The Roman imperial Stoics were familiar with exile. This paper argues that the Stoics’ view of being a refugee differed sharply from their view of what is owed to refugees. A Stoic adopts the perspective of a cosmopolitēs, a “citizen of the world,” a rational being everywhere at home in the universe. Virtue can be cultivated and practiced in any locale, so being a refugee is an “indifferent” that poses no obstacle to happiness. Other people are our fellow cosmic (...) citizens, however, regardless of their language, race, ethnicity, customs, or country of origin. Our natural affinity and shared sociability with all people require us to help refugees and embrace them as welcome neighbors. Failure to do so violates our common reason, justice, and the gods’ cosmic law. (shrink)

Our era is profoundly marked by the phenomenon of exile and it has become increasingly urgent to rethink the concept and our stance towards it. Permeated with references to the stranger, the other and exteriority, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas signifies towards a positive understanding of exile. This article distills from Levinas' philosophy a wisdom of exile, for the first time shedding a positive light on the condition itself.

Being-at-home in a particular, determined, world is dangerous for thinking. For thinking to be thinking/becoming, one should not get too comfortable. For thinking is to not arrive back home, in the same place one begins. But how to escape the world that has created who you are, gave you purpose and a past? How to make sure the future is not a repetition of the Same? How to break away from something that you need? In this article, my aim is (...) not to give one more solution to this fundamental problem that is in essence an ethical problem. For providing a refuge, a new theory, a new methodology, would be providing a new island for those who realise that a flood is endangering their own island. My aim is to exercise the craft of exilic thinking as a way to deal with the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” Exilic thinking as a craft of fragilising the self establishes a matrixial borderspace through which the impossible becomes possible. (shrink)

Exile constitutes one of the most central experiences in the Bible, notably in the book of Genesis. The question has rarely been asked however as to why exile plays such an important role in the lives of Biblical characters. Biblical Portraits of Exile proposes a philosophical reading largely inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas of the experience of exile in the book of Genesis. Focusing on the 8 central figures of exile Adam, Eve, Cain, (...) the sons of Shem, Abraham, Rebekah, Jacob and the sons of Levy the book draws out the ethical and redemptive implications of exile and thereby paves the way for a renewed description of the human subject, one that situates ethics at its very core. (shrink)

Collective imagination has traditionally associated architecture with political and economic power. As a result, when quoting Edward Said: «Modern Western culture is, in large part, the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees», the last people we typically consider are exiled architects. But is the heritage left by exiled architects truly insignificant? Can we find expressions of their spiritual quest, new life experiences, nostalgic feelings, and aesthetic shocks in their works? When does Modernism cease to be a universal language and instead becomes (...) an existential language of the exile – and can they both coexist? The international conference Architects in Exile. Stories of New Spatial Experiences" aims to address these questions. (shrink)

Poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) described himself as someone who is an “exile from the country of which he had always considered himself a citizen…” Is it apposite to associate exile with someone who — apart from spending nine years in South Africa during his youth — essentially never stirred out of his native Portugal? This essay examines this question by comparing Pessoa to another famous exile, Albert Camus.

The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. These make being wealthy very pleasant indeed, but they are also toxic to democracy. First, I analyse the mechanisms by which the presence of very wealthy individuals undermines the two pillars of liberal democracy, equality of citizenship and legitimate social choice. Second, I make a radical proposal. If we value the preservation of democracy we must limit the amount of wealth any individual can have and still be a (...) citizen of our polity. (shrink)

Our era is profoundly marked by the phenomenon of exile and it has become increasingly urgent to rethink the concept and our stance towards it. Permeated with references to the stranger, the other and exteriority, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas signifies towards a positive understanding of exile. This original and compelling book distills from Levinas' philosophy a wisdom of exile, for the first time shedding a positive light on the condition itself.

Ernst Cassirer, 2011, Symbolische Prägnanz, Ausdrucksphänomen und „Wiener Kreis“, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 4, ed. Christian Möckel, 478pp., Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag.

Rumi and Bahá’u’lláh did not belong to the same century, movement, or religious office. Rumi was not Bahá’í; Bahá’u’lláh was not merely a Sufi poet. Yet between them runs a major Persian religious arc: displacement becomes vision, longing becomes language, love becomes authority, and mystical inwardness is later redirected toward a universal religious message. This article argues not for prediction, dependence, or ownership, but for inheritance and transformation. Rumi gave Persian Islam one of its most powerful idioms of divine love, (...) annihilation, longing, and union. Bahá’u’lláh, emerging in nineteenth-century Qajar and Ottoman crisis, entered a Persianate-Sufi vocabulary that still carried Rumi’s authority, quoted Rumi, composed in Rumi-linked forms, and responded to Sufi metaphysical debates while placing revelation, moral distinction, law, community, and the oneness of humanity at the center of religious renewal. The argument proceeds through Rumi’s displaced sacred biography and Islamic scholarly formation; the catalytic role of Shams-i Tabrizi; Sultan Walad and the institutionalization of Rumi’s fire through the Mawlawī/Mevlevi order; Bahá’u’lláh’s exile from Iran to Baghdad, Istanbul, Edirne, and Acre; and Bahá’u’lláh’s direct engagement with Rumi’s Mathnawi in the “Commentary on a Verse of Rumi” and with the mathnavi form in the Mathnavíy-i Mubárak. The article also develops the careful modern category of “displaced sacred biography.” It avoids calling Rumi a refugee in the modern legal sense and distinguishes Bahá’u’lláh’s imprisonment and exile from contemporary bureaucratic refugee status. Nevertheless, in an age of migration, border fear, religious fragmentation, and stateless suffering, their lives remain legible as sacred histories of forced movement: the soul may lose its home before it finds its mission. -/- . (shrink)

Paper presented at a meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, Stony Brook, New York, USA, May 2000. -/- Foucault rejects the idea of intellectuals acting as "prophets": telling others what must be done and what sorts of social and political goals they should pursue. I argue that in outright rejecting such prophecy, Foucault may not be pursuing the most effective means of eventually breaking it down. I locate in Foucauldian genealogical works such as Discipline and Punish a (...) rhetorical strategy through which the intellectual acts as a prophet while also distancing him/herself from this role: the genealogist speaks as a universal intellectual while also encouraging others to question the truths thus provided, as well as the role of the intellectual as prophet itself. I argue that in so doing the genealogist engages in a kind of exile, a term I borrow from Edward Said to denote a movement of distancing without effecting a clean break. This intellectual, rather than rejecting outright the role of the prophet, works within this role while yet distancing him/herself from it -- acting as (what I call) a “prophet in exile.”. (shrink)

Il est question dans cette méditation métaphysique d'examiner l'horizon de la vérité de notre condition humaine terrestre. Par-dela les révélations du langage, il s'agit de penser la réalité organique de la 'différance' au sein du réel. La transcendance des formes historiques contingentes, et l'ouverture silencieuse à la réalité absolue du possible, se manifestent comme la signification de la différance. Ils sont la vérité organique de toute vie humaine épanouie, l'ultime et inexorable condition de la réalisation du sujet.

Engaging with the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, we submit that there are difficulties associated with providing a good description of morality that are intimately connected with difficulties in understanding other human beings. We suggest three senses in which moral philosophical reflection needs to account for our understanding of others: (1) the failure to understand someone is not merely an intellectual failure, but also engages us morally; (2) the moral question of understanding is not limited to the extent to which (...) we understand a particular person, but also presents itself in how we picture difficulties in understanding people; and (3) “philosophical pictures of morality” fundamentally shape the conceptual framework we use to investigate morality, as well as the analysis of morality we find illuminative and satisfactory. Exploring the implications of these claims, we ask what it means to think of others as the same, or as different, from ourselves. We then consider the ethical significance of finding, or not finding, our feet in our encounters with others, dwelling on how the metaphor of movement reveals one way in which we are never at peace in the exploration of morality. (shrink)

This paper advances a critical account of language and definition as epistemic instruments rather than ontological revelations. It argues, first, that language originates not as a vehicle of metaphysical disclosure but as a pragmatic construct securing intersubjective stability within social orders. From this vantage, definitions do not disclose essences; rather, they function as epistemic constraints, semantic placeholders grounded in genesis, function, composition, or observable predicates. Human cognition, in turn, is shown to be irreducibly mediated by linguistic structures, such that thought (...) itself disintegrates without symbolic differentiation. This dependence introduces a paradox: definition necessarily limits, circumscribing what can be thought, yet these very limits estrange us from the fullness of reality. All definitional acts are perspectival renderings, bound to context and scale, producing knowledge that is situated rather than absolute. The paper further examines the psychological dimension of epistemic conservatism, suggesting that humanity’s attachment to definitional clarity arises less from ontological insight than from a fear of indeterminacy and epistemic vertigo. Ultimately, definition is revealed as a necessary fiction: the act by which we stabilize experience and render the world navigable, even as it simultaneously distances us from metaphysical truth. (shrink)

Considers Goethe's Italienische Reise in regard to Adorno's notion of "late style," with especial focus on the role of Ovid's poetry in the work.

on race and Adorno’s philosophy of language by engaging Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida; singled out in the collection as "superb" by the reader for Sage Press.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in bear sightings in Latvia, causing a change of tone in the country’s media outlets, regarding the return of “wild” animals. The unease around bear reappearance leads me to investigate the affective side of relations with beings that show strength and resilience in more-than-human encounters in human-inhabited spaces. These relations are characterized by the contrasting human feelings of alienation vis-à-vis their environments today and a false sense of security, resulting in disbelief to encounter beings (...) capable of challenging human exceptionalism. In a broader sense, the unease connects to human self-constitution and the fragility of the self, fueled by the domination of substance ontologies. This article considers bears as beings “in exile,” as potential threats to human self-pronounced exceptionality, and thus, examples of experienced abject (Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) regarding human subjectivity. The article aims to analyze the way the constitution of human selfhood is tied to the alienation of wildlife and its genealogical and biopolitical context and to question if a reconceptualization of the human/nonhuman relations via process, instead of substance ontology, is needed. (shrink)

This article explores the negative framing of environmental concern in the context of food procurement and consumption, through the lens of the myth of Eden considering the ontological and genealogical aspects of the experienced exile from nature. The article first considers the theoretical context of the negative framing of food ethics. Demonstrating the consequences of the experience of food as abject, the article then goes on to discuss the exile from Eden as an explanatory myth for the perceptual (...) inbetweenness of humankind. The aim of the article is to outline the genealogical markers of the negative framing of food ethics via the discussion of the exile from Eden. In the context of a new materialist understanding of the nature–culture continuum, the article depicts the exile as a perceptual rather than ontological divide that does not reflect a factual human inbetweenness but mirrors the objectification of nature by stripping the flesh of its spirit. Such reenvisioning is thought to be a pivotal aspect for mitigating the affectual abjectivity of food and recapturing the factual entanglement of body–environment to enable affirmative environmental ethics. (shrink)

These comments on Sabine Grebe, "The Transformation of the Husband/Wife Relationship during Exile: Letters from Cicero and Ovid" raise questions about the similarities and dissimilarities of marriage and friendship examined in the marriages of Cicero and Ovid.

The problem of trickster leadership is discussed in this chapter in the context of the Romanian experience of modernity. This experience has emerged as a Post-Byzantine condition; it was strongly marked by the forty years of communist regimes and was loaded with a high amount of duplicity and ambivalence. The chapter argues that the communist type of trickster leadership in Romania was the outcome of a clash between two types of corruption: a domestic one and a global one. The idea (...) of ‘forms without substance’, coined in 1868 by the historian Titu Maiorescu, is shown to be indicative of the exilic condition in which Romanians remained caught even after their country became independent. The description of this paradoxical condition is followed by a review of the main eras of Romania as a modern state, arguing that this condition has led to an accumulation of disharmony and the absurd in the social fabric of the people. (shrink)

Rumi is often presented as a universal mystic whose poetry floats above history. This article argues the opposite. Rumi’s universality was produced through a deeply historical world of movement. The Silk Roads carried more than silk, spices, horses, paper, pigments, and precious objects. They carried spiritual vocabularies, poetic forms, manuscripts, scholarly habits, musical practices, medical and astronomical knowledge, calligraphic aesthetics, legal-religious training, and Sufi methods of remembrance. Reading Rumi through this world does not reduce him to geography. It restores the (...) conditions that made his symbolic language possible. This article reconstructs the Persianate and Islamic networks surrounding Rumi’s formation, beginning with the eastern world associated with Balkh, Khurasan, Transoxiana, and Central Asian learning, then following the westward pressure of migration, Mongol rupture, Seljuk Anatolia, and Konya’s religious-intellectual ecology. It treats the Silk Roads not as a single road but as a layered network of cities, caravan routes, sea lanes, markets, madrasas, lodges, shrines, manuscript cultures, courts, workshops, and oral traditions. Rumi’s poetry is read as a condensed archive of this network: Qur’anic allusion, Persian poetics, music, breath, motion, cosmology, healing, light, calligraphy, exile, and the discipline of love. The article’s contribution is methodological. It proposes a source-controlled model for reading mystical literature through transmission systems rather than isolated genius, national ownership, or modern spiritual branding. The central claim is not that every image in Rumi can be traced to a trade route. The stronger claim is that Rumi’s mystical imagination belongs to a Silk Road ecology of knowledge in which poetry, religion, science, art, sound, and movement traveled together. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) was a formidable figure in early-twentieth-century philosophy of science. Educated in Germany, he was influential in establishing the so-called Berlin Circle, a companion group to the Vienna Circle founded by his colleague Rudolph Carnap. The movement they founded—usually known as "logical positivism," although it is more precisely known as "scientific philosophy" or "logical empiricism"—was a form of epistemology that privileged scientific over metaphysical truths. Reichenbach, like other young philosophers of the exact sciences of his generation, was deeply (...) impressed by the far-reaching changes in physics brought about by Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. Reichenbach responded to scientific advances by doing fundamental work in space-time theories, in quantum mechanics, in statistical mechanics, and in the development of probability theory—making him the most important philosopher of physics in the first generation of logical empiricism. Forced from his academic position by the Nazi race laws in 1933, Reichenbach wrote _Experience and Prediction_ at the University of Istanbul, where had had fled, expressly to introduce logical positivism to English speakers. In the two decades following World War II, during the explosion of scientific advances in North America, logical positivism was the reigning theory of the philosophy of science and Reichenbach was at the peak of his career. But, inevitably, support for logical positivism began to wane as it became obvious that the justification of scientific theories could not be entirely resolved by relying on strictly formal, technical processes. The growth of the discipline of the history of philosophy of science, which has created an audience of scholars eager for seminal classics in scientific philosophy, and the evidence supporting a historicist paradigm within logical positivism are two important reasons to make _Experience and Prediction_ available once again. "Hans Reichenbach's_ Experience and Prediction_ is one of the most important books in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Its author was, along with Rudolf Carnap, one of the two principal ambassadors to North America of the exciting new European philosophical movement known here under the names 'Logical Positivism' and 'Scientific Philosophy.' In 1938, when the book was published, Reichenbach was an exile from his native Germany, teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, and about to emigrate to the United States to take up a prestigious position at UCLA. He wrote_ Experience and Prediction_ in English as his calling card to his new American colleagues. More than any other single book,_ Experience and Prediction_ set the agenda for the new discipline of the philosophy of science that was to emerge after World War II as, perhaps, the most exciting new area in North American philosophy. Many of the problems still at the focus of discussion were given their classic formulations in this book. Long out of print,_ Experience and Prediction_ appears here in a new edition accompanied by a splendid historical introduction by the noted young philosopher and historian of the philosophy of science, Alan Richardson. A jewel of a book may once again be appreciated in its proper setting." —Don A. Howard, University of Notre Dame. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) stands as one of the most original political thinkers of the twentieth century — not merely because of her scholarship, but because of her capacity to think within the rupture of history. Born in Germany and shaped by the philosophical traditions of continental Europe, Arendt's intellectual life unfolded in the shadow of profound existential and political dislocation. Her biography is inseparable from the crises of her time, and her work is marked by a continual attempt to make (...) sense of the human condition under conditions of rupture, exile, and transformation. Raised in Königsberg, a city once associated with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Arendt’s early exposure to learning and inquiry positioned her to engage not only with abstract questions, but with the reality of political life. Her studies in philosophy, theology, and classical philology were not pursuits of academic detachment but rather modes of inquiry into the nature of existence, plurality, and responsibility. Under the influence of Martin Heidegger, Arendt encountered phenomenology — a method of returning to the immediacy of lived experience. But while Heidegger explored Being in abstraction, Arendt would later shift toward a more worldly engagement: to understand the conditions under which human beings appear to one another, speak, act, and judge. Her dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine reveals an early preoccupation with natality — the fact of birth as the beginning of uniqueness — and the human desire for transcendence. These existential concerns would remain central throughout her thought, but they were soon reframed by the concrete historical rupture of the 1930s. The rise of totalitarianism forced Arendt into exile, initiating a lifelong confrontation with statelessness, the breakdown of political belonging, and the question of human rights. -/- Her experiences as a refugee and as a Jew under Nazi persecution were not only biographical facts but philosophical revelations. In losing the formal protection of the state, Arendt came to see that the foundation of human dignity is not legal status alone, but recognition — the acknowledgment of one's humanity within a shared world. This insight would later inform her analysis of the pariah, the stateless, and the condition of rootlessness that defines modernity. Interned in France during the war and later arriving in the United States in 1941, Arendt found herself in a new context that both challenged and expanded her thought. While she faced the disorientation of exile, she also encountered a different political tradition — one that emphasized constitutionalism, federalism, and public freedom. Her philosophical reflection began to shift from the metaphysical orientation of early European thought to a more political ontology: a concern with how freedom appears in the world, how action becomes meaningful, and how the human capacity for beginning — for natality — might form the basis of a new political ethics. In the United States, Arendt did not retreat into academic isolation but entered into the vibrant intellectual life of postwar New York, where she joined a community of exiled thinkers, writers, and artists. It was here that she began to articulate her most significant contributions, not only as a theorist of totalitarianism, but as a thinker concerned with the conditions under which human beings live together in freedom. Becoming a U.S. citizen in 1950 did not merely mark a legal change; it represented, for Arendt, a re-entry into political life — a renewed commitment to a world in which human plurality, responsibility, and judgment could be reimagined. Her thought is not reducible to ideology or method; rather, it is a continuous engagement with the fundamental questions of existence: What does it mean to be human in a world where politics can both reveal and destroy our shared reality? How is freedom possible amid necessity? And what responsibility does each individual bear for the shape of the world we co-create? -/- The period in which Hannah Arendt lived and developed her thought was one of unprecedented upheaval — a century defined by war, displacement, ideological struggle, and the fragmentation of shared meaning. The first half of the twentieth century had witnessed the collapse of empires, the trauma of two world wars, the mechanized cruelty of the Holocaust, and the rise of totalitarian states. These events did not merely shape historical circumstances; they shattered traditional assumptions about progress, morality, and the nature of human society. In the aftermath of destruction, a new global order emerged, marked by the Cold War’s ideological bifurcation — a world divided between East and West, each claiming to represent the truth of human freedom. It was within this fractured and contested space that Arendt pursued her philosophical project, asking not only how such horrors had occurred, but what it meant to live and think responsibly in their shadow. During the 1950s and 1960s, Arendt produced some of her most significant works, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). These were not historical chronicles in the conventional sense, but meditations on the breakdown of meaning, the limits of judgment, and the erosion of political responsibility. Arendt was not aligned with any one school of thought. Rather, her work constituted a deliberate act of thinking — a practice of remaining open to the complexity of reality, rather than reducing it to ideological systems. While her contemporaries were shaped by existentialist questions of freedom, alienation, and authenticity — influenced by figures such as Heidegger and Sartre — Arendt resisted abstract categories. Instead, she focused on how these existential conditions unfolded in the public world: How do individuals relate to others in shared space? What does it mean to appear before others, to act, to be seen, and to take responsibility? -/- Her analysis of power, authority, and the vulnerability of democratic institutions was not a theoretical exercise. It was rooted in lived experience — exile, statelessness, and political rupture — and informed by her critical engagement with Marxism, liberalism, and postwar human rights discourse. The intellectual landscape of the mid-20th century was searching for foundations after catastrophe. Arendt's contribution was to shift attention not toward abstract principles, but toward human plurality, judgment, and action — the conditions under which meaning and community become possible again. Her work was not without controversy. Her reflections on Jewish identity, the moral ambiguity of collaboration, and the nature of evil drew criticism and misunderstanding. Yet, through it all, Arendt remained committed to independent thought, insisting that philosophy must engage with the world as it is, not as it is imagined. In this way, her life becomes more than a biography — it becomes a lens through which to understand the philosophical challenges of an age: the loss of rootedness, the disintegration of meaning, and the search for a new beginning. For Arendt, history is not just what happens; it is what human beings do, remember, and are responsible for. Her enduring significance lies in her ability to face this condition without resignation. -/- Thinking and Reality For Arendt, thinking is not reducible to the acquisition of knowledge, nor is it equivalent to instrumental reasoning. Thinking is a distinct mode of being — a dialogical process within the self, in which one interrogates, questions, and suspends certainty. It is not designed to produce immediate answers but to illuminate meaning. In this way, thinking reveals the invisible architecture of human experience: assumptions, values, and the fragile structures of moral judgment. Thinking, as Arendt conceives it, is not a utilitarian task; it is not defined by its outcomes. Rather, it is an activity through which individuals maintain their autonomy and engage with the world reflectively. It allows one to remain in relation with oneself — to become one’s own witness. Thinking is not merely a private pursuit, however; it forms the ground for responsibility in the public realm. The trial of Adolf Eichmann offers a critical demonstration of this principle. Arendt observed that Eichmann was not driven by hatred or ideology in the conventional sense. Instead, he exhibited an absence — a failure to think. He did not ask whether what he was doing was right; he only asked whether it conformed to the rules. This thoughtlessness, this moral vacuity, was what Arendt identified as the “banality of evil.” It was not the presence of monstrous intent that shocked her, but the absence of inner dialogue — the collapse of judgment in the face of bureaucratic normality. In this example, we see how the refusal or inability to think has concrete ethical consequences. It demonstrates that moral failure does not always stem from wickedness but can emerge from passivity, from disengagement with meaning. Thinking is thus not an abstract ideal; it is a condition of moral life. Without it, the human being becomes merely functional — obedient, efficient, and dangerous. -/- Challenges to Arendt’s View Despite the profound impact of Arendt’s conception of thinking, her position has drawn criticism from multiple directions. Some argue that her view overemphasizes the solitary nature of thought, neglecting the social, historical, and embodied conditions that shape human consciousness. Thinking, in this view, does not occur in isolation but is embedded in cultural narratives, material conditions, and interpersonal relationships. Others, particularly those working from empirical or scientific frameworks, view Arendt’s approach as speculative and insufficiently grounded in data. From this perspective, her phenomenological and interpretive style lacks the methodological rigor demanded by contemporary cognitive science or behavioral studies. There is also concern about the accessibility of her thought. Critics suggest that her ideal of thinking — involving distance from daily pressures — may reflect a privileged position, one not equally available to all. This raises important questions about whether meaningful reflection is reserved for the few, or whether it can be realized amid the constraints of ordinary life. Finally, some argue that her emphasis on reason and moral judgment underplays the role of emotion, empathy, and collective experience in ethical decision-making. Thinking, they claim, is not purely rational but also deeply affective and relational. -/- . -/- . (shrink)

Western philosophy has always been haunted by two abysses: nothingness and wholeness, zero and infinity. These two concepts have functioned as the extreme poles of metaphysical thought—the absolute negation and the absolute plenitude, the void that threatens all meaning and the totality that exceeds all comprehension. Yet, curiously, they have almost always been treated as opposites, as mutually exclusive horizons that define the boundaries within which human thought must operate. Zero is the limit of absence, infinity the limit of presence; (...) between them, the finite world of measurable beings unfolds. But what if this opposition is itself the deepest illusion of the metaphysical tradition? What if zero and infinity are not opposites but two faces of the same reality, two expressions of a single relationship that precedes and transcends all distinction? What if the relationship between zero and infinity is not a contradiction to be resolved but a primordial mystery to be inhabited—a mystery that reveals the very structure of Being as a dimensionless, paradoxical, self-referential whole? The philosophical project we examine here—which we may call "dimensionless ontology"— proposes precisely this: that the true nature of reality is not to be found in the opposition between nothingness and plenitude, but in their radical inseparability. It suggests that the relationship between zero and infinity is not a problem to be solved but a truth to be lived, a truth that shatters the very frameworks through which Western thought has traditionally understood existence, knowledge, and the self. This essay will explore the philosophical dimensions of this relationship, tracing its implications for ontology, epistemology, and ethics. It will argue that the dimensionless ontology emerging from this exploration offers a radical alternative to the dominant paradigms of Western metaphysics—one that transcends the dualisms of being and non-being, unity and multiplicity, finitude and infinitude, and opens the way to a new understanding of truth as event, of knowledge as participation, and of existence as the living experience of a paradox that never resolves but endlessly generates meaning. The Crisis of Classical Ontology The Geometric Prison of Being The Western philosophical tradition, from its Greek origins, has been dominated by what we might call a "geometry of Being." This geometry—this spatial, measurable, dimension-bound understanding of existence—has shaped virtually every major metaphysical system. From Pythagoras to Plato, from Descartes to Kant, Being has been understood as something that occupies space, that has position, that can be located, defined, and bounded. The very language of philosophy—substance, attribute, accident, essence, existence—is the language of spatialization: we speak of "underlying" (substance), of "standing under" (hypostasis), of "properties" that belong to a thing, as if Being were a container and beings were its contents. This geometricization reached its apotheosis in the Cartesian revolution. Descartes, in his radical search for certainty, reduced the material world to res extensa—extended substance, pure spatiality. The world became a vast geometric system of coordinates, where every being could be located, measured, and predicted. Reality became a map, and the map became the territory. To know meant to represent, to place within a grid of intelligibility, to reduce the ineffable to the measurable. The consequences of this geometricization have been profound and far-reaching. By reducing Being to extension, philosophy lost sight of the very nature of existence—its dynamism, its creativity, its unpredictability. The world became a machine, a clockwork of deterministic laws, and the human being became a spectator—an isolated consciousness observing a universe that was fundamentally alien, external, other. The intimacy between subject and world, the participative relationship that characterized pre-modern thought, was shattered. Knowledge became power, observation became domination, and truth became correspondence—a mirroring of an external reality that the subject could never fully enter. The "misery of geometricization"—the reduction of the infinite, paradoxical richness of existence to the flat, two-dimensional plane of a Euclidean diagram. The geometric prison of Being is a prison precisely because it cannot contain the full reality of what Being is. It can only capture its shadows, its projections onto the wall of representation, while the living, dynamic, self-creating reality of existence escapes through every crack. The Tyranny of Identity and Non-Contradiction The second pillar of classical ontology is the logic of identity—the principle of non-contradiction formulated by Aristotle as the most fundamental law of thought. This principle states that a thing cannot simultaneously be and not be, in the same respect, at the same time. A is A, and A is never not-A. Identity is absolute; difference is secondary; contradiction is forbidden. This logical principle has been the foundation not only of philosophy but of all systematic knowledge —science, law, mathematics, ethics. Without it, there could be no certainty, no rational discourse, no stable framework for thought. And yet, this very foundation has also functioned as a prison, excluding from the realm of the thinkable all that is paradoxical, ambiguous, contradictory—all that refuses to be reduced to a fixed, unchanging identity. The tyranny of identity has had profound consequences for philosophy. It has made it impossible to think the dynamic nature of existence, the fact that things change, that they evolve, that they are never simply identical with themselves. It has forced thought to conceive of becoming as a series of static states, of process as a sequence of fixed moments, of transformation as a superficial alteration of an underlying substance that remains unchanged. The real—becoming, flux, the ceaseless creativity of existence—has been hidden behind a veil of conceptual stability, a stability that is entirely a product of the mind's need for order Moreover, the principle of non-contradiction has made it impossible to think paradox—the simultaneous existence of opposites, the co-presence of being and non-being, the co emergence of unity and multiplicity. And yet, paradox is everywhere: in the quantum realm, light is both wave and particle; in the human realm, freedom is both real and constrained; in the realm of the sacred, the finite contains the infinite; in the realm of the self, identity is both stable and fluid. The refusal to think paradox has forced philosophy into a perpetual evasion, a flight from the very richness of reality into the sterile comforts of abstract consistency. The Inaccessible Infinite The third pillar of the classical prison is the finite conception of infinity. The Western tradition has almost always understood the infinite as an inaccessible horizon, a limit that can be approached but never reached, a goal that is forever deferred, a promise that is never fulfilled. This finite conception of the infinite has its roots in Aristotle's definition of the infinite as that beyond which there is always something—a never-ending addition, an endless series, a perpetually receding frontier. This conception has had two major consequences. First, it has placed the infinite outside the world, beyond the reach of finite beings. The infinite has become a theological concept—the transcendence of God, the ineffable mystery beyond all categories. Second, it has made the finite the only reality, the only object of genuine knowledge. What can be measured, bounded, and completed—only this is truly real. The infinite is a luxury, a speculative excess, a concept that points beyond experience but cannot ground it. This dual movement—the exile of the infinite and the absolutization of the finite—has produced a profound impoverishment of philosophical thought. The infinite has been transformed from an immanent reality, a constitutive dimension of existence, into a distant ideal, a regulative principle without ontological weight. The finite has been elevated to the status of ultimate reality, and yet the finite, by itself, is incomplete, fragmentary, and meaningless. The result has been a philosophy that is simultaneously arrogant and desperate—arrogant in its claim to know finite reality completely, desperate in its acknowledgment that finite reality alone cannot satisfy the deepest human longing for meaning, truth, and transcendence. (shrink)

Albert Camus’ views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as Absurdism, he defines the Absurd “as the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any meaning in a purposeless, meaningless, and irrational universe, with the ‘unreasonable silence’ of the universe in response.” However, this world in itself is not absurd, what is absurd is our relationship with the universe, which is irrational. Camus is considered to be (...) an existentialist, even though he firmly rejected the term throughout his lifetime. He is properly categorised as an atheist existentialist. However, he would also disagree with this label. In his notebooks, he presents the following contradictory statement: -/- “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” -/- This reflects the notion of the Absurd. The search of the possibility of the existence of God is humanly impossible, but this also entails that the proof that God does not exist is impossible too. He writes in The Myth of Sisyphus: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” The Myth of Sisyphus is a fierce expression of the Absurd. It starts off with a powerful and thought-provoking statement: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” . (shrink)

El propósito del presente ensayo es desarrollar una lectura existencial del poema “Del país de la pena” escrita por la poeta venezolana Hanni Ossott con el fin de pensar el término “expatriación” como concepto filosófico. Luego de una introducción histórica que busca situar el poema de Ossott al filo de una tradición poética que busca recuperar la sensación de extranjeridad frente a lo propiamente nacional, éste ensayo se propone trazar los horizontes metodológicos de la interpretación del poema a través de (...) una lectura del ensayo “Paysage avec dépaysement” [Paisaje en desorientación] escrito por el filósofo francés Jean-Luc Nancy. La lectura del ensayo de Nancy posibilitará la lectura existencial del poema de Ossott con la que el presente ensayo buscará demonstrar la riqueza filosófica de este poema y la manera en que tematiza la expatriación. A modo de conclusión, se sugerirá que la expatriación puede entenderse como una condena pero no necesariamente de modo negativo sino a través de una valencia positiva que éste término puede tener para la conceptualización contemporánea sobre América Latina. -/- The purpose of this paper is to develop an existential reading of the poem “Del país de la pena” written by the Venezuelan poet Hanni Ossott with the aim of thinking the term “expatriation” as a philosophical concept. Following a historical introduction that seeks to situate Ossott’s poem within a poetic tradition that tries to recuperate the feeling of strangeness in the face of the properly national, this essay attempts to trace the interpretative and methodological horizons of the poem through a reading of the essay “Paysage avec dépaysement” [Uncanny Landscapes] written by the French philosopher Jean- Luc Nancy. The reading of Nancy’s essay will facilitate the existential reading of Ossott’s poem with which the present essay will seek to demonstrate the philosophical richness of this poem and the way in which it thematizes expatriation. By way of conclusion, it will be suggested that expatriation can be understood as a sentence, but not necessarily in a negative manner; rather, it can be thought through a positive valence that can aid in the contemporary conceptualization about Latin America. (shrink)

En este texto se analiza cómo el filósofo español exiliado en México, José Gaos (1900- 1969), considera que la filosofía hispanoamericana, e incluso las propias tierras americanas, son lugares de una “utopía – aunque no ucronía-, debido a que tanto las tradiciones trascendente-religiosas como inmanente-filosóficas europeas han convertido a América, y como resultado final de una determinada filosofía de la historia, en lugar ideal del futuro del pensamiento filosófico –y, en última instancia, del hombre contemporáneo.

This paper interrogates the profound tension between Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism and modern evolutionary-neurobiological frameworks of consciousness, ultimately indicting Kant's practical philosophy from the standpoint of an ontology of care. The analysis begins by bridging Kant's epistemology of ``representation" and ``mental content" with Antonio Damasio's somatic theories of consciousness. While modern neurobiology effectively maps Kant's phenomenal self - demonstrating that all mental content is inextricably anchored to the body's homeostatic survival - it simultaneously exposes the fatal fragility of Kant's reliance (...) on an inaccessible, purely rational ``noumenal" soul. The inquiry then pivots from epistemology to ethics, contrasting Kant's Categorical Imperative with a survival-oriented moral framework grounded in the historical continuum of the Big Bang, Life, and Human Being. We contrast Kant's demand for absolute logical consistency-which systematically exiles empathy, biological consequence, and relational vulnerability from the realm of moral worth-with an evolutionary mandate focused on the mitigation of suffering. By framing moral behavior through the pragmatic, contextual lens of ``microlect expressions" and Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom), this paper exposes the inherent danger of Kant's mathematical universalism. We argue that by substituting the messy, vital work of human compassion for a sterile geometry of duty, Kantian deontology does not elevate human dignity. Rather, to a biologically embedded agent whose survival depends entirely on interconnected care, Kant's moral machinery is revealed to be deeply inhuman and philosophically disgusting. (shrink)

Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially (...) qualified affirmative answer. (shrink)

We argue that probability theory, in its canonical formulation, suffers from a pathol- ogy we term epistemic presentism: the systematic erasure of evidential history through normalization. This is not a technical limitation but an ontological mistake— mistaking the shadow for the substance, the map for the territory, the amnesia for the truth. Drawing on contact geometry, we demonstrate that probability distributions are exiled fragments of richer dynamical objects whose memory has been surgically removed. Evidence is not accumulated but integrated—not summed (...) algebraically but woven geometrically along paths through belief space. The curvature of these paths is not mathematical decoration but the scar tissue of irreversibility, the trace that learning leaves on the manifold of the possible. We resolve long-standing puzzles in confirmation theory, the problem of old evidence, and scientific underdetermination by recognizing that probability encodes conclusions while geometry encodes justi- fication. The implications extend to the nature of information, the arrow of epistemic time, and the thermodynamic soul of inference. Probability theory has been operating in Plato’s Cave, studying shadows while the sun of contact geometry blazed unseen above. (shrink)

In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that just punishment, though painful, benefits the unjust person by removing injustice from her soul. This paper argues that Socrates thinks the true judge (i) will never use corporal punishment, because such procedures do not remove injustice from the soul; (ii) will use refutations and rebukes as punishments that reveal and focus attention on psychological disorder (= injustice); and (iii) will use confiscation, exile, and death to remove external goods that facilitate unjust action.

How did immigrant scholars such as Rudolf Carnap, Max Horkheimer, and Alfred Schütz influence the development of American philosophy? Why was the U.S. community more receptive to logical empiricism than to critical theory or phenomenology? This volume brings together fifteen historians of philosophy to explore the impact of the intellectual migration. -/- In the 1930s, the rise of fascism forced dozens of philosophers to flee to the United States. Prominent logical empiricists acquired positions at prestigious U.S. universities. Critical theorists moved (...) their Frankfurt School to Columbia University. And a group of phenomenologists taught at the New School for Social Research. Though many refugee scholars acquired some American following, logical empiricism had the biggest impact on academic philosophy. The exiled empiricists helped the country turn into a bastion of ‘analytic philosophy’ after the war. Phenomenology and critical theory became prominent schools from the 1970s onwards and continue to be influential in American philosophy today. -/- This is the first book to investigate to the migration from an integrated perspective, bringing together historians of American philosophy, logical empiricism, phenomenology, and critical theory. (shrink)

In the long river of human thought, science and philosophy are like the two wings of civilization. Science illuminates the structure of the cosmos with the light of reason, revealing the order of nature; philosophy penetrates the origin of existence through the way of wisdom, discerning the meaning of life. The sages of the ancient world never divided reason from the Way (Dao). The Greek philosophia, meaning “love of wisdom,” embraced both the study of the heavens and the reflection on (...) human life. In the East, Laozi said: “Man follows Earth, Earth follows Heaven, Heaven follows the Dao, and the Dao follows Nature.” He, too, took the cosmos as teacher and the Dao as the source, uniting nature with the human heart. In that ancient age, thought was circular — science and philosophy formed one integral cognition. The light of reason and the way of wisdom were like day and night— opposite yet complementary; light reveals all forms, while Dao connects all beings. Reason allows humanity to understand how existence works; wisdom helps us perceive why it exists at all. But since the modern era, science and philosophy have parted ways. Science pursued precision and empirical power; philosophy sank into the solitude of speculation and the abyss of value. Science occupied the center of civilization, while philosophy was exiled from the temple of knowledge. Thus the light of reason grew ever brighter, while the way of wisdom faded into shadow. Humanity mastered the energy of the universe but lost the peace of the soul. We gained accuracy in calculation, yet forgot the meaning of existence. Reason became the pride of science; wisdom became the ghost of the age. The train of civilization speeds forward— yet no one knows where it is going. (shrink)

This paper explores the philosophical and psychological dimensions of atemporal consciousness—a mode of experiencing existence where linear time dissolves into fragmented seconds, rendering continuity illusory and precision lethal. We conceptualize atemporal minds not as exceptional anomalies but as forced exiles in temporality, compelled to endure amplified suffering through mental or existential time-travel. These minds thrive in chaos, rejecting geometric linearity and grand narratives in favor of discontinuous leaps toward creation. By integrating Bergson's theory of duration, Deleuze's notions of difference and (...) repetition, and chaos theory's implications for creativity, this essay argues that atemporal existence demands acceptance of uncertainty and fragmentation as pathways to meaningful, albeit non-linear, fulfillment. References to phenomenological disturbances of time consciousness and the role of chaos in unconscious creativity underscore the therapeutic and artistic potential of such experiences. (shrink)

The philosophical life can be a nomadic life, both in thought and practice. In the engaging and insightful work of the Mexican-Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Pereda, the more important of these is nomadic thought—a mode of thinking that moves and explores, that is not stationary or static, that is not stubbornly hidebound. This is a kind of nomadism that characterizes healthy or epistemically virtuous thinking in general, and that might indeed be indispensable to it. But a nomadism in practice—of migration, or (...) exile, or cross-border transplantation—is certainly also central to Pereda’s philosophical outlook. "Mexico Unveiled" brings together for an English-speaking audience some of Pereda’s most recent reflections on the philosophical significance of these two different types of nomadism, with a special emphasis on nomadic thinking. That idea is the through-line for Pereda’s thinking here. But the book also offers an idiosyncratic synthesis of 20th-century Mexican philosophy that considers the persistent influence of European colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of identity and inclusion, and the changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. (shrink)

The self that narrates a life is not always its author. This paper argues that coherent agency does not require psychological unity but governance, and its gravest failure is not always fragmentation but capture. The Modular Governance Model (MGM) holds that the mind is organized as functionally distinct modules — individuated by the register of their normative logic rather than by domain — operating under a regime that is Sovereign, Unstable, or Colonized. A Library of Introjects, assemblages installed through developmental (...) and cultural imprinting, can serve authentic governance or seize it. In the Colonized Regime the affective core — the one module that cannot be rewritten — is gated out of governance, and an installed False Self occupies the cleared executive position, producing the first-person perspective with the full phenomenology of authenticity while the exiled module remains physiologically intact. Malignant narcissism is the paradigm case, and the architecture explains what symptom- and trait-based accounts do not: the systematic failure and 63–64% dropout of standard therapy, together with the narrow conditions under which change is nonetheless possible. MGM is continuous with computational psychiatry at the level of mechanism — colonization is the capture of precision-weighting — but adds a configurational claim that mechanism alone cannot express: that a learned structure can author the self from within. It reframes agency, authenticity, and therapeutic change as phenomena of governance rather than of diagnosis. (shrink)

This article challenges the use of social deprivation as a punishment, and offers a preliminary examination of the human rights implications of exile and solitary confinement. The article considers whether a human right against coercive social deprivation is conceptually redundant, as there are recognised rights against torture, extremely cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment as well as rights to basic health care, education, and security, which might encompass what this right protects. The article argues that the right is not conceptually (...) redundant, but that, even if it were, there would be significant reasons to articulate it. (shrink)

In the title essay of The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art Arthur Danto describes two dominant strains of the philosophy of art in its Platonic beginnings: one that art is dangerous, and thus subject to political censorship or control, and the other that art exists at several removes from the ordinary reality, impotent to effect any meaningful change in the human world.1 These two ways of understanding art, really two charges laid at art’s door, seem contradictory, he writes, until one realizes (...) that the second is a philosophical response to the first. In a ‘‘kind of warfare between philosophy and art’’ philosophy sees art as a rival, as a challenger to the supremacy of reason over the minds of men. Thus Danto describes the premise advanced in Book X of the Republic that art is mimesis, or that of The Ion that the artist lacks knowledge of what he does, as components of a powerfully disabling theory of art, designed not so much to come to terms with the essence of art as to neutralize its power through metaphysical exile, denying art causal efficacy or epistemic validity in the real world. And the history of aesthetics, in Danto’s view, continues this disenfranchisement, whether in the Kantian ephemeralization of art as an object of disinterested judgment, outside the realm of human practical and political concerns, or in the Hegelian ‘‘takeover’’ of art, in which it is demoted as an inadequate form of philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the “Austro-American” logical empiricism proposed by physicist and philosopher Philipp Frank, particularly his interpretation of Carnap’s Aufbau, which he considered the charter of logical empiricism as a scientific world conception. According to Frank, the Aufbau was to be read as an integration of the ideas of Mach and Poincaré, leading eventually to a pragmatism quite similar to that of the American pragmatist William James. Relying on this peculiar interpretation, Frank intended to bring (...) about a rapprochement between the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle in exile and American pragmatism. In the course of this project, in the last years of his career, Frank outlined a comprehensive, socially engaged philosophy of science that could serve as a “link between science and philosophy”. (shrink)

I argue that the tragedies envisioned by the Symposium are two, both of which are introduced in the dialogue: (i) within months of Agathon's victory, half the characters who celebrated with him suffer death or exile on charges of impiety; (ii) Socrates is executed weeks after the dramatic date of the frame. Thus the most defensible notion of tragedy across Plato's dialogues is a fundamentally epistemological one: if we do not know the good, we increase our risk of making (...) mistakes and of suffering what are sometimes their catastrophic consequences. (shrink)

My study unfolds across several intertwined themes: -/- Historical Frankism — Frank’s biography, his antinomian revolt against rabbinic Judaism, his conversions, his authoritarian charisma, and the traumatic dynamics of the Frankist community. I show how his movement destabilized Jewish–Christian boundaries and reshaped Polish religious imagination.“Only to wipe out all laws, all religions, did I come to Poland…” -/- Frank and Sade — A comparative exploration of libertine transgression. While both inhabit an eighteenth‑century counter‑world of scandal and boundary‑breaking, I argue that (...) Sade’s cruelty is nihilistic and anti‑religious, whereas Frank’s provocations remain symbolically and ritually embedded within a sacred framework. -/- Frank and Bataille — The heart of the paper. I trace how Frank’s insistence on the primacy of matter, his valorisation of debasement, and his descent into the “lowest place” resonate with Bataille’s base materialism. Yet I highlight their divergence: Frank descends in order to rise; Bataille descends with no promise of ascent. -/- Poland as Esau/Edom — I show how Frank reimagines Poland as the mythic site of redemption, the place where Jewish law is overturned and gnosis becomes possible. This reconfigures Jewish exile and maps Frankist theology onto Polish geography and Catholic symbolism. -/- The Androgynous Messiah — Frank’s mythic self‑presentation as Adam and his daughter Eve as the Maiden/Messiah, drawing on Zoharic androgyny while unsettling normative religious categories. -/- Dreams, profanation, and the undoing of binaries — I argue that Frank’s dream‑logic and profanations destabilize distinctions between holy/unholy, true/false, sacred/profane — anticipating later thinkers like Bataille, Serres, Derrida, and even Adorno’s claim that the sacred must pass through the profane to endure. (shrink)

This paper formalises the Turing Theory, a diagnostic model of institutional recognition failure in which high intensity cognitive agents are systematically excluded during their lifetime and valorised only after neutralisation. The theory is anchored in the Law of the Dead Asset, which holds that institutions can safely recognise surplus cognition only once it has been rendered inert through death, silencing, exile, or administrative flattening. In this paper, Alan Turing is used as a diagnostic case rather than a biographical subject. (...) The analysis identifies a recurring institutional sequence of extraction, rejection, and posthumous appropriation. This sequence persists within contemporary academic, bureaucratic, and technological systems that publicly celebrate innovation while operationally enforcing procedural conformity. The paper concludes by examining the implications of this failure mode for artificial intelligence governance and epistemic justice, arguing that systems optimised for predictability risk reproducing the same architecture of erasure in both human evaluation and machine mediated decision making. (shrink)

This essay argues that we should find Crimmigration, which is the collapsing of immigration law with criminal law, morally problematic for three reasons. First, it denies those who are facing criminal penalties important constitutional protections. Second, it doubly punishes those who have already served their criminal sentence with an added punishment that should be considered cruel and unusual (i.e., indefinite imprisonment or exile). Third, when the tactics aimed at protecting and serving local communities get usurped by the federal government (...) for immigration enforcement purposes, they often undermine these original aims or get used in ways that conflict with the U.S. Constitution. These concerns should prompt us therefore either to reject the government’s plenary power over immigration or require the federal government to be more consistent about maintaining the separation between criminal law and immigration law. (shrink)

This paper identifies and formalizes two structural mechanisms — the Marie Antoinette Mechanism and the Reform Acceleration Paradox — that operate specifically under conditions of biological longevity asymmetry, and argues that their combination produces a governance failure mode categorically distinct from any previously analyzed in political theory. Both mechanisms are grounded in Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that political destabilization intensifies during reform rather than at peak misery, because improvement makes remaining asymmetry visible, legible, and attributable. The paper makes three principal (...) contributions. First, it establishes that in every prior historical instance of the symbol-targeting mechanism — from the French Revolution through the twentieth-century revolutionary movements — the symbol could in principle be separated from the body of the person who carried it, providing a theoretical exit through abdication, exile, or renunciation. Longevity asymmetry removes this exit: what makes a person a symbolic target is the biological fact of their body, which cannot be renounced. The symbol has become the body. Second, it formalizes the Reform Acceleration Paradox as a Tocquevillian derivation: under conditions of persistent biological asymmetry, partial reforms designed to reduce political pressure increase it by converting exclusion from a diffuse system property into a specific institutional choice. Louis XVI died not despite his reforms but partly because of them. Third — and against an intuitive assumption widely present in longevity governance discourse — the paper demonstrates that neither mechanism requires immortality or comprehensive longevity technology. Both are activated by visible biological asymmetry at any scale. A pre-existing epigenetic age gap of 7.3 years between income quintiles, documented by Belsky et al. (2022) before any targeted longevity intervention reached clinical deployment, establishes that the mechanisms are not predictions. They are already operative. (shrink)

The genocide in Pontos and in other parts of Anatolia, as well as in Thrace, is not merely as part of history but a window into a contemporary human rights crisis. The destruction continues in a somewhat less violent form in our time as the culture, language, and religious rites of the Ottoman Greeks are being lost due to massacres, forcible exile, and expropriations of sacred sites. This chapter introduces relevant human rights norms and argues that measures implemented by (...) the international community after other genocides could be a model for restitution and guarantees of non-recurrence in Pontos and other parts of Turkey. -/- It is a chapter preprint from The Genocide of the Christian Populations in the Ottoman Empire and Its Aftermath (1908-1923) (Taner Akçam, Theodosios Kyriakides, and Kyriakos Chatzikyriakidis eds., Routledge 2024). (shrink)

Leibniz’s philosophy enjoyed a Russian fandom that endured from the eighteenth century to the death of the last exiled Russian philosophers in the twentieth century. There was, to begin with, Leibniz’s direct impact on Peter the Great and on the scientific development of Saint Petersburg. Then there was, still in the eighteenth century, Mikhail Lomonosov, who was sent to study with Christian Wolff in Marburg, and who came back to Saint Petersburg with a watered-down Leibnizian worldview, which he applied to (...) the study of chemistry and physics. Another eighteenth century philosopher, Alexander Radishchev, who studied in Leipzig, displayed acquiescence with a number of key elements from Leibniz’s philosophy. Russian Lebnizianism as a continuous philosophical movement was considerably reinvigorated in the 1870s when the Leibnizian German philosopher Gustav Teichmüller took a position at the University of Dorpat (nowadays Tartu, Estonia), which was then located within the Russian Empire. Teichmüller influenced a number of Russian philosophers into adopting a “Teichmüllerian” version of Leibnizianism. Among these philosophers were Evgeny Bobrov and Alexei Kozlov. In Saint Petersburg, Kozlov influenced his own son, Askoldov, and the latter’s friend — Nikolai Lossky. In the meanwhile, in Moscow Lev Lopatin, Nikolai Bugaev, and Petr Astafiev developed their own Leibnizianism in seemingly relative independence from Teichmüller’s influence and presumably, in some cases, under the partial influence of Vladimir Solovyov. Despite this relative independence, however, the fact remains that there was in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia a network of more or less loosely interconnected Leibnizian philosophers who read each other and wrote about each other, who exchanged ideas, and who constituted a movement that we might characterize as “Russian Leibnizianism” or “Russian Neo-Leibnizianism.” In this chapter, I tell the story of the intellectual lineage of Russian Leibnizianism. (shrink)