It is obvious that the fact that I consider my views to be true does not mean that they are true. However, not only is it my obligation to say what I think to be the case, but I do not know what else I should or even could say. It may be suggested – pointlessly – that I should say what is objectively true and not what I subjectively think to be true. The suggestion is pointless because if I (...) thought my views to be true merely subjectively, I would not entertain them; it is precisely because I think that they are objectively true that I do in fact hold them. It may also be suggested, equally unhelpfully, that if there existed a system of philosophy which contained the truth and nothing but the truth, then we should teach that system and not the views that we personally consider to be true. Since some people think that such a system does indeed exist, let us consider why this suggestion does not enable us to say something other than what each of us considers to be true. (shrink)

While historians of pragmatism often present William James as the founder of the “subjectivist” wing of pragmatism that came back into prominence with the writings of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam has argued that James’s views are actually much closer to Peirce’s (and Putnam’s own). Putnam does so by noting that James distinguishes two sorts of truth: “temporary truth,” which is closer to a subjective notion of warranted assertibility, and “absolute truth,” which is closer to Peirce’s own (...) comparatively objective notion of truth as what would be believed at some idealized end of inquiry. Putnam then argues that the temptation to read James as a precursor to Rorty requires privileging his talk of temporary truth, when, in fact, it was always absolute truth that was the primary sense of the term for James. This paper will argue that James’s views on truth are, in fact, much less tied to the absolute notion than Putnam suggests, and, indeed, that James’s account of the relations between our concepts and reality leave open the possibility that no claim of ours could ever be “absolutely” true, and thus that “temporary” truth would be all we could ever expect to have. (shrink)

I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at (...) fault, since, in their context of assertion V was bivalent. This theory requires a theory of assertion that is a form of cognitive expressivism. (shrink)

Absolute needs (as against instrumental needs) are independent of the ends, goals and purposes of personal agents. Against the view that the only needs are instrumental needs, David Wiggins and Garrett Thomson have defended absolute needs on the grounds that the verb ‘need’ has instrumental and absolute senses. While remaining neutral about it, this article does not adopt that approach. Instead, it suggests that there are absolute biological needs. The absolute nature of these needs is (...) defended by appeal to: their objectivity (as against mind-dependence); the universality of the phenomenon of needing across the plant and animal kingdoms; the impossibility that biological needs depend wholly upon the exercise of the abilities characteristic of personal agency; the contention that the possession of biological needs is prior to the possession of the abilities characteristic of personal agency. Finally, three philosophical usages of ‘normative’ are distinguished. On two of these, to describe a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ is to describe it as value-dependent. A description of a phenomenon or claim as ‘normative’ in the third sense does not entail such value-dependency, though it leaves open the possibility that value depends upon the phenomenon or upon the truth of the claim. It is argued that while survival needs (or claims about them) may well be normative in this third sense, they are normative in neither of the first two. Thus, the idea of absolute need is not inherently normative in either of the first two senses. (shrink)

Is there a notion of contradiction—let us call it, for dramatic effect, “absolute”—making all contradictions, so understood, unacceptable also for dialetheists? It is argued in this paper that there is, and that spelling it out brings some theoretical benefits. First it gives us a foothold on undisputed ground in the methodologically difficult debate on dialetheism. Second, we can use it to express, without begging questions, the disagreement between dialetheists and their rivals on the nature of truth. Third, dialetheism (...) has an operator allowing it, against the opinion of many critics, to rule things out and manifest disagreement: for unlike other proposed exclusion-expressing-devices (for instance, the entailment of triviality), the operator used to formulate the notion of absolute contradiction appears to be immune both from crippling expressive limitations and from revenge paradoxes—pending a rigorous nontriviality proof for a formal dialetheic theory including it. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to propose and defend an absolute principle of truthmaking, a maximalist one according to which every truth is made true by something in the world beyond itself. I maintain that an absolute principle must be true, that any weakened version is straightforwardly contradictory or incoherent. I criticize one principle of truthmaking (in terms of bald necessity) and articulate one in terms of the relation in virtue of. I then criticize other principles (...) of truthmaking in light of the latter, for I contend that in virtue of has a role in the theory of truthmaking that is essential and ineluctable. That all true representations have a truthmaker as defined by the principle I articulate is the absolute principle of truthmaking I defend. The crux of the paper is the arguments I present in defense of this absolute principle. In defending it against familiar objections to maximalism, an account of the truthmakers that seem to ground all true representations emerges. I maintain that such truthmakers are simple facts. With the absolute principle and its corollary account of truthmakers, this paper contains the core of a comprehensive theory of truthmaking. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper concerns the apparent difference between what we might call absolute truth and truth in a model, following Donald Davidson. The notion of absolute truth is the one familiar from Tarski’s T-schema: ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. Instead of being a property of sentences as absolute truth appears to be, truth in a model, that is relative truth, is evaluated (...) in terms of the relation between sentences and models. I wish to examine the apparent dual nature of logical truth (without dwelling on Davidson), and suggest that we are dealing with a distinction between a metaphysical and a linguistic interpretation of truth. I take my cue from John Etchemendy, who suggests that absolute truth could be considered as being equivalent to truth in the ‘right model’, i.e., the model that corresponds with the world. However, the notion of ‘model’ is not entirely appropriate here as it is closely associated with relative truth. Instead, I propose that the metaphysical interpretation of truth may be illustrated in modal terms, by metaphysical modality in particular. One of the tasks that I will undertake in this paper is to develop this modal interpretation, partly building on my previous work on the metaphysical interpretation of the law of non-contradiction (Tahko 2009). After an explication of the metaphysical interpretation of logical truth, a brief study of how this interpretation connects with some recent important themes in philosophical logic follows. In particular, I discuss logical pluralism and propose an understanding of pluralism from the point of view of the metaphysical interpretation. (shrink)

By the absolute Good, I understand the Idea of the Good; by the human goods, I understand pleasure and reason, which have been disqualified in Plato's "Republic" as candidates for the absolute Good (cf.R.505b-d). Concerning the Idea of the Good, we can distinguish a maximal and a minimal interpretation. After the minimal interpretation, the Idea of the Good is the absolute Good because there is no final cause beyond the Idea of the Good. After the maximal interpretation, (...) the Idea of the Good is the One. The maximal and the minimal interpretation go beyond the textual evidence. I will defend two theses: (1) Since the platonic Socrates deliberately gives no more information, it seems wise to stop with Socrates and to give only a formal, not a substantive, interpretation: The absolute good is the third item between and above knowledge and the known. (2) To mediate between the absolute Good and the human goods, Plato’s Eleatic Stranger introduced in the "Politicus" and "Philebus" an intermediate principle: "the appropriate" (to metrion). For more information concerning "the appropriate" cf. Ferber, Rafael (2010). Plato's Side Suns: Beauty, Symmetry and Truth. Comments concerning semantic monism and pluralism of the "Good" in the Philebus (65A 1-5). Elenchos, 31, p. 51-76, esp. 64-67. (shrink)

Truth and reality are not the same. Truth is experience of reality. Reality is perception of outside physical world and mental phenomenon. Truth is absolute and must be the same for every one though expressions may differ. But Reality is relative to the mental makeup and capacity of the individuals.

The main goal in this paper is to outline and defend a form of Relativism, under which truth is absolute but assertibility is not. I dub such a view Norm-Relativism in contrast to the more familiar forms of Truth-Relativism. The key feature of this view is that just what norm of assertion, belief, and action is in play in some context is itself relative to a perspective. In slogan form: there is no fixed, single norm for assertion, (...) belief, and action. Upshot: 'knows' is neither context-sensitive nor perspectival. (shrink)

Greenwood (2019) casts doubts upon whether a certain view about social groups (the view that social groups persist throughout changes in their membership, by virtue of the maintenance of their structure or function) is a fundamental metaphysical truth about social groups, rather than a theoretical truth about some or many social groups. In this note, I introduce a distinction between absolute and relative metaphysics, and argue that there are no 'fundamental metaphysical truths‘ (as Greenwood conceives of them) (...) at all. If there is one thing that should not persist here, it is absolute metaphysics. (shrink)

It is a consequence of both Kennedy and McNally’s typology of the scale structures of gradable adjectives and Kennedy’s :1–45, 2007) economy principle that an object is clean just in case its degree of cleanness is maximal. So they jointly predict that the sentence ‘Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one’ :259–288, 2004) is a contradiction. Surely, one can account for the sentence’s assertability by saying that the first instance of ‘clean’ is used (...) loosely: since ‘clean’ pragmatically conveys the property of being close to maximally clean rather than the property of being maximally clean, the sentence as a whole conveys a consistent proposition. I challenge this semantics–pragmatics package by considering the sentence ‘Mary believes that both towels are clean but that the red one is cleaner than the blue one’. We can certainly use this sentence to attribute a coherent belief to Mary: One of its readings says that she believes that the towels are clean by a contextually salient standard ; the other says that she believes that the towels are clean by her own standard. I argue that Kennedy’s semantics–pragmatics package can’t deliver those readings, and propose that we drop the economy principle and account for those readings semantically by assigning to the belief sentence two distinct truth conditions. I consider two ways to deliver those truth-conditions. The first one posits world-variables in the sentence’s logical form and analyzes those truth-conditions as resulting from two binding possibilities of those variables. The second one proposes that the threshold function introduced by the phonologically null morpheme pos is shiftable in belief contexts. (shrink)

Throughout history, oppressors have used multiple forms of violence to impose their own logic on the human universe they oppress. One such form is epistemic violence, which is based on the monopoly control of truth and the hijacking of universality. Those who apply this violence seek to convince everyone of the absolute character of their supposed truths, of the quasi-natural universality of their ways of thinking, of living, of organizing socially. Truth and universality are ineludible objects in (...) dispute between conservative and emancipating forces. The scenario of this complaint today reaches global dimensions. Life itself is at stake. It is obvious that, without an undermining of oppressive truths and predatory particularisms dressed-up as universalities, social emancipation is not feasible. It is also not possible to conserve life. Unlimited growth, the permanent trend towards wealth accumulation, the pursuit at all costs of profit, make capital increasingly incompatible with life. False truths, such as the inevitable centrality of the market and the natural character of capitalism, must be dismantled. Following the logical-deductive method, this work aims to speak critically of the truth, but not denying its existence. This work speaks critically of truth, but does not negate its existence. Attempts are made to uncover the social conditions of the possibility of truth. It seeks to describe how truth can and should exist, if it aspires to be free and decolonized within a social paradigm such as Our America. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

We will explicate Cantor’s principle of set existence using the Gödelian intensional notion of absolute provability and John Burgess’ plural logical concept of set formation. From this Cantorian Comprehension principle we will derive a conditional result about the question whether there are any absolutely unprovable mathematical truths. Finally, we will discuss the philosophical significance of the conditional result.

This work will argue that Mahāyāna philosophy need not result in endorsement of some cosmic Absolute in the vein of the Advaitin ātman-Brahman. Scholars such as Bhattacharya, Albahari and Murti argue that the Buddha at no point denied the existence of a cosmic ātman, and instead only denied a localised, individual ātman (what amounts to a jīva). The idea behind this, then, is that the Buddha was in effect an Advaitin, analysing experience and advocating liberation in an Advaitin sense: (...) through a rejection of the individual ātman and knowledge (jñāna) of and immersion into the universal ātman-Brahman. I will explore how different religious traditions define and shape the Absolute according to their own religious convictions, illustrating a divergence in conception from the very start, before exploring key differences between the Advaitin conception of the Absolute as put forth by Śaṅkara and as defended by Bhattacharya in The Ātman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism. I then challenge Bhattacharya’s claims that prajñāpāramitā literature necessarily endorses the ātman-Brahman and that Mahāyāna philosophies reorientate Buddhists towards the truth of the ātman-Brahman. I do this by arguing that there are viable interpretations of Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra and Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka that do not advocate such a belief, that prajñāpāramitā literature can be viewed as a project in episteme rather than ontology, and that we need not find a ground of the same sort as the ātman-Brahman in the Buddhist flux of experience. I conclude by showing that whilst Absolutism is a theme in some schools of Buddhism, it need not be – contra Bhattacharya – the conclusion of two major Mahāyāna philosophies. (shrink)

Nietzsche has been accused by Habermas of abandoning the pursuit of emancipation and truth. Ironically, this pursuit is at the core of Nietzsche’s works, though radically transformed. The pursuit of knowledge requires emancipated sovereign individuality, a severe honesty, and the courage to follow one's most rigorous use of reason and creative insight wherever they may lead, including the most disturbing insights about truth, language and reason themselves. The first part of this paper discusses Nietzsche’s ideas of individual sovereignty (...) and the associated ideas of emancipation and transformation necessary to this. The next section entitled The Question of Truth: Beyond Universalism and the Quest for Foundations and Certainty deals with how knowledge and truth are intelligible notions in the absence of certainty and absolute standards of truth. The following section, Nietzsche, Habermas and Social Solidarity shows how Habermas’s attempt to ground morality in his discourse ethics cannot succeed once the Nietzchean insight into truth is understood. In the final part, The Irony of Sovereign Individuality, I argue that morality is inconsistent with the individuality that it is supposed to uphold. Nietzsche’s ethical ideal provides a model for concrete individuality that offers the most powerful ethical contribution to social solidarity, given the failure of any grounded morality. (shrink)

If we start out with the assumption that the empirical world is real then we leave philosophy behind from the start. Descartes established the real Copernican revolution in philosophy when he began with “Doubt.” This doubt was directed toward everything familiar including even the world of experience. The only certainty he allowed was the being of himself as thinking. From this he wanted to deduce everything else. This is the spirit of philosophy. If we START with the world as given, (...) then we have not philosophically comprehended what that empiric world is. Genuine philosophy can only begin with doubt. But this doubt must not remain supreme and thereby turn us into skeptics. One must also be willing ultimately to doubt the doubt and in that way arrive at absolute knowledge. Unfortunately, Descartes simply forgot his doubt and uncritically accepted the familiar world of sense as being alongside the being of thought, thus creating a dualism. By tracing the movement of thinking involved in concept formation and its implications with respect to its object — that movement itself is what establishes the ground of truth and basis of what we call reality. Seeing, for example, involves a process, and only when we have intimate familiarity with the thinking that goes on behind or within that process do we know it in its truth. Otherwise simply accepting what we see or sense at face value, without understanding what is going on at an internal level is naive, unconscious existence - basically indistinguishable from animal life. Human life is the unique opportunity to rise above mere animal awareness and come to a more fully conscious existence. Serious work is required to do that — thinking work that is also called negative activity or the act of negating, because thinking means to negate what is directly present, i.e. not to accept what is merely given or apprehended but to try to understand it at a deeper or thinking level in order to comprehend its fundamental basis or truth. Comprehending the unity of the movement and development of the concrete universal with itself as the concept is conceptual knowing or the Absolute Idea. (shrink)

The Church faces a number of challenges concerning the sociological impact postmodernism is having on society. And one very significant area that has been profoundly disputed is the epistemological content of the concept of truth. Evangelical Christians believe in Objectivism: the conviction that there exists some ahistorical (outside of history) source, foundation or framework to which we can appeal to in determining the substance and nature of truth, knowledge, reality, right or wrong that is independent and external to (...) personal experience or thinking. However, the majority of people no longer believe in absolute truth but in relativism. Relativism is the denial that there exists such an ahistorical source or foundation that we can appeal to. Truth, knowledge, reality, right and wrong are all concepts that are relative to a specific conceptual scheme, framework, or paradigm founded in a society, religion and culture. This paper represents an endeavour to dialogically reunite the two perspectives by arguing for the seeking of the truths in both perspectives. God is Objective Truth and has become involved in history: in the existential; in the material setting of our relative and infallible thoughts and the slanted interpretative experiences of the Triune God and life. The synthesis will be an affirmation that for Christians Truth is discovered and revealed in fellowship within community. And members of the Body of Christ are first and finally called to reveal and demonstrate truth to the world - in their unity. (shrink)

What is the relationship between knowledge and ethics? Does what we know and the reason that secures knowledge determine ethical responsibility, or might ethical responsibility itself awaken and animate the enterprise of knowing? The dissertation affirms the priority of ethics by juxtaposing two accounts of the relationship between truth and goodness. It critiques Hegel's systematic conception of absolute knowing by showing that this knowing elides the anarchical ethical demand arising from the other person. Hegel's dialectic reconciles the problem (...) of the relation with the other by transposing it to the plane of cognition where it becomes spirit's self-knowing. However, Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenological reduction of the structures of knowing exposes an ethical level of experience that both inspires and interrupts this adventure of knowing. ;After the introduction of this problematic, Chapter 1 examines the challenge that Levinas poses to Hegel, discovering in experience and subjectivity a ground where real dialogue can take place. Chapter 2 traces the reconception of subjectivity by which Hegel brings all exteriority within the experience of self-consciousness and compares this with Levinas's notion of "lived experience." In Chapter 3, I show how Levinas's account of sensibility and enjoyment resists incorporation into Hegel's notion of self-consciousness. Chapter 4 examines the encounter with the other person and explicates why Hegel's and Levinas's accounts cannot be reconciled or made to complement one another, for the non-allergic responsibility incurred in the face to face relation is inassimilable to the antagonism of the same and the other experienced as self-consciousness. Then, in Chapter 5, I trace Hegel's pursuit of a more authentic recognition of otherness through the development of the concept of spirit, paying special attention to the role of language. The ultimate accomplishment of spiritual recognition in Hegel's account is again challenged by Levinas's notion of responsibility, which signifies as an ethical "saying" apart from the "said." Finally, I contest the absoluteness of knowing without denying the dialectic that animates it by suggesting that philosophy can be maintained as a human enterprise, a pursuit of knowing that is ever subject to and interrupted by the face of the other. (shrink)

When I was first studying Hegel I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher, who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any foundational absolute (...) being. Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading I want to talk about the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science. (shrink)

Progress in philosophy means to understand and accept one point and from there go on to develop the next. The whole is made up of many parts just as a building is composed of many floors – we cannot take out one or more of the beginning floors and expect that the building can thereby be erected. The overall system of Hegel’s philosophy requires an understanding of each of the parts within it, especially the beginning steps. In the earlier articles (...) on this subject the essential point has been made that the subjective and objective aspects of reality cannot be understood separately from each other. There is no meaning to concept without that of which it is the concept, as much as there is no meaning to an object without a subject. With that basic and simple principle of the “distinct but inseparable” notion of the two, further progress was made to the details of the relationship between subject and object. The subject-predicate proposition was introduced to show how thinking takes on a dialectical nature and described this dialectical unity as being the first basic form in understanding the Concept as a dynamic unity of subject and object. Further determinations lay hidden in this structure which have not yet been made explicit for understanding. Only some general ideas or an outline for a basic understanding of what the basic principles are has been presented thus far. A more detailed comprehension is required to go further. The experiences that consciousness goes through in its development in learning about itself display the entire system of the truth of consciousness or the realm of spirit. These are not mere abstract thoughts but appear in relation to consciousness as actual shapes or stages of itself. The development of these determinate moments constitutes consciousness as a whole in its true existence. At that point in the developement of consciousness when it is no longer burdened with itself as that which appears to exist merely for it and as an other, its alien nature is overcome and appearance becomes identical to its own essence. This marks the entrance to the platform of the genuine science of spirit in which consciousness grasps its own essence or is absolute knowing. (shrink)

This paper examines the work of Immanuel Kant in the light of a new theory on the nature of truth, knowledge and falsehood (the Inversion Theory of Truth). Kant’s idea that knowledge could be absolutely certain, and that its truth must correspond with reality, is discredited by a dissection of the Correspondence Theory of Truth. This examination of the nature of truth, as well as knowledge and falsehood, is conducted with reference to Sir Karl Popper’s (...) writings on regulative ideas, the criterion of demarcation and the principle of falsifiability. It is argued that if truth is to be regarded as certain, it should be used to describe objects and events in the objective (noumenal) state, and that subjective knowledge must contain (and is improved by) falsehood. Perceptions and knowledge are obtained by the biological and evolutionary process of Active Subjectivism. Ideas we have knowledge of can be metaphysical or scientific, according to Popper’s Criterion of Demarcation. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” claim that our intellect imposes absolutely true laws on nature could not allow for the possibility that ideas might be constructed from fallible perceptions, and hence that all knowledge is uncertain. Instead, he developed a Critique of Practical Reason in which religion, though not provable through logical reasoning, could be proved by our innate moral sense, giving us a Categorical Imperative that could lead to perverse results. By rejecting the absolute certainty of a priori knowledge, and admitting a degree of essential falsehood, we arrive at a more reasonable grounding for moral behavior. (shrink)

This article aims to study George Berkeley's subjective concept of psychoism to analyze George Burley's subjective concept. The results of the study showed that in Berkeley's philosophy, the idea is not exactly what it really is. But the idea is the potential of the mind to make us aware of the outside world. The perception must therefore start from the mind to the outside world. Berkeley's philosophy is more focused on specific things than the general. The existence of the outside (...) world in Berkeley's perspective means existence as something that appears to our perception. And the perception of external things is therefore reached in the same way as access to God in our minds. Making God the most important absolute thing in George's subjective theory. Berkeley's philosophy believes in a genuine, spiritual identity, and that vision is the result of identity. Matter is present as a vision. Therefore, the world only exists with the manophage, his philosophy is purely the idea, meaning idea, which means that the idea means that the spirit is used instead of idealism, this cult is taught that the mind exists as one person, so it is called the Daemon God, so the true mind is god's mind only. (shrink)

Classical interpretations of Goedels formal reasoning, and of his conclusions, implicitly imply that mathematical languages are essentially incomplete, in the sense that the truth of some arithmetical propositions of any formal mathematical language, under any interpretation, is, both, non-algorithmic, and essentially unverifiable. However, a language of general, scientific, discourse, which intends to mathematically express, and unambiguously communicate, intuitive concepts that correspond to scientific investigations, cannot allow its mathematical propositions to be interpreted ambiguously. Such a language must, therefore, define mathematical (...) truth verifiably. We consider a constructive interpretation of classical, Tarskian, truth, and of Goedel's reasoning, under which any formal system of Peano Arithmetic---classically accepted as the foundation of all our mathematical Languages---is verifiably complete in the above sense. We show how some paradoxical concepts of Quantum mechanics can, then, be expressed, and interpreted, naturally under a constructive definition of mathematical truth. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Frege’s argument against the relativity of truth contained in his posthumous writing Logic from 1897. Two points are made. The first is that the argument is a performative version of the common objection that truth relativism is incoherent: it is designed to show that the assertion of the relativity of truth involves a performative incoherence, because the absoluteness of truth is a success condition for making assertions. From a (...) modern point of view, the central premise of the argument, that the successful making of assertions depends on the absoluteness of truth, is highly doubtful. The second point is that this premise can be made plausible within the framework of Frege’s conception of truth and assertion: it can be derived from his thesis that, in order to put something forward as true, we do not need the word ‘true’, but only the assertoric force. (shrink)

According to Kierkegaard, truth is superimposed on the objective character that encompasses from a historical investigation to a speculative exercise, keeping a correspondence with subjectivity in a movement that implies the limit-condition of interiority. Focusing on such existential-hermeneutic principle, the article points out spirituality as an epistemic-existential experience involving truth as a paradox in Kierkegaard, that overlaps the logical-discursive mediation and implies a dialectical-subjective construction that transcends reason historical-objective (or finite). In this way, characterizing spirituality as an epistemic-existential (...) experience thatconverges to the borders that contain non-rational evidence as the only type of evidence, the article resorts to Rudolf Otto's phenomenological perspective, that emphasizes the sacred and its absolute distinction in relation to natural reality and its perceptible character in a construction that emphasizes the non-rational element and its supra-rational nature and implies the numinous, which escapes logical-rational processes and, emerging as a priori, converges to the apprehension of the rational and the non-rational in the notion of Divinity. Thus, if the relationship with God overlaps the borders that enclose subjectivity and objectivity, converging to overcome the aforementioned epistemic structural scheme, the article, based on Paul Tillich's theological-philosophical perspective, focuses on the concept of Spiritual Presence that, characterizing life without ambiguity, implies a transcendent unión, correlatingagape and gnosis as an epistemic-existential experience involving the relationship with the sacred as the presence of God through an ecstatic-religious movement that converges to self-manifestation, self-revelation and the self-communication of the Absolute and Transcendent as God. (shrink)

According to Kierkegaard, truth is superimposed on the objective character that encompasses historical investigation and speculative exercise, dialoguing with subjectivity and the limit-condition of interiority. Focusing on such existential-hermeneutic principle, the article points out spirituality as an epistemic-existential experience involving truth as a paradox in Kierkegaard, that overlaps the logical-discursive mediation and implies a dialectical-subjective construction that transcends reason historical-objective. Thus, characterizing spirituality as an epistemic-existential experience that contains non-rational evidence, the article resorts to Rudolf Otto's phenomenology to (...) underline the sacred and its absolute distinction from natural reality and its perceptible character, emphasizing the non-rational element and its supra-rational nature in the numinous, which escapes logical-rational processes and converges to the apprehension of the rational and the non-rational in the notion of Divinity. Therefore, if the relationship with God overlaps subjectivity and objectivity and overcomes the aforementioned epistemic structural scheme, the article, based on the philosophical theology of Paul Tillich, focuses on the concept of Spiritual Presence and on life without ambiguity, which implies the union transcendent and correlates agape and gnosis in an ecstatic-religious movement that encompasses the self-manifestation, self-revelation and self-communication of the Absolute and Transcendent. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the consequences of two commonsensical premises in semantics and epistemology: (1) natural language is a complex system rooted in the communal life of human beings within a given environment; and (2) linguistic knowledge is essentially dependent on natural language. These premises lead me to emphasize the process-socio-environmental character of linguistic meaning and knowledge, from which I proceed to analyse a number of long-standing philosophical problems, attempting to throw new light upon them on these grounds. In (...) particular, I criticize the use of expressions such as ‘absolute truth’, ‘absolute existence’ and ‘the thing in itself’, arguing that they lead to what I call ‘the ultralinguistic paradox’ (a fatal antinomy). In the same way, I review a number of mainstream topics in philosophical semantics, epistemology and metaphysics, reformulating them in terms much more naturalistic – and less mysterious – than usual. (shrink)

To the extent that William James had an account of ‘meaning,’ it is best captured in his “pragmatic maxim”, but James’s maxim has notoriously been open to many conflicting interpretations. It will be argued here that some of these interpretive difficulties stem from the fact that (1) James seriously understates the differences between his own views and those presented by Peirce in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”, and (2) James’s understanding of the maxim typically ties meaning to truth, (...) but since James takes “truth” talk to stretch from “temporary” to “absolute” truth, a similar ‘elasticity’ can be found in his conception of meaning. However, this ‘elasticity’ is found in our everyday talk of meaning as well, and James manages to capture it in a more cohesive way than more contemporary accounts that often try to do so by positing two completely distinct types of meaning or content. (shrink)

As much as we may currently accept the Absolute as being Substance, to an equal degree we must now understand it as being Subject. Just as Spinoza shocked the age in which he taught that the Absolute was Substance, so too Hegel comes to shock our modern age with the Truth that Reality is Subject or Personality. "...alles darauf an, das Wahre nicht als Substanz, sondern eben so sehr als Subjekt aufzufassen und auszudrucken." "...everything turns on comprehending (...) and expresssing the Absolute Truth, not only as Substance but just as certainly as Subject." GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Personality is an undeniable element of Reality, as each of us affirms by our own existence. That personality should be the fundamental and irreducible nature of Reality as a whole as much as in part is rationally justifiable since the part may not have any greater quality than that of the whole to which it belongs. On the other hand, the concept that Reality is merely Substance is incomplete and therefore leaves us perplexed. (shrink)

Ken Foldes and I agreed to present what we consider an important controversy concerning the actual interpretation of Hegelian philosophy as regards the nature of the relationship between Man and God. Ken wants to argue for the oneness of God and Man, with the unity and exclusive Being of God as the Absolute Truth, making all being other than God illusory. On the other hand, I want to show the simultaneous identity and difference of Man and God dynamically (...) integrated as a variegated system that is chiefly characterized as pure negative activity, or self-thinking-thought, in which God and Man and the World each have a distinct yet harmonized relationship when considered in their negative or sublated significance with respect to God. (shrink)

It is best to study Hegel as he presents himself in the context of his own writings. In this way we allow Hegel to teach us what the Science of Philosophy is, and how, through such Science, the Absolute Truth reveals or rationally unfolds itself, although this may challenge, in a radical and transformative way, the accepted ideas and methods we may currently have of philosophy and science. By taking the approach of simply following Hegel’s thought in its (...) own development, we discover in the process that we have actually re-invented Philosophy and Science in a such a totally comprehensive and systematic way that we are finally able to integrate Mind and Matter into an Absolute Whole that transcends and encompasses both while yet maintaining a clear differentiation and distinction between them – a genuine unity in diversity that has been the cynosure of philosophical inquiry from time immemorial. (shrink)

A guide for translators, about the translation theory, the translation process, interpreting, subtitling, internationalization and localization and computer-assisted translation. A special section is dedicated to the translator's education and associations. The guide include, as annexes, several independent adaptations of the corresponding European Commission works, freely available via the EU Bookshop as PDF. For a “smart”, sensible translation , you should forget not the knowledge acquired at school or university, but the corrective standards. Some people want a translation with the touch (...) of the source version, while another people feel that in a successful version we should not be able to guess the original language. We have to realize that both people have right and wrong, and that their only fault is to present requirement as an absolute truth. Teachers agree at least on this principle: “If a sentence is ambiguous, the translation must also be“. There is another critical, less easy to argue, based on an Italian phrase with particularly strong wording: “Traduttore, traditore“. This critique argues that any translation will betray the author‘s language, spirit, style … because of the choices on all sides. What to sacrifice, clarity or brevity, if the formula in the text is brief and effective, but impossible to translate into so few words with the exact meaning? One could understand this criticism that it encourages us to read “in the text.” It seems obvious that it is impossible to follow this advice into practice. (shrink)

The paper looks at three big ideas that have been associated with the term “relativism.” The first maintains that some property has a higher-degree than might have been thought. The second that the judgments in a particular domain of discourse are capable only of relative truth and not of absolute truth And the third, which I dub with the oxymoronic label “absolutist relativism,” seeks to locate relativism in our acceptance of certain sorts of spare absolutist principles. -/- (...) The first idea is well illustrated by the famous cases drawn from physics, but is ill suited for providing a model for the sorts of relativism about normative domains that have most interested philosophers. -/- The second idea – according to which it is the truth of certain judgments that is relative – seems subject to a very difficult dilemma. -/- The final idea provides a coherent model of cases like etiquette but is not plausibly applied to the moral or epistemic domains. (shrink)

In the pair of articles of which this is the first, I shall present a set of problems and philosophical proposals that have in recent years been associated with the term “relativism”. All these problems and proposals concern the question of how we should represent thought and speech about certain topics. The main issue here is whether we should model such mental states or linguistic acts as involving representational contents that are absolutely correct or incorrect, or whether, alternatively, their correctness (...) should be thought of as varying with some (more or less surprising) factor. In this, first, article, I shall discuss the general issue of relativism about representational content. I shall claim that there are legitimate ways of attributing contents that are absolute truth-bearers, and there are also equally legitimate ways of attributing relativistic representational contents. In the companion piece “Relativism 2: Semantic Content”, I look in more detail at the more specific question whether semantic contents (i.e. the contents assigned to linguistic utterances in the semantics of natural language) should be construed in an absolutist or a relativist way. (shrink)

During the second decade of the 20th century Hans Kleinpeter, an Austrian scholar devoted to the development of the modern science, published some brief papers on Nietzsche’s thought. Kleinpeter has been one of the main upholders of Mach’s epistemology and probably the first who connected his ideas with the philosophy of Nietzsche. In his book on Der Phänomenalismus (1913) he described a new world view that arose in the 19th century, a perspective that ‒ according to him ‒ completely contrasted (...) the mechanistic and metaphysical world view of the old school of scientific inquiry. The main outcome of the scientists whose name was related with this perspective (e.g. Clifford, Maxwell, Kirchoff and, obviously, Mach himself) has been the refusal of the absolute value of any “truth”. Kleinpeter’s statements on this topic are a good example of the rising of a Scientific Philosophy, whose development involved many scientists and thinkers that later set up the Verein Ernst Mach and the Wiener Kreis. On the other hand, his interest on Nietzsche is a relevant case of reception of the latter’s thought, that Kleinpeter puts into the context of the contemporary epistemology. In fact, he considers Nietzsche as one of the main upholders of the phenomenalistic world view, and states that he «took part at the same renewal of philosophical investigation that arose from the latest results of scientific inquiry» during the 19th century. A renewal whose main outcomes has been presented by John Stallo in his book on The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881), which Kleinpeter translated in German and published in 1901. According to Kleinpeter, in Nietzsche’s writings (mostly unpublished) one can find a theory of knowledge quite close to the one presented by both Mach and the new born Pragmatism, i.e. the complete refusal of an absolute truth and, therefore, the development of an antimetaphysical world view. In my paper I’ll discuss the main statements presented by Kleinpeter on this topic and show which of Nietzsche’s ideas has actually been in compliance with the main outcomes of late 19th century science. Thus, I’ll carry out a reconstruction of an unfamiliar side of the first period of reception of the philosophy of Nietzsche and its relevance to the development of a new (scientific) world view. (shrink)

The critique of Metaphysics and Morality occupies a central place in post-modern philosophy. The decline and decadence of absolute truths about the true nature of reality, was presented by radical changes in scientific progress. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God will be set as the starting point for the critique and personal reflection. Nietzsche’s new conception of man, breaks off from traditional understanding, inherited from the pre-Socratics. Nietzsche is not a post-modern philosopher who is against morality, but rather (...) opposed to the traditional way of moral evaluations, which have historically been based on different metaphysical models that presupposes a world replete of universal truths. This work deals with the proposition given on the impossibility of morals based on transcendental truths given a stronger version of Nietzsche‘s Will to Power and the implication of such findings on the most practical aspects of our daily lives and future moral evaluations. (shrink)

The science of operations research is one of the modern sciences that have made a great revolution in all areas of life through the methods provided by it, suitable and appropriate to solve most of the problems that were facing researchers, scholars and those interested in the development of societies, and the most beneficiaries of this science were companies and institutions that are looking for scientific methods that help them manage their work so that they achieve the greatest profit and (...) the lowest cost, and one of the important methods that have been used in the management of companies we offer in this research two methods, Dynamic programming method. This method has been used in many practical matters and helped decision-makers in companies to achieve a maximum profit and less cost by formulating the reality of the state of the company and the data provided by decision-makers with a dynamic mathematical model that is solved using methods of solving dynamic models and we will provide in this research an example of this through the issue of choosing the optimal investment for the budget of a company so that it achieves a maximum profit, and the method of programming with integers: the method that provided these companies with solutions with integer values suitable for the nature of its work, through the use of the binary integer in the formulation of the appropriate mathematical model on the one hand, and on the other hand, the use of the binary integer variable helped to convert some nonlinear models that lead to some practical problems into linear models, and it should be noted here that in the previous two methods there is something indeterminable because we must make a decision in choosing or not choosing something, but the optimal solution that we will get remains A specific value because we are building the mathematical model for any realistic issue through the data provided by those responsible for the work and these data are calculated quantities and therefore they are uncertain values because their validity depends on the circumstances surrounding the work environment, they may be exposed to increase or decrease, and therefore the optimal solution on which the company will base its decision is suitable for specific values and any change in them can cause the company an uncalculated loss, so in this research we will use the concepts of neutrosophic science, the branch of science founded by the American scientist Florentin Smarandache in 1995 based on his belief that there is no absolute truth, a science that is interested in the study of ideas and concepts that are neither true nor false, but just in between, and we will take the data (calculated quantities) neutrosophic values that are specified or unspecified values are any set close to the calculated quantities, then the resulting mathematical model is a neutrosophic model and the optimal solution has neutrosophic values and thanks to the indefinite uncertainty that these values have, companies from the development of appropriate plans for all circumstances and thus achieve the greatest profit and the lowest cost, and we will clarify the above through two issues, the issue of optimal designation of a warehouse site, which we will formulate the mathematical model of using the neutrosophic integer programming method - and the issue of capital budget, which we will present in two different forms, we use in the first form the neutrosophic integer programming method and in the second the neutrosophic dynamic programming method. (shrink)

The currently used humanity model is chaotic, devoid of logic or coherence. In Part 1 of this two-part paper, we examined human traits of a scientific model in absence of ‘born sinner’ starting point. We demonstrated that the so-called ‘viceroy model’ that is characterized as scientifically sustainable can replace the existing models that are based on fear and scarcity. Part Two of the paper deals with adequate definition of moral campus that conforms to the viceroy model. In this paper, it (...) is shown that the talk of morality or a moral compass is aphenomenal in absence of strict necessary and sufficient conditions. It also follows that natural justice can only be followed after defining the term ‘natural’ with the same scientific rigor as that of the viceroy model. Once these terms are consistently defined, one is well poised to talk about inalienable rights, moral compass, environmental sustainability, and humanity. The immediate consequence of this model is the demonstration that currently used governance models, such as democracy, is inherently implosive and must be replaced with a new model that is in conformance with the scientific definition of ‘natural’. This emerging model is free from inconsistencies and will remain effective as a governance tool that optimizes individual rights and balances with the right of the state as well as a Creator. It is concluded that this model offers the only hope of maximizing individual liberty without compromising universal peace and natural justice. At this point, morality and legality become equivalent to each. The implications of this paper are overwhelming, making all current judicial actions immoral, in essence repudiating the entire Establishment as little more than a mafia entity, bringing back ‘might is right’ mantra, packaged as ‘social progress’. The paper finally shows how a standard that is necessarily and sufficiently universal can become impetus for a true knowledge. (shrink)

George M. Searle (1839-1918) and Charles S. Peirce worked together in the Coast Survey and the Harvard Observatory during the decade of 1860: both scientists were assistants of Joseph Winlock, the director of the Observatory. When in 1868 George, a convert to Catholicism, left to enter the Paulist Fathers, he was replaced by his brother Arthur Searle. George was ordained as a priest in 1871, was a lecturer of Mathematics and Astronomy at the Catholic University of America, and became the (...) fourth superior general of his congregation from 1904 to 1909. Among the books he wrote for non-Catholic audiences was Plain Facts for Fair Minds (1895). On the 8th of August of 1895, Peirce found that book in a bookstore and the following day wrote a letter to George Searle developing his strong reservations about the question of the infallibility of the Pope. This letter (L 397) is almost unknown amongst Peirce's scholars. -/- After describing these historical circumstances as a framework, the aim of my paper is to describe Peirce's arguments against papal infallibility presented by George Searle in his book, and the contrast between the genuine scientific attitude and the putative metaphysical notion of absolute truth that is —according to Peirce— behind Searle's defense of infallibility. In this sense, Peirce's fallibilism will be explained with some detail, giving an account also of his practical infallibilism: "The assertion that every assertion but this is fallible, is the only one that is absolutely infallible. But though nothing else is absolutely infallible, many propositions are practically infallible; such as the dicta of conscience" (Minute Logic, CP 2.75, c. 1902). -/- Finally, having in mind the present interest in Peirce's religious ideas it will be suggested that some of Peirce's ideas on infallibility are nearer to contemporary understanding of that issue than Searle's defense. "I would with all my heart join the ancient church of Rome if I could. But your book," —Peirce writes to Searle— "is an awful warning against doing so." -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What's so Important about Music Education?Leonard TanJ. Scott Goble, What's so Important about Music Education? (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010)In What's so Important about Music Education, J. Scott Goble proposes a new philosophical foundation for music education in the United States based on the theory of semiotics by American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Following a brief summary, I will note several merits in Goble's book before sketching four (...) recommendations for future editions.In Chapter One, Goble notes how the inclusion of non-Western musics in the public schools as espoused in the 1967 Tanglewood Declaration has raised two crucial questions: "Whose music should be included in the curriculum?" and "What is the role or social importance of public school music education in the United States as a postmodern society?" Noting that music education was established in the United States during the modern era, and that the Tanglewood Declaration did not account for vast differences in beliefs about music, Goble argues that there is a need to establish a new philosophical foundation that can accommodate the varied beliefs and practices of diverse cultural groups in postmodern United States.In Chapter Two, Goble sketches and critiques five cultural anthropologists. Of the five, he singles out Clifford Geertz's conception of culture as "semiotic [End Page 201] webs" (p. 20) as the conceptual foundation that is appropriate for this study. He then links Geertz's notion of culture to the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce which is to become the theoretical underpinning of the book. Subsequently, he unpacks many key Peircian themes: human conceptions are maintained not individually but collectively in cultural groups, provisional truth (as opposed to absolute Truth) is relative and dependent on conceptions of communities, and the scientific method is the sole mode of inquiry by which people in communities may use to satisfy their doubts to formulate beliefs. Most importantly, Goble expounds the "pragmatic maxim" that since humans live in communities united by common beliefs, "the 'clear' meaning of an idea held by a member of the community will almost inevitably stem from the beliefs—or ways of understanding—held by members of that community" (p. 30). Goble concludes the chapter by presenting the Peircian semiotic system of cognition which posits that a "sign" is conceptualized in a triadic relationship: the Sign or "Firstness," the Object or "Secondness," and the Interpretant or "Thirdness" (p. 33).In Chapter Three, Goble considers how music is a sign based on the theoretical framework laid in Chapter Two. Drawing on the work of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and a neuroscientist, he formulates a Peircian pragmatic approach to musical practices which posits that "the musical practices of different cultural communities represent a diverse cluster of community-specific ritualized behaviors involving sound" (p. 252). Furthermore, each of the musical practices "serves those persons who meaningfully participate in it as a means of psychophysiological, psychosocial, and/or sociopolitical equilibration relative to the worldview—or ordered conception of Reality—they tacitly share" (p. 252). For Goble, this pragmatist conception of musical practices is neither ethnocentric, universalist, nor relativist, and can serve as a conceptual framework for all diverse musical practices in postmodern United States.With the Peircian pragmatic conception in mind, Goble examines historical factors that contributed to current conceptions of music in the United States in Chapter Four. He laments that as a result of European Enlightenment and three socio-political phenomena in the United States (the separation of church and state, promotion of no other worldview than democracy, and adoption of democratic capitalism), music is no longer pragmatically oriented but trivialized and pursued by self-serving musicians.In Chapter Five, Goble traces the philosophical justifications for music education throughout the history of the United States. While the sign "musical practice" was conceptualized as "worship" in colonial America, the sign "music" was conceived as "art" during the age of Enlightenment, and as "product" during the age of science and technology. Noting that Bennett Reimer's music education as aesthetic education is limited in its Western focus on music as works [End Page 202] of artistic objects, Goble aligns his Peircian conception along praxial lines—in particular, with... (shrink)

William James was one of the most controversial philosophers of the early part of the 20 century, and his apparent skepticism about logic and any robust conception of truth was often simply attributed to his endorsing mysticism and irrationality out of an overwhelming desire to make room for religion in his world-view. However, it will be argued here that James’s pessimism about logic and even truth (or at least ‘absolute’ truth), while most prominent in his later (...) views, stem from the naturalistic conception of concepts developed much earlier in The Principles of Psychology (1890), and it is his commitment to naturalism about our conceptual powers, rather than to any sort of mysticism or irrationalism, that motivates his skepticism about the scope and power of logic, and ultimately about the objectivity of truth itself. (shrink)

This thesis develops and defends a Peircean conception of the task of metaphysics and critically compares it with recent anti-metaphysical forms of pragmatism. Peirce characterises metaphysics in terms of its place within his hierarchical classification of the sciences. According to the classification, metaphysics depends on logic for principles and provides principles to the natural and social sciences. This arrangement of the sciences is defended by appeal to Peirce's account of philosophy as 'cenoscopy'. The dependence of the natural and social sciences (...) on cenoscopy is then argued for on the basis of Peirce's rejection of psychologism and in terms of the necessity of abductive inference. Peirce's position is then compared with recent forms of pragmatism. While it is less naturalistic, Peirce's position is defended on pragmatist grounds. An account of Peirce on truth is then developed. Peirce's account of truth in terms of an ideal limit of inquiry is defended as consistent with recent, more deflationary, approaches. The truth of 'abstract propositions' is a matter of local indefeasibility. These abstract propositions are related to the 'absolute truth', understood as a single non-abstract proposition. The truth of this proposition is then understood in terms of an identity theory. Two conceptions of Peircean metaphysics are presented. Both are 'abductive'. Their task is to explain the possibility of success in inquiry. However, only one proposal accepts the notion of an absolute truth. The 'absolutist' proposal is defended as an interpretation of Peirce and as a contemporary option for pragmatist philosophers. The thesis concludes by comparing recent anti-metaphysical arguments due to Huw Price with the Peircean position. Room for the absolutist proposal is defended by means of an account of recent exchanges between Price and Robert Brandom on dispositional modality. (shrink)

In this paper, I delve on Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism and how it becomes relevant amid contemporary society’s openness to relative standpoints. The foremost era that reflects this description points to postmodernism as a politics of difference. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is generally a critique of the conditions that absolutize truth. While this may seem a valiant opening for a welcoming era on an epistemological standpoint, it does not however do away with its own paradoxes. I contend whether this fits well (...) with postmodernism and its ironic relationship to truth and asserts further that the conditions for Nietzsche’s perspectivism can only achieve its future if it hermeneutically stands as political consensus. Later, I will present the features of this perspectivism as political consensus and how it can be viable in postmodernity. (shrink)

The Myth of the Forbidden Fruit as Allegory on The Limits of Human Knowledge. The history of science points out to the fact that all theories are born to be surmonted by yet to come better ones. Notwithstanding this, paradigmatic developments stay for us as truth as if ultimate, absolute ones. What a fake news! We are allowed to infere that in a coming future, impossible to know how far from now, even Einstein's great theoretical achievements will sound (...) as a rough approximation of a deeper insight on Physics. Might this unreachable character of ultimate, absolute truths be the deepest meaning of the genesis myth of the forbidden fruit? (shrink)

A guide for translators, about the translation theory, the translation process, interpreting, subtitling, internationalization and localization and computer-assisted translation. A special section is dedicated to the translator's education and associations. The guide include, as annexes, several independent adaptations of the corresponding European Commission works, freely available via the EU Bookshop as PDF and via SetThings as EPUB, MOBI (Kindle) and PDF. For a “smart”, sensible translation , you should forget not the knowledge acquired at school or university, but the corrective (...) standards. Some people want a translation with the touch of the source version, while another people feel that in a successful version we should not be able to guess the original language. We have to realize that both people have right and wrong, and that their only fault is to present requirement as an absolute truth. Teachers agree at least on this principle: “If a sentence is ambiguous, the translation must also be“. There is another critical, less easy to argue, based on an Italian phrase with particularly strong wording: “Traduttore, traditore“. This critique argues that any translation will betray the author‘s language, spirit, style … because of the choices on all sides. What to sacrifice, clarity or brevity, if the formula in the text is brief and effective, but impossible to translate into so few words with the exact meaning? One could understand this criticism that it encourages us to read “in the text.” It seems obvious that it is impossible to follow this advice into practice. CONTENTS: Translation - Assessment of the amount of translated texts - Translation and interpretation - - Translation documents - Translation theories - - Practical / communicative approach - - Approaches of literary theories - - Sociolinguistic mainstream - - Approaches based on linguistic theories - - Approaches based on philosophical and hermeneutic concepts - - Semiotic approaches - The translation process - Types of translations - - Technical translation - Schools of thought - Difficulties associated with specialized domains - The problem of double translation - Thoughts about translation - European standard for translation services - Beautiful infidels - Self-translation - - Types of self-translation - - Factors that promote self-translation - - Self-translation and not authorial translation - Technical translation - - Terminology - - Translation process - - Translation tools - - The technical translator - - - Status - - - Remuneration - Conference interpreting - - Methods of interpretation - - Skills of the interpreter - - Contexts and working languages - - The interpretation in international institutions - - - UNESCO - - - European Union Internationalization and localization - Example - Internationalization and localization - Challenges - Software localization - - Difficulties - - Composing specifications - - Special tools Computer-assisted translation - Translation memory - - Advantages and disadvantages - - General operation - - Various - - Software - Machine translation - - Translation process - - Prerequisites - - Difficulties - - Approaches - - Development - - Existing products and services - - Prospective - Parallel text Subtitle - Subtitling or dubbing? - Description - Subtitling the movies - - Spotting - - Translation - - Simulation - - Engraving, inlaying or packaging - - The live broadcast - Live captioning - - Velotype - - Touch typing - - Computer-aided stenotype - - Speech recognition - Surtitles - - Comments - - Technical means - - Artistic issues - Quasi instant voice translation - - Difficulties - - Ongoing projects - - Future Translation Studies - Theories of translation - Interpretive theory - Back-translation - - The proper use of back-translation - False friends - - Cognates - - - Complete false friends - - - Partial false friends - - False cognates - Translation process - - The implications of the "inside" language - - Total and not absolute translation - - A single model - Untranslatability - - Hovering - - Translation methods - - - Adaptation - - - Calque - - - Compensation - - - Borrowing - - - Periphrasis - - - Translator's note - - Untranslatability of poetry and puns - - An amazing counterexample Translators - Translator's notes - European Master's in Translation - - European Master's in Translation - - - Organization of EMT - - - Core skills - - The EMT label - - EMT Network - - - Eligibility - - Members - European Council of Literary Translators' Associations - - History - - Objectives - International Translation Day Annexes: Translation in EU - Translation Guide - - Think before you write - - - Who will be reading the document? - - - What are you trying to achieve? - - - What points must the document cover? - - Focus on the reader - - - Be direct and interesting - - Get your document into shape - - - When you start - - - As you write - - - Two common problems at the European Commission: - - KISS - Keep It Short and Simple - - - Short... - - - ... and Simple: - - - Simple, uncluttered style also means: - - Make sense - structure your sentences - - Cut out excess nouns - verb forms are livelier - - Be concrete, not abstract - - Prefer active verbs to passive - - - Name the agent - - Beware of false friends, jargon and abbreviations - - - Avoid false friends - - - Avoid or explain jargon - - - Take care with abbreviations - - Revise and cheque check - Clear English Tips - - English prefers to be simple, concise and concrete. - - - Use simple words where appropriate. - - - Prefer a verb to an abstract noun - - - Prefer a gerund to an abstract noun - - - Prefer participles to relative clauses - - - And eliminate participles entirely if appropriate. - - - Use the passive voice sparingly - - - Consider replacing negatives with positives - - - Consider short forms and pronouns to avoid repeating full names … - - - Express conditions, including hidden ones, with ‘if’ ... - - - In general, cut out extra verbiage. - - English prefers straightforward syntax - - - Keep the subject close to the beginning of the sentence - - - Avoid splitting up subjects, modals, verbs and direct objects - - - If a sentence is too long, pull information out into separate sentences. - - - Use topic-introducing phrases sparingly. - - English may use different number, articles, gender or words from other languages - - - Keep uncountable nouns in the singular. - - - Use ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ for members of a class. - - - Do not use gender pronouns for entities. - - - Consider alternatives to ‘of’. - - - Finally, avoid ‘false friends’ in translation. - English Style Guide - - Introduction - - Writing English - - - GENERAL - - - SPELLING - - - PUNCTUATION - - - NUMBERS - - - ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS - - - Acronyms and initialisms - - - Contractions and truncations - - - FOREIGN IMPORTS - - - PARTS OF SPEECH - - - LISTS - - - SCIENCE GUIDE - - - FOOTNOTES, CITATIONS AND REFERENCES - - - CORRESPONDENCE - - - PERSONAL NAMES AND TITLES - - - NAMES OF BODIES - - - GENDER-NEUTRAL LANGUAGE - - About the European Union - - - THE EUROPEAN UNION - - - PRIMARY LEGISLATION - - - SECONDARY LEGISLATION - - - THE EU INSTITUTIONS - - - REFERENCES TO OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS - - - EU FINANCES - - - MEMBER STATES - - - OFFICIAL LANGUAGES AND CURRENCIES - - - EXTERNAL RELATIONS - - TRANSLITERATION - - - TRANSLITERATION TABLE FOR GREEK - - - TRANSLITERATION TABLE FOR CYRILLIC - - FORMS OF ADDRESS - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - - - Envelop - - - Start - - - Close - Style Guide for EU Member States - - Austria - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - - Government bodies and administrative divisions - - Belgium - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - - Federal structure - - Bulgaria - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Croatia - - - Geography - - - Regions - - - Judicial bodies - - - Political and administrative structure - - - Legal instruments - - - Law gazettes, official gazettes and official journals - - - Miscellaneous - - Cyprus - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Czech Republic - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Denmark - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Estonia - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - - Law gazettes, official gazettes and official journals - - Finland - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - - Law gazettes, official gazettes and official journals - - France - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Germany - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - - Government bodies and administrative divisions - - Greece - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Hungary - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Iceland - - - Judicial bodies - - Ireland - - Italy - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Latvia - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Lithuania - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - - Law gazettes, official gazettes and official journals - - Luxembourg - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Malta - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Netherlands - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Poland - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - - Law gazettes, official gazettes and official journals - - Portugal - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Romania - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Slovakia - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Spain - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Sweden - - - Geography - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - Turkey - - - Judicial bodies - - - Legal instruments - - United Kingdom - - - Geography Quotes References About the author - Nicolae Sfetcu . 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The confessional work of the Church has been from the very beginning a foundation and basis for the Divine Truth. Starting from this real necessity, the Apologetic Theology claims some important research directions, grounded on the Holy Scripture and the Holy Tradition. Given this historical and doctrinal context, we can highlight the next support coordinates of the Christian Apologetics background: “the truth of God’s existence, the reality of the supernatural world and man’s immortality. All of this are, as (...) we can say, the Christian specific starting from the first ages. The truths about the divine origin of Christianism are to be found here, on the dignity of this revealed doctrine, on the divine-human character of his Founder, on the importance and necessity of Christian Church for the religious and morale life of human kind”. . Apologetics and (or) Fundamental Theology The reason why the Church must justify her teaching in the context of her missionary activity does not rise up from inner necessity. It does more from external misconceptions. In this context we can define the main concern of apologetics as a theological discipline. On the other hand, one can discover almost the same meaning in Fundamental Theology. However, as a difference between them, Fundamental Theology is interested in the direction and bears informative message, since “it aims at basic religious principles systematic presentation, both external and internal, as well as their justification before the scientific-theological conscience of believers. Thereafter, Christianity can be considered the only true religion”. On the other hand, one can claim that the name of “Apologetics” rises up from the necessity that the Christian arguments must be scientifically enforced and illustrated externally. Therefore, the mission of Christian Apologetics is to reject the anti-Christian objections through the power of the theological arguments in dialogue with philosophy, culture or science. In fact, even the object of Apologetics is "the scientific ground of Christian truths" with the purpose to "offer the Truth, reject error, and eradicate lies." In order to achieve its goal, Christian Apologetics offers us a positive method, which consists in "a logical and direct development of a certain thesis, in clarifying a certain truth, by revealing its content and the outcomes deriving from it". Therefore, we have a very dynamic field through which this discipline comes and supports the active life of the Church. Moreover, the method of the Apologetics as a theological subject is based on a conceptual struggle, very active starting with the very first centuries of the Early Church. Due to its energetic character, Fundamental Theology won its most important place among Christian doctrines. “Through struggle, Fundamental Theology imposed itself as a theological subject and became individualised. Through struggle and only through struggle, Fundamental Theology must exist and strengthen the positions of Christianity”. In its theologically mission, Christian Apologetics identifies and also prevents the alteration of the doctrinal truth. In this concern, it has the responsibility to enforce of believers’ moral conscience in their spiritual process of development. As a subject, one can say that the mission of Apologetics is “rational, objective and represents a very important basis for the Christian truths of faith”. Therefore, one can notice that the most important aspect of our subject is to enforce the Christian faith and experience through proper knowledge of the fundamental principles of the doctrine. This is the reason why we also mention Apologetics together with Fundamental Theology. However, we must highlight a few important details regarding the sensible difference between both of the denominations. Therefore, historically speaking, “they both arise from those who personally share Christian faith and act within the believing community and in its service. They both aim to respond to objections raised by critics and to offer a trustworthy account of main beliefs about matters as the existence of a personal God, the divine self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and the nature of faith”. On the other hand, we can identify almost three important differences between Apologetics and Fundamental Theology. “First, a Christian apologist can simply address a question: does the existence of horrendous evil in our world rule out the existence of almighty and all-loving God? or has science caused faith in God to be demoted in the past? … Second, good Apologetics has typically a sharply defined audience: Apologetics can seek, for example, to alert non-believers to the weakness of the case currently being against God and religion. But Fundamental Theology addresses to a wider range of readers … Third, polemics (in the good sense of this word and not as mindless ranting) belong to the exercise of Apologetics … The tone of fundamental theologians, even when rebutting objections to Christian faith, is or should be more expository and less polemically inclined to illustrate defects in opposing positions”. Moreover, we must mention that Apologetics can be considered as a particular subject. Although, it is similar in terms of content with Dogmatic and Philosophy through its method, our subject has its own research direction. Therefore, if Dogmatic is defined by an expositive and imperative character, Apologetics is demonstrative and constraining. In other words, dogmatic rationality, which has a subsidiary role, in Apologetics becomes primordial. In this case, “the faith truths become truths also for the rationality and moreover, the eternal truths of the Divine Reason become constraining for the human reason, too. Truths of natural religion, which are in fact the object of the Philosophy of Religion, are conditioned in Apologetics by the Absolute Truth completed in the Christian faith”. In all its theological and external interaction perspectives, Apologetics holds the main role to “expose, defend and justify with rational meanings the general truths of religion”. It is necessary to clear up one aspect: as subject, Apologetics is different from Apology. On the one hand, one can speak about the general research background and, on the other hand, one can describe a singular part of theological approach. Therefore, these two “theological sisters” are different depending on the type of approach. However, Apology is older than Apologetics. Among the first Christian apologists, we mention: Saint Justin the Martyr and Philosopher, Tatian, Athenagoras or Tertullien. In its current meaning, Apologetics is of a western theological origin, having its beginning in Middle Ages. Even so, its blooming age is the 18th century, when the Western Catholic Church replied to the materialist and atheistic philosophy. In the Eastern Church this type of confession had a more profound theological overview, in a theonomic perspective. “In the light of the Holy Scripture, the eastern theological thinking always shows priority to the divine Revelation in spite of the philosophical human systems and places the Creator - Logos at the basis of all creation, in the light of biblical thoughts”. -/- II. “Rational-spiritual Apologetics” Reverend Professor Dumitru Popescu, one of the most important Romanian theologians, develops the concept of “Rational-spiritual Apologetics”. In his theological approach, he illustrates the fact that one of the most essential part of the Church’s confessional work are the relations between rational arguments and spiritual purpose of the Christian life. In this case, we can identify two possibilities of argumentation: rational and spiritual, each of them in connection with the knowledge of God. This is in fact, the Orthodox specificity of the Apologetics, as theological subject, in contrast with the principles of western scholastic. Therefore, the most important argument, which Dumitru Popescu brings up in the support of his thesis, belongs to Saint Maximus the Confessor’s theology: “The Scripture provide a double knowledge of the divine things. One is relative and consists in its rationality and meanings, without the direct feeling of God. Through it we are guided in this life. The other one is in a true sense true and consists in leaving experience of divine grace, outside rationality and meanings, having the complete experience of God. Through it we will receive in the future life the deification”. On the other hand, we can understand that the purpose of human rationality is not to replace the spiritual perspective, since human mind does not own the divine mystery. In this case, rationality can be useful in discovering and demonstrating the existence of God from natural realities to a point where we must assume a spiritual understanding. Consequently, in the context of human deification, the orthodox theology cannot conceive the gnoseological process in rational terms. Therefore, Rev. Dumitru Popescu carries out a dual argumentation: 1. since God is not a solitary power, but descends and interacts with man providentially (through His divine grace and energies); 2. because the created world doesn’t have an independent rationality through which man can receive the possibility to reach God. Therefore, Father Professor Dumitru Popescu concludes that “the deification process is here, on the earth, a foretaste of immortality, which springs from the personal meeting of man with God”. One of the most recent Romanian Apologetics academically approach is the book of professor Adrian Lemeni: “Truth and Demonstration”. Except his very complex analysis on the interaction between theology and science, Professor Lemeni goes further and perfects Dumitru Popescu’s theological view, on the “Rational-spiritual” character of Orthodox Apologetics. Therefore, he offers a very important example, starting from Saint Gregory Palamas’ theological view. In his work “the authority of Patristic gnoseology” is illustrated, which is offered by the “Eternal Truth, God’s Word, incarnated in the Person of Jesus Christ”. “The authority of patristic gnoseology” – notes down Adrian Lemeni – “is expressed along the process for searching the truth of knowledge illustrated by deeds and life. In his debate with Varlaam from Calabria, Saint Gregory Palamas insists on the power of persuasion which arises from the Church’s Tradition, biblical and patristic fundamentally. In an ultra-confident argument, based on the autonomic logical power, we believe that one word has power over another. But Saint Gregory Palamas shows that the truth is based and validated through spiritual and ecclesiastical experience. Truth is validated by the words and deeds of the Holy Fathers, in direct connection with apostolic Tradition. Any argument can be fought against by another argument. Nevertheless, the apologetic concession based on the deeds of the saints is unbookable. This is the thesis which Saint Gregory Palamas develops in complete harmony with the patristic gnoseological Tradition”. Therefore, we can consider that the position of the subject of Apologetics (of Fundamental Theology) is one of interactions. It has connections with all domains external to Theology. In this case, we can consider it sets up a dialogue or debate with philosophy, culture or science. Starting from the historical argument, this interaction between theology and other sciences has existed from the very first Christian century. Therefore, we have an apologetic literary genre starting with the first patristic writings. Including the Early Church, we can identify three important stages in terms of historical apologetics development: 1. The Christian apologists struggle age with Judaism and paganism; 2. From the issue of Islam to the Middle Eve; 3. From the period of the Renaissance of Western sciences to the present day. (shrink)

Now it’s the time to hear lots of talks about crisis of philosophy and disappearance of humanities. One can assume that the trend of such dialogues is related to a culture that conviction on the modernistic absolute truth is waning and belief’s on postmodernistic pluralism gets strong. How could postmodoernism gain such a strong momentum? I could offer a hypothesis for the question, that is, that philosophy of quantum mechanics played an important role. In my mind, Zhang Hwe-Ik’s (...) book explains how postmodernistic quantum philosophy can replace Newton’s modernistic mechanics and it tries to offer a philosophical paradigm by his own Seoul interpretation on the quantum mechanics, paradigm which is comparable to the role of Kant’s philosophy toward Newton’s classic mechanics. Zhang seems to be successful to lead to be able to get a holistic world view and yet to have tasks to struggle with, one of which is how to offer a grammar of understanding of quantum mechanics without employing Newton-Kant’s notions like individual, identity, causality. -/- Philosophy (CHEOLHAK, Korean Philosophical Association), 150(2022.02): PP. 333-343. (shrink)

The long-standing dispute between absolutists and relativists traditionally focuses on whether there are absolute truths, absolute epistemic norms, and absolute.