In this chapter I discuss the relation between imaginative perception and moral creativity. I focus on three authors that have explained moral imagination as imaginative perception. Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and Cora Diamond have all argued how we use imagination to transform our perspective of moral situations. However, their central examples demonstrate the importance of morally inventive action as well. I argue that this reveals another mode of moral imagination: moral creativity. While a creative process might build on imaginative perception, (...) moral creativity includes inventive responses to moral problems that are not necessarily given by seeing the world in another way. (shrink)

There are two links that stand in the foreground of Deleuze’s treatment of Epicurus and Lucretius: the themes of immanent naturalism and of the externality of ontological relations. However, the links are problematised in Difference and Repetition, which presents an important critique of the concept of the atom. I will argue that this critique reveals the limits of the intellectual affinity between ancient atomism and Deleuzian metaphysics; in particular, that Deleuze’s notions of relationality and spatium respond to problems raised by (...) the relations between atoms and by the not-being of the atomists’ vacuum. In this sense, Deleuze’s treatment of atomism is significant because it makes clear Deleuze’s aim in shifting the mereological vocabulary from points to lines; it shows what, in Deleuze’s sense, it means to unfound and sets down the conditions for a successful Deleuzian critique of essentialist varieties of the metaphysics of structure. (shrink)

This article confronts two different evaluations of the narrative identity paradigm in order to examine the possibility of a minimal narrative, practical identity without excessive stress on psychic unity and moral wholeness. It consists of three sections. The first part explains the criticisms of Lippitt and Quinn. Both authors warn of the MacIntyrean narrative model's emphasis on psychic unity and moral wholeness and argue for an ethical thinking that is built around concepts of psychic disunity and moral openness. The second (...) section introduces thoughts of Korsgaard and Frankfurt as having one important intuition in common: both their insights express the idea that our identity conceptions are intimately connected with processes of practical and moral reasoning; the ways in which we see ourselves are significant for the ways in which we act. Their sort-like conclusions are linked to the insights of Kennett and Matthews, who argue with help of empirical research on Dissociative Identity Disorder and psychopathy that we should understand our practical identity conceptions narratively. The third and last section shows how the insights of the first and second sections can be brought together in a truthful vision of moral reasoning and the moral person. It argues for a more realistic perspective on morality without altogether banishing narrative thinking, centred on the concept of moral responsiveness. This results in the affirmation of a basal practical, narrative identity and the acceptance of qualities as improvisation and imagination in moral reasoning. (shrink)

Shared intentions supporting cooperation and other social practices are often used to describe human social life but not the social lives of nonhuman animals. This difference in description is supported by a lack of evidence for rebuke or stakeholding during collaboration in nonhuman animals. We suggest that rebuke and stakeholding are just two examples of the many and varied forms of social maintenance that can support shared intentions. Drawing on insights about mindshaping in social cognition, we show how apes can (...) be stakeholders of a different sort in joint action. Drawing on pluralistic social maintenance methods of behavior enforcement, we show ape joint action can be supported by different forms of positive and negative social pressures, and not just protest. We explain how diverse relationships, contexts, social structures, and forms of communication may play a role in forming and successfully fulfilling joint commitments for humans, great apes, and other animals. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to consider the nature of the philosophical task and of the conditions of its possibility according to Parmenides and Plato. With these thinkers, the task of the philosopher necessitates a propaedeutic activity that makes the doing of philosophy possible; that is, both Parmenides and Plato identify the need for a philosophical education that would alleviate the obstacles that would make philosophy impossible to practise, ensuring and accounting for the possibility of philosophical practice. The impossibility (...) of philosophical practice concerns the philosopher’s claim and obligation to occupy a place (τόπος) from which to contemplate being. The problem becomes conspicuous, for the first time, in the first lines of the first fragment of the first text of pure ontology: in the proemium of Parmenides’ poem. I will argue that the proemium has a crucial philosophical function that binds it integrally to the argument of the poem. This function consists in the implementation of a philosophical propaedeutic that makes possible the articulation of the goddess’s critique. The need for a propaedeutic stems from the nature of the project that lies ahead, that is, the project of the youth’s education. Such education takes the form of the delimitation of the realm of the beings that νοῦς can concern itself with. (shrink)

This essay describes and evaluates the conception of mereological structure that underpins Deleuze’s account of ontogenesis in Difference and Repetition. A theory of mereology is a theory of composition: it asks what it is to be a part making a whole, what it is to be a whole collecting its parts; in short, in what the relation of making or composing consists. The locus classicus for modern mereology is the third of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (‘On the Theory of Wholes and (...) Parts’), which deduces the definitions, axioms and principles governing the relation of parthood and associated notions, such as wholeness, separation, simplicity and complexity. My question is this: what happens to these notions when they are no longer the terms of a ‘calculus of individuals’ and, instead, become the terms of a differential calculus of individuation? (shrink)

This investigation constitutes an attempt towards (1) understanding issues and problems relating to the notions of one, many, part and whole in Parmenides and Plato; (2) extracting conditions for a successful account of multiplicity and parthood; (3) surveying Deleuzian conceptions and uses of these notions; (4) appraising the extent to which Deleuze’s metaphysics can answer some of these ancient problems concerning the status of multiplicity and the nature of mereological composition, that is, of the relations that pertain between parts and (...) the wholes that they compose. (shrink)

Αναμφίβολα, όσοι γνώρισαν προσωπικά και όχι μόνο μέσα από τα κείμενά του τον Ευθύμη Παπαδημητρίου, θα θυμούνται ότι ο ίδιος κατέφευγε συχνά σε αυτήν την έκφραση, όταν αναφερόταν σε κάτι αυτονόητο ή σε κάτι δύσκολο στην πραγμάτωση του και άρα δεν σχετίζεται άμεσα με τη συνήθη χρήση της ως έκφραση στην αγγλική γλώσσα. Επιπλέον, οι ίδιοι μάλλον θα συμφωνήσουν μαζί μου, ότι οι παρελθοντικοί χρόνοι που θα ακουστούν/θα χρησιμοποιηθούν σήμερα εδώ και θα τον αφορούν, θα δημιουργήσουν, μάλλον, αμηχανία, αφού, αν (...) θέλουμε να είμαστε ακριβείς στην περιγραφή μας οφείλουμε να προκρίνουμε στις αναφορές μας για εκείνον, ως πιο ενδεδειγμένο χρόνο έναν Εξακολουθητικό Ενεστώτα, ο οποίος στην περίπτωση του Παπαδημητρίου μπορεί αβίαστα να συμπαρουσιάζεται με έναν Οραματικό Μέλλοντα…. (shrink)

The paper replies to an earlier paper by Yannis Stephanou, who presented an argument purportedly showing the falsity of certain instances of the characteristic axiom of the modal logic B. The paper argues that the B axiom was not to blame for the unsoundness of Stephanou's argument.

La inscripciόn inédita que presentamos en el presente trabajo está grabada en un bloque de caliza de forma rectangular que encontré bajo la supervisión de la arqueóloga griega Vanna Ninioú-Kindelí, en la casa de Yannis Kelaidís en el actual pueblo de Megala Choraphia, el cual está situado junto al emplazamiento de la antigua Aptera. La inscripción procede probablemente de la necrópolis occidental de Aptera, la cual estaba situada fuera del recinto amurallado de la ciudad al oeste de la misma (...) y se encontraba a escasa distancia del lugar en el que se halló la inscripción. (shrink)