In a 2014 article in The Guardian, an Indigenous shaman of the Yanomami people of the Amazon rainforest named Davi Kopenawa offers a devastating critique of white society. It is formed of excerpts from multiple interviews, which form the basis of his memoir The Falling Sky, compiled and translated by his French anthropologist collaborator Bruce Albert. Here I bring the dual lenses of philosophy and dance studies to explore how Kopenawa’s lifelong interaction with white people facilitated his reworking of (...) Yanomami shamanic discourse into a parrhesia against the “epidemic fumes” of climate change, on behalf of the Yanomami of the Amazon, white people, and all the beings of the earth. (shrink)

American Indian Thought is a contemporary collection of twenty-two essays written by Indigenous persons with Western philosophical training, all attempting to formulate, and/or contribute to a sub-discipline of, a Native American Philosophy. The contributors come from diverse tribal, educational, philosophical, methodological, etc., backgrounds, and there is some tension among aspects of the collection, but what is more striking is the harmony and the singularity of the collection’s intent. Part of this singularity may derive from the solidarity among its authors. In (...) addition to the fact that all belong to Indigenous tribes, there is also a striking sensitivity to the interconnection between distinct Western disciplines—particularly between philosophy and poetry. I take the latter to be a thread which can be strategically woven into the center of the anthology’s weave. In this book discussion, I aim to draw out the poetic aspects of five of the anthology’s essays, which deal with philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, respectively. In this way, I hope to illuminate a poetic quality at the heart of the collection, and thus also of the burgeoning field of Native American or Indigenous philosophy in general. In the process, I will also consider ways in which Indigenous philosophy resonates with the Western philosophical traditions of phenomenology and American pragmatism. With the latter tradition in particular this connection has become more fully appreciated, especially through the work of Bruce Wilshire and Scott Pratt. (shrink)

Comparative religion scholar Thomas Berry’s influential concept of “Earth jurisprudence” has been helpfully elaborated in three principal books. My first section identifies four of their common themes, deriving therefrom an implicit narrative: (1) the basis of ecology is autopoiesis, which (2) originally generated human communities and Indigenous vernacular laws, which were (3) later reasserted by forest defenders who fought to create the Magna Carta’s “Charter of the Forest,” which is (4) now championed globally by the Indian physicist and eco-activist Vandana (...) Shiva’s Earth Democracy movement. My next three sections identify mutually exclusive elements of the three books, deriving the following alternative narrative: self-conscious new dancing rituals (Cullinan) could empower an historically informed reconstruction of private property (Burdon) via commons-based vernacular law (Weston and Bollier). And my conclusion offers one template for such a strategy, namely a new environmental variation on my dancing-poetic conception of legal justice, christened “emerald star-law.”. (shrink)

Consonant with the ongoing “aesthetic turn” in legal scholarship, this article pursues a new conception of law as poetry. Gestures in this law-as-poetry direction appear in all three main schools in the philosophy of law’s history, as follows. First, natural law sees law as divinely-inspired prophetic poetry. Second, positive law sees the law as a creative human positing (from poetry’s poesis). And third, critical legal theory sees these posited laws as calcified prose prisons, vulnerable to poetic liberation. My first two (...) sections interpret two texts at the intersections among these three theories, namely Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Shelley identifies a poetic rebirth in the ruins of natural law, suggesting a philosophy of law as “natural poesis.” And Tocqueville names several figurative aristocracies capable of redeploying aristocratic law against democratic despotism, suggesting a philosophy of law as “aristo-poetic counterforce.” Finally, I propose a new theory of law as poetry bridging these two theories, “natural aristo-poetic counterforce.”. (shrink)

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Jim Woodward, has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt—though poorly understood—hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations, of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology and economics, are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this paper to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal-explanatory scheme, as presently (...) formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous. (shrink)

Both realist and anti-realist accounts of natural kinds possess prima facie virtues: realists can straightforwardly make sense of the apparent objectivity of the natural kinds, and anti-realists, their knowability. This paper formulates a properly anti-realist account designed to capture both merits. In particular, it recommends understanding natural kinds as ‘categorical bottlenecks,’ those categories that not only best serve us, with our idiosyncratic aims and cognitive capacities, but also those of a wide range of alternative agents. By endorsing an ultimately subjective (...) categorical principle, this view sidesteps epistemological difficulties facing realist views. Yet, it nevertheless identifies natural kinds that are fairly, though not completely, stance-independent or objective. (shrink)

According to the psychological account of personal identity, our identity is based on the continuity of psychological connections, and so we do not begin to exist until these are possible, some months after conception. This entails the psychological account faces a challenge from the non-identity problem—our intuition that someone cannot be harmed by actions that are responsible for their existence, even if these actions seem clearly to cause them harm. It is usually discussed with regard to preconception harms, but in (...) the context of the psychological account, it is also applicable to prenatal harms. Inflicting prenatal injury is widely thought to be morally impermissible, but if the injury is identity-determining on the psychological account, then no-one seems to be harmed—rather, the injury is responsible for bringing them into existence. Here, I argue that identity-determining injuries can routinely occur on the psychological account, and that this undermines the account. I assess Nicola Williams’ proposal to salvage the account based on a trans-world account of personal identity, and show that it is unsuccessful. I then show that Jeff McMahan’s embodied mind account of personal identity is also susceptible. I conclude that identity-determining prenatal injuries pose a significant challenge for the psychological account and its variants, and provide a reason for supporting alternative accounts that fix personal identity at conception. (shrink)

General Relativity says gravity is a push caused by space-time's curvature. Combining General Relativity with E=mc2 results in distances being totally deleted from space-time/gravity by future technology, and in expansion or contraction of the universe as a whole being eliminated. The road to these conclusions has branches shining light on supersymmetry and superconductivity. This push of gravitational waves may be directed from intergalactic space towards galaxy centres, helping to hold galaxies together and also creating supermassive black holes. Together with the (...) waves' possible production of "dark" matter in higher dimensions, there's ample reason to believe knowledge of gravitational waves has barely begun. Advanced waves are usually discarded by scientists because they're thought to violate the causality principle. Just as advanced waves are usually discarded, very few physicists or mathematicians will venture to ascribe a physical meaning to Wick rotation and "imaginary" time. Here, that maths (when joined with Mobius-strip and Klein-bottle topology) unifies space and time into one space-time, and allows construction of what may be called "imaginary computers". This research idea you're reading is not intended to be a formal theory presenting scientific jargon and mathematical formalism. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: This article is part of a larger project in which I suggest a historically informed philosophy of dance, called “figuration,” consisting of new interpretations of canonical philosophers. Figuration consists of two major parts, comprising (a) four basic concepts, or “moves”—namely, “positure,” “gesture,” “grace,” and “resilience”—and (b) seven types, or “families” of dance—namely, “concert,” “folk,” “societal,” “agonistic,” “animal,” “astronomical,” and “discursive.” This article is devoted to the first of these four moves, as illustrated by both its importance for Aristotle (...) and also its applicability to these seven families of dance. One goal of figuration as a whole, and the central goal of this excerpt from that larger project, is to model and justify a dancing aesthetic education pursuant to psychological and political flourishing. (shrink)

My article began as a very short 250 words inspired by astrophysicist Jeff Hester's (pro-evolution) pages on entropy (Astronomy magazine - Oct. and Nov. 2017 - http://www.astronomy.com/magazine/jeff-hester/2017/09/entropys-rainbow and http://www.astronomy.com/magazine/jeff-hester/2017/10/entropy-redux). The letter I wrote pointed out evolution's pluses (eg adaptations) and minuses (regarding origins). It went on to speak of a human, scientific, entirely natural explanation for what is called God. It proposes that the true human condition after death and before birth is as a member of the Elohim - a (...) name used for God in the Old Testament which, according to World Book Encyclopedia, means the PLURAL MAJESTY OF THE ONE GOD. This led to a few hundred more words about why some people call an entirely natural process "supernatural". I speculate that it must be because of the applications in thousands of years of finding a successful theory of quantum gravity (union of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity - general relativity). Like quantum mechanics and gravitation, those apps would include all space and all time, and would undoubtedly be as mysterious to us as our technology would initially be to the builders of Egypt's first pyramids. In years past, the denial of divine beings by science may have been logical. But times sometimes change radically. Such a paradigm shift seems to be upon us now, with the recent discovery of gravitational waves and the anticipation of quantum gravity. In changing times, scientists and philosophers and everyone must always keep open minds. Of course, proposing that the human condition after death and before birth is as a member of the Elohim means that humans of the far distant future must be capable of the creation attributed to God by many people throughout the centuries. Therefore, a subsection entitled "Creation Of The Infinite, Eternal Cosmos Using Electronic BITS, Pi And Imaginary Time" has been added to the end of this article. -/- . (shrink)

In this article, I offer a new philosophical interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid, dually centered on the queens of Olympus and Carthage. More specifically, I show how the philosopher-poet Virgil deploys Dido’s Junonian furor as the Aristotelian matter of the unjust Roman imperium, the feminist counterforce to the patriarchal force disguised as peaceful order. The first section explores Virgil’s political and biographical background for the raw materials for a feminist, anti-imperial political philosophy. The second section, following Marilynn Desmond, situates the continuing (...) misogynist condemnation of Virgil’s two goddess-queens in the context of their honored centrality in Roman and Carthaginian culture. The third section reinterprets Virgil’s goddess-queens as agents of furor as (apparently mad) feminist counterforce to the (actually mad) unjust force of the Roman empire and its agents Jupiter and Aeneas. The fourth section translates these poetic philosophical interpretations into prose, arguing that Dido’s Junonian furor is the Aristotelian matter constituting the unjust forms of Roman imperium. And the conclusion applies the latter analysis to Hardt and Negri’s Empire, suggesting Dido as a model for the “multitude” in the fight against the imperial injustice of today’s globalized empire. (shrink)

In 1982, MIT physicist Frank Wilczek predicted and named ANYONS, quasiparticles (particle-like formations) that are confined to 2 dimensions. The name might come from Prof. Wilczek's lighthearted comment "anything goes". This article's main goal is to show that anyons could be another name for 1) virtual particles, 2) Mobius strips, and 3) figure-8 Klein bottles. Along the way, we'll see the picture painted by the article confirm that Einstein's dream of gravitational-electromagnetic unity fits in with anyons being Mobius strips. We'll (...) also have encounters with intergalactic travel and imaginary computers. They really could exist but are imaginary in the sense that they use imaginary time (as well as space-time warping). (shrink)

On the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's current affairs program "7.30 Report" (29/01/2015), presenter Leigh Sales asked Canadian psychiatrist and author Norman Doidge "What is the difference between the mind and the brain?" Dr. Doidge's reply - "Well, the brain is thought to be roughly three pounds of physical material and nobody, to my mind, has adequately defined and established what the contours of mind are - and that includes all the neuroscientists I know, with respect." -/- I’ve recently read interesting thoughts (...) by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff; as well as by 20th-century Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrodinger, Discover Magazine’s writer Shannon Palus and philosopher/neuroscientist Eddy Nahmias. I’d like to weave these thoughts together (with a few of my own) to hopefully find a satisfactory definition of mind. (shrink)

A substantial proportion of human embryos spontaneously abort soon after conception, and ethicists have argued this is problematic for the pro-life view that a human embryo has the same moral status as an adult from conception. Firstly, if human embryos are our moral equals, this entails spontaneous abortion is one of humanity’s most important problems, and it is claimed this is absurd, and a reductio of the moral status claim. Secondly, it is claimed that pro-life advocates do not act as (...) if spontaneous abortion is important, implying they are failing to fulfill their moral obligations. We report that the primary cause of spontaneous abortion is chromosomal defects, which are currently unpreventable, and show that as the other major cause of prenatal death is induced abortion, pro-life advocates can legitimately continue efforts to oppose it. We also defend the relevance of the killing and letting die distinction, which provides further justification for pro-life priorities. (shrink)

In his book "A Brief History of Time", Stephen Hawking says "If a complete unified theory was discovered, it would only be a matter of time before it was digested and simplified - and taught in schools, at least in outline. We should then all be able to have some understanding of the laws that govern the universe and are responsible for our existence." If complete, a unified theory would be physical and embrace all the space, matter and time of (...) the entire universe. It could not be partial and, as often interpreted, restricted to mathematics. -/- A complete unified theory that includes everything in space-time has practical applications for the matter called children who live today or in the past. They'd have "some understanding of the laws that govern the universe" at least from conception and associations formed at childhood would not always be "simpler". Pruning of nerve connections deprives us, in an intuitive sense, of "some understanding of the laws that govern the universe". Pruning prepares us for this part of existence - to attend school and university, and to develop the physics and maths that leads to discovery of the complete unified theory which, in their earliest years, children have some intuitive knowledge of. (shrink)

This paper critiques the new mechanistic explanatory program on grounds that, even when applied to the kinds of examples that it was originally designed to treat, it does not distinguish correct explanations from those that blunder. First, I offer a systematization of the explanatory account, one according to which explanations are mechanistic models that satisfy three desiderata: they must 1) represent causal relations, 2) describe the proper parts, and 3) depict the system at the right ‘level.’ Second, I argue that (...) even the most developed attempts to fulfill these desiderata fall short by failing to appropriately constrain explanatorily apt mechanistic models. -/- *This paper used to be called "The Emperor's New Mechanisms". (shrink)

In my 1990 work – Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice – I argued for four modifications of Rawls’s principles of social justice and rendered a modified version of his theory in four principles, the first of which is the Basic Rights Principle demanding the protection of people’s security and subsistence rights. In both his Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness Rawls explicitly refers to my version of his theory, clearly accepting three of my four proposed modifications but rejecting the fourth (...) ‐‐ the demand for social and economic democracy – on grounds that it automatically justifies socialism as opposed to capitalism. I argue, contrary to Rawls, that it is not true that this demand automatically picks socialism as the preferablesocioeconomic/political system and that a Social and Economic Democracy Principle demanding workplace and neighborhood democracy is officially neutral between these two systems … although plausible empirical assumptions may, indeed, favor the former. I then significantly elaborate my second version of Rawls’s theory of social justice which is composed of the following principles arranged in a very strong order of priority : Basic Rights Principle, Equal Basic Liberties Principle, Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle, Modified Difference Principle, and Social and Economic DemocracyPrinciple. I argue that this elaborated version of the theory – which I call “Justice as Fair Rights” – is better than either Rawls’s original theory or my previous versions of it. (shrink)

James Sterba has constructed a powerful argument for there being a conflict between the presence of evil in the world and the existence of God. I contend that Sterba’s argument depends on a crucial assumption, namely, that God has an obligation to act according to the principle of meticulous providence. I suggest that two of his analogies confirm his dependence on this requirement. Of course, his argument does not rest on either of these analogies, but they are illustrative of the (...) role that meticulous providence plays in his argument. I then investigate the ethical principles Sterba invokes in his use of meticulous providence and suggest that not only do we often not predicate goodness of human persons based on these principles of obligation, but that these principles are much too stringent to function to determine moral obligations and moral goodness. From there, I contend that to think that God has a similar obligation regarding meticulous providence in order to be good encounters several serious problems, especially with respect to the soul-building Sterba wants to preserve. I conclude by considering Sterba’s reply in terms of a limited application of meticulous providence. (shrink)

The alleged conflict between religion and science most pointedly focuses on what it is to be human. Western philosophical thought regarding this has progressed through three broad stages: mind/body dualism, Neo-Darwinism, and most recently strong artificial intelligence (AI). I trace these views with respect to their relation to Christian views of humans, suggesting that while the first two might be compatible with Christian thought, strong AI presents serious challenges to a Christian understanding of personhood, including our freedom to choose, moral (...) choice itself, self-consciousness, and the relevance of God to our beginning, being, and ending. (shrink)

Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes — and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled (...) solution to it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples, including to a debate concerning the ‘causal democracy’ of organismal development, with an anti-democratic (though not a gene-centric) moral. (shrink)

Perry Hendricks’ impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on two premises: first, impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, and second, if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. He calls this the impairment principle. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than FAS, it follows from these two premises that abortion is immoral. Critics have focussed on the ceteris paribus (...) clause of TIP, which requires that the relevant details surrounding each impairment be sufficiently similar. In this article, we show that the ceteris paribus clause is superfluous, and by replacing it with a more restrictive condition, the impairment argument is considerably strengthened. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg, in “A New Logical Problem of Evil,” published in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, argues that (if God exists) God has, of necessity, a disappreciation of evil, operating at a metalevel in such a way as to give God a non-defeasible reason to rule out actualizing a world containing evil. He also argues that since God’s motive in creating the world is to share with finite beings the good that God experiences prior to creation, (...) which is good without evil, it follows that God will create a world that contains no evil. I investigate in detail the foregoing lines of argument and provide grounds for rejecting them. My paper is published in Vol 38 No.2, whose date is nominally April 2021 although the issue is not in fact available yet. (shrink)

What is it about a person's becoming an adult that makes it generally inappropriate to treat that person paternalistically any longer? The Standard View holds that a mere difference in age or stage of life cannot in itself be morally relevant, but only matters insofar as it is correlated with the development of capacities for mature practical reasoning. This paper defends the contrary view: two people can have all the same general psychological attributes and yet the mere fact that one (...) person is at the beginning of a life and another in the middle of one can justify treating the younger person more paternalistically than the older one. Recognising the moral relevance of age, moreover, is crucial if one is to accommodate both the liberal moral ideal of respect for autonomy and our demanding educational aims, given that these otherwise come into conflict with one another. (shrink)

Conscientious objection in healthcare has come under heavy criticism on two grounds recently, particularly regarding abortion provision. First, critics claim conscientious objection involves a refusal to provide a legal and beneficial procedure requested by a patient, denying them access to healthcare. Second, they argue the exercise of conscientious objection is based on unverifiable personal beliefs. These characteristics, it is claimed, disqualify conscientious objection in healthcare. Here, we defend conscientious objection in the context of abortion provision. We show that abortion has (...) a dubitable claim to be medically beneficial, is rarely clinically indicated, and that conscientious objections should be accepted in these circumstances. We also show that reliance on personal beliefs is difficult to avoid if any form of objection is to be permitted, even if it is based on criteria such as the principles and values of the profession or the scope of professional practice. (shrink)

I begin by distinguishing four different versions of the argument from evil that start from four different moral premises that in various ways link the existence of God to the absence of suffering. The version of the argument from evil that I defend starts from the premise that if God exists, he would not allow excessive, unnecessary suffering. The argument continues by denying the consequent of this conditional to conclude that God does not exist. I defend the argument against Skeptical (...) Theists who say we are in no position to judge that there is excessive, unnecessary suffering by arguing that this defense has absurd consequences. It allows Young Earthers to construct a parallel argument that concludes that we are in no position to judge that God did not create the earth recently. In the last section I consider whether theists can turn the argument from evil on its head by arguing that God exists. I first criticize Alvin Plantinga’s theory of warrant that one might try to use to argue for God’s existence. I then criticize Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian argument to the same conclusion. I conclude that my version of the argument from evil is a strong argument against the existence of God and that several important responses to it do not defeat it. (shrink)

Perry Hendricks’ original impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on the impairment principle (TIP): if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and giving a fetus FAS is immoral, it follows that abortion is immoral. Critics have argued that the ceteris paribus is not met for FAS and abortion, and so (...) we proposed the Modified Impairment Principle (MIP) to avoid these difficulties. Dustin Crummett has responded, arguing that MIP is open to various counterexamples which show it to be false. He also shows that MIP can generate moral dilemmas. Here, we propose a modification to MIP that resolves the issues Crummett raises. Additionally, Alex Gillham has criticized our appropriation of Don Marquis’ ‘future like ours’ reasoning about the wrongness of impairment. We show that his objections have minimal implications for our argument. (shrink)

Perhaps owing to frictions between his Christological worldview and the dominant secularism of contemporary French thought as taken up in the U.S., and persistent worries about a seeming solipsism in his phenomenology, Michel Henry's innovative contributions to aesthetics have received unfortunately little attention in English. The present investigation addresses both issues simultaneously with a new interpretation of his recently-translated 1996 interview, “Art and Phenomenology.” Inspired by this special issue’s theme, “French Thought in Dialogue,” it emphasizes four levels of dialogue in (...) the interview, as follows: (1) the interview as such, with Brohm; (2) its titular dialogue between art and phenomenology; (3) what I term a “trans-religious” dialogue between Christianity’s Jesus and Nietzsche’s Dionysus; and (4) a related dialogue between painting (Henry’s favored genre) and dance that is “Dionysian” (in Nietzsche’s sense). It concludes with new phenomenological accounts of a literal and a figurative dance, namely the social Latin dance called bachata, and an improvised musical dialogue with the mockingbirds of my hometown. In sum, thanks to Henry’s engagement with various forms of dialogue, including with Brohm, the arts, paganism, and dance, one can find room in his transcendental subjectivity of Life for others, dancingly transcending even humanity. (shrink)

intro to Part 1 - -/- Most people disliked mathematics when they were at school and they were absolutely correct to do so. This is because maths as we know it is severely incomplete. No matter how elaborated and complicated mathematical equations become, in today's world they're based on 1+1=2. This certainly conforms to the world our physical senses perceive and to the world scientific instruments detect. It has been of immeasurable value to all knowledge throughout history and has elevated (...) science to the lofty status it enjoys. Science is now striving towards Unification - where the subatomic realm, all matter, energy, forces, space and time will be seen as entangled parts of one universe. While 1+1=2 has been vital in getting humanity to this point, it's time to suppress our attachments to the past and realize that whereas 1+1 will always equal 2, it's also capable of equalling the 1 which represents unification. -/- intro to Part 2 -/- b) Division by zero is accepted, in Newtonian maths, to be impossible. But we can regard division by zero as division by nothing i.e. division that has no effect. In this case, 1 divided by 0 is 1. However, to a physicist there is no such thing as nothing (even empty space contains energy). What could the something called 0 actually be? It could be a binary digit. If we use the base of ten (for simplicity) and attach one and zero to it as exponents, we get 10^1 divided by 10^0 = 10^1. If we then cancel 10 from each factor in the expression, we get 1 divided by 0 = 1. At the start of the paragraph, this was referred to as division by nothing. Then 0 was called a binary digit and division by nothing became division by something. The 1 that the division equals is the unified field of space-time. Division by 0 is impossible in Newtonian maths because the result can be infinity. But the word “infinity” can, as the last section of this book shows, apply to the unified field of spacetime. So division by zero is not impossible because it results in the universe, which is obviously possible … a possibility that has always been, and always will be, realized. -/- intro to Part 3 -/- If quantum entanglement has existed in the entire universe forever, everything would be everywhere and everywhen. Space, time and 5th-dimensional hyperspace would not be restricted to certain parts of the Mobius Universe but would exist in every particle. Past, present and future would not exist as the distinct periods which everyday life assumes. All instants of all periods would exist eternally, permitting time travel to any point in the past and to any point in the future. Entanglement may be created by simply zipping along at close to the speed of light - “Quantum entanglement of moving bodies” by Robert M. Gingrich and Christoph Adami in Physical Review Letters 89, 270402 (issue of 30 December 2002) – which might be achieved, according to this book, by warping space so it’s either a fraction of the 90 degrees allowing instantaneous travel or almost at 270 degrees to space as we know it. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore how we might understand the relation of Deleuze’s early works to ethics, and to develop the connections between this way of understanding Deleuze and the work of Søren Kierkegaard. I will claim that we can view both figures as arguing that the sense or meaning we take from the world, and the metaphysical structure we ascribe to it, is secondary to an ethical stance we take in the face of a world of (...) becoming. As such, the central preoccupation of both Kierkegaard and Deleuze is how we make sense of an existence which is necessarily temporal. As we shall see, recognizing the importance of temporality involves a move away from the traditional resolution of the problem of sense that operates by making temporality an accidental aspect of a world. In the first half of this paper, I want to explore this claim in relation to Deleuze’s reading of Plato, tying his claim that Plato is essentially developing an ethical rather than metaphysical doctrine with the claim that “the task of modern philosophy has been defined: to overturn [renversement] Platonism” (DR 59). My emphasis in this section is how Deleuze, rather than “overturning” Platonism by simply rejecting the priority it gives to Forms or essences over appearances, the renversement of Deleuze’s reading inverts the relation to show how the search for essence is in fact grounded in an ethical decision, or “selection,” in the world of appearances/simulacra itself. As such, both Plato and Deleuze can be seen as presenting different trajectories for making sense of a world of becoming, either by grounding it in a transcendent, atemporal realm, or by seeing it as an intensive field of processes. In the second half, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s philosophy rests on a claim, similar to the one we find in Deleuze’s work, that we need to develop a logic of sense in response to a world of becoming. I will conclude that Deleuze’s reading of Kierkegaard is limited by a focus on the theological aspects of his thought, and that Kierkegaard provides a sophisticated and complementary taxonomy of the ways in which we try to make sense of our existence in a world of becoming by developing diverse ethical postures. (shrink)

Compulsive smartphone users’ psyches, today, are increasingly directed away from their bodies and onto their devices. This phenomenon has now entered our global vocabulary as “smartphone zombies,” or what I will call “iZombies.” Given the importance of mind to virtually all conceptions of human identity, these compulsive users could thus be productively understood as a kind of human-machine hybrid entity, the cyborg. Assuming for the sake of argument that this hybridization is at worst axiologically neutral, I will construct a kind (...) of phenomenological psychological profile of the type of cyborg which engages in these patterns of behavior. I follow Judith Butler in seeing this identity as the result of performance practices, which as such can be modified or replaced using other performances. Pursing one such alternative, I compose a dancing critique that “reverse engineers” the choreographies implied by these cyborgs’ survival practices. The upshot of this critique is that their movement patterns do indeed align closely to those of horror cinema’s zombies. I therefore conclude by suggesting a few possible choreographic imperatives to facilitate more enabling ways of being for iZombie cyborgs today. (shrink)

Joona Räsänen has argued that pro‐life arguments against the permissibility of infanticide are not persuasive, and fail to show it to be immoral. We responded to Räsänen’s arguments, concluding that his critique of pro‐life arguments was misplaced. Räsänen has recently replied in ‘Why pro‐life arguments still are not convincing: A reply to my critics’, providing some additional arguments as to why he does not find pro‐life arguments against infanticide convincing. Here, we respond briefly to Räsänen’s critique of the substance view, (...) and also to his most important claim: that possession of a right to life by an infant does not rule out the permissibility of infanticide. We demonstrate that this claim is unfounded, and conclude that Räsänen has not refuted pro‐life arguments against infanticide. (shrink)

The year in the title comes from “2001: A Space Odyssey”. The article was inspired by reading about the Vera C. Rubin Telescope, due to begin operations in Chile next year. The article I read talked about the telescope photographing the entire Southern Hemisphere sky but the heading spoke of watching the whole universe. Reconciling the Southern Hemisphere with the entire cosmos quickly became the challenge I chose to accept. The Unimaginable Telescope uses multi-messenger (combined neutrino / gravitational / electromagnetic) (...) astronomy, quantum (and macroscopic) entanglement, as well as Unipositional Quantum Mechanics to not only observe the entire universe but also to instantly transmit messages to every possible coordinate in time as well as space and, from “reflections” of those signals which arrive back on Earth of 4 001 instantaneously, pinpoint the locations of extraterrestrial civilizations. The telescope’s functions include the potential to form a spaceship and crew that could be transported to the Voyager and Pioneer probes that exited the solar system way back in the early 2000s. They’d visit the spaceprobes in order to service and repair them, collect them and bring them back to a museum, or whatever … Other topics covered by this article include dark matter and modified dark matter, human/AI partnership, electric dipole moment, quantum/macroscopic entanglement, hidden electromagnetism in cosmological constant, time dilation, Wick rotation, Vector-Tensor-Scalar (and elliptical VTS) geometry, quantum spin, precession related to Mercury and Planet 9, Riemann hypothesis, solar system and intergalactic and time travel, infinite and eternal universe with a beginning, ETs the Extraterrestrials, model universe, origin of life, heaven on earth, Weyl and Majorana fermions, topological insulators and topological superconductors, topological propulsion and topological manufacturing, consciousness, Higgs boson and Higgs field, plus ocean tides and Saturn’s moon Enceladus with A Brief History of Gravity. (shrink)

Against caricatures of the poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller as an unoriginal popularizer of Kant, or a forerunner of totalitarianism, Frederick Beiser reinterprets him as an innovative, classical republican, broadening his analysis to include Schiller’s poetry, plays, and essays not widely available in English translation, such as the remarkable essay, “On Grace and Dignity.” In that spirit, the present article argues that the latter text, misperceived by Anglophone critics as self-contradictory, is better understood as centering on gender and dance. In brief, grace (...) is a virtuous power of beautiful gestures associated with women, while dignity is a power of sublime gestures associated with men, and the improvised combination thereof is a divinely androgynous power of gesture that I term “stateliness,” in a three-step choreography of aesthetic education. (shrink)

Look! Up in the bookshelf! Is it science? Is it science-fiction? No, it's Super Science: strange visitor from the future who can be everywhere in the universe and everywhen in time, can change the world in a single bound and who - disguised as a mild mannered author - fights for truth, justice and the super-scientific way. -/- Though I put a lot of hard work into this book, I can't take all the credit. I believe that the whole universe (...) - everything on Earth and in space plus everything in the past, present, and future - is entangled and unified. Everybody is part of this unity, so anybody could have written the ideas in this book. It turned out to be me simply because I've got intense curiosity about the book's contents, enough persistence and imagination to combine science with topics like religion and philosophy, and enough spare time to assemble all the pre-existing pieces in space and time (my contribution to the book is like putting together the pieces of a big jigsaw puzzle). -/- This book, with its vast collection of scientific fact and study results, presents some fascinating theories and is an expansive journey through my research. The topic will appeal to the science-minded reader who is open to speculating on how conditions may evolve in the future, perhaps questioning the very foundations of our place in the universe. This book is not written as a single story but is a collection of 9 articles written in the first half of 2022. Each chapter of this book is presented as a research paper. There's the abstract, the introduction, the keywords, the body of the work divided into sections, and a reference section. Though this might turn some readers off, I'm a member of ResearchGate, a community of researchers. So it isn't surprising that I've presented this book this way. Each article is meant to be self-contained and well explained in plain English. As a result, some explanations appear in several of the articles. -/- Please be patient when you encounter jargon and mathematics - I've tried to keep these to a minimum but they're bound to put in an appearance in a book that's largely about science (and I have compiled an enormous amount of intricate research for this project, hopefully impressing with the organization). Quotes from a range of scientists and icons in the industry should add further fascination to the descriptions, inspiring the reader into more of an openness to speculating on the distant future. There's a lot to absorb here but understanding the future . . . It Don't Come Easy (just ask Ringo Starr who once dreamed he was an alien living on another planet in the future. -/- Contents -/- Special Relativity's Consequences For General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics And Quantum Gravity (Can Science And The Paranormal Coexist?) -/- Intergalactic Travel and Riemann Hypothesis - featuring Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Higgs Boson, Higgs Field, Electroweak Interaction, No Big Bang, Other Dimensions, Plus Other Physics and Mathematics -/- New Perspectives On Life, Death, Cancer and Covid-19 Arising From An Artificially Intelligent, Non-probabilistic Universe -/- Unipositional Interpretation Of Quantum Mechanics Means Entanglement Occurring Simultaneously With Gravitational Slingshots Reduces Problems Associated With Spaceflight -/- Unipositional Interpretation Of Quantum Mechanics Explains Time Dilation, Updates Cosmology -/- WHERE DID EVERYTHING COME FROM – Combining Science, Mathematics, Computers, Religion, Philosophy, Relativity, Quantum Physics, Darwinism, and a Podcast to Reach One Person’s Plausible Ideas -/- Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence and the Origin of Life Resulting from General Relativity, with Neo-Darwinist Reference to Human Evolution and Mathematical Reference to Cosmology -/- Planet 9 and Black Hole Versus Relativity’s Precession and Dark Matter -/- THE WORLD’S REAL-LIFE EXPERIMENTS WITH COVID-19 AND PHYSICS ALTER SOCIETY AND GLOBAL ECONOMICS . (shrink)

The paper reaches two main conclusions: Firstly, even if there are one or more possible worlds than which there are none better, God cannot actualise any of them. Secondly, if there are possible worlds which God can actualise, and than which God can actualise none better, then God must actualise one of them. The paper is neutral between compatibilist and libertarian views of creaturely freedom. The paper's main ideas have been used, with modifications, in my book "God, the Best, and (...) Evil" (OUP 2008). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to develop a consistent reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of capitalism by taking seriously their use of Kant’s philosophy in formulating it. In Sect. 1, I will set out the two different roots of the term axiomatic in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. The first of these is the axiomatic approach to formalising fields of mathematics, and the second the Kantian account of the indeterminate relationship between the transcendental unity of apperception and the transcendental (...) object. In Sect. 2, we will see how this transcendental aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of axiomatics is expressed in the notion of binding, which Deleuze and Guattari take to be a process that forces us to understand a field of entities in a certain manner, namely as clearly delimited and deployed in a homogeneous space. I will argue that this process of binding operates as a transcendental condition for capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari. Section 3 addresses some of the details of the capitalist axiomatic itself, drawing out why a Kantian reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the axiomatic provides a response to some of the criticisms of it. Section 4 then analyses Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the outside of capitalism, using the double signification of the noumenal to understand the complex relationship between what they call the war machine and its representation within the axiomatic. (shrink)

This communicates to you my vision of exploring the whole universe. What if you had a plausible method (based on today's science and technology) of going anywhere you wanted in the entire universe? Wouldn't that be a radical breakthrough in exploration? I'll first summarise the steps leading up to (and beyond) exploration of all space then write a detailed essay showing how those paragraphs are consistent with the plausible nature of the universe and are therefore not science fiction.

Abstract: Scepticism has only two moves to make and each is indefensible.

Jeremy Williams has argued that if we are committed to a liberal pro-choice stance with regard to selective abortion for disability, we will be unable to justify the prohibition of sex selective abortion. Here, I apply his reasoning to selective abortion based on other traits pregnant women may decide are undesirable. These include susceptibility to disease, level of intelligence, physical appearance, sexual orientation, religious belief and criminality—in fact any traits attributable to some degree to a genetic component. Firstly, I review (...) Williams’ argument, which claims that if a woman is granted the right to abort based on fetal impairment, then by parity of reasoning she should also be granted the right to choose sex selective abortion. I show that these same considerations that entail the permissibility of sex selective abortion are also applicable to genetic selection abortion. I then examine the objections to sex selective abortion that Williams considers and rejects, and show that they also lack force against genetic selection abortion. Finally, I consider some additional objections that might be raised, and conclude that a liberal pro-choice stance on selective abortion for disability entails the permissibility of selective abortion for most genetic traits. (shrink)

The complete title of this article is - -/- "Particle spin, F=ma and black holes revise gravity, unify gravitation with electromagnetism and matter, and eliminate the two nuclear forces (with support for the existence of God, ESP, and time travel; deletion of disasters, disease, death and parallel universes; as well as new explanations of why planetary orbits are ellipses, and why tides follow the moon/why the moon’s slowly moving away from Earth)". -/- I think the phrase "end of the world" (...) doesn't refer to the literal end of the world (as in the planet blowing up or something) but refers to an enormous change in everything we know and to the end of the world AS WE KNOW IT. I think this enormous change will start in science and this article spells out the conclusions I believe science will arrive at (in English). This science will change the way everyone thinks about everything. (shrink)

Background: The feeding modalities applied in countries with school meal programs are varied because these are shaped not only by the national commitments to alleviate food insecurity among children but also by resource availability from national and international agencies. In terms of financial resources, the USA plays a consistent role in providing donations, grants, loans, and loan guarantee programs to support global school feeding. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees these funding sources for international school meal programs. Aim: This (...) study aims to examine the moderating effect of USDA funding on the relationship between supply purchasing methods and feeding modalities among countries implementing school meal programs. Methods: The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework, combining the reasoning strengths of Mindsponge Theory and inference advantages of Bayesian analysis, was employed on a dataset of 126 government representatives who manage large-scale school meal programs in 126 different countries. Results: The findings indicated that USDA funding has the potential to positively moderate the relationship between foreign supply purchases and the feeding modalities of school meal programs. However, the direct association between foreign purchases and feeding modalities was unclear. Conversely, while USDA funding was found to have a negative moderation effect on the relationship between domestic supply purchases and feeding modalities, it is these domestic purchases that show potential for positively influencing the feeding modalities. Conclusions: Findings underscore the importance of supporting the World Bank and World Food Programme’s recommendation to rely more on local resources and capacities for developing long-term and sustainable school meal programs. Further exploration of the impact of foreign supply purchases on feeding modalities is needed. Formulating strategic plans to better leverage USDA funding for enhancing domestic supply purchases is highly recommended. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation for Sartre’s account of the unity of consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego. I will argue that it is only once The Transcendence of the Ego is read alongside other texts written around the same time, such as The Imaginary, that we can understand how Sartre believes it is possible for consciousness to be unified without an I. I begin by setting out the Kantian context that Sartre develops for (...) his views, before looking at Sartre’s arguments themselves. I then turn to some of the difficulties other readers have encountered with making sense of the arguments of the Transcendence of the Ego. I argue that it is only in relation to Sartre’s account of what he calls the illusion of immanence in The Imaginary, that we can make sense of Sartre’s account of consciousness, before reconstructing what I take to be Sartre’s position drawing on Sartre’s references to Bergson and Spinoza. (shrink)

This paper sketches a causal account of scientific explanation designed to sustain the judgment that high-level, detail-sparse explanations—particularly those offered in biology—can be at least as explanatorily valuable as lower-level counterparts. The motivating idea is that complete explanations maximize causal economy: they cite those aspects of an event’s causal run-up that offer the biggest-bang-for-your-buck, by costing less (in virtue of being abstract) and delivering more (in virtue making the event stable or robust).

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

Rob Lovering has developed an interesting new critique of views that regard embryos as equally valuable as other human beings: the moral argument for frozen human embryo adoption. The argument is aimed at those who believe that the death of a frozen embryo is a very bad thing, and Lovering concludes that some who hold this view ought to prevent one of these deaths by adopting and gestating a frozen embryo. Contra Lovering, we show that there are far more effective (...) strategies for preserving the lives of frozen embryos than adoption. Moreover, we point out that those who regard the deaths of frozen embryos as a very bad thing will generally regard the deaths of all embryos as a very bad thing, whether they are discarded embryos, aborted embryos or embryos that spontaneously abort. This entails these other embryos must be taken into account when considering moral obligations, as well as other human lives at risk from preventable causes. (shrink)

This paper is a rejoinder to Michael Almeida's reply to my chapter "Unrestricted Actualization and Divine Providence" in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume 9 (where his reply also appears).

'If a complete unified theory was discovered, it would only be a matter of time before it was digested and simplified - and taught in schools, at least in outline. We should then all be able to have some understanding of the laws that govern the universe and are responsible for our existence.' ('A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking, Introduction by Carl Sagan) So let's see what can be written when we we throw away everyday tradition and conformity, (...) let our imaginations fly (while trying to stay grounded in science and technology), and all gain "... some understanding of the laws that govern the universe and are responsible for our existence. (This tries to focus on the outlines of the workings of Nature, including how science will be reconciled with philosophy and religion. Also, this latest version suggests Particle spin, F=ma and black holes revise gravity, unify gravitation with electromagnetism and matter, and eliminate the two nuclear forces.). (shrink)