgias, Republic, Timaeus, and Philebus contain a common psychological core, despite the substantial developments and greater sophistication in the later works. I argue that, contrary to the scholarly consensus, all four dialogues take the necessary condition for pain to be a state of imbalance or disharmony rather than a process of destruction or deterioration. Given that the necessary condition for pleasure is (...) a process of restoration, it follows that the restoration model offers a strikingly asymmetrical account of pleasure and pain. This unorthodox interpretation of pain is not only favoured by the textual evidence but is also more charitable, as it attributes to Plato a more plausible view of impure pleasures, a more realistic account of desire, and a more compelling argument for the greater pleasantness of the philosophical life. (shrink)

In light of new historical evidence regarding ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s correspondence with art historian Erwin Panofsky, this article provides an in-depth analysis of the presence of entheogenic mushroom images in Christian art within the context of the controversy between Wasson and philologist John Marco Allegro over the identification of a Garden of Eden fresco in the 12th century Chapel of Plaincourault in France. It reveals a compelling financial motive for Wasson’s refusal to acknowledge that this fresco represents Amanita muscaria, (...) as well as for Wasson’s reluctance to pursue his hypothesis regarding the entheogenic origins of religion into Christian art and artifacts. While Wasson’s view – that the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in the Near and Middle East ended around 1000 BCE – prevailed and stymied research on entheogens in Christianity for decades, a new generation of 21st century researchers has documented growing evidence of A. muscaria and psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Christian art, consistent with ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini’s typology of mushroom trees. This article presents original photographs, taken during fieldwork at churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and the Middle East, that confirm the presence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art: in frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass windows. Based on this iconic evidence, the article proposes a psychedelic gospels theory and addresses critiques of this theory by art historians, ardent advocates, medieval historians, and conservative Catholics. It calls for the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels to independently evaluate the growing body of evidence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art in order to resolve a controversial question regarding the possible role of entheogens in the history and origins of Christianity. (shrink)

In this article, I channel the autobiography of Black Panther cofounder Huey P. Newton, entitled Revolutionary Suicide, against the misogyny of the alt-right movement today. Both Newton and the alt-right have been powerfully influenced by Nietzsche, but one way of grasping the central difference between them is by comparing their conceptions of Dionysus. While the alt-right sticks closer to Nietzsche’s conception, which minimizes the god’s androgyny, Newton’s thought resonates with that androgyny, thereby bringing him closer to the most influential Dionysus (...) scholar since Nietzsche, Walter Otto. I therefore turn to the latter’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult, whose analyses I synthesize into the following image inspired by the god’s closest animal familiar: the dancingly-graceful panther as aqueous-androgynous soul-hunter. Reimagining Newton’s Black Panther in this way, finally, can help us overcome the alt-right. (shrink)

This essay—part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves”—concerns the second Move, “gesture,” the etymology of which reveals its close connection to the Greek word “metaphor.” More specifically, I examine the treatments of gesture by the philosophers George Herbert Mead and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, both of whom view it as the foundation of language. I conclude by showing how gesture can be used in analyzing (...) various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

A case could be made that the practice of philosophy demands a certain humility, or at least intellectual humility, requiring such traits as inquisitiveness, openness to new ideas, and a shared interest in pursuing truth. In the positive psychology movement, the study of both humility and intellectual humility has been grounded in the methods and approach of personality psychology, specifically the examination of these virtues as traits. Consistent with this approach, the chapter begins with a discussion of the examination of (...) intellectual humility as a “character trait,” comparing intellectual humility to various well-known traits in the personality psychology literature (e.g the “Big 5” and the “Big 2”) as well as other key traits such as the need for cognition and the need for closure. The chapter then turns to the proverbial issue of whether virtues in general, and intellectual humility in particular, are a matter of “nature”- that is, an innate trait determined by heritability, or “nurture” – a trait mostly shaped by situation and environment. While the chapter does not resolve the issue, it provides occasion for an examination of the role of situations in the expression of intellectual humility, and for the interaction of “situation” and “trait.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the interaction of trait with situation provides the most robust understanding of the psychology of any character virtue, including humility and intellectual humility. (shrink)

In this exploratory paper, I consider how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might contribute to the failure of testimonial exchanges. In §1, I will briefly highlight four broad ways a testimonial exchange might fail. In §2, I will very briefly review the nature of epistemic injustice. In §3, I will explore how both epistemic injustice and intellectual humility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange, and I’ll conclude by suggesting how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might be related.

[First paragraphs: This essay takes its practical orientation from my experiences as a member of a philosophy reading group on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Penitentiary in Nashville, Tennessee. Its theoretical orientation comes from W. E. B. Du Bois’ lecture-turned-essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” which argues that the realm of aesthetics is vitally important in the war against racial discrimination in the United States. And since, according to Michele Alexander’s critically-acclaimed The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age (...) of Colorblindness, the prison system should be the primary front today in this war, my essay’s ultimate aim is t/o articulate a new criterion of the present-day “Negro” art being created by a prison population that is still overwhelmingly constituted by persons of color. In my first section, I will show how Du Bois’ insights in “Criteria of Negro Art” remain relevant today, especially in the prison context, and argue that it is thus appropriate for my new criterion to be shaped by his distinctive conception of “propaganda.” In my second section, through a close reading of two texts by Michel Foucault (the pivotal thinker of modern imprisonment), I will flesh out this new criterion, “self-torsion,” defined as the effect of prisoners’ attempts at self-care within a prison system that distorts those attempts into further exploitation of both prisoners and the outside world that imprisons them. And my final section, in an attempt to illustrate this new criterion’s efficacy as a form of propagandistic resistance to contemporary racism, will deploy self-torsion as a critique of two artworks created by imprisoned members of my reading group at Riverbend penitentiary. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify E- Learning strategies and their relation to the efficiency of research performance in foreign and Palestinian universities (University of Ottawa, Munster, Suez Canal, Al-Azhar, Islamic, Al-Aqsa). The analytical descriptive approach was used for this purpose, and relying on the questionnaire as a main tool for data collection. The study society is from the senior management, where the number of senior management in the universities in question is 206. The random stratified sample was selected and (SPSS) (...) was used for statistical data analysis. The study found a significant relationship between E- Learning strategies and the efficiency of research performance in universities. It also reached the participation of senior management in the research that develops the university performance in the Palestinian universities. The senior management indicated that they do not care to follow the policies of implementing the development of scientific research. While the senior management in foreign universities indicated that they are interested in following up the policies of implementing the development of scientific research. The study also showed that senior management in Palestinian universities does not care about providing the appropriate budget for E- Learning. The study recommended that the senior management of Palestinian universities should provide an E- Learning budget and encourage employees to continue using E- Learning strategies. The administration in the Palestinian universities should adopt and support outstanding research, and the need to encourage interest in the implementation of policies for the development of scientific research. (shrink)

Truth is a locus of guilt for the Christian, according to Jacques Lacan. The religious person, he argues, punitively defers truth eschatologically. Yet Lacan’s own view dissolves eschatological deferral to the world, as the “Real”. The metaphysics of Erich Przywara SJ helps highlight that this mirrors Lacan’s view of the religious person. Przywara’s Christian metaphysics and Lacanian psychoanalysis converge on the immanence of truth to history. But Przywaran analogy corrects Lacan’s position on the religious person, which by implication calls for (...) an adjustment to Lacan’s worldview. In the final analysis, Lacan’s dialectical nihilism should yield to a Christian’s hopeful relation to the truth. (shrink)

We present an abstract social aggregation theorem. Society, and each individual, has a preorder that may be interpreted as expressing values or beliefs. The preorders are allowed to violate both completeness and continuity, and the population is allowed to be infinite. The preorders are only assumed to be represented by functions with values in partially ordered vector spaces, and whose product has convex range. This includes all preorders that satisfy strong independence. Any Pareto indifferent social preorder is then shown to (...) be represented by a linear transformation of the representations of the individual preorders. Further Pareto conditions on the social preorder correspond to positivity conditions on the transformation. When all the Pareto conditions hold and the population is finite, the social preorder is represented by a sum of individual preorder representations. We provide two applications. The first yields an extremely general version of Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem. The second generalizes a classic result about linear opinion pooling. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a new theoretical method, which I call “dancing-with,” emerging from the process of writing my dissertation and the book manuscript that followed it. Defined formally, a given theorist X can be said to “dance-with” with a second theorist Y insofar as X “choreographs” an interpretation of Y which is both true to Y and Y’s historical communities, and also meaningful and actionable (i.e. facilitating social justice) for X and X’s historical communities. In this pursuit, the method of (...) dancing-with involves both (1) a creative “torsion” of Y’s thought (particularly in the direction of unconscious, embodied and political factors at work in Y’ texts), and (2) a resultant, sympathetic torsion of X’s thought toward Y. In other words, X and Y “meet in the middle,” like two dancers walking onto the dance floor, to explore the promise of a flourishing artistic partnership. In this partnership, each must attend to the way that political meanings are inscribed on the other’s raced/sexed/etc. body, both to react maximally justly, and to maximize the aesthetic movement options that can be brought into play. As the method of dancing-with is thus modeled on an ideal comportment for improvisational social dance (such as the contemporary Latin dance called “salsa”), I envision the end-goal of dancing-with as what I call “poetic social justice.” By this, I mean the “poetic justice” of two theorists’ mutually empowering each other for maximal social good. Though this process is admittedly more difficult between some theorists, in part as a function of their respective embodiments and sociohistorical positions, at least a move or two together is always possible. (shrink)

In this chapter, I approach the subject of peace by way of Andrew Fiala’s pioneering, synthetic work on “practical pacifism.” One of Fiala’s articles on the subject of peace is entitled “Radical Forgiveness and Human Justice”—and if one were to replace “Radical Forgiveness” with “Peace,” this would be a fair title for my chapter. In fact, Fiala himself explicitly makes a connection in the article between radical forgiveness and peace. Also in support of my project, Fiala’s article names four of (...) the six historical figures who are central to my chapter, namely Marcus Aurelius, King, Arendt, and Nietzsche. Moreover, Fiala also insists there “forgiveness must be held in creative tension with justice,” and it is this very tension that forms the basis of my new conception of socially-just peace. To wit, I propose that socially-just peace is lovingly generous reimagining (peace) through intuitively self-overcoming tension (social justice). (shrink)

[First paragraph]: Believe it or not, it’s no exaggeration to say that Ender’s Game has been the most transformative book of my life. In fact, when I first read it, at the age of fifteen, it almost single-handedly initiated a crisis of faith in me that ended up lasting for eight long years. The reason that it was able to do so is that it is positively full of important philosophical ideas (a fact attested to by the very existence of (...) this volume and its many essays). It should come as no surprise to fellow science fiction fans—and especially fans of Ender’s Game in particular—that science fiction is full to bursting with philosophical ideas. But the skeptical reader need not fear; in this case, at least, you don’t have to take my word for it. Orson Scott Card’s 1991 edition of Ender’s Game mentions his master’s degree in literature, and that all “the layers of meaning are there to be decoded, if you like to play the game of literary criticism.” So if you think you might have found a hidden layer of meaning in Ender’s Game, it’s a lot less likely that he or she is just crazy, and a lot more likely that there really is some hidden meaning there—and maybe even one that Card himself consciously put there to be found! (shrink)

This essay derives its focus on poetry from the subtitle of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft: “la gaya scienza.” Nietzsche appropriated this phrase from the phrase “gai saber” used by the Provençal knight-poets (or troubadours) of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries — the first lyric poets of the European languages — to designate their Ars Poetica or “art of poetry.” I will begin with an exploration of Nietzsche’s treatment of poets and poetry as a subject matter, closely analyzing his six aphorisms which (...) deal explicitly with poets and poetry. Having considered The Gay Science as a text about poetry, I will then briefly explore three further ways in which The Gay Science can be thought of as itself a kind of poetry. The result of these analyses is an understanding of Nietzsche’s own understanding of philosophy (and of the best way to live) as also a form of poetry. (shrink)

: In APo II 3-7 Aristotle discusses a series of difficulties concerning definition, deduction, and demonstration. In this paper I focus on two interrelated but distinct questions: firstly, what are exactly the difficulties emerging from or alluded to in the discussion in II 3-7; secondly, whether and in what sense the discussion in II 3-7 can be considered an aporetic discussion with a specific role to play in the development of the argument in APo II.

Artikkeli käy läpi Quentin Meillassoux’n Äärellisyyden jälkeen -teoksessa esittelemiä spekulatiivisen materialismin lähtökohtia: ajatuksen Kantin jälkeistä filosofiasta hallinneesta korrelationismista ja sen ”heikosta” ja ”vahvasta” muodosta sekä Meillassoux’n perusargumentin, jolla hän pyrkii osoittamaan vahvan korrelationismin pyrkimyksen absoluuttisista viitepiisteistä luopumiseen sisäisesti ristiriitaiseksi. Tarkastelun pääpaino on Meillassoux’n väitteessä, että ajattelun riisuminen kaikista absoluuttisista näkökohdista johtaa vahvan korrelationismin omaksumaan ”fideistisen”, uskon ja järjen erillisyyttä ja keskinäistä riippumattomuutta korostavan suhtautumisen uskonnolliseen uskoon. Tällainen fideismi voi Meillassoux’n mukaan suojella tai jopa palvella ”nykypäivän fanatismia”. Artikkeli esittää joukon kriittisiä (...) huomioita Meillassoux’n fideismin ja uskon, uskonnollisten absoluuttien sekä fanatismin käsitteistä. Hänen klassiseen valistusmoderniin nojaava fideismikritiikkinsä osoittautuu toistaiseksi puutteellisesti perustelluksi ja ongelmallisesti muotoilluksi. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: On Wednesday, June 8, 2011, UK’s The Guardian reported that numerous US universities including Harvard and Vanderbilt were invested in companies that were buying large tracts of African farmland and kicking off the indigenous farmers in order for their employees (mostly non-Africans) to grow cash crops to sell to Europe.1 Harms associated with this land-grabbing include, in addition to the evictions themselves, corruption among African governments and among absentee African land owners, increased food prices, and accelerated climate change.

Richard Wright gave a series of lectures in Europe from 1950 to 1956, collected in the following year in the volume, White Man, Listen! One dominant theme in all four essays is that expanding the moral imagination is centrally important in repairing our racism-benighted globe. What makes Wright’s version of this claim unique is his forthright admission that expanding the moral imagination necessarily involves pain and suffering. The best place to hear Wright in regard to the necessary pain of expanding (...) the moral imagination, I would argue, is his poetry collection, This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner. To wit, for Wright the necessary pain of expanding one’s moral imagination is the loneliness that results from delegating to others—in the etymological sense of “deputizing or committing”—one’s whiteness qua privilege or social capital. In conclusion, lonely delegation constitutes an imperative template from Wright regarding the painful expansion of our own moral imagination, in the service of social justice for economically oppressed communities of color across the globe. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will explore the intersection of philosophy and childhood through the intriguing case study of J. S. Mill, who was almost completely denied a childhood—in the nineteenth-century sense of a qualitatively distinct period inclusive of greater play, imaginative freedom, flexibility, and education. For his part, Mill’s lack of such a childhood was the direct result of his father, James Mill (economic theorist and early proponent of Utilitarianism), who in a letter to Jeremy Bentham explicitly formulates a plan (...) to raise his son as an experiment in the Utilitarian “science” of ethics. More specifically, although James Mill’s end was to create a near-superhuman champion of Utilitarianism, his means to that end included denying John access to other children and the Romantic poetry of his contemporaries. Despite this oppressive lack of a childhood, however, J. S. Mill went on to become perhaps the most influential social and political reformer in British history, especially in regard to gender relations through his groundbreaking work for women’s suffrage. This begs the central question of this chapter, namely how could a philosopher’s tyrannized childhood nevertheless lead to his later overturning of such tyranny in the political sphere? (shrink)

Many strategies for incorporating poetry into non-poetry classes, especially outside of English and associated disciplines, appear to make poetry subservient and secondary in relation to the prose content of the course. The poet under consideration becomes a kind of involuntary servant to one or more prose authors, forced to “speak only when spoken to,” and effectively prevented from challenging the ideas of the course’s prose writers, and thereby the instructor. Fortunately, this is not the only strategy for incorporating poetry into (...) prose-dominated courses. In this chapter, I will suggest an alternate approach which recognizes and facilitates the agency of poets and poetry per se, which I term “empowering poetic defiance.” In brief, this approach consists of the following four steps: (1) challenge one’s own poetic self-loathing (2) position the course’s poetry’s content to challenge the course’s non-poetic contents (3) position the course’s poetry’s forms to challenge your class’s non-poetic forms (4) comport oneself as interlocutor toward the poets featured in the course as the intellectual equals of oneself and the course’s prose writers. My first section will elaborate on these four steps, and my second section will flesh out the method further with a new reading of one of the most powerfully defiant poets in the Western canon, the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, in dialogue with one of the most formidable challengers to the power of poetry, the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

My intention in this paper is to respond to Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that poetry, along with philosophy, is essentially incapable of what Nancy describes as "thinking love." To do so, I will first try to come to an understanding of Nancy’s thinking regarding love and then of poetry as presented in his essay "Shattered Love." Having thus prepared the way, I will then respond, via Pablo Neruda’s poem "Oda al Limón," to Nancy’s understanding of poetry vis-à-vis "Shattered Love." This response, (...) in acting out Nancy’s thinking regarding love, will suggest a greater plurality within poetry than Nancy acknowledged. (shrink)

The computer science (CS) graduated students suffered from documenting their projects and specially from coordinating it. In addition, students’ supervisors faced difficulties with guiding their students to an efficient process of documenting. In this paper, we will offer a suggestion as a solution to the mentioned problems; that is an application to make the process of documenting computer science (CS) student graduation project easy and time-cost efficient. This solution will decrease the possibility of human mistakes and reduce the effort of (...) documenting process. (shrink)

Joseph Raz argues that legal authority includes a claim by the law to replace subjects’ contrary reasons. I reply that this cannot be squared with the existence of choice-of-evils defenses to criminal prosecutions, nor with the view that the law has gaps (which Raz shares). If the function of authority is to get individuals to comply better with reason than they would do if left to their own devices, it would not make sense for law to claim both to pre-empt (...) our contrary reasons and to leave open spaces or catch-all exceptions which we must use our own devices to fill. (shrink)

Do skeptical arguments undermine reason, as Hume supposes? In this paper, I argue that they do not and that skepticism is thus no threat to dogmatism about the possibility of knowledge.

Modern rationalism transformed the modern homeland to a discursive space and time by means of institutes governing the modern society in all its walks. Based on the Newtonian and Kantian conception of space and time the discursive field is just a scene wherein any human individual adopts stewardship to create progress by reducing landscape and non-human life to auxiliary items for human’s benefit. In contrast, Aldo Leopold considered humans, non human life and the landscape as mutually influencing participants and enlarged (...) ethical care to all living participants and the landscape, called ´the land´. Integrity and autonomy of the homeland are the central topics of Leopold’s land ethics. Baird Callicott suggested to complete it with new metaphysical conceptions of space and time. -/- We formulated a metaphysical background for Leopold’s land ethics by phenomenology of space and time based on the Leibnizian conception of space-time. The latter is constructed by particular places and events called ´ecotopois´ embracing all human participants, locals and foreigners in a varying symbolic temporal and spatial field of dynamic process of identification and self consciousness. Adopting Warwick Fox´ transpersonal identification idea non-human life and landscape enriches these processes. Finally, it is not a matter of conquering the land, it is matter of making a community. -/- Though landscape and participants are particular, integrity and autonomy of the homeland claim the universal status of the land. Adopting Gadamer hermeneutical way of understanding, we reject mutual and equally understanding. Only acceptance of mutual prejudice makes room for asymmetric praxis between locals and foreigners as well as between humans and non-humans. What is more, Gadamer´s hermeneutics makes an ontological status of the foreigner possible and recognizes the interest of homeland’s particularity. This universal status is guaranteed as a priori space-time that links subject’s tradition and that of the land to actual contact with the foreigner. Transpersonal identification is a consequence of converging hermeneutical understanding of foreigner’s particularity and that of the landscape. Ethics of the land evolves from the ethical status of any foreigner in the own homeland. -/- . (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the analysis of the feasibility of global justice developed by Pablo Gilabert in his recent book From Global Poverty to Global Equality: A Philosophical Exploration. Gilabert makes many valuable contributions to this topic and I agree with most of his analysis. However, I identify a distinction between strategic justification and moral justification that Gilabert neglects. I show how this distinction is useful in addressing objections to the feasibility of global justice. I also claim that Gilabert (...) makes some problematic assumptions concerning the way in which global justice is morally demanding. (shrink)