In this paper I aim to show that the issue of the constitution of time in Husserl’s thought can not be fully exhausted by a descriptive analysis of the immanent level of consciousness and it rather asks for a deeper search at a pre-immanent (and pre-subjective) level. The way Husserl developes his interpretation regarding the constitution of time leads the descriptive (phenomenological) method to an impasse. Because of this, the Husserlian analysis proceeds to some techniques which bear on (...) what some commentators called a constructive phenomenology. The central point that I argue for in this study is that the premise from which Husserl starts his examination of the constitution of time is ab initio problematic or debatable: that is, consciousness forms the origin of time and one could reach this source by following the path oppened by descriptive analysis. I will hold that time rather originates in the encounter between consciousness and objects or between consciousness and other consciousness (i.e. founded/originated in a relation). (shrink)

The Fifth Element (1997) is a French science-fiction film in English, directed and co-written by Luc Besson. The title and the plot of the film refer to a central notion of Greek philosophy, that is, pemptousia, or quintessence. Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes and others, were convinced that all natural beings – in fact, nature itself – consist in four primary imperishable elements or essences (ousiai), i.e., fire, earth, water, and air. To these four, Aristotle added aether, a (...) fifth essence (pemptousia). The introduction of aether gave birth to a great tradition in late Antique and Medieval philosophy, and eventually it came to signify not an additional primary element, but the core-essence of all beings, their fundamental ontological structure. Besson’s film draws its inspiration on this philosophical tradition but its cinematographic rendering of the concept of Quintessence is typical of the contemporaneous views on the core characteristics of matters. The modernity that stimulates the film is equally anti-transcendentalist and anti-essentialist. Thus, the fifth element of the film is existentially personified and genderized making the traditional philosophical significance of the term to be adjusted by modernity in an immanent and temporal context where in addition aesthetics plays a crucial role. (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)

In Chapter 1 I discuss the basic problem which made me undertake the issue of human death. That problem was the dualism in the depiction of human nature which has not been fully overcome yet, the dualism which leads to the emergence of new difficulties in contemporary attempts at adequately solving the problem of human death. They include the separation of soul from the body in the moment of death, and the borderline between the moment of death and the moment (...) of resurrection. Chapter 2 is devoted to the presentation of a new anthropological perspective, of an anthropology build “from the bottom up”, that is “from foundations”, and taking into account man’s rooting in the biological environment, and thus also in the genetic heritage taken over from our pre-human ancestors. That anthropology brings new aspects into traditional anthropology by extending it to include new ways of explaining the genesis of the human body and spirit, and new depictions of man’s death. In Chapter 2 I will also present the concept of evolution proposed by P.T. de Chardin, which I appreciate for its comprehensive evolutionary perception of the world. This concept has provoked various responses, but it certainly provides a creative inspiration for further attempts at applying the idea of evolution to various issues. The general framework of the evolutionary model proposed by the French researcher turns out to be useful also when applied to the evolutionary understanding of human death. Chapter 3 contains a discussion of the principal premises of the evolutionary concept of human death taken from analyses carried out by T. Wojciechowski concerning the issue of time, space, and the structure of variable material beings. A being is variable because it has a temporal structure, and the changes that occur are the derivatives of that structure. The temporal structure may be seen as endless, in which a being, even though its existence had a beginning, will exist for ever. Material substance should not be seen statically, but in dynamic and evolutionary terms. In evolution, time becomes a driver of development, an element shaping and directing the evolution of the entire cosmos. Man’s substance has been made capable of two levels of being and acting: the spatial and temporal level, and the endless and immanent level. Together, they form the one essence of man. Thus, the human person is partially immersed in the material cosmos, and partially elevated above it. Chapter 4 presents the evolutionary approach to the moment of man’s death. The views of T. Wojciechowski will be presented in which the moment of death is seen as a moment of transformation and perfection of the structure of the essence of human existence. Furthermore, the issue of the relationship existing, according to T. Wojciechowski, between man’s death and resurrection will be discussed. Understood in evolutionary terms, the moment of death is the time when the structure of human existence is transformed. Death transfers man fully into eternity and enables his life on a higher level of existential being. The element of flesh is retained, but changes its nature. Such view of death allows it to be understood as the moment of resurrection and the culmination of the evolutionary process of life. Death is therefore an “invention” of the evolution and should be seen as a natural and positive phenomenon. At this point, I also propose a solution to the question about reconciliation between temporal and endless existence. In Chapter 5 I take up the issue of consequences flowing from the postulated understanding of human death. They have been pointed to by T. Wojciechowski, but need to be further developed and clarified. He believed two lines in man’s development need to be recognized: that of natural and that of supernatural evolution. Both have the same direction, while occurring on different planes. In each of these lines, death is a natural element of life, pre-planned and, so to say, “encoded” in the cosmic matter. Therefore, the treatment of biological death as the consequence of sin is not only contrary to the evolutionary understanding of life, but in addition artificially combines that which is natural with that which is supernatural. Man’s authentic experience of his own present is a condition of his achieving full existential perfection in the moment of this death. Full engagement in the present is, in a way, a harbinger of the future; thus, the life “here” and “there” may not be inherently inconsistent. In the light of the evolutionary concept, death is not a punishment, but the most positive experience of man’s life in that it enables him to achieve full existential perfection. Chapter 6 is devoted to a substantiation of the possibility of evolutionary transformation of the structure of human existence in the moment of death. An adequate cause needs to be identified which could substantiate that transformation and achievement of perfection. I believe an appropriate substantiation can be found in God’s creative act, interpreted in evolutionary terms. The process of evolution, with its subsequent stages, is only a necessary condition for that “transformation” and “elevation”. The sufficient condition is fulfilled by the continuous creative intervention of God. The concept of God’s creative activity in the moment of man’s death finds its continuation in Chapter 7, where I present a detailed analysis of God’s activity at the time of man’s death. The concept of God’s creative activity extended over the entire process of evolution makes it possible to consider the moment of death as the moment of man’s resurrection. The moment of death is thus a moment of creation in evolutionary terms. Thus, as long as man is related to temporal and spatial elements, his development, or creation, continues. Death is only the completion of the final stage of creation, which may be painful and evoke fear, but in fact should give hope, for it involves resurrection. I also propose that the creative act in the moment of man’s death-resurrection be considered a basic action of God, which explains the manner in which God’s activity is contained within the framework of the creative act, encompassing also the moment of death-resurrection. The final Chapter 8 describes a didactic model illustrating the concept proposed here. I use the analogy of white light dispersion effect in the prism, and compare the incident ray to the creative act, and the dispersed rays going through the prism to the line of man’s natural and supernatural evolution. This model also shows the difference in the perspectives from which the phenomenon of death is seen by God and by man. (shrink)

In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or pre-reflective “sense of agency”. However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. (...) In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, have been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people’s causal beliefs can be affected by the extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding. (shrink)

Temporal experience and its radical alteration in schizophrenia have been one of the central objects of investigation in phenomenological psychopathology. Various phenomenologically oriented researchers have argued that the change in the mode of temporal experience present in schizophrenia can foreground its psychotic symptoms of delusion. This paper aims to further the development of such a phenomenological investigation by highlighting a much-neglected aspect of schizophrenic temporal experience, i.e., its non-emotional affective characteristic. In this paper, it denotes the type of an experience (...) wherein an afflicted individual experiences a pervasive pull or attraction coming from the past, present, and future. By employing Husserl’s account of affection, I argue that such an affectively prominent temporal experience is not yet another abnormality that happens to be present in schizophrenia. Instead, it is indicative of the core disturbance that underpins the schizophrenic temporal mode of experience. I identify such a disturbance as ‘affective modification dysfunction’ and employ it as a core concept with which I synthesize and organise heterogeneous components of schizophrenic temporal experience in their conceptual unity. For the sake of clear description, I organise those components into the following categories: 1.) Time Stop 2.) Ante-festum 3.) Déjà vu/vécu and 4.) Time Fragmentation. I conclude by demonstrating how approaching schizophrenic temporal experience from its affective dimension can further help us better understand its pre-psychotic phase known to precipitate schizophrenic primary delusion, i.e., delusional mood. (shrink)

The article presents Erwin W. Straus’ unpublished manuscript “Temporal Horizons” from 1952. In the paper, in addition to an extensive philosophical discussion with St. Augustine, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, Straus elaborates on his idea of a unified view of temporal experience, comprising both the personal and the impersonal dimensions of time. The manuscript also contains an interview with a psychotic patient, which is supposed to exemplify Straus' core idea on the psychotic temporal experience, according to which the break of (...) the invisible bond between immanent or personal, and clock or impersonal time leads to a loss of a sense of reality. (shrink)

According to Leininger, presentists and growing blockers cannot explain why past and present regularities persist in the future. In order to do so, they would have to appeal to enforcers, such as causation, laws or dispositions. But in a world with no future, these enforcers are powerless and cannot guarantee future regularity. I disagree and argue that Leininger’s coordination problem can be met by distinguishing type- from token-level necessitation. Whereas token-level necessitation is cross-temporal and subject to Leininger’s coordination problem, type-level (...) necessitation is atemporal and immune to the coordination problem. For this solution to work, though, type-level necessitation must be ontologically prior to token-level necessitation. This forces us to adopt a Platonist position according to which universals are transcendent, and not immanent. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for (...) each psychopathological disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

In his debut book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche presents what he understands as a metaphysics of art or metaphysics of the artist. As it becomes clear throughout the argument developed in the work, his aim is to favor a justification of the world and of existence as an aesthetic phenomenon. The path to his metaphysics passes through the interaction with Kantian and, mostly, Schopenhauerian formulations, and through a deep dialogue with Greek culture in general and, indirectly, with Pre-Socratic thought. (...) The objective of this article is to delimit the retentions and displacements of the critical tradition in his book from 1872, and highlight the importance of the interlocution with the Greek cultural repertoire in the conformation of his metaphysics of the artist. In particular, the working hypothesis is that Nietzsche, in these approaches and appropriations of critical and archaic philosophical tradition, finds the possibility of an immanent metaphysics in the post-Kantian context, conceived as a physiology (in the antique sense) of aesthetic bias. (shrink)

This paper investigates the meaning of the neo-Confucian concept of 'li'. From early on, it has the sense of a pattern designating how things are and ought to be. But it takes on the appearance of something transcendent to the world only at a certain point in history, when it becomes juxtaposed to 'qi'. Zhu Xi has been criticized for this 'li-qi' dichotomization and the transcendentalization of 'li'. The paper re-examines this putative dualism and transcendentalism, looking into both Zhu's discussions (...) and pre- and post-Zhu discussions of 'li', and concludes it to be an inter-connective threading immanent to the world. (shrink)

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

My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...) further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

This paper investigates the degree to which information theory, and the derived uses that make it work as a metaphor of our age, can be helpful in thinking about God’s immanence and transcendance. We ask when it is possible to say that a consciousness has to be behind the information we encounter. If God is to be thought about as a communicator of information, we need to ask whether a communication system has to pre-exist to the divine and impose itself (...) to God. If we want God to be Creator, and not someone who would work like a human being, ‘creating’ will mean sustaining in being as much the channel, the material system, as the message. Is information control? It seems that God’s actions are not going to be informational control of everything. To clarify the issue, we attempt to distinguish two kinds of ‘genialities’ in nature, as a way to evaluate the likelihood of God from nature. We investigate concepts and images of God, in terms of the history of ideas but also in terms of philosophical theology, metaphysics, and religious ontology. (shrink)

[This is a pre-print; please cite the published version] This paper employs structural topic modeling (STM) to describe the academic philosophy landscape in Brazil. Based on a public national database, a corpus consisting of 12,515 abstracts of monographs defended in philosophy graduate programs between 1991 and 2021 was compiled. The final STM model identified 74 meaningful research topics, clustered into 7 thematic categories. This study discusses the prevalence of the most significant topics and categories, their trends across three decades, and (...) their (positive or negative) association with the supervisor's gender. Results show the first empirical evidence that Brazilian philosophical research exhibits a greater focus on philosophers than on specific themes or problems. Moreover, by visualizing the variations in topic prevalence over time, it was possible to track the rise or decline of the major interest categories and topics. Finally, results also show which topics are more influenced or less influenced by gender. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Eugene Gendlin’s contribution to radically temporal discourse , situating it in relation to Husserl and Heidegger’s analyses of time, and contrasting it with a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that draw inspiration from, but fall short in their interpretation of the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger. Gendlin reveals the shortcomings of these approaches with regard to the understanding of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, intersubjectivity, attention , reflective and pre-reflective (...) self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior. Gendlin traces the weaknesses of these approaches in the above areas to the way these perspectives construe time. (shrink)

Nas obras A intuição do instante (1932) e A dialética da duração (1936), o problema do tempo nos é apresentado em paralelo a um psicologismo temporal bachelardiano que objetivamos situar. Inicialmente, será através de um não-bergsonismo — ou seja, um bergsonismo generalizado — que convirá introduzirmos as nuances psicológicas das teses bachelardianas, elencando: 1) sua interpretação de memória, amparada pelas teses sobre a conduta do psicólogo Pierre Janet (contra a imediaticidade) e 2) a evidenciação do dinamismo e liberdade presentes na (...) psyché a partir da valorização da ideia de intervalos imanentes às estruturas temporais da consciência (descontinuidade). -/- Dans les ouvrages L’intuition de l’instant (1932) et La dialectique de la durée (1936), le problème du temps nous est présenté en parallèle d'un psychologisme bachelardien temporel que nous cherchons à situer. Dans un premier temps, ce sera à travers un non- bergsonisme — c’est-à-dire un bergsonisme généralisé — qu’il conviendra d’introduire les nuances psychologiques des thèses bachelardiennes, en listant : 1) leur interprétation de la mémoire, appuyée par les thèses sur la conduite de le psychologue Pierre Janet (contre l’immédiateté) et 2) la révélation du dynamisme et de la liberté présents dans la psyché à partir de la valorisation de l’idée d’intervalles immanents aux structures temporelles de la conscience (discontinuité). (shrink)

Kant‘s moral philosophy is one of the great cornerstones of the Western ethical reflection. The little that is known is that the basic conception on which Kantian ethics was built – videlicet, the concept of autonomy of the will – was developed from the attempt to solve a set of problems of metaphysical and theological character that could only have been overcome through the adoption of a new practical metaphysics. With this in mind, this research is an attempt at a (...) reconstruction of the Kantian moral thought in its development, having as a higher aim the emphasis on the importance of the problem of theodicy in the genesis of Kant‘s original conceptions of freedom and the moral world, which emerged from the middle of the 1760s and only came to a bloom on the next decade. Such an attempt at a reconstruction will be guided by the chronological sequel of the pre-critical writings and Kant‘s reflections on the Manuscript Legacy, besides his Lectures on Ethics, sources that are temporally circumscribed from the late 1750s and the first half of the 1780 decade. In a first moment, the genesis of the moral problem will be analyzed from Kant‘s critical position – due to the objections that were raised precisely by the theodicy – in front of the intellectualistic comprehension of the concepts of perfection and will such as they were received by the German Scholastic. In a second moment, the beginning of a reformulation directly influenced by Crusius and the British moralists will be highlighted, and it will culminate in a repositioning of the ethical problem, having in mind the roles of reason and feeling. The third moment is marked by the Kantian assimilation of Rousseau‘s thought. Rousseau‘s influence will propel the emergency of a new understanding of the concept of perfection as an inner attribute of the will, enabling support for a new concept of practical philosophy. Indeed, a solution to the ethical problem regarding the conditions of possibility of free actions within the natural world will emerge and, besides that, a path to an adequate answer to the problem of theodicy will rise by means of the concept of a practical rational faith. Finally, the development of the Kantian doctrine of the categorical imperative will be highlighted – by means of the debate with Baumgarten‘s compendium – as the first attempts to lay down a systematic and unified view of morality that will try to establish a connection between the concepts of virtue and happiness – in this contexts, approach from the perspective of the highest Good. (shrink)

Usage of the Greek verb ‘to be’ is generally divided into three broad categories — the predicative use, the existential and the veridical—and these usages often inform the way we understand Being in ancient philosophy. This article challenges this approach by arguing that Being is not the product of linguistic reflection in Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle; rather, these thinkers treat Being as the ontological and epistemological primary. Though this may overlap with the linguistic senses, it is not the same thing. (...) The article is divided into three sections: the first one raises several basic issues with the predicative interpretation of Being, the second argues that Being is unified and singular in a significant sense and the third brings out the special pre-immanence of Being. (shrink)

It’s generally thought that we naively or pre-theoretically represent the future to be open. While philosophers have modelled future openness in different ways, it’s unclear which, if any, captures our naïve sense that the future is open. In this paper we focus on just one way the future might count as being open: by being nomically open, and empirically investigate whether our naïve representation of the future as open is partly constituted by representing the future as nomically open. We also (...) investigate the connection between our naïve representation of the future as open, and our representation of time. One of the purported advantages of the growing block theory of time is that it captures our naive sense that the future is open, and the past closed. We investigate whether there is an explanatory connection between people representing the future to be nomically open and representing our world to be a growing block and reflect on the implications of our findings for theorising about future openness and temporal ontology. (shrink)

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss assumes central importance throughout Schelling’s oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810–11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here and (...) to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling’s best efforts to theorize it as ‘love’; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity’s foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling’s conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present, and the eschatological—as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity —not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves. (shrink)

A widespread (and often tacit) assumption is that fear is an anticipatory emotion and, as such, inherently future-oriented. Prima facie, such an assumption is threatened by cases where we seem to be afraid of things in the past: if it is possible to fear the past, then fear entertains no special relation with the future—or so some have argued. This seems to force us to choose between an account of fear as an anticipatory emotion (supported by pre-theoretical intuitions as well (...) as empirical research in psychology) and admitting cases of past-oriented fear. In this paper, we argue for a proposal that dissolves this dilemma. Our claim is: with the right account in place, the future-orientation of fear can be made compatible with, and is actually explanatory of, cases where we are genuinely afraid of something in the past. So, there is no need to choose: fear is still future-oriented, even when we are genuinely afraid of things in the past. The key is a correct understanding of what fear’s temporal orientation amounts to, and the framework we offer here provides us with such an understanding. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects (...) persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

The A-theory of time is plagued by certain standard armchair problems: the presentism–eternalism dilemma, the problem of truth-makers, the alleged impossibility of cross-temporal relations, and the problem of temporary intrinsics. These challenges supposedly force A-theories to make incredible claims. I argue that these challenges are not deep antinomies in common sense, but rest on avoidable mistakes. Then I present a new A-theory that shows what’s possible once we move past the old problems. On this proposal, time’s passing is a metaphysically (...) fundamental aspect of reality. I take this to mean that there are fundamental facts like: four hours passed from 8am today until noon. This A-theory also posits fundamental facts about the state of the universe at a time, and about cross-temporal relationships. The proposed metaphysical package attractively articulates our common sense, pre-relativistic conception of time. (shrink)

As all philosophical concepts, also the concept of person constitutes itself referring to a particular problem. The analysis drafted by Marcel Mauss regarding the genesis of the aforementioned category permits to analyse the problematic nucleus to which such concept refers to, disclosing that it responds to the necessity of solving the ancient problem of the link between mind and body in a specific perspective. In this respect, Bergsonian theory of images represents a solid attempt of passing not only the habitual (...) solution of the problem represented by the concept of person, but also the problem itself whereto refers. The deleuzian reading of Henri Bergson’s theory leads him to define the impersonal and pre-individual field sketched out by Bergson as a plane of immanence, and this last as “a life”. The ultimate aim of this paper is to analyse the nature of such plane and to suggest an interpretation of the latest Gilles Deleuze’s piece of writing, "L’immanence: une vie..." that unveils its profound Bergsonism. (shrink)

This paper has two parts: In the first part, I give a general survey of the various reasons 17th and 18th century life scientists and metaphysicians endorsed the theory of pre-existence according to which God created all living beings at the creation of the universe, and no living beings are ever naturally generated anew. These reasons generally fall into three categories. The first category is theological. For example, many had the desire to account for how all humans are stained by (...) original sin (we were all there). As another example of a theological motivation, some take the organism as an obvious starting point for a teleological argument for God’s existence, and this staring point is sometimes developed into a full-blown theory of pre-existence. The second category could be thought of as non-theological metaphysical, and paramount here is the desire to deal with the metaphysical problem of individuation. So, for example, Leibniz embraces a version of hylomorphism in order to overcome difficulties with Descartes’ theory of material substance, including the difficulty of how to account for enduring material individuals, and Leibniz’s hylomorphism is closely linked with his embrace of pre-existence. The third category might be termed “biological”, and one example of such a concern is how to explain the organic unity of living beings where the whole seems to ontologically precede the parts. This is frequently translated into a temporal priority of whole to parts, and thus pre-existence is posited. Of course, many natural philosophers of the early modern period embrace pre-existence for more than one reason, but in general, these are the three classes of motivations one might have for embracing the theory. In the second part of the paper I examine in detail one argument that appears in the work of Malebranche. On the face of it, this argument seems to be a biological one, specifically the biological or organic holism argument mentioned above. But upon closer examination, I shall argue, Malebranche’s reasons for endorsing pre-existence bring together several of the arguments discussed in the first part of the paper. I conclude with some considerations about what we can learn about Malebranche as a natural philosopher from his motivations for holding the pre-existence doctrine of generation. (shrink)

Spontaneous activity levels prior to stimulus presentation can determine how that stimulus will be perceived. It has also been proposed that such spontaneous activity, particularly in the default-mode network (DMN), is involved in self-related processing. We therefore hypothesised that pre-stimulus activity levels in the DMN predict whether a stimulus is judged as self-related or not. Method: Participants were presented in the MRI scanner with a white noise stimulus that they were instructed contained their name or another. They then had to (...) respond with which name they thought they heard. Regions where there was an activity level difference between self and other response trials two seconds prior to the stimulus being presented were identified. Results: Pre-stimulus activity levels were higher in the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), the right temporal pole (RTP), and the left superior temporal gyrus in trials where the participant responded that they heard their own name than trials where they responded that they heard another. Conclusion: Pre-stimulus spontaneous activity levels in particular brain regions, largely overlapping with the DMN, predict the subsequent judgement of stimuli as self-related. This extends our current knowledge of self-related processing and its apparent relationship with intrinsic brain activity in what can be termed a rest-self overlap. (shrink)

The political actions of Martin Heidegger raise a compelling question to those concerned with philosophy: How was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century willing to ally himself with Nazism and what does this mean for philosophy? This question has been raised and brushed aside from the end of the Second World War, when Heidegger was formally accused for his involvement with Hitler's regime and forbidden to attain any official teaching position henceforth. Important thinkers, like his colleague (...) and friend in the pre-war years, Karl Jaspers. testified then against him. But Heidegger's fame rose again above his indignity in the 1950s, when Hannah Arendt in the USA and Jean-Paul Sartre in France, among others, began once again to spread the word of his philosophy and translate his works. These problems have recently intensified after the posthumous publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) in 2014, containing his notes from 1931-1941. Their publication caused seismic tremors in the field of philosophy, with Heidegger's opponents considering themselves finally vindicated by his own pen, and his supporters trying to separate thinking from actual life. However, the influence of Heidegger's thought - as well as that of other representatives of German anti-humanist nationalistic conservatism, such as Oswald Spengler - continues to spread, not only in academic but also in broader social and political circles. In the face of this spreading influence, which is combined with the influence of some disciples such as Nick Land or Giorgio Agamben, a biographical-type confrontation is not enough. We should confront Heidegger directly at the core of his philosophy. We cannot afford to ignore him or bury him under superficial gossip. Instead, we should confront him philosophically. We might be able to clear the ground for such a confrontation, if we resort to the philosophical concepts of autonomy, temporality, and human freedom. In my opinion, the most important philosophical challenge to Heideggerian thought, in this context, has been expressed by Cornelius Castoriadis. In the following chapters, I will argue in favor of this position, outlining the Castoriadian philosophy of time in contrast to the Heideggerian and highlighting the main points of their opposition. The book is divided into two parts. Part one, "Castoriadis against Heidegger" deals with the basic concepts and arguments of both philosophers around human existence, the individual, society, and temporality. We start by presenting Heidegger's scandal in the social-historical context but also with the help of Hannah Arendt's last assessment of the thinker. We move on to outline the basic concepts and structures of Heidegger's philosophical thinking in parallel with Castoriadis' criticism as regards politics, ontology and technoscience. Part two, "Time and existence" first examines the relevant approaches of Lukacs and Ricoeur in comparison to Heidegger and Castoriadis, to elucidate the basic concept of temporality and then presents an outline of Castoriadis' insights on time and existence, before finally applying these concepts to contemporary social-historical phenomena that redefine and transform human existence and social temporalities, like space exploration, digital cyberspaces and online communications. //////// -/- "This book is a tour de force that excites those who agree or disagree with the philosophy of Heidegger. With clarity and sophistication, Schismenos revives the public debate to reveal the rich possibilities for another world. A must-read for everyone interested in a philosophy that matters." - VASILIS KOSTAKIS - Professor of P2P Governance at Tallinn University of Technology and Faculty Associate at Harvard University -/- . (shrink)

The author of the article framed the question of the possible relevance of the treatment of the Schelling's philosophy in the context of a phenomenological one. Thereby, he points its problematic character, referencing Husserl's treatment of German idealism after Kant (including the thought of Schelling) as the romantic idealism. At the same time, he also states the influence of Schelling on the few phenomenologists who made their careers after Husserl. The article's author reviews the concept of the «being outside-itself» or (...) «ecstasy» in Schelling and Heidegger (as one of the phenomenologists) for the further concretization of the theme. The ecstasy in Schelling is the new name for the idealistic intellectual intuition, by which a singular subject loses its own position as subject and thereby gets to the position of the absolute subject. The absolute subject is one which cannot be an object already. Schelling identifies the ecstasy understood in this way with the wondering as philosophical initiation in Ancient Greece. Such ecstasy leads to unknowing knowledge in Schelling's words. The concept of being outside-itself means the structural element of being of human Dasein, i.e. of temporality in Heidegger. This philosopher thinks that a human being is always already outside itself ontologically, before any intuition both sensual and intellectual. The human subject is not closed in on itself, for then it has to transcend from its immanence to the outside. It is always outside itself, it is ecstatic. In its ecstasies, it is always in the world, instead of being inside the world and other people. Heidegger bases his critique of the traditional metaphysics of the subject on such understanding of the ontological structure of Dasein, i.e. of the true «subject». In conclusion, the article's author states that the approaches to the problem of being outside-itself of both mentioned philosophers are in principle, quite different. Schelling tries to rehabilitate the subjectivity by the reduction of the singular subject to the absolute one. On the contrary, the finitude of human Dasein is the necessary condition of its being in Heidegger. The ecstasy is interiorization in Schelling, but it is exteriorization, which has been always already realized, in Heidegger. However, the author of the article also pinpoints a certain isomorphism of the treatments of ecstasy in both thinkers. In the different ways they attempt to overcome the crisis of the understanding of the subject as closed in itself, create the conditions of this isomorphism. (shrink)

Zahavi offers a model of ‘I’, You and We consciousness that is grounded in the transcendentality of a minimal pre-reflective self-awareness , which he calls ‘for-meness’. Zahavi’s formulation of transcendental self-belonging as ‘for me-ness’ relies on the notion of a felt non-changing self- identity accompanying all intentional experiences. Zahavi’s treatment of the subject and object poles of experience as, respectively, self-inhering internality and externality, makes of self-awareness an alienating opposition between a purely self-identical felt for-meness and an external object, a (...) fracture between self-identity and otherness.I argue that for Husserl the pure ego’s unchanging in-itself identity over time is merely an anonymous zero point of activity and is not felt or sensed, and thus there is no experienced for-meness to self-awareness. There is instead a relation of ownness between the ego and the object pole, consisting of a constant, that is, essential, underlying structural feature of the ego’s changing relation to objects of intentional acts. I believe that this essential structural intimacy of associative relationship between the noetic and noematic poles of intentional constitution is what Husserl is attempting to capture when he characterizes the constitution of the subject's stream of lived-experience in terms of ‘my ownness’. Zahavi thinks that what gives an intended object its ‘mineness’ is the fact that as foreign to me, it is intended by a ‘me’ that is familiar with itself. But this self-familiarity’ speaks only of my proximity to myself as pure self-identity, not of my proximity to my world. Husserl’s notion of ‘ownness’ understands the subject-object relation not as fracture between self-identity and otherness (“a ruptured structure which is completely foreign to its nature“) but as an intimate synthetic unification and belonging.Heidegger makes an even more radical break with Cartesianism by replacing the subject object structure of intentionality with the self-world temporal structure of Dasein. In different ways , Husserl’s concept of ‘ownness’ and Heidegger’s notion of ‘ownmost’ capture the profound intimacy of relation between self and world that reveals itself after Zahavi’s idealized internal-external binary has been deconstructed. (shrink)

Kant’s pre-1770 philosophy responded to the mind-body problem by applying a theory of “physical influx”. His encounter with Swedenborg’s mysticism, however, left him disillusioned with any dualist solution to Descartes’ problem. One of the major goals of the Critical philosophy was to provide a completely new solution to the mind-body problem. Kant’s new solution is “perspectival” in the sense that all Critical theories are perspectival: it acknowledges a deep truth in both of the controversy’s extremes (i.e., what we might nowadays (...) call eliminative materialism and an absolutely ideal folk psychology), by viewing both as ways of considering the issue, rather than as the only correct approach. Once we take into account its perspectival character, a new way of understanding Kant’s philosophy of mind emerges. The mind is no longer separate from the body, but is a manifestation of it, viewed from another (specifically human, rational) perspective. Kant’s transcendental conditions of knowledge (spatio-temporal intuition, categorial conception, and principled schematization) do not portray the mind as somehow creating the physical world; rather, they imply the opposite, that knowledge of objects is necessarily structured by a set of unconscious assumptions about the physical world. Our pre-conscious (or pre-mental, in Descartes’ sense of “mental”) encounter with an assumed spatio-temporal, causal nexus is entirely physical. A reincarnated Kant’s solution to today’s mind-body problem would be: eliminative materialism is good science; but only the “explanatory idealist” can consistently be an eliminative materialist. Philosophically, multiple perspectives are necessary in order to understand anything we say or do. (shrink)

According to presentism, only the present exists. The view is in a bad dialectical situation since it has to face several objections based on physics and a priori arguments. The view remains nonetheless popular because it is, allegedly, more intuitive than alternative views, namely eternalism (past, present and future entities exist) and no-futurism (only past and present entities exist). In the essay, I shall not discuss whether intuitivity is an accurate criterion for ontological enquiry. I will rather argue that any (...) philosophically acceptable version of presentism entails highly counterintuitive consequences. Indeed, the presentist has to commit herself to substantial claims in order to provide an answer to two problems : the grounding problem and the cross-temporal relations problem. Therefore, if the main motivation for presentism is the willingness to stick with common sense intuitions, presentists should consider endorsing another view about existence in time. (shrink)

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant’s revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the process, (...) he introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new. -/- Keywords: concepts, becoming, multiplicity, singularity, the middle [au milieu], difference, intensity, time, system, the new. (shrink)

The paper discusses Heidegger's early notion of the “movedness of life” (Lebensbewegtheit) and its intimate connection with Aristotle's concept of movement (kinēsis). Heidegger's aim in the period of Being and Time was to “overcome” the Greek ideal of being as ousia – constant and complete presence and availability – by showing that the background for all meaningful presence is Dasein, the ecstatically temporal context of human being. Life as the event of finitude is characterized by an essential lack and incompleteness, (...) and the living present therefore gains meaning only in relation to a horizon of un-presence and un-availability. Whereas the “theological” culmination of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics finds the supreme fulfillment of human life in the semi-divine self-immanence and self-sufficiency of the bios theōrētikos, a radical Heideggerian interpretation of kinēsis may permit us to find in Aristotle the fundamental structures of mortal living as self-transcendent movement. (shrink)

The triumph of scientific materialism in the Seventeenth Century not only bifurcated nature into matter and mind and primary and secondary qualities, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out in Science and the Modern World. It divided science and the humanities. The core of science is the effort to comprehend the cosmos through mathematics. The core of the humanities is the effort to comprehend history and human nature through narratives. The life sciences can be seen as the zone in which the (...) conflict between these two very different ways of comprehending the world collide. Evolutionary theory as defended by Schelling developed out of natural history, but efforts have been made to formulate neo-Darwinism through mathematical models. However, it is impossible to eliminate stories from biology. As Stuart Kauffman argued, mathematical models attempt to pre-state all possibilities, but in evolution there can be adjacent possibles that can be embraced by organisms but cannot be pre-stated. To account for such actions it is necessary to tell stories. Mathematics provides analytic precision allowing long chains of deductions, but tends to deny temporal becoming and cannot do justice to the openness of the future, while narratives focus on processes and events, but lack exactitude that would provide precise deductions and predictions. In advancing mathematics adequate to life, Robert Rosen argued that living beings as anticipatory systems must have models of themselves, and strove to develop a form of mathematics able to model life itself. It has been convincingly argued that narratives are central to human self-creation and they are lived out before being explicitly told. Their models of themselves are first and foremost, stories or narratives. If this is the case, might not living beings as biological entities be characterized by proto-stories or narratives in their models of themselves? Biosemiotics, largely inspired by C.S. Peirce, provides a bridge between mathematical and narrative comprehension, conceiving them as different forms of semiosis. The study of life through biosemiotics could reveal how mathematics and narratives can be understood in relation to each other. This could have implications for how we understand science and the humanities and their relationship to each other. In this paper I will examine work in theoretical biology that might advance these efforts. (shrink)

I begin by defending Heinrich Gustav Hotho’s foundational edition of the Lectures on Aesthetics (LA) contra Gethmann-Siebert and others who argue for a non-systematic view of Hegel’s aesthetics generally and music specifically. I defend Hegel against the common conceit that his comprehension of music was somehow deficient and introduce the Hegelian idea of absolute agency as performative in art and music. Reference to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics then allows us to grasp how, in Hegel, meaningful tones arise from the vibratory oscillation (...) between selfhood’s presiding unity and its temporal self-positing. I then trace back further elements of musical architecture, such as rhythm, harmony and melody to the temporal oscillation arising from within selfhood. The fundamental ambiguity within temporal oscillation is the source of meaningfulness in music, the feeling that its experience is meaningful without telling us exactly what that meaning is. Meaningfulness forms the absolute Ur-Ton of beautiful music, which arises as determinate tones within selfhood and resonates into the soul of the listener. The temporal vanishing of musical tones within a compositional framework is a pre-linguistic expression of meaning, performative of the ambiguous oscillation between the human and the divine. (shrink)

The “consequence argument”, together with the “luck objection”, which are summed up by the “standard argument against free will”, state that if our volition were dependent on physical causally indeterministic processes, our actions would lack control and, thereby, result in random behavior that would be a mere matter of luck and chance. In particular, quantum indeterminacy is supposed to be of no use in support of libertarian agent-causation theories because any volitional act interfering with the probability distributions de fining quantum (...) laws would lead to its violation. Building upon recent conjectural work questioning this assumption (Clarke 2010, Kastner 2016, Masi 2023), it is shown, with a concrete example involving quantum indeterminacy, how a hypothetical agent with access to the temporal ordering of events can pre-determine the result of a process taking place in time without modifying the probability laws defining it. This conclusion is then taken as a basis for a libertarian panpsychist interpretative model. (shrink)

In this article, the notion of entropology introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss is applied and developed in the context of Georges Bataille’s anthropological philosophy: Bataille’s project is defined as entropological. Four philosophical vectors are chosen for this: the theory of general economy, the concept of decay, the idea of extinction and the notion of inhumanism. The theory of general economy allows us to understand the immanent terrestrial nature of humanity and the negative – entropic – side of the capitalist economy. (...) The concept of decay gives access to the thought of bodily disintegration and decomposition, which is temporality and mortality that split the subject. The idea of extinction speculates on the consequences of humanity’s destructiveness, libidinally charged inertia, and the extreme perspective of entropy’s impact on the planet. The notion of inhumanism suggests a radical rethinking of the human relationship with alienation and exteriority: Bataille’s philosophy is reinterpreted as inhumanist. I conclude that the Lévi-Strauss’s neologism – entropology – can be productively articulated and actualised within the framework of Bataille’s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation of the existential conception of selfhood that follows from Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception. On this view, people relate to themselves not by “looking within” in acts of introspection but, first, by “looking without” at the field of solicitations in which they are immersed and, eventually, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, by “making explicit” the “melodic unity” or “immanent sense” of their behavior. To make sense of this, I draw out a distinction latent in Merleau-Ponty’s view between (...) a pre-reflective sense of self and a reflective self-interpretation. The former is a suite of abilities and dispositions in light of which a person is aware of and drawn to act in a situation. This sense of self undergoes transitions over time, is constitutively susceptible to moments of disorientation, and tends toward but never achieves full coherence. Reflective self-interpretation is an activity whereby someone—provisionally and defeasibly—clarifies, articulates, and gets a better “grip” on how they are prereflectively drawn to act. I ground this interpretation in a detailed reading of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of romantic love and I corroborate it by examining his account of the emergence of class-consciousness in the self-interpretation of a worker. (shrink)

How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for (...) its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being “meta-dynamism” (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time. (shrink)

We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. Natural (...) history and its descendant discipline of biological taxonomy are prime examples of sciences dedicated to creating and managing systems of ordering data. In some sense, the idea of biological taxonomy as an information science is commonplace. Perhaps it is because of its self-evidence that the information science perspective on taxonomy has not been a major theme in the history and philosophy of science. The botanist Vernon Heywood once pointed out that historians of biology, in their ‘preoccupation with the development of the sciences of botany and zoology… [have] diverted attention from the role of taxonomy as an information science’ (Heywood 1985: 11). More specifically, he argued that historians had failed to appreciate how principles and practices that can be traced to Linnaeus constituted ‘a change in the nature of taxonomy from a local or limited folk communication system and later a codified folk taxonomy to a formal system of information science [that] marked a watershed in the history of biology’ (ibid.). A similar observation could be made about twentieth-century philosophy of biology, which mostly skipped over practical and epistemic questions about information management in taxonomy. The taxonomic themes that featured in the emerging philosophy of biology literature in the second half of the twentieth century were predominantly metaphysical in orientation. This is illustrated by what has become known as the ‘essentialism story’: an account about the essentialist nature of pre- Darwinian taxonomy that used to be accepted by many historians and philosophers, and which stimulated efforts to document and interpret shifts in the metaphysical understanding of species and (natural) classification (Richards 2010; Winsor 2003; Wilkins 2009). Although contemporary debates in the philosophy of taxonomy have moved on, much discussion continues to focus on conceptual and metaphysical issues surrounding the nature of species and the principles of classification. Discussions centring on whether species are individuals, classes, or kinds have sprung up as predictably as perennials. Raucous debates have arisen even with the aim of accommodating the diversity of views: is monism, pluralism, or eliminativism about the species category the best position to take? In addition to these, our disciplines continue to interrogate what is the nature of these different approaches to classification: are they representational or inferential roles of different approaches to classification (evolutionary taxonomy, phenetics, phylogenetic systematics)? While there is still much to learn from these discussions—in which we both actively participate—our aim with this topical collection has been to seek different entrypoints and address underexposed themes in the history and philosophy of taxonomy. We believe that approaching taxonomy as an information science prompts new questions and can open up new philosophical vistas worth exploring. A twenty-first century information science turn in the history and philosophy of taxonomy is already underway. In scientific practice and in daily life it is hard to escape the imaginaries of Big Data and the constant threats of being ‘flooded with data’. In the life sciences, these developments are often associated with the socalled bioinformatics crisis that can hopefully be contained by a new, interdisciplinary breed of bioinformaticians. These new concepts, narratives, and developments surrounding the centrality of data and information systems in the biological and biomedical sciences have raised important philosophical questions about their challenges and implications. But historical perspectives are just as necessary to judge what makes our information age different from those that preceded us. Indeed, as the British zoologist Charles Godfray has often pointed out, the piles of data that are being generated in contemporary systematic biology have led to a second bioinformatics crisis, the first being the one that confronted Linnaeus in the mid-18th century (Godfray 2007). Although our aim is to clear a path for new discussions of taxonomy from an information science-informed point of view, we continue where others in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science have already trod. We believe that an appreciation of biological taxonomy as an information science raises many questions about the philosophical, theoretical, material, and practical aspects of the use and revision of biological nomenclatures in different local and global communities of scientists and citizen scientists. In particular, conceiving of taxonomy as an information science directs attention to the temporalities of managing an accumulating data about classified entities that are themselves subject to revision, to the means by which revision is accomplished, and to the semantic, material, and collaborative contexts that mediate the execution of revisions. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that Lessing develops in his aesthetics a pre-Kantian philosophy of consciousness. The concept of virtuality that the german writer puts forward in his essay Laocoon implies an interweaving of temporal dimensions similar to the threefold temporal synthesis described by Kant in the transcendental deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason. But whereas Kant thematizes an a priori of consciousness, Lessing is in search of an a priori of plastic art. It will be seen that perfect (...) sculpture presupposes the choice of that moment in time which can open the imagination to the past and the future in a way that enriches the present by transforming it into a "pregnant moment". The final aim of the article is to trace the genesis of the concept of simultaneity of temporal dimensions presupposed by the idea of the pregnant moment, and its implications for the idea of the temporality of consciousness. (shrink)

Whatever its ultimate philosophical merits, it is often thought that the growing block theory presents an intuitive picture of reality that accords well with our pre-reflective or folk view of time, and of the past, present, and future. This is partly motivated by the idea that we find it intuitive that, in some sense, the future is open and the past closed, and that the growing block theory is particularly well suited to accommodate this being so. In this paper, we (...) empirically investigate three claims. First, that people's intuitive or pre-reflective sense that the future is open is at least partly captured by there being truth-gaps for future contingents: what we call alethic openness. Second, that people, perhaps tacitly, believe that the fact that the future is alethically open is a reason to endorse the growing block theory; and third, that part of what explains why people tend to naively represent our world as a growing block is that they represent the future as alethically open. We found evidence in support of the first two claims. We consider the implications of these findings for several debates in the philosophy of time. (shrink)

One of the most intuitive views about the metaphysics of laws of nature is Tim Maudlin's idea of a Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution. So-called FLOTEs are primitive elements of the universe that produce later states from earlier states. While FLOTEs are at home in traditional Newtonian and non-relativistic quantum mechanical theories (not to mention our pre-theoretic conception of the world), I consider here whether they can be made to work with relativity. In particular, shifting to relativistic spacetimes poses two (...) threats to FLOTEs. First, the lack of a privileged spacelike hypersurface in relativistic spacetime makes it unclear how to understand what produces what. A survey of several conceptions of the nomic production relation compatible with relativity reveals all of them to be lacking. Second, relativity motivates a four-dimensional block universe conception of time, according to which all events that will ever occur already exist. On such a view, it's unclear what work there is to be done by FLOTEs. I consider how a proponent of FLOTEs might respond, but conclude that these combined threats seriously undermine the prospects of a productive conception of laws. In short, if spacetime is relativistic, laws are not productive. (shrink)

This doctoral dissertation investigates the notion of physical necessity. Specifically, it studies whether it is possible to account for non-accidental regularities without the standard assumption of a pre-existent set of governing laws. Thus, it takes side with the so called deflationist accounts of laws of nature, like the humean or the antirealist. The specific aim is to complement such accounts by providing a missing explanation of the appearance of physical necessity. In order to provide an explanation, I recur to fields (...) that have not been appealed to so far in discussions about the metaphysics of laws. Namely, I recur to complex systems’ theory, and to the foundations of statistical mechanics. The explanation proposed is inspired by how complex systems’ theory has elucidated the way patterns emerge, and by the probabilistic explanations of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. More specifically, this thesis studies how some constraints that make no direct reference to the dynamics can be a sufficient condition for obtaining in the long run, with high probability, stable regular behavior. I hope to show how certain metaphysical accounts of laws might benefit from the insights achieved in these other fields. According to the proposal studied in this thesis, some regularities are not accidental not in virtue of an underlying physical necessity. The non-accidental character of certain regular behavior is only due to its overwhelming stability. Thus, from this point of view the goal becomes to explain the stability of temporal patterns without assuming a set of pre-existent guiding laws. It is argued that the stability can be the result of a process of convergence to simpler and stable regularities from a more complex lower level. According to this project, if successful, there would be no need to postulate a (mysterious) intermediate category between logical necessity and pure contingency. Similarly, there would be no need to postulate a (mysterious) set of pre-existent governing laws. Part I of the thesis motivates part II, mostly by arguing why further explanation of the notions of physical necessity and governing laws should be welcomed (chapter 1), and by studying the plausibility of a lawless fundamental level (chapters 2 and 3). Given so, part II develops the explanation of formation of simpler and stable behavior from a more complex underlying level. (shrink)

Between Timelessness and History: The Image of the Human Being in Hans Jonas’ Ethics. This essay offers a contribution to the inquiry into the notion of image of the human being in Hans Jonas’ ethics. More specifically, passages from Das Prinzip Verantwortung and Technik, Medezin und Ethik are discussed to shed light on the complex temporal character that the image exhibits, stretched between the atemporality of what is equal to itself and the vulnerability that is distinctive of historical time. Particular (...) attention is dedicated to the fact that Jonas depicts the image as cross-cutting usual dichotomies such as temporal and timeless, permanent and changing, historical and non-historical – perhaps even transcendent and immanent. Albeit within its limits, the present work identifies the paradoxical temporal character of the image and, in so doing, points to a middle way between essentialism and relativism that may help rethink the relation between ethical values and historical time. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects (...) persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

In his genetic phenomenology, Husserl introduces types, pre-predicative frames of experience that guide the perception and cognition of objects. In this essay, I argue that there are two types that are functionally almost identical to Kant’s schemata. To support this conclusion, I first present an interpretation of Kant’s discussion of schemata. I argue that we must see schemata as pure, a priori cognitions that involve only pure intuition, pure concepts of the understanding, and the imagination. I offer two analogies to (...) explain how schemata function to subsume objects under concepts and to anticipate possible objects of experience before moving on to discuss the schema of substance. Next, I present a brief explanation of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, organizing my presentation around the idea of apperception. This paves the way for a demonstration of how the fundamental type is best understood as standing at the center of a cluster of concepts, including apperception, passive belief, natural bodies, and the one spatio-temporal horizon of experience. I argue that the fundamental type is central to Husserl’s attempt to ground logic in pre-predicative experience. Finally, I compare two specific types with schemata on the grounds cultivated in the previous sections. The first of these types, the fundamental type, functions to pre-predicatively anticipate objects of possible experience, just as schemata do. The second of these types, which is implied by but never discussed in Husserl’s work, serves to mediate between a formal system of rules and an intuitive grasp of the world, just as schemata do. (shrink)

The reality of spirits? A historiography of the Akan concept of 'mind' (La réalité des esprits: Vers une historiographie de la conception akan de l'esprit). In this article the following thesis is considered: the classifications used to define African Indigenous Religions are 'inventions' of Western scholars of religion who employ categories that are entirely "non-indigenous". The author investigates the presumptions of this statement and discusses the work of scholars of religion studying the Akan and in particular the Akan concept of (...) mind. In the analytic philosophical tradition the precise meaning of Akan concepts of mind such as okra and sunsum, described by various scholars of religion in different eras, are reviewed. The pre-colonial, colonial and the postcolonial era all have had specific influence on the conceptualisation of the mind. On the basis of an historiography of the Akan mind the author concludes that, contrary to the originally thesis under review, 'cultural background' and 'academic discipline' are relatively unimportant in the classification of 'indigenous religions'. The 'paradigm' prevailing within a discipline , 'personal belief' and the spatio-temporal context in which conceptualisations are created, turn out to be far more significant. (shrink)

This paper offers a social phenomenological reading of the globally binding practice of 'social distancing' in light of the precautionary measures against the spreading of the Covid-19 virus. Amid speculation about the far-reaching effects of temporarily applicable measures and foresights about the advent of an ethos that has been heralded by the media as the 'new normal', the ubiquitous phenomenon of social distancing calls for a fundamental ontological elucidation. The purported hermeneutic that is situated in the broader place branding and (...) experiential marketing literatures places Covid-19 in the shoes of Being, and, therefore, imagines how Being would behave ontologically if it were a virus. By positing that the virus does operate like Being, five these are formulated as experiential interpretive categories with regard to the ontological status of Covid-19. The adopted approach makes the following contributions to the extant literature: First, it addresses a wholly new phenomenon in place branding, namely a pre-branded place that is non-negotiable, globally applicable and seemingly equivalent to pure void. Second, it advances the application of phenomenological research in experiential consumption by highlighting the aptness of the so far peripheral (in the marketing discipline) strand of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Third, it expands the notion of place in the place branding literature, by showing how spatialization is the outcome of temporalization, in line with the adopted phenomenological perspective. (shrink)