This study aims to evaluate whether the idea of ultimate reality in world religions contributes to the characteristics of the world religion paradigm, which is hierarchical cosmology or “subject-object cosmology.” Several research on this topic claims that one of the characteristics of the world religion paradigm is its hierarchical perspective. Discussing this issue is important to distinguish the world religions as the paradigm and the world religions as the most widely embraced religion. This study argues (...) that the hierarchical perspective of the world religion paradigm can be rooted in the idea of ultimate reality, that there is a supreme, foremost, and most principal reality in the continuity of this universe, namely the supernatural or God. The hierarchical cosmology consists of three main domains: supernatural/God, culture/human, and nature. This study uses a literature study methodology, relying on books, journals, and texts related to research questions. This study finds that the world religion paradigm or hierarchical cosmology or “subject-object cosmology” is prominent, especially in Abrahamic religions such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, even though the concept of ultimate reality in these three religions is different. (shrink)

"...T S Eliot was unimpressed by Freud. Eliot preferred the more approachable Roger Vittoz. It was only Scofield Thayer, who in his prolonged therapy with Sigmund Freud can be said to have brought anything Freudian in the classically psychoanalytic sense to Modernism." This is from the review. The review of the book is contrarian as the book under review is. The salient points of the book are interrogated in this review.

In this paper I will draw attention to an important route to external world skepticism, which I will call confidence skepticism. I will argue that we can defang confidence skepticism (though not a meeker ‘argument from might’ which has got some attention in the 20th century literature on external world skepticism) by adopting a partially psychologistic answer to the problem of priors. And I will argue that certain recent work in the epistemology of mathematics and logic provides (...) independent support for such psychologism. (shrink)

Let serious propositional contingentism (SPC) be the package of views which consists in (i) the thesis that propositions expressed by sentences featuring terms depend, for their existence, on the existence of the referents of those terms, (ii) serious actualism—the view that it is impossible for an object to exemplify a property and not exist—and (iii) contingentism—the view that it is at least possible that some thing might not have been something. SPC is popular and compelling. But what should we say (...) about possible worlds, if we accept SPC? Here, I first show that a natural view of possible worlds, well-represented in the literature, in conjunction with SPC is inadequate. Though I note various alternative ways of thinking about possible worlds in response to the first problem, I then outline a second more general problem—a master argument—which generally shows that any account of possible worlds meeting very minimal requirements will be inconsistent with compelling claims about mere possibilia which the serious propositional contingentist should accept. (shrink)

In this article I consider the idea that Glasersfeld’s “radical constructivism” offers an ideal framework for putting in place such a reality of the best fit for us. Along with this, I examine also the fundamental biological and epistemological limitations that we are faced with when trying to fathom objective reality and, secondly, the inescapable gap between language – which we use as a primary cognitive tool in our attempt to comprehend the world. The paper then show that (...) class='Hi'>literature – especially fiction – best meets the criteria for addressing these gaps and constructing such a model of reality in line with what radical constructivism proposes. (shrink)

Abstract: There has been an ongoing dispute between defenders of world disclosure (understood here in a loosely Heideggerian sense) and advocates of normative debate. I will take up a recent confrontation between Charles Taylor and Robert Brandom over this question as my point of departure for showing how world disclosure can expand the range of normative argument. I begin by distinguishing pre-reflective disclosure—the already interpreted, structured world in which we find ourselves—from reflective disclosure—the discrete intervention of a (...) particular utterance or text. I discuss Taylor’s notion of social imaginaries as a way of thematizing our pre-reflective background and Talal Asad’s critique of Taylor to show how this background can be one space of argument. I then develop my own understanding of reflective disclosure, of which Taylor gives an indequate account, developing my argument with help of literature, including a close analysis of Susan Glaspell short story “A Jury of Her Peers.” This story illustrates how world disclosure can make normative arguments without confining itself to Brandom’s or Habermas’s idea of the exchange of reasons. (shrink)

A conference paper examining the relationship between art and what is loosely termed the “real world”.

Many works of fiction include portraits in their storyworlds. Some of these portraits are themselves fictional, such as the portrait of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel. Others are real, such as the Darnley portrait of Elizabeth I in A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden. When authors invent portraits, they expect us to visualise them. When they refer to real portraits, they exploit our familiarity with how they actually look. Like representations of other real entities in fiction, references (...) to real portraits function to ground the story in the real world. But portraits are more than material entities; they are also representational in their own right. In contrasting the ways real portraits are used in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, I argue that authors can be criticised when they mischaracterise the representational features of real portraits. (shrink)

Until recently, an almost perfect parallelism seemed to hold between theories of identity through time and across possible worlds,as every account in the temporal case(endurantism,perdurantism, exdurantism) was mirrored by a twin account in the modal case (trans-world identity, identity-via-parts, identity-via-counterparts). Nevertheless, in the recent literature, this parallelism has been broken because of the implementation in the debate of the relation of location. In particular, endurantism has been subject to a more in-depth analysis, and different versions of it, corresponding (...) to different ways an entity can be located in time, emerged. In this article, we provide a precise map of the conceptions at stake, complete the debate by introducing a version of endurantism not yet considered in the debate — we call transcendentism — and show that it allows us to provide an effective interpretation of the relation of trans-world identity and an intuitive solution in the temporal case. (shrink)

The world never stands still. There is always a Brownian movement of economic subjects and objects on the face of it. But, if we have been visualizing this movement over a relatively long period of time, then we can distinguish the acceleration and increase in the volume of movements along individual commodity routes, the growth and formation of new subjects of international economic relations. From time to time, "accelerators" of this movement appear, either in the form of new types (...) of energy to service production, or technologies to simplify the exchange and distribution of benefits. The market, controlled by the "invisible hand", is gradually taking over the whole world, and some new goods appear to meet the needs. We use technologies and devices described in unreal fantasy plots of classical literature already today in real life. The speed of change is exciting on the one hand and is frightening on the other hand. In the modern world, it would seem, everything is mobile. The quality and cost of transportation has no longer been a physical obstacle to any exchange and travel. The forms of modern financial transactions for service international economic relations, their speed and coverage are impressive. Enterprises, in terms of capitalization, exceed the national incomes of states and do not have spatial territorial boundaries, being the main players in international economic relations along with states, their associations and international organizations. Digitalization is no longer a challenge for society, but our present. It seems sometimes that the world allegedly wants to slow down the further development of mankind and creates obstacles in the form of wars, epidemics and crises. Such obstacles become challenges for the development of economic entities of all levels. Change always creates unexpected opportunities for someone and insurmountable restrictions for other one. Change always leads to a redistribution of forces. Changes are needed to overthink the nature and direction of movement. Changes are the certain reorganization of the world economic system. The world is always on the verge of changes. What will they be this time? (shrink)

The main objective of the paper is to give initial answers to three important questions. Why did Leibniz visit Spinoza? Why did his preparation for this meeting include a modification of the ontological proof of God? What is the philosophical result of the meeting and what do possible worlds have to do with it? In order to provide answers, three closely related manuscripts by Leibniz from November 1676 have been compared and the slow conceptual change of his philosophical apparatus has (...) been analyzed. The last of these manuscripts was presented and read in front of Spinoza. Around that time Leibniz abandoned the idea of plurality of worlds (cf. Tschirnhaus) and instead proposed the idea of possible worlds, thus introducing possibility into the (onto/theo)logical structure itself in order to avoid the “precipice” of Spinoza’s necessity. What is interesting, however, is how exactly this conceptual change occurred at the end of 1676 and what its philosophical and methodological implications are. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Nelson Goodman’s pluriworldism, understood as the claim that there exists a plurality of actual worlds. This proposal has generally been quickly dismissed in the philosophical literature. I argue that we ought to take it more seriously. As I show, many of the prima facie objections to pluriworldism may receive straightforward answers. I also examine in detail Goodman’s argument for the conclusion that there are many worlds and attempt to show how it might be supported. (...) Eventually, I discuss some underexplored challenges to pluriworldism. (shrink)

Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman, or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans (...) to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital. (shrink)

A number of moral philosophers have endorsed instances of the following curious argument: it would be better if a certain moral theory were true; therefore, we have reason to believe that the theory is true. In other words, the mere truth of the theory—quite apart from the results of our believing it or acting in accord with it—would make for a better world than the truth of its rivals, and this fact provides evidence of the theory’s truth. This form (...) of argument may seem to be an obvious non-starter. After all, the fact that the truth of some empirical claim, say, the claim that there is an afterlife, would be desirable does not, by itself, give us any reason to believe it. But I argue that, when it is properly understood, this form of argument—which I call the better world argument—is valid in moral philosophy. I develop and defend a version of the argument that rests on the view that the correct moral theory cannot exhibit a certain form of self-defeat—a form that, as far as I know, has not been discussed in the literature. I also identify two promising applications of this form of argument. The first is a defense of permissions to promote one’s own private aims, rather than promote the greater good, and the second, an argument against the possibility of moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Are philosophy and literature allies or enemies in Jorge Luis Borges's fictions? In this paper, I argue that Borges can satisfy membership in the allies camp because his fictions provide the imaginative scenarios the allies believe are so necessary to this coalition; however, because his stories question philosophy's hold on reality, they can also seem to fall into the enemies camp by countervailing any claim philosophy has on reality and truth; although, ultimately, the manner in which Borges forges an (...) alliance between philosophy and literature will be for reasons not traditionally accepted by those in either the allies or enemies camps. (shrink)

Muhammad Wazeh Rashid al-Hasani al- Nadawi is an eminent scholar of Islamic sciences and Arabic language and literature and also a celebrated Arabic journalist in contemporary India. He belongs to a famous family of Rai- Berali (U. P.), viz. Shah Elmullah family. He is an alumnus of Darul Ulum Nadwatul Ulama, Laknow and Aligarh Muslim University, two prestigious institutions of India. He is now occupying the post of Education Secretary in Darul Ulum Nadwatul Ulama, Laknow. He is also the (...) chief editor of Al Raid (a fortnightly Arabic news paper) and sub editor of Al- Ba’sul Islami (a monthly Arabic Journal). Till now, he has produced many articles, research papers which are published in various national and international journals and also written a good number of Arabic books in history of Arabic literature, biography, Islamic culture etc. which are well accepted among the readers. One of his famous book is أدب الصحوة الإسلامية (The literature of Islamic awakening). In this book the writer discussed the contribution of many Islamic thinkers, philosophers, writers such as Amir Shakib Arsalan, Hasan al- Banna, Al- Sayeed Kutub, Ali Tantawi, Muhammad Ekhba, Abul Hasan Ali Al Hasani al- Nadawi etc. in all round development of their society and also mentioned how they use their outstanding literary works to awaken the people of their society from their deep sleep in respect of religious and worldly affairs. This book is an important guide for those who want to do something for betterment of their society. I have studied this book analytically and the present article entitled "أدب الصحوة الإسلامية: دراسة تحليلية" is the output of this study. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to sketch an account of Kant’s signature metaphysical doctrine (transcendental idealism) that (a) has no supporters – as far as I am aware – in the contemporary literature, and (b) draws its primary motivation (as interpretation) from considerations regarding our practical situation and needs as agents. -/- The consideration I focus on here is that people not only have mental and moral features, but they also appear to us – in our daily experience (...) – to have such features: “[w]e can perceive virtue in our experience (Wir können in der Erfahrung wohl Tugend wahrnehmen)” (24: 906). The same presumably goes for vice: When I see you casually torturing a cat, you appear to me to be brown-haired, wearing jeans, moving your arms, laughing, and so on, but you also appear to me to be vicious and cruel. Your character shines through in your actions. I can then make a defeasible inference from those appearances to the moral reality. -/- Such appearances and inferences play a central role in our practices of praise, blame, forgiveness, and punishment. An interpretation of transcendental idealism that gives primacy to the practical will thus seek to analyze the concepts of experience, acquaintance, and appearance/phenomenon in a capacious-enough way that they can apply to mental and moral features too. If successful, such an interpretation would have a clear practical advantage over those that leave us merely conjecturing from experiences of bodies, gestures, and secondary qualities to moral features that do not appear, or even to the non-appearing features of a distinct set of things. (shrink)

Raquel Cascales and Luis Echarte focus on the development of practical wisdom and what they call ‘seeing with the heart’ for science students by means of reading science fiction literature. They argue that literature can bring the student into contact with the reality of moral life as moral dilemmas are made concrete by the characters and circumstances in a novel. They provide an analysis of how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World can be read in the classroom and (...) show how the novel invites students to think about the role of science in society, the evolutionary paradigm, advances in genetic and psychological manipulation, as well as questions concerning human emotions,suffering, and friendship. (shrink)

William L. Rowe’s argument against divine freedom has drawn considerable attention from theist philosophers. One reply to Rowe’s argument that has emerged in the recent literature appeals to modified accounts of libertarian freedom which have the result that God may be free even if he necessarily actualizes the best possible world. Though in many ways attractive, this approach appears to lead to the damning consequence of modal collapse i.e., that the actual world is the only possible (...) class='Hi'>world. But appearances can be deceiving, and in this paper I argue that the threat of modal collapse dissolves when we consider Alvin Plantinga’s critique of the purportedly Leibnizian notion that God can actualize any possible world, and incorporate the implications of this critique into the divine freedom debate. Developing a suggestion by Edward R. Wierenga, I argue first that the modal collapse objection fails within a Molinist context, and then I extend the discussion beyond that context to show that the objection also fails on the assumption that Molinism is false. (shrink)

The transport sector is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand. To address this issue, the government is planning a set of actions to be implemented in the next 15 years. One of these actions deals with transport emissions and targets for a reduction in light vehicle travel. However, to achieve this goal, there is a need for both an updated assessment of effective interventions and an analysis of their relevance and applicability to the New (...) Zealand context. This report seeks to close the gap by conducting a narrative literature review of a collection of existing literature, supplemented with some targeted searches. With the focus on evidence relevant to New Zealand’s largest and fastest growing urban environments, the report identified 24 publicly available research outputs from around the world (mainly from Western European countries). The papers assessed differ not only in the type of research method and analysis applied but also the form of intervention (s) evaluated, the duration of the intervention and follow-up periods, the characteristics of the population groups or intervention sites studied, the measures, results and metrics relevant to New Zealand, and the outcomes of the interventions. Although these differences may represent a challenge in terms of comparability and transferability, they also provide opportunities and lessons for policy-and decision-makers. Finally, the report discusses the implications of the review and its findings and provides some directions and recommendations for future research, policy and practice for the measurement and evaluation of interventions. (shrink)

This paper disputes the notion, endorsed by much of narrative theory, that the reading of literary narrative is functionally analogous to an act of communication, where communication stands for the transfer of thought and conceptual information. The paper offers a basic typology of the sensorimotor effects of reading, which fall outside such a narrowly communication-based model of literary narrative. A main typological distinction is drawn between those sensorimotor effects pertaining to the narrative qua verbal utterance (verbal presence) and those sensorimotor (...) effects pertaining to the imaginary physical world(s) of the story (direct presence). While verbal presence refers to the reader's vicarious perception of the voices of narrators and characters, direct presence refers to the emulated sensorimotor experience of the imaginary worlds that the narrators' and characters' utterances refer to. The paper further elaborates on how, by which kinds of narrative content and structure, direct presence may be prompted. The final section addresses some of the observational and historical caveats that must be attached to any theoretical inquiry made into the sensorimotor effects of reading. As a preliminary for further research, a few ideas about the model's potential for empirical validation are put forward. A brief, tentative history of the sensorimotor benefits of literary narrative reading is then outlined. (shrink)

Suppose we are about to enter an era of increasing technological unemployment. What implications does this have for society? Two distinct ethical/social issues would seem to arise. The first is one of distributive justice: how will the efficiency gains from automated labour be distributed through society? The second is one of personal fulfillment and meaning: if people no longer have to work, what will they do with their lives? In this article, I set aside the first issue and focus on (...) the second. In doing so, I make three arguments. First, I argue that there are good reasons to embrace non-work and that these reasons become more compelling in an era of technological unemployment. Second, I argue that the technological advances that make widespread technological unemployment possible could still threaten or undermine human flourishing and meaning, especially if they do not remain confined to the economic sphere. And third, I argue that this threat could be contained if we adopt an integrative approach to our relationship with technology. In advancing these arguments, I draw on three distinct literatures: the literature on technological unemployment and workplace automation; the antiwork critique—which I argue gives reasons to embrace technological unemployment; and the philosophical debate about the conditions for meaning in life—which I argue gives reasons for concern. (shrink)

Mental causation, idea that it is us – via our minds – who cause bodily actions is as commonsensical as it is indispensable for our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. Somewhat less uncontroversial, but nonetheless widespread (at least among ordinary people) is the idea that the mind is non-physical, following the intuition that what is physical can neither act nor think nor judge morally. Taken together, and cast into a metaphysical thesis, the two intuitions yield interactive dualism: the view (...) that human persons and their minds are non-physical but can nonetheless interact with their bodies, most notably through their brains. This thesis has two main objectives: first, to defend interactive dualism against objections, and second, to show how it can blend in with a physical world in which laws of nature hold. The first part (chapter 1) consists in a brief motivation of interactive dualism as opposed to non-interactive dualism. I argue that non-interactive, epiphenomenalist dualism sacrifices so many crucial aspects of our human existence that interactive dualism is highly to be preferred to it, barring even stronger counterarguments against the latter. It is those putative counterarguments I address in parts II and III. Part II takes on the philosophical objections from the causal closure of the physical and from causal heterogeneity. The former takes the success of physics and physiology as basis for the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical (CCP). I argue against this that there is not only no convincing argument for CCP, but also that any science-based belief in CCP cannot be epistemically justified. As regards the causal heterogeneity objection, it is ‘weighed and found wanting’, because it relies on unwarranted assumptions about causation. In part III, I examine the objection from energy conservation. It roughly says that if interactive dualism were true, then energy would not be conserved, which physics taught us cannot be the case. My reply is that the underlying conception of energy (and momentum) conservation is wrong-headed and not the one that actual physicists use. Instead of being categorical and global, conservation laws are conditional and local, thereby making natural room for mental interaction. Some dualists, however, have sought to make interactive dualism conservation-friendly, notably by invoking quantum physics; I show that these attempts are unnecessary and create more problems than they solve. Finally, in chapter 9, I turn the tables on non-interactionists by investigating current neurophysiological literature on volitional actions, which, though not addressing the question directly, still encourages the interactive dualist picture more than a non-interactionist one. Part IV is about the interplay between interactive dualism and the laws of nature. The ultimate goal is, if possible, to come up with a theory of the laws of nature that explains the lawlike behavior of nature and at the same time makes room for interaction. I begin by pointing out that the laws of nature are or at least should be what physicalists worry about (chapter 10). I then proceed with a historical survey on the development of the notion of laws of nature (chapter 11) that sheds light on its theistic origin. This is followed by an inquiry into the question how a law of nature could possibly be broken (chapter 12) and a survey of the extant metaphysical theories of the laws of nature with special regard to their receptivity to interaction (chapter 13). Finally, in chapter 14 I develop a theory of the laws of nature both faithful to their divine origin and the possibility of mental interaction: dispositionalist divine decretalism, a synthesis of dispositionalism and Jeffrey Koperski’s divine decretalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a moderately cognitive account of religious beliefs. Religious beliefs are interpreted as “worldview beliefs”, which I explicate as being indispensable to our everyday and scientific practice; my reading is nonetheless distinct from non-cognitivist readings of “worldview belief” which occasionally appear in the literature. I start with a brief analysis of a recent German contribution to the debate which on the one hand insists on the priority of epistemic reasons for or against religious beliefs, but (...) on the other hand contends that religious beliefs are worldview beliefs. This leads me to explicate a special sense of worldview beliefs, as well as their cognitive role. After that, I shed some light on a special epistemological characteristic of worldview beliefs, namely the strong involvement of “free certitude” in their acceptance. I explore the implications for the possible role of arguments for worldview beliefs, especially for worldview beliefs concerning theism. (shrink)

Part of the draw of athletics is its straightforwardness. There are nuances to competitions to make them more sporting contests, but at the end of a long jump competition whomever records the longest jump should win. Unfortunately, a recent rule-change at the highest level of the sport – the “Final 3” format – undermined this simplicity for the horizontal jumps and the throws for some of the 2020 and much of the 2021 seasons. While fortunately this rule was largely reverted (...) within days of the initial submission of this paper, it’s still valuable to critically evaluate why such a rule is problematic so as to better understand of the value of sporting competitions and give guidance on future rule changes, be they in athletics or other sports. To that end, we will be drawing from the literature on the purpose and value of competitions and coupling that with simulations based on data from actual top-tier long jump competitions to show that the Final 3 format makes for significantly worse competitions than the standard format. (shrink)

Today, the world is facing many global crises and challenges. In order to limit negative environmental and social impacts, human being had put forward the concept of sustainable development, set goals and taken actions to advance the process of sustainable development. However, scholars’ research on sustainable development mainly focuses on the three major aspects: economy, society and environment/ecology. Only a few articles talked about culture and sustainable development. In order to further promote the development of human high-quality life and (...) the construction of sustainable development, it must consider the relationship between culture and sustainable development. Therefore, the thesis raises two research questions: 1. What is the connection and contribution of culture to the sustainable development according to the scholars’ research on sustainable development in the past? 2. How can culture contribute to sustainable development? The first part of this thesis introduced the background, significance, and the objectives of the research. Then, the second part defined the concept of “culture” discussed in this research, which referred to all the spiritual activities of mankind and its products. Culture explains the core problems of kinds of issues being produced, sent, communicated, accepted, understood, and mutated to people, and all kinds of cultural forms are the basic methods of providing human communication and studying things. viii These products and activities were divided into two kinds, the material culture and non-material culture. Material culture was an entity that existed, it presented culture in a physical, perceptible and measurable form while non-material culture included symbols, values, cultural norms and people’s way of life, it was abstract and constantly inherited. The third part was to introduce the process of culture development through Sichuan cuisine’s development. Culture itself had the characteristics of development and inheritance, but to achieve the sustainable development of culture, it required planning and strategy. Consequently, the author combed the milestone of culture development in the process of sustainable development, sorting out the characteristics of sustainable development culture, that required sustainable development culture were: people-based, participation-based, systematic, pluralistic, dynamic, integrated, confident and responsible. The third part used two methods to analyze the literature that met the search criteria in Web of Science from 1900 to 2020. The first was Occurrence, resulted in 11463 results, finding that the most studied areas of sustainable development were environmental science, green sustainable science technology and environmental studies, which meant research on culture and sustainable development was a weak subject compared to other areas. The second was Co-occurrence, resulted in 52 review articles, then used the method of the systematic literature review to analysis. Lastly, these 52 articles were analyzed by the systematic literature review (SLR) approach, and then ix divided into four categories and were the focus of this article. The first category directly discussed the relationship between culture and sustainable development; the second category discussed of the single culture in sustainable development; the third category was the development of culture in specific circumstance in the context of sustainable development; and in the fourth category, “culture” meaning cultivation, not related to the culture this paper discussed about. From the above analysis for 52 articles, the following findings and discussing are discovered: in sustainable development, the definition of culture is too broad and then requires a concept of “culture”, which can be adapted to various disciplines and applied to sustainability research. Culture needs to be and should be a pillar of sustainable development. Culture can be in, for, as sustainable development. Culture is not only an artistic and creative activity, but also concerned with the relationship with nature and a broader social issue. The power of culture in sustainable development cannot be ignored, it can not only play in the other pillars of sustainable development, but also can eventually form a sustainable development culture, to change people’s way of life, behavior and mind, so that human beings can be better and more sustainable development. (shrink)

In this essay, I depart from the historical exclusion of trans women’s ethical insights from care ethics by focusing on trans literature as a source of knowledge expressed by trans women about care. I open up with the systematic denial of trans women as ethical knowers by analyzing Marilyn Frye's characterization of trans women as mindless servile robots under patriarchy. I then turn to trans literature to counter this portrayal. Specifically, I discuss short stories by Casey Plett and (...) Ryka Aoki as sources of knowledge about assumptive and futurebound practices of care. I begin by arguing that the work of Maria Lugones considers the spatial dimensions of love, and that this suggests that care involves giving space to another on their own terms. I then turn to Plett’s story “Other Women” to unpack assumptive care as a short-circuited form of caring in which a relationship to the other on their own terms is closed off by transphobic assumptions. I contrast this with Plett’s story “Winning,” which describes a futurebound care in which another’s space is kept open, permitting action that allows them to flourish on their own terms. After this, I discuss Aoki’s “To the New World” as an engagement with both racist assumptive care and futurebound care aimed at self-care. I conclude that these stories provide a rich space for considering trans ethical knowledge about care. (shrink)

This essay argues not just that literature can corrupt its readers—if literature can improve, it can also corrupt—but that some of that is our fault: by telling people to extract moral lessons from fictions, we’ve set them up to be led astray by writers like Ayn Rand. A global attitude of message-mining sets readers up to be misled, confused, or complacent (because they “gave at the office”), as well as to reject some excellent books. Ironically, the best way (...) to make sure that literature sometimes corrupts is to pretend that it always improves. So maybe we should be more careful about ascribing universal moral value to literature, whether via empathy, training, or propositional content. We should be equally wary of a second kind of aesthetic corruption, one that leads people to judge ideas true merely because they are delightful. Aesthetic Pollyannas subscribe to optimistic theories because they're beautiful (literature always improves! how lovely!); aesthetic Eeyores subscribe to pessimistic theories because they're sublime (literature always fails! how cool!). Our only hope of getting it right about literature depends on us all resisting aestheticized cognition. As we saw above, there may be real-world consequences if we don't. (shrink)

This translation of Enrique Dussel's “‘Ser-Hispano’: Un Mundo en el ‘Border’ de Muchos Mundos” offers an interpretation of hispanos (Latin Americans and U.S. latinos) as historically, culturally, and geographically located “in-between” many worlds that combine to constitute an identity on the intercultural “border.” To illustrate how hispanos have navigated and continue to navigate their complex history in order to create a polyphonic identity, the essay sketches five historical-cultural “worlds” that come together to form the hispanic “world.”.

During the Second World War, more than 60,000 Jewish members of the American, British and French armed forces became prisoners of war in Germany. Against all expectations, these prisoners were treated in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention, and the majority made it home alive. This article seeks to explain this most astonishing circumstance. It begins by collating the references to the experiences of Western Jewish POWs from the historical literature to provide a hitherto-unseen overview of their treatment (...) in captivity. It then asks what made their protection from persecution possible. To this end, it explores Germany’s wider motivations for its selective application of the Geneva Convention and highlights the role that military identity played in making its application seem necessary for all POWs from the Western front, including Jewish POWs. (shrink)

There is widespread consensus that the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) environment has contributed to the subpar quality of public sector service delivery in South Africa. Hence, the aim of this paper is to ascertain how the South African government can enhance service delivery in a VUCA world. This article presents a comprehensive study of a number of secondary literature sources. The author makes an effort to draw attention to knowledge gaps that might serve as the foundation (...) for more research in the future. The main finding is that for the South African government to provide good service in a VUCA environment, its employees must be proficient in Results-Based Monitoring and Evaluation, Strategic Planning, Programme and Project Management Methodology, and Change Management Methodology. There is a severe lack of empirical study on the delivery of public sector services in an environment characterized by VUCA. As a result, there is a need for more research on this topic. Specifically, in order to establish the effect that the VUCA environment has on the governments of emerging nations. The research will be beneficial to the governments of developing countries, notably South Africa, as well as to those who work in the field of public administration. (shrink)

There is widespread consensus that the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) environment has contributed to the subpar quality of public sector service delivery in South Africa. Hence, the aim of this paper is to ascertain how the South African government can enhance service delivery in a VUCA world. This article presents a comprehensive study of a number of secondary literature sources. The author makes an effort to draw attention to knowledge gaps that might serve as the foundation (...) for more research in the future. The main finding is that for the South African government to provide good service in a VUCA environment, its employees must be proficient in Results-Based Monitoring and Evaluation, Strategic Planning, Programme and Project Management Methodology, and Change Management Methodology. There is a severe lack of empirical study on the delivery of public sector services in an environment characterized by VUCA. As a result, there is a need for more research on this topic. Specifically, in order to establish the effect that the VUCA environment has on the governments of emerging nations. The research will be beneficial to the governments of developing countries, notably South Africa, as well as to those who work in the field of public administration. (shrink)

Reedition of papers in English spanning from 1986 to 2009 /// Historical background -- An imposed legacy -- Twentieth century contemporaneity -- Appendix: The philosophy of teaching legal philosophy in Hungary /// HISTORICAL BACKGROUND -- PHILOSOPHY OF LAW IN CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE: A SKETCH OF HISTORY [1999] 11–21 // PHILOSOPHISING ON LAW IN THE TURMOIL OF COMMUNIST TAKEOVER IN HUNGARY (TWO PORTRAITS, INTERWAR AND POSTWAR: JULIUS MOÓR & ISTVÁN LOSONCZY) [2001–2002] 23–39: Julius Moór 23 / István Losonczy 29 // (...) ON THE SURVIVAL OF ILMAR TAMMELO’S LETTER AND MANUSCRIPT ADDRESSED TO PROFESSOR MOÓR [2009] 41–44 // PROFESSIONAL DISTRESS AND SCARCITY: ALEXANDER HORVÁTH AND THE LEGACY OF NATURAL LAW IN HUNGARY [2005] 45–50 // HUNGARIAN LEGAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY [2011] 51–72: I. The Pre-war Period [1. Bódog (Felix) Somló (1871–1920) 52] / II. The Inter-war Period [2. Gyula (Julius) Moór (1888–1950) 54 / 3. Barna Horváth (1896–1973) 55 / 4. József Szabó (1909–1992) 57 / 5. István Bibó (1911–1979) 58 / 6. Tibor Vas (1911–1983) 59 / 7. István Losonczy (1918–1980) 60] III. The Post-war Period (Communism) 61 [8. Imre Szabó (1912–1991) 62 / 9. Vilmos Peschka (1929–2006) 63 / 10. Kálmán Kulcsár (1928–2010) 65] IV. Contemporary Trends and Perspectives 66 [11. Csaba Varga (b. 1941) 66 / 12. András Sajó (b. 1949) 69 / 13. Béla Pokol (b. 1950) 70] V. Our Understanding of the Law Today 71 --- AN IMPOSED LEGACY -- LOOKING BACK [1999] 75–94: 1. On Ideologies and Marxism in general 75 / 2. Life of an Intellectual in Communism 79 / 3. On Marxism and its Socialist Cultivation in Particular 82 / 4. Legal Philosophising [4.1. Approaches to Law 87 / 4.2. Arriving at a Legal Ontology 91] 5. Conclusion 94 // LEGAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE MARXISM OF SOCIALISM: HUNGARIAN OVERVIEW IN AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE [2003] 95–151: I. Development and Balance of Marxist Philosophising on Law in Hungary [1. Preliminaries (until 1948) 96 / 2. Stalinism (from the Soviet Occupation on) {a) Liquidation of the »Residues« 98 / b) Soviet-type Uniformisation [Gleichschaltung] 99 / c) Denial of the Past, with a Dual Effect 99 / d) »Socialist Legality«, Drawn from the Progressive Past of Western Europe 103 / e) Search for the Germs of Scholarly Evolution 103} 3. Institutionalisation Accompanied by Relaxation (from the 1960s) [a) Epigonism Becoming the Scholarly Ideal 104 / b) Stalinism in a Critical Self-perspective 105 / c) Disciples Diversified Launching their own Trends 107 / d) Comparatism 110 / e) (Re)discovery of the Western Legal Philosophy as a Competitor 112 / f) A Leading Mediatory Role within the »Socialist World Order« 114} 4. Disintegration (in the 1980s) {a) Attempt at Laying New Foundations for Marxism with Epigonism Exhausted 115 / b) Competitive Trends Becoming Exclusive 115 / c) Western Legal Philosophy Acknowledged as a Fellow-traveller within the Socialist Orbit Proper 116 / d) Hungarian Legal Theory Transforming into a National Corpus 118 / e) The Practical Promotion of Some Balance 119} 5. End-game for a Substitute State Religion (in the 1990s) 120] II. Marxist Legal Philosophising in an International Perspective [Ad 1: To the Preliminaries 122 / Ad 2: To Stalinism 124 / Ad 3: To Institutionalisation Accompanied by Relaxation {a) Late Separation from Vishinskiy’s Theory 125 / b) From Ideological Self-closure to an Apparently Scholarly Openness 127 / c) From Political Ideology to Genuine Scholarship 130 / d) International Recognition of Socialist Jurisprudence as an Independent Trend 135 / e) Together with Western Trends 137} Ad 4: To Disintegration {a) Loss of Attraction as Mere Epigonism 139 / b) Exclusivity of Competing Trends 139 / c) Fellowship with »Bourgeois« Trends 140 / d) An own Trend, Internationally Recognised 141 / e) A yet Progressive Role 142} Ad 5: To the Present state 143] III. A Temporary Balance 145 // AUTONOMY AND INSTRUMENTALITY OF LAW IN A SUPERSTRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE [1986] 151–175: 1. The Strange Fate of Concepts 151 / I. A Relational Category 2. Basis and Superstructure: The Genuine Meaning 154 / 3. Exerting Social Influence as a Conceptual Minimum 156 / 4. Relationships within the Prevailing Totality 158 / 5. Attempts at Interpretation in Hungary 159 / 6. The Lukácsian Stand 162 / 7. Lukács’s Recognitions 168 / 8. Some Criticism 169 / II. The Law’s Understanding 171 / 9. Law Interpreted as Superstructure 171 / 10. Conclusions Drawn for the Law’s Understanding 173 // LEGAL THEORY IN TRANSITION (A PREFACE FROM HUNGARY) [2000] 177–186 // DEVELOPMENT OF THEORETICAL LEGAL THOUGHT IN HUNGARY AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM [2006] 187–215: 1. International Environment 188 / 2. The Situation in Hungary 190 / 3. Outlook I: The Historical-comparative Study of Legal Cultures and of the Lawyerly Way of Thinking 203 / 4. Outlook II: The Paradigmatic Enigma of the Transition to Rule of Law 207 / 5. Incongruity in Practice 213 / 6. Perspectives 214 --- TWENTIETH CENTURY CONTEMPORANEITY -- CHANGE OF PARADIGMS IN LEGAL RECONSTRUCTION: CARL SCHMITT AND THE TEMPTATION TO FINALLY REACH A SYNTHESIS [2002] 219–234: 1. Dangers of Intellectualism 219 / 2. Schmitt in Facts 221 / 3. Schmitt and Kelsen 222 / 4. On Bordering Conditions 226 / 5. With Kelsen in Transubstantiation 230 / 6. Polarisation as the Path of Theoretical Development 232 // KELSENIAN DOCUMENTS IN HUNGARY: CHAPTERS ON CONTACTS, INCLUDING THE GENESIS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY [2006] 235–243: 1. Preludes 235 / 2. The Search for Moór’s Bequeath 235 / 3. Moór’s Collegiality 238 / 4. Bibó as a Disciple Translating 241 // THE »HART-PHENOMENON« [2002] 245–267: I. The Hart-miracle 246 [1. The Scene of Britain at the Time 247 / 2. The Personal Career 250 / 3. The Opus’ Career 252 / 4. Verbal Sociologism 255 / 5. Growing into the British Pattern 259] II. The Hart-phenomenon 260 [6. Origination of a Strange Orthodoxy 261 / 7. Mastering Periods of the 20th Century 263 / 8. Raising the Issue of Reception in Hungary 365] // LITERATURE? A SUBSTITUTE FOR LEGAL PHILOSOPHY? [2007] 269–287: 1. The Enigma of Law and its Study 269 / 2. “Law and Literature” 271 / 3. Varieties of “Law and Literature” 274 / 4. The German Study of Artistic Representations 280 / 5. Some Literary Reconsiderations 285 / 6. Conclusion 287 --- APPENDIX -- THE PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING LEGAL PHILOSOPHY IN HUNGARY [2007] 291–320: I. Why and How to Philosophise in Law? 291 / II. The State of Teaching Legal Philosophy 294 / III. The Philosophy of Teaching Legal Philosophy 296 / IV. Programme at the Catholic University of Hungary 300 [1. Graduate Studies 300 {a) Basic Subjects 301 / b) Facultative Seminars 305 / c) Closing Subjects 309 / d) Written Memoranda and the Thesis 312} 2. Postgraduate Studies 313 / 3. Conclusion 317] V. Perspectives 318 /// Index of Subjects 321 / Index of Normative Materials 328 / Index of Names 329 . (shrink)

Andrew Chignell and Omri Boehm have recently argued that Kant’s pre-Critical proof for the existence of God entails a Spinozistic conception of God and hence substance monism. The basis for this reading is the assumption common in the literature that God grounds possibilities by exemplifying them. In this article I take issue with this assumption and argue for an alternative Leibnizian reading, according to which possibilities are grounded in essences united in God’s mind (later also described as Platonic ideas (...) intuited by God). I show that this view about the distinction between God’s cognition of essences as the ground of possibility and the actual world is not only explicitly stated by Kant, but is also consistent with his metaphysical picture of teleology in nature and causality during the pre-Critical period. Finally, I suggest that the distinction between the conceptual order of essences embodied in the idea of God and the order of the objects of experience plays a role in the transition into the Critical system, where it is transformed into the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible worlds. (shrink)

The choice of tracking Hegel’s reception in the Arab world in order to explore the connections between modernity and colonialism is an excellent one, since it was Hegel himself who inaugurated the explicit philosophical discourse of modernity (Habermas 1990: 4-5). Ventura’s book is divided into three parts of roughly equal length of around fifty pages each. The first part provides an overview of Hegel’s philosophy of history, and of the place of Arab peoples and Islam in his philosophy of (...) history. This section allows Ventura to put forward some of her own interpretations in relation to questions that are the objects of controversy in the secondary literature on Hegel. In general, Ventura’s account of Hegel’s views on Arabs and Islam draws attention to the internal differentiation which characterized ‘Orientalism’ as a discourse. The second part of the book deals with the indirect reception of Hegel in nineteenth century Ottoman Syria (which encompassed modern day Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan). Ventura’s salutary emphasis on internal differentiation is one of the strengths of this part of the book. She emphasizes the differences between the American Protestant missionaries who founded the Syrian Protestant College in 1866 and the French Jesuits who founded the Université Saint-Joseph in 1880. Ventura argues that the American Protestant missionaries were influenced by Hegel (58), whereas the French Jesuits were not (59). The third part of the book attempts to provide an account of the direct reception of Hegel in the Arab world which, according to Ventura, only begins in the 1960s and 1970s. Ventura’s account of the contemporary reception of Hegel is based on the research that she conducted in Syria and Lebanon in 2009-2010, which involved conducting interviews with prominent Syrian and Lebanese philosophers and examining libraries. While the title of the book might suggest that it aims to provide an account of the reception of Hegel in the Arab world as a whole, the focus is really on the reception of Hegel in modern day Syria and Lebanon, with Egypt being given rather cursory treatment. (shrink)

The state of our current world has brought about a very active discussion concerning possible alternatives to our current society. In this article, I wish to consider Marx’s idea of communism as a possible alternative, by understanding it as an undetermined concept that only proposes a society without classes and private property. The thesis I will defend here is that we can meaningfully think about such an alternative through the means of Science Fiction literature. In particular, I will (...) take Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (2006) as a case study. To clarify this relation between science fiction (SF) literature and communism as a particular case of an alternative society, I will introduce some concepts of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological theory. Thus, I shall argue that in SF we can presentify in bounded phantasy an alternative lifeworld, so furnishing with content the undetermined idea, and in doing so, strengthen the belief in the possibility of such an alternative society. (shrink)

Designing a virtual environment within a digital game occupies a large part of the design procedure, requiring holistic attention and a broad arrangement of the game constituents. Considering other design disciplines, they occupy a unified design methodology; however, a comprehensive literature review reveals the lack of the intended design methodology in the digital game domain's virtual environment development, despite a currently proposed theoretical methodology trying to dissolve the issue. Hence, this research aims to determine the industry's requirements and provide (...) a set of assets included in current digital games as an initial step of providing such a design methodology for the domain. In this regard, the researchers reverse-engineered ten selected digital games, understanding the current condition of digital games via adopting the mentioned currently available design methodology. This dataset reveals a lack in the assets of the story layer in the recent digital games, despite their focus on being story-based. This dilemma leads to long text or speech conversations between game characters, disrupting the players while following the game. The current design focuses on environmental resources only, however, as a virtual landscape, the story needs to be reinforced to be a balanced and well-designed game. Hence, increasing the ratio of the assets in this layer will advance the games' interactivity. Also, as future work, this data set could pave the way for a digital game industry design tool regarding the virtual environment. (shrink)

European colonialism is an extremely controversial affair in world history that is also discussed today. This paper explores the influence of these happenings as the world incorporates the culture of European in every step of life. Europe dominated almost the entire world and its people were leaders in science and technology. European languages, literature, and culture spread all over the globe. Decisions in Europe largely determined global events for centuries. The other continents did not approach European (...) power until after WW1 or WW2. Europe consisted of constantly competing nations, and this competition spurred development. Europe achieved world hegemony in the years after 1500 A.D., primarily due to technological advancements, scientific research, political development of nations with stable succession and continuity, and a culture dominated by Christianity. These advantages were translated into military power, projected all over the world. (shrink)

Cannabis in the Ancient Greek and Roman World explores the use of cannabis and hemp in medicine, religion, and recreation in the classical period. This work surveys the plant in Greek and Roman literature and provides a compendium of primary sources discussing hemp through the Middle Ages.

The Antinomies of Huxley Novel "Brave New World".

The aim of this paper is to explore what insights relevant logics may provide for the understanding of literary fictional narrative. To date, hardly anyone has reflected on the intersection of relevant logics and narratology, and some could think that there is good reason for it. On the one hand, relevance has been a prominent issue in pragmatics, in the tradition of Grice, and Sperber and Wilson; thus framed, relevance is highly context-sensitive, so it seems unsuitable for formal analysis. On (...) the other hand, the very idea of a logic of narrative has been criticized, arguing that logic brings to a stasis the time of human action (Ricœur, II: 29-60), or that its emphasis on rules misses the creative, unpredictable character of literature (De Man)... First, I will briefly introduce relevant logics, with an eye to showing their interest for narratological concerns, rather than to here providing a coherent (let alone comprehensive) survey. Secondly, lest I get drawn into purely abstract discussion, I will analyse several stories in order to give some instances of the kind of topics congenial to narratology that may be addressed with a relevantist toolkit. Thirdly (and lastly), I will expand in more theoretical fashion on certain issues raised in the second section and bring them into connection with pragmatic relevance theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the cognitive value of fantasy literature. Using Immanuel Kant's and Jean-Paul Sartre's discussions of the imagination, and J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories,” I argue that fantasy literature is cognitively valuable when it confers phenomenal knowledge. I move on to demonstrate what a work of fantasy literature requires to confer this phenomenal knowledge. Fantasy literature has the potential to reveal true insights into this world when it brings the reader into a (...) state of “secondary belief” and confers phenomenal knowledge through the union of world and story. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, the poet Herman Gorter is mostly known as the author of the neo-romantic poem May and the “sensitivistic” Poems, but internationally he became famous as a propagandist of radical Marxism: the author of influential brochures and of an “open letter” to comrade W.I. Lenin in 1920. During the 1890s, Gorter became increasingly dissatisfied with his poetry, considering it as ego-centric, disinterested and “bourgeois”, unconnected with what was happening in the real world. He wanted to put his (...) poetry on a scientific footing, notably by endorsing a dialectical materialist worldview. In the communist society he envisioned, science would become poetry and poetry would become science. In his opus magnum Pan, two terms are rather prominent, namely heelal and kristal. These signifiers not only reflect important themes, but also two friendships which began around 1900, namely with prominent astronomer and marxist Anton Pannekoek and with Ada Prins, the first woman in the Netherlands who acquired a PhD in chemistry, specialised in liquid crystal research. Whereas Ada Prins is mostly remembered as one of Gorter’s secret lovers, she was first and foremost his educated guide into the complex and enigmatic world of twentieth-century chemistry research. Liquid crystal chemistry became an important source of inspiration for Gorter’s work and the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate her influence on Gorter’s Pan as a scientific poem After presenting the two heroes of this paper, and their work in poetry and chemistry respectively, I will analyse the role of liquid crystals in Herman Gorter’s Pan, highlighting important connections with Ada Prins’ research into liquid crystal chemistry. (shrink)

The impact of Persian literature on world culture and literature is undeniable. Persian poets such as Firdowsi, Sa’di, Hafiz, Rumi and Khayyam who deal with universal themes beyond a particular place and time are among the most widely-known literary figures of the world; their works are translated into different languages. Despite the fact that there are different translations of Persian literature in English, it is still not clear whether Persian literature has gained its appropriate (...) place in the world. We study the reception of Persian literature in general and classical Persian poetry in particular in Britain and The United States to see whether it is rightly introduced to these countries or not. A close study of the reception of Persian poetry in Anglophone world in general and in Britain and The United States in particular reveals that while Persian literature is introduced and taught in these countries, it is still far from being truly known there. Those who have been familiar with Persian literature have mainly known it through translations by western scholars, and this has led to problems and misconceptions. As Edward Said argues in Orientalism, the orient is never truly depicted by the west. The best way would be to have Persian scholars of English literature translate Persian works into English. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, the poet Herman Gorter is mostly known as the author of the neo-romantic poem May and the “sensitivistic” Poems, but internationally he became famous as a propagandist of radical Marxism: the author of influential brochures and of an “open letter” to comrade W.I. Lenin in 1920. During the 1890s, Gorter became increasingly dissatisfied with his poetry, considering it as ego-centric, disinterested and “bourgeois”, unconnected with what was happening in the real world. He wanted to put his (...) poetry on a scientific footing, notably by endorsing a dialectical materialist worldview. In the communist society he envisioned, science would become poetry and poetry would become science. In his opus magnum Pan, two terms are rather prominent, namely heelal and kristal. These signifiers not only reflect important themes, but also two friendships which began around 1900, namely with prominent astronomer and marxist Anton Pannekoek and with Ada Prins, the first woman in the Netherlands who acquired a PhD in chemistry, specialised in liquid crystal research. Whereas Ada Prins is mostly remembered as one of Gorter’s secret lovers, she was first and foremost his educated guide into the complex and enigmatic world of twentieth-century chemistry research. Liquid crystal chemistry became an important source of inspiration for Gorter’s work and the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate her influence on Gorter’s Pan as a scientific poem After presenting the two heroes of this paper, and their work in poetry and chemistry respectively, I will analyse the role of liquid crystals in Herman Gorter’s Pan, highlighting important connections with Ada Prins’ research into liquid crystal chemistry. (shrink)

Samuel Clarke was one of Spinoza's earliest and fiercest opponents in England. I uncover three related Clarkean arguments against Spinoza's metaphysic that deserve more attention from readers today. Collectively, these arguments draw out a tension at the very heart of Spinoza's rationalist system. From the conjunction of a necessary being who acts necessarily and the principle of sufficient reason, Clarke reasons that there could be none of the diversity we find in the universe. In doing so, Clarke potentially reveals an (...) inconsistent triad in Spinoza. Responses to this inconsistency map onto a deep division in the contemporary Spinoza literature. I conclude that Clarke's arguments provide a new approach to the recently revived debate over acosmic interpretations of Spinoza and point to new interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose the concept of the “animated persona,” a soundless voice that says, “I am here” and appears on the surface of someone or something. This concept can bring clarity to the experience of perceiving a kind of personhood on a corpse, a wooden mask, or even a tree. In the first half of this paper, I will examine some Japanese literature and a work of Viktor Frankl’s that discuss these phenomena. In the second half, I (...) will analyze the concept of animated persona from five perspectives: (1) a compelling power, (2) surface-ness, (3) religious experience, (4) universality, and (5) the meaning of “I.” Lastly, I will discuss the relationship among the three layers of biological object, animated persona, and self-conscious being. My aim is to shed new light on the meaning of the encounter between the living and the dead. (shrink)

Kant’s Refutation targets what he calls the problematic idealist. This is understood by the mainstream of Kantian scholarship as the global skeptic that Descartes briefly adumbrated in his first Meditation. The widespread view in the literature is that the fate of the Refutation is tied to its success as an argument against this Cartesian global skepticism. This consensus is what I want to question in this paper. I argue that Kant’s opponent – the problematic idealist – is not the (...) Cartesian global skeptic but rather what I prefer to call here the Cartesian problematic external-world idealist. According to Cartesian global skepticism, we cannot know whether our commonsensical beliefs are true until we rule out that the skeptical hypotheses are false. In contrast, the Cartesian external-world idealist sees as problematic the assumption that the underlying nature of outer things of which we have ideas is mind-independent rather than caused by our own thinking. My aim here is to disentangle Cartesian global skepticism from Cartesian problematic external-word idealism and show that, if measured against global skepticism, Kant’s Refutation is doomed to fail, while against problematic idealism, it is at least a promising argument. (shrink)

Madness and Modernism is undoubtedly one of the most profound and perspicacious treatments of an illness that is utterly baffling to most laypersons and academics alike. Sass artfully brings together two obscure, complex, and unnerving realms -- the schizophrenic and the modern and postmodern aesthetic -- into mutual enlightenment. The comparisons between schizophrenic symptoms such as loss of ego boundaries, perspectival switching, and world catastrophe with modern literature and art is so adroit that it is almost eerie. The (...) reader finds herself peering into a borderline incomprehensible realm with increasing levels of clarity, by which she gains insight into the utterly chaotic, confused, and bizarre. The lucidity Sass brings to the obscure and confused is a reflection of the many contradictions he introduces to his readers as being entirely paradigmatic of both madness and modernism: that of desiring human contact but also shunning it entirely, of being both afflicted by disease but also exercising a sort of agency, and indeed, an ideal intellectual freedom within the confines of such an affliction, of moving both towards an objectifying materiality of the external world and a total subjectivization of perception, of the tendency towards the hyperabstract and the utterly concrete (between being too "far away" or "too close," respectively). Sass is able to make sense of a world in which these contradictions exist side by side simultaneously, and the disconcerting confusion this causes is palpable to the reader. Sass demonstrates not only his penetrating intellect, but also his unwavering patience and empathy, both in the treatment of the subject matter and the treatment of the subjects suffering from this extraordinary illness. The book is required reading for anyone interested in phenomenological psychiatry, or even psychiatry more generally. (shrink)