تُعلمنا الفلسفة كيف نُفكر»، عبارةٌ تتردد كثيرًا على ألسنة أساتذة الفلسفة أمام طلابهم الجُدد، وربما في حواراتهم وحلقاتهم البحثية التي لا تعكس قطعًا نمط حياتهم اليومية. قد تصيبك العبارة بالدهشة، ليس فقط لأن مجرد حضورك لدرسٍ فلسفي يُعد دليلاً كافيًا على أنك تعرف كيف تفكر! بل ولأنك قد تتساءل ساخرًا: حتى إن لم أكن أعرف كيف أفكر، فماذا أفعل بالتفكير في مكانٍ وزمانٍ يُعد فيه التفكير جريمة تودي بمقترفها إلى الهلاك، وتُلقي به في غيابة الحُزن والفقر والمعاناة والنبذ المجتمعي؟! لكنك (...) ستُدرك بعد حين مدى قوة وصواب العبارة؛ فالفلسفة تُعلمنا حقًا كيف نُفكر في العالم بطرقٍ جديدة، وكيف نرى أنفسنا وواقعنا بأعينٍ كُشفت عنها حُجب الإدراك، لاسيما في لحظاتنا الحياتية الفارقة، وكيف نخلع المعنى على وجودنا البائس، وكيف نصنع التاريخ ونُعيد توجيه مسيرته: علمًا وفنًا وثقافة. (shrink)

As a nexus of fertility’s finitude and female midlife, menopause is a physical and cultural phenomenon through which the relation between the medicalization of the female reproductive cycle and normative attitudes toward aging become expressed. Age, like other systems of separation, can function as an “instrument of regulatory regimes” and shows similarities to gender in its body-bound, surface-focused, and morally coded position in the sociomedical sphere. However, although age is an influential social category, its reliance on historical and epistemic constructions (...) of the body has not been politicized to a degree comparable to other categories like gender, race, and sexuality. As Kathleen. (shrink)

“Pick a card, any card. This has to be a completely free choice.” the magician tells you. But is it really? Although we like to think that we are using our free will to make our decisions, research in psychology has shown that many of our behaviours are automatic and unconsciously influenced by external stimuli (Ariely, 2008; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Newell & Shanks, 2014; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), and that we are often oblivious to the cognitive mechanisms that underpin (...) our decision (Wegner, 2002, 2003). Magicians have exploited this illusory sense of agency for a long time, and have developed a wide range of techniques to influence and control spectators’ choices of such things as card, word, or number (Annemann, 1933; Banachek, 2002a; Jones, 1994; Turner, 2015). These techniques are instances of what is called forcing. -/- Many forces are extremely effective, illustrating various weaknesses in our sense of control over decisions and their outcomes. Researchers have started to investigate them in various ways (Kuhn, Pailh s, & Lan, 2020; Olson, Amlani, Raz, & Rensink, 2015; Pailhes & Kuhn, 2020b, 2020c; Shalom et al., 2013) and are beginning to obtain valuable insights into decision-making processes as well as a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that lead people to experience an illusory sense of free will and of agency. -/- Although magicians have acquired large amounts of knowledge in covertly controlling people’s choices, much of this knowledge is only discussed in the context of individual magic tricks, or in books that are not readily accessible to non-magicans. As we and others have argued elsewhere (Ekroll, Sayim, & Wagemans, 2017; Kuhn, 2019; Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008; Kuhn, Caffaratti, Teszka, & Rensink, 2014; Macknik et al., 2008; Olson et al., 2015; Olson, Landry, Appourchaux, & Raz, 2016; Shalom et al., 2013; Thomas, Didierjean, Maquestiaux, & Gygax, 2015), a particularly effective way of making this knowledge more available is via the creation of taxonomies centered around psychological mechanisms (Rensink & Kuhn, 2015). For example, the psychologically based taxonomy of misdirection (Kuhn et al., 2014) helps draw links between misdirection and formal theories of perception and cognition. -/- Our aim here is to apply a similar process to the knowledge magicians have about forcing. The present paper develops a psychologically based taxonomy of forcing techniques with two goals in mind. Firstly, it should help uncover the various psychological mechanisms that underlie forcing techniques. Secondly, it should facilitate knowledge transfer between magicians and psychologists. Among other things, this knowledge will allow researchers to gain new insights into the mechanisms underlying decision-making, and the feeling of free will and of agency over choice. We start by defining the magician’s force and then look at some of the past classifications of forcing. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

Our perceptual experience is largely based on prediction, and as such can be influenced by knowledge of forthcoming events. This susceptibility is commonly exploited by magicians. In the Vanishing Ball Illusion, for example, a magician tosses a ball in the air a few times and then pretends to throw the ball again, whilst secretly concealing it in his hand. Most people claim to see the ball moving upwards and then vanishing, even though it did not leave the magician’s hand (...) (Kuhn & Land, 2006; Triplett, 1900). But what exactly can such illusions tell us? We investigated here whether seeing a real action before the pretend one was necessary for the Vanishing Ball Illusion. Participants either saw a real action immediately before the fake one, or only a fake action. Nearly one third of participants experienced the illusion with the fake action alone, while seeing the real action beforehand enhanced this effect even further. Our results therefore suggest that perceptual experience relies both on long-term knowledge of what an action should look like, as well as exemplars from the immediate past. In addition, whilst there was a forward displacement of perceived location in perceptual experience, this was not found for oculomotor responses, consistent with the proposal that two separate systems are involved in visual perception. (shrink)

Introduction: -/- Walking, illegally, down main Montreal thoroughfares with students in nightly demonstrations, with neighbors whom I barely knew before, banging pots and pans, and with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people on every 22nd of the month since March—this was unimaginable a year ago.1 Unimaginable that the collective and heterogeneous body, which is the “manif [demonstration]”, could feel so much like home, despite its internal differences. Unimaginable that this mutual dependence on one another could enable not only (...) collective protection from traffic and police but the affective strength and audacity to take back the street—a mutual dependence that includes the masked demonstrators ready to help when gassed by police. Unimaginable too that we would be breaking the law daily,2 that blocking traffic and seeing the city from the center of the street would become habit, and that as the “printemps érable” becomes summer, we would be investing our time in neighborhood assemblies, in weaving social bonds, and in sustaining and deepening the mobilization. -/- I say these actions were unimaginable not merely because the context that motivated the enlargement of the student movement into a popular struggle combines a number of unique features. Nor were they simply unimaginable because the Quebec I previously knew was marred by the Islamophobia and cultural racism made visible during the reasonable accommodation debates, a society whose mapping excluded me and for whose sake it would have been difficult to protest.3 Rather, I say these actions were unimaginable because the possibility of this popular and inclusive mobilization had not yet been created. It is this possibility that the Quebec student movement has created, I argue, not only in quantitative terms by engaging so many, but at the level of lived subjectivities and intercorporeal solidarity. The evolution of the movement should be understood, then, both as a swelling of its popular base and as an intensification and qualitative transformation of ways of life. (shrink)

It is often thought that there is little that seems more obvious from experience than that time objectively passes, and that time is, in this respect, quite unlike space. Yet nothing in the physical picture of the world seems to correspond to the idea of such an objective passage of time. In this paper, I discuss some attempts to explain this apparent conflict between appearance and reality. I argue that existing attempts to explain the conflict as the (...) result of a perceptual illusion fail, and that it is, in fact, the nature of memory, rather than perception, that explains why we are inclined to think of time as passing. I also offer a diagnosis as to why philosophers have sometimes been tempted to think that an objective passage of time seems to figure directly in perceptual experience, even though it does not. (shrink)

This book was first published in Japanese in 2013 and was warmly welcomed not only by general readers but also by specialists in philosophy. I believe that it succeeded in breaking new ground in the field of introductory approaches to philosophy. Many manga or comic books explaining the thought of major philosophers have already been published. There have also been manga whose story was conceived by philosophers. To the best of my knowledge, however, there has never been a book in (...) which a philosopher has illustrated his or her own philosophical thought entirely in manga form. There are no doubt many philosophers who can draw manga or illustrations, so it’s quite strange that no such book has been published until now. “I want to try drawing a manga introduction to philosophy myself!” After this idea came to me, I began by taking a draft of about twenty manga pages to the editing department at Kodansha Publications. The characters were awkward at first, but as I kept drawing they seemed to move more smoothly, and by the time I had finished it almost felt like they were speaking for themselves. I drew around 220 original pages in detail using a pencil. Manga creator Nyancofu Terada then gave these pencil drawings professional lines. It is entirely thanks to him that I was able to publish my manga in the Kodansha paperback series. As the title says, this book is an introduction to philosophy. I tried to write about questions like “What is philosophy?” and “What does it mean to think philosophically” for a general readership. This is not a book that presents easy-to-understand explanations of the theories of famous philosophers. Instead, I have tried to express as clearly as possible how I myself think about four major topics: “time,” “existence,” “I,” and “life.” By following this route, the reader will be led directly to the core elements of philosophical thought. My aim was to imbue this journey with a sense of speed and intensity. (shrink)

An extended examination of Libet's works led to a comprehensive reinterpretation of his results. According to this reinterpretation, the Minimum Train Duration of electrical brain stimulation should be considered as the time needed to create a brain stimulus efficient for producing conscious sensation and not as a basis for inferring the latency for conscious sensation of peripheral origin. Latency for conscious sensation with brain stimulation may occurafterthe Minimum Train Duration. Backward masking with cortical stimuli suggests a 125-300 ms minimum (...) value for the latency for conscious sensation of threshold skin stimuli. Backward enhancement is not suitable for inferring this latency. For determining temporal relations between stimuli that correspond to subjects' reports, theendof cerebral Minimum Train Duration should be used as reference, rather than its onset. Results of coupling peripheral and cortical stimuli are explained by a latency after the cortical Minimum Train Duration, having roughly the same duration as the latency for supraliminal skin stimuli. Results of coupling peripheral stimuli and stimuli to medial lemniscus (LM) are explained by a shorter LM latency and/or a longer peripheral latency. This interpretation suggests a 230 ms minimum value for the latency for conscious sensation of somatosensory near-threshold stimuli. The backward referral hypothesis, as formulated by Libet, should not be retained. Long readiness potentials preceding spontaneous conscious or nonconscious movements suggest that both kinds of movement are nonconsciously initiated. The validity of Libet's measures of W and M moments (Libet et al., 1983a) is questionable due to problems involving latencies, training, and introspective distinction of W and M. Veto of intended actions may be initially nonconscious but dependent on conscious awareness. (shrink)

Plato's view on time, a key aspect of his doctrine of forms, is influenced by his reception of Parmenides, but the way in which Plato takes up and modifies Parmenides' view is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. In this article, the author analyzes Plato's revision of Parmenidean time by exploring four temporalities: the eternal present, timeless eternity, the enduring present, and the instant between time and eternity. Through this examination, she uncovers the common origin of both (...) the eternal present of Parmenides' fragment B8 and the flowing present of the phenomenal realm in the instant (ἐξαίφνης) in Plato's Parmenides. This perspective on time offers a promising solution to Plato's problem of participation, bridging the gap between the eternal being of the form and the being in time of the particulars. (shrink)

This paper proffers an account of why interdisciplinary research on, inter alia, the nature of time can be fruitful even if the disciplines in question have different explanatory pro-jects. We suggest that the special sciences perform a subject setting role for lower-level disciplines such as physics. In essence, they tell us where, amongst a theory of the physical world, we should expect to locate phenomena such as temporality; they tell us what it would take for there to be (...) class='Hi'>time. Physical theory tells us whether there is anything like that in the world and what its hidden nature is. Only working in tandem can physics and the special sciences locate and describe the phenomenon that is time. (shrink)

Philosophers have usually approached the concept of timing of experiences by addressing the question how the experiences of temporal phenomena can be explained. As a result, the issue of timing has been addressed in two different ways. The first, similar to the questions posed in sciences, concerns the relationship between the experienced time of events and the objective time of events. The second approach is more specific to philosophers’ debates, and concerns the phenomenology of experiences: how is the (...) apparent temporal structure of experiences constituted? In regard to both questions, this article shows why and how philosophers’ views differ from those held by most scientists. To conclude, I present a combination of views that is not only compatible with that of scientists, but also addresses the problems that engage philosophers. (shrink)

“Do Anthropocene narratives confuse an important distinction between the natural and the historical past?” asks Giuseppina D’Oro. D’Oro defends the view that the concept of the historical past is sui generis and distinct from that of the geological past against a new, Anthropocene-inspired challenge to the possibility of a humanistically oriented historiography. She argues that the historical past is not a short segment of geological time, the time of the human species on Earth, but the past investigated from (...) the perspective of a distinctive kind of interest, that of uncovering the norms which governed historical agents in different periods of time. The past for the Egyptologist, or for the Roman historian, is not the same past studied by the palaeontologist or the geologist, not because it is infinitesimal short in comparison to geological time, but because the questions asked by historians concerned with the Egyptian or Roman civilization are not the same kind of questions asked by empirically minded scientists. She argues that the accusation that the distinction between the historical and the natural/geological past, rests on unacceptable form of human exceptionalism is based on the conflation of the concept of the historical past with that of the human past and that keeping alive the nature/culture distinction has important implications for praxis. If the distinction between nature and culture is collapsed, and the corollary that historical agents are not distinct in kind from natural agents (such as yeast and microbes) is accepted, then “the anticipation of the future would become a mere spectator’s sport analogous to the activity of predicting the weather”: collapsing the nature culture distinction, D’Oro argues, undermines the possibility of political action against the very threat (climate change) that motivates Anthropocene narratives in the first instance. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates one aspect of the folk concept of time by testing how the presence or absence of directedness impacts judgements about whether there is time in a world. Experiment 1 found that dynamists, showed significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in dynamically directed worlds than in non-dynamical non-directed worlds. Comparing our results to those we describe in Latham et al., we report that while ~ 70% of dynamists say there is (...) class='Hi'>time in B-theory worlds, only ~ 45% say there is time in C-theory worlds. Thus, while the presence of directedness makes dynamists more inclined to say there is time in a world, a substantial subpopulation of dynamists judge that there is time in non-directed worlds. By contrast, a majority of non-dynamists judged that there was time in both growing block worlds and C-theory worlds, with no significant differences between the means. Experiment 2 found that when participants are only presented with non-dynamical worlds—namely, a directed world and a non-directed world—they report significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in B-theory worlds. However, the majority of participants still judge that there is time in C-theory worlds. We conclude that while the presence of directedness bolsters judgements that there is time, most people do not judge it to be necessary for time. (shrink)

We can locate the problematic of time within three philosophical questions, which respectively designate three central areas of philosophical reflection and contemplation. These are: 1) The ontological question, i.e. 'what is being?' 2) The epistemological question, i.e. 'what can we know with certainty?' 3) The existential question, i.e. 'what is the meaning of existence?' These three questions, which are philosophical, but also scientific and political, as they underline the political and moral question of truth and justice, arise from the (...) phenomenon of time, the irreversible constant flow of phenomena that undermines every claim to absolute knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to illuminate the importance of time for philosophical thought and, more generally, for human social and psychical life, in the context of the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis, who asserted that " being is time – and not in the horizon of time " , correlated history to society and being to temporality within the social-historical stratum, the ontological plane created by human existence, where " existence is signification ". Time is interpreted as the creation and destruction of forms in a magmatic, layered with a non-regular stratification, reality, where the social-historical manifests as the creation of collective human activity, in the manner of social imaginary significations. This notion of temporality is accompanied by a profound criticism of traditional rationalistic philosophy, to which Castoriadis assigns the name 'ensemblistic/identitary', that highlights the necessity of a new, magmatic ontology, based on the primacy of time. (shrink)

“The universe is expanding, not contracting.” Many statements of this form appear unambiguously true; after all, the discovery of the universe’s expansion is one of the great triumphs of empirical science. However, the statement is time-directed: the universe expands towards what we call the future; it contracts towards the past. If we deny that time has a direction, should we also deny that the universe is really expanding? This article draws together and discusses what I call ‘C-theories’ of (...) time — in short, philosophical positions that hold time lacks a direction — from different areas of the literature. I set out the various motivations, aims, and problems for C-theories, and outline different versions of antirealism about the direction of time. (shrink)

This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (...) (a) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation. (shrink)

In this paper, Lévinas’s criticisms and reformulations of Sartre’s phenomenology of imagination, in the early text “Reality and its Shadow,” are explored in detail. Levinas's own views on imagination and art are shown to be intimately linked to his critique of Sartrean temporality, insofar as they rely on a renewed phenomenological examination of sensation. As a result, understanding Lévinas’s discussion of the image provides benefits for grasping his notion of the instant and its importance for some of his own positions (...) vis-à-vis temporality, e.g. on the future and death. The manner in which Lévinas takes issue with Sartre through a phenomenology of the image and and its composition in sensation is first investigated by looking at Lévinas’s novel choice to situate his descriptions of the image with respect to the function and power of art. Nevertheless, despite this crucial decision on Lévinas’s part, departing from earlier phenomenological accounts, there are clear parallels can be drawn between Lévinas’s and Sartre’s descriptions of the image. The similarites and differences between their treatments of the image and the role played therein by the materiality of sensation are then elucidated in terms of the ‘amphiboly’ of the image, distinguishing the image in both its representational and anti-representational characteristics. From there, we proceed to examine the amphiboly of the image according to its temporality attributes, seeing how for Lévinas and Sartre the temporality of the image, as that of an instant, relates to the temporality of consciousness in general. (shrink)

I analyze Deleuze’s concept of temporality in terms of its ontology and axiological (political and aesthetic) aspects. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that it is modified throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co-authored with Félix Guattari — and that it is developed through reference to a dizzying array of concepts, thinkers, artistic works, and social phenomena. -/- I observe that Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves a complex ontology of (...) difference, which I elaborate through reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Ancient Greek and Stoic conceptualizations of time. From Plato through to Chrysippus, temporality gradually comes to be identified as a form that comprehends the variation of particulars. Deleuze modifies the ancients’ concept of time to suggest that time obtains as a form of ceaseless ontological variation. Through reference to Deleuze’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, I further suggest that Deleuze tends to conceive of temporality as an ontogenetic force which participates in the complex process of individuation. -/- A standout feature of this dissertation involves an analysis of how Deleuze’s concept of temporality is modified in his works on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, temporality comes to be characterized as something other than the measure of the movement of existents. In his detailed analyses of Bergson — in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Bergsonism — Deleuze suggests that time involves an actualization of aspects of a virtual past as contemporaneous with the lived present. While not an outright denial of the relation of temporal succession, Deleuze’s claim implies a diminishment of this relation’s significance in an adequate elaboration of the nature of temporality. -/- Further, I observe —through reference to Deleuze’s readings of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza — that (the explicitly temporal) change of societal forms of economic organization is non-reducible to that suggested by linear evolution. The claim is that putatively discrete modes of economic organization do not enjoy temporal displacement with respect to one another. This suggests that linear evolutionary models of societal development are inadequate. This further implies that temporality is non-reducible to the relation of temporal succession. In concrete terms, societal change is characterized as immanent temporal variation. -/- Taken together, these analyses yield the conclusion that Deleuze tends to conceive of the nature of temporality as involving the ongoing realization of multiple — non-identical, sometimes contrary — aspects of a stochastic process of creation that is expressed in ontogenetic circumstances, social evolution, literary works, and filmic works. (shrink)

Recent new materialist and posthumanist research in curriculum and pedagogy studies is focusing more and more on the intertwinement between social justice, fairness, and accountability, and how to put these ideals to use to create inclusive, consciousness-raising canons, curricula, and pedagogies that take the dehumanized and the more-than-human into account. Especially pedagogical responsibility, often rephrased as ‘response-ability’ to accentuate the entanglements that this notion engenders versus forgotten or forcefully eradicated knowledges, and between teacher and student as intra-active learners, is highlighted (...) in this ethico-political turn. In this chapter, a critical pedagogical cartography of response-ability is sketched out to philosophically expand on—and also better anchor—the above turn. This critical cartography is put together at the backdrop of critical new materialist reflections with regards to the COVID-19 crisis; a crisis demanding a pedagogical but also ethico-political reorientation toward the hauntological powers of past-present-future injustices, the thick material present, and a more response-able engagement with the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore some of the temporal structures of racialized experience – what I call racialized time. I draw on the Martiniquan philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in particular his book ‘Black Skin, White Masks,’ in order to ask how racism can be understood as a social pathology which, when internalized or ‘epidermalized,’ may result in aberrations of affect, embodiment and agency that are temporally lived. In this regard, I analyze the racialized experience of coming ‘too late’ (...) to a world predetermined in advance and the distorted relation to possibility – the limitation of playfulness and imaginative variability – that defines this sense of lateness. I argue that the racialization of the past plays a structuring role in such experience. Racialization is not limited to the present, but also colonizes and reconfigures the past, splitting it into a duality of times: one open and civilizational, the other closed, anachronistic and racialized. To understand this colonial construction of the past, I draw on the work of Latin American thinker Aníbal Quijano. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in Hegel’s mature Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences contains the outlines of a philosophically rich notion of the constitutive temporality of subjectivity. The temporality of the being of Hegel’s concrete subject is intimately connected with embodiment and sociality, and is thus an essential element of its fully detranscendentalized inner-worldly nature.

In this brief philosophical exposé, I will narrate the events as well as my personal and ecospiritual reflections pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic which began in Wuhan, China sometime in November 2019 and have spread sporadically across countries and continents wreaking havoc medically, politically, and individually, as it claimed more than three hundred thousand lives and had virally infected more than four million of the global population. This phenomenon had led us to confront inevitable eschatological questions: Is this a sign (...) of the end times? Will this efface the vulnerable human race? Will this disrupt the global economy as capitalism had collapsed worldwide? Do these events signal a new political era, perhaps the dawn of socialism and communism, as countries worldwide are led to confront its own deficiencies and inadequacies? Which social and political systems and worldviews are efficient particularly in this age of globalization? What are our chances for human survival? These apocalyptic questions had led me to my reflections on Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, particularly on his concept of Christian ethics and the moral theology of liberation. In so doing, the paper incorporates a holistic outlook on the pandemic trying to look at the bigger picture in a global scale and considers an all-inclusive interpretation on the pandemic that ranges from the environmental, civic, cultural, political, and socioeconomic concerns. I shall try to sew and patch the pieces together into a much wider, integrated, and comprehensive outlook that includes both the global and the peripheral human experiences. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the compossibility of presentism and time travel from two objections. One objection is that the presentist’s model of time leaves nowhere to travel to; the second objection attempts to equate presentist time travel with suicide. After targeting some misplaced scrutiny of the first objection, I show that presentists have the resources to account for the facts that make for time travel on the traditional Lewisian view. In light of this ability, I (...) argue that both of the objections fail. (shrink)

Deleuze argued that a fundamental mutation in the concept of time occurred in Kant. In antiquity, the concept of time was subordinated to the concept of movement: time was a ‘measure’ of movement. In Kant, this relation is inverted: time is no longer subordinated to movement but assumes an autonomy of its own: time becomes "the pure and empty form" of everything that moves and changes. What is essential in the theory of time is (...) not the distinction between objective ‘clock time’ (or physical time) and the subjective experience of ‘time consciousness,’ since both of them measure movements, whether the movement of extensive objects or intensive states. What is fundamental is rather the relation between time and movement, since time can only assume its own concept when it ceases to be subordinate to movement, whether that movement is objective or subjective. This article examines how Kant inverted the relation between time and movement, and how Deleuze’s own theory of time builds on Kant’s revolution and extends it further. (shrink)

Between 1927 and 1936, Martin Heidegger devoted almost one thousand pages of close textual commentary to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This article aims to shed new light on the relationship between Kant and Heidegger by providing a fresh analysis of two central texts: Heidegger’s 1927/8 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I argue that to make sense of Heidegger’s reading of Kant, one must resolve two (...) questions. First, how does Heidegger’s Kant understand the concept of the transcendental? Second, what role does the concept of a horizon play in Heidegger’s reconstruction of the Critique? I answer the first question by drawing on Cassam’s model of a self-directed transcendental argument, and the second by examining the relationship between Kant’s doctrine that ‘pure, general logic’ abstracts from all semantic content and Hume’s attack on metaphysics. I close by sketching the implications of my results for Heidegger’s own thought. Ultimately, I conclude that Heidegger’s commentary on the Critical system is defined, above all, by a single issue: the nature of the ‘form’ of intentionality. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the temporal content of perceptual experience. It argues that we must recognize the existence of temporal perceptions, i.e., perceptions the content of which cannot be spelled out simply by looking at what is the case at an isolated instant. Acts of apprehension can cover a succession of events. However, a subject who has such perceptions can fall short of having a concept of time. Similar arguments have been put forward to show that a subject (...) who has spatial perceptions can fall short of having a concept of space. In both cases, it is the fact that perception is from a point of view which stands in the way of it constituting an exercise of a concept of how things are objectively. However, the paper also shows that the way in which perception is perspectival takes a different form in each of the two cases. (shrink)

Libet's (2000) arguments in defense of his interpretation of his experimental results are insufficient. The claims of my critical review (Gomes, 2008) do not suffer with his new statements.

This paper proffers an account of why interdisciplinary research on, inter alia, the nature of time can be fruitful even if the disciplines in question have different explanatory projects. We suggest that the special sciences perform a subject setting role for lower-level disciplines such as physics. In essence, they tell us where, amongst a theory of the physical world, we should expect to locate phenomena such as temporality; they tell us what it would take for there to be (...) class='Hi'>time. Physical theory tells us whether there is anything like that in the world and what its hidden nature is. Only working in tandem can physics and the special sciences locate and describe the phenomenon that is time. (shrink)

The aim of the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason is to solve the problem posed by the “inhomogeneity” of intuitions and categories: the sensible properties of objects represented in intuition are of a different kind than the properties represented by categories. Kant's solution is to introduce what he calls “transcendental schemata,” which mediate the subsumption of objects under categories. I reconstruct Kant's solution in terms of two substantive premises, which I call Subsumption Sufficiency (i.e., that subsuming an (...) object under a transcendental schema is sufficient to subsume it under the corresponding category) and Real Possibility (i.e., that it is really possible to subsume objects under each of the transcendental schemata). These two principles, together with a trivial modal one (the Subsumption-Possibility Link), entail that it is possible to subsume objects under categories; in other words, the argument of the Schematism is valid. The main work of the paper consists in reconstructing Kant's arguments for, and explanations of, these premises. I argue that they hinge on Kant's claim that transcendental schemata are “time-determinations,” which I interpret to mean: rules for reflexively representing the temporal relations among our own representational states. On the basis of this reading, I reconstruct Kant's argument for Subsumption Sufficiency, category by category. I also explain why Real Possibility follows almost immediately. Granting Kant the argument up to this point in the Critique, the argument of the Schematism is sound. (shrink)

The nature and topology of time remains an open question in philosophy, both tensed and tenseless concepts of time appear to have merit. A concept of time including both kinds of time evolution of physical systems in quantum mechanics subsumes the properties of both notions. The linear dynamics defines the universe probabilistically throughout space-time, and can be seen as the definition of a block universe. The collapse dynamics is the time evolution of the linear (...) dynamics, and is thus of different logical type to the linear dynamics. These two different kinds of time evolution are respectively tensed and tenseless. Ascribing tensed semantics to the collapse dynamics is problematic in the light of special relativity, but this difficulty does not apply to a relational quantum mechanics. In this context, while the linear dynamics is the time evolution of the universe objectively, the collapse dynamics is the time evolution of the universe subjectively, applying solely in the functional frame of reference of the observer. (shrink)

Does mere passage of time have causal powers ? Are properties like "being n days past" causally efficient ? A pervasive intuition among metaphysicians seems to be that they don't. Events and/or objects change, and they cause or are caused by other events and/or objects; but one does not see how just the mere passage of time could cause any difference in the world. In this paper, I shall discuss a case where it seems that mere passage of (...) time does have causal powers : Sydney Shoemaker's (1969) possible world where temporal vacua (allegedly) take place. I shall argue that Shoemaker's thought-experiment doesn't really aim at teaching us that there can be time without change, but rather that if such a scenario is plausible at all (as I think it is) it provides us with good reasons to think that mere passage of time can be directly causally efficient. (shrink)

The “born this way” narrative remains a popular way to defend nonnormative genders and sexualities in the United States. While feminist and queer theorists have critiqued the narrative's implicit ahistorical and essentialist understanding of sexuality, the narrative's incorporation by the state as a way to regulate gender identity has gone largely underdeveloped. I argue that transgender accounts of this narrative reorient it amid questions of temporality, race, colonialism, and the nation-state, thereby allowing for a critique that does justice to the (...) enmeshment of categories of difference. (shrink)

Various understandings and definitions of time will be reviewed. The nature and structure of time will be reviewed and the concepts of time and passage of time will be refreshed. The fundamental role played by energy and four natural forces in the actions, reactions and interactions concerning matter, anti-matter, energy in space and time will be critically analyzed. The reality how time is constructed during the construction of materials will be presented and discussed. The (...) classical and quantum ideas in this regard will be comprehensively studied. How these ideas will give us a fresh insight about the nature, structure and role of time in the construction of materials through natural scientific and manmade processes will be highlighted. The relations among matter, anti-matter, energy and time will be freshly stated. The milli-, micro-, nano, pico-, femto-, atto-times will be qualitatively analyzed considering physical, inorganic, organic and bio-materials and their construction and structure. The physics of timelessness also will be put forward. -/- . (shrink)

In the time of Coronavirus, it is perhaps as good a time as any to comment on the use and abuse of metaphors. One of the worst instances of metaphor abuse-especially given the recent epidemiological crisis-is Lynne Tirrell's notion of toxic speech. In the foregoing reply piece, I analyze Tirrell's metaphor and reveal how it blinds us to the liberating power of public speech. Lynne Tirrell argues that some speech is, borrowing from field of Epidemiology, toxic in the (...) sense that it harms vulnerable listeners. In this response piece, I summarize the main points of Tirrell's toxic speech argument, map the underlying conceptual metaphor and pose three objections. (shrink)

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of (...) process ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it. (shrink)

One of the theories that have been produced in linguistics in the light of J. E. McTaggart’s influential essay “The Unreality of Time” (1908) is a critique of reality that may be attributed to the semantics of tenses in natural languages. This chapter from my book The Linguistic Picture of the World: Alice’s Adventures in Many Languages proposes an alternative approach to the semantics of time, not as a dubious product of linguists’ imagination, i.e. not as something that (...) can easily be discarded from the philosophy of language but rather as a firm category of human thinking. Particular emphasis is placed on the idea of time as it is expressed by the seemingly rather contradictory morphology of the past, present, and future. (shrink)

In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, we postulate a low-entropy boundary condition to account for the temporal asymmetry. In this paper, I show that the Past Hypothesis also contains enough information to simplify the quantum ontology and define a unique initial condition in such a world. First, I introduce Density Matrix Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a fundamental density matrix that represents something objective. This stands in sharp contrast to Wave (...) Function Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a wave function that represents something objective. Second, I suggest that the Past Hypothesis is sufficient to determine a unique and simple density matrix. This is achieved by what I call the Initial Projection Hypothesis: the initial density matrix of the universe is the normalized projection onto the special low-dimensional Hilbert space. Third, because the initial quantum state is unique and simple, we have a strong case for the \emph{Nomological Thesis}: the initial quantum state of the universe is on a par with laws of nature. This new package of ideas has several interesting implications, including on the harmony between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, the dynamic unity of the universe and the subsystems, and the alleged conflict between Humean supervenience and quantum entanglement. (shrink)

The concept of time-travel is a modern idea which combines the imaginary signification of rational domination, the imaginary signification of technological omnipotence, the imaginary concept of eternity and the imaginary desire for immortality. It is a synthesis of central conceptual schemata of techno-science, such as the linearity and homogeneity of time, the radical separation of subjectivity from the world, the radical separation of the individual from his/her social-historical environment. The emergence of this idea, its spread during the 20th (...) century as a major theme of science fiction literature alongside its dissemination as a scientific hypothesis, its popularity with both the public and the scientific community, are indications of the religious role of techno-science. It is my opinion, finally, that, as a chimera, time-travel is non-feasible and impossible. In order to support my claims, I will briefly outline the origins of the time-travel concept and its epistemological and metaphysical/ontological conditions. If these conditions prove to be absurd, the logical impossibility of time-travel will have been demonstrated. (shrink)

In what follows, I suggest that, against most theories of time, there really is an actual present, a now, but that such an eternal moment cannot be found before or after time. It may even be semantically incoherent to say that such an eternal present exists since “it” is changeless and formless (presumably a dynamic chaos without location or duration) yet with creative potential. Such a field of near-infinite potential energy could have had no beginning and will have (...) no end, yet within it stirs the desire to experience that brings forth singularities, like the one that exploded into the Big Bang (experiencing itself through relative and relational spacetime). From the perspective of the eternal now of near-infinite possibilities (if such a sentence can be semantically parsed at all), there is only the timeless creative present, so the Big Bang did not happen some 13 billion years ago. Inasmuch as there is neither time past nor time future nor any time at all at the null point of forever, we must understand the Big Bang (and all other events) as taking place right here and now. In terms of the eternal now, the beginning is happening now and we just appeared (and are always just appearing) to witness it. The rest is all conscious construction; time and experience are so entangled, they need each other to exist. (shrink)

Ordinary usage gives a way to think of identity through time: the Pittsburgh of 1946 was the same city as the Pittsburgh of today is--namely Pittsburgh. Problem: The Pittsburgh of 1946 does not exist; Pittsburgh still does. How can they have been identical? I reject the temporal parts view on which they were not but we may speak as though they were. Rather I argue that claiming their identity is not contradictory. I interpret ‘the Pittsburgh of 1946’ as ‘Pittsburgh (...) as it was in 1946’ and suggest that the apparent contradiction results from an ambiguity in the scope of ‘as’. (shrink)

It is common, even among the laity, the doubt about the reality of time. We think it is possible that time is an illusion and that the perception of his passage is just awareness of something other than time. There are a number of arguments made by philosophers, both to defend and to attack the intuition that time is real. One of them, and perhaps the best known, is the argument of McTaggart, which tries to establish (...) some condition for the existence of time and that time, thought through that condition and applied to reality, leads to a contradiction, which makes him conclude that time can not exist, and therefore does not exist. What I intend in this article is to present the argument of McTaggart along with some original and non-original objections, and try to show that if we accept the Prior’s approach of the flow of time, the cogency of the argument of McTaggart is lost. (shrink)

This study presents a new type of foundational model unifying quantum theory, relativity theory and gravitational physics, with a novel cosmology. It proposes a six-dimensional geometric manifold as the foundational ontology for our universe. The theoretical unification is simple and powerful, and there are a number of novel empirical predictions and theoretical reductions that are strikingly accurate. It subsequently addresses a variety of current anomalies in physics. It shows how incomplete modern physics is by giving an example of a theory (...) that is genuinely unified. In doing this, it radically alters the metaphysical interpretation of the nature of time, space and matter currently interpreted from modern physics. It also profoundly challenges materialist expectations about a naturalistic account our own existence. I contend here that there is sufficient evidence to support this theory as a leading paradigm for a unified foundational theory. (shrink)

The temporal unity of the self cannot be accounted for by the continuity of causal, factual, or contiguous relations between independently definable mental events, as proposed by Locke and Parfit. The identity of the self over time is normative: it depends on the institutional context of social rules external to the self that determine the relationship between past commitments and current responsibilities. (2005).

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford (...) an organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognised disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon, and to recognise that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create the conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel. (shrink)

This open access monograph offers a detailed study and a systematic defense of a key intuition we typically have, as human beings, with respect to the nature of time: the intuition that the future is open, whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas it seems unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first world war. -/- The book contributes, in particular, three major and original insights. First, it provides a (...) coherent, non-metaphorical, and metaphysically illuminating elucidation of the intuition. Second, it determines which model of the temporal structure of the world is most appropriate to accommodate the intuition, and settles on a specific version of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT). Third, it puts forward a naturalistic foundation for GBT, by exploiting recent results of our best physics (viz. General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity). Three main challenges are addressed: the dismissal of temporal asymmetries as non-fundamental phenomena only (e.g., thermodynamic or causal phenomena), the epistemic objection against GBT, and the apparent tension between GBT and relativistic physics. It is argued that the asymmetry between the open future and the fixed past must be grounded in the temporal structure of the world, and that this is neither precluded by our epistemic device, nor by the latest approaches to Quantum Gravity (​e.g., the Causal Set Theory). -/- Aiming at reconciling time as we find it in ordinary experience and time as physics describes it, this ​innovative book ​will raise the interest of both academic researchers and ​graduate students working on the philosophy of time. More generally, it ​presents contents of interest for all metaphysicians and non-dogmatic philosophers of physics. (shrink)

We aim to show that Kant’s theory of time is consistent by providing axioms whose models validate all synthetic a priori principles for time proposed in the Critique of Pure Reason. In this paper we focus on the distinction between time as form of intuition and time as formal intuition, for which Kant’s own explanations are all too brief. We provide axioms that allow us to construct ‘time as formal intuition’ as a pair of continua, (...) corresponding to time as ‘inner sense’ and the external representation of time as a line Both continua are replete with infinitesimals, which we use to elucidate an enigmatic discussion of ‘rest’ in the Metaphysical foundations of natural science. Our main formal tools are Alexandroff topologies, inverse systems and the ring of dual numbers. (shrink)