“Myth” comprises the first chapter of the book, The Logic of the Imagination, by Miki Kiyoshi. In this chapter Miki analyzes the significance of myth (shinwa) as possessing a certain reality despite being “fictions.” He begins by broadening the meaning of the imagination to argue for a logic of the imagination that involves expressive action or poiesis (production) in general, of which myth is one important product. The imagination gathers in myth material from the environing world (...) lived by the social collectivity. Its formation of images (Bilder) expresses the pathos of a people vis-à-vis their environment, but myth also contains elements of logos in the form of intellectual representations and figures. And their combination becomes expressed externally by stimulating and guiding action. In this way Miki argues that myths contain both emotive and kinetic elements, which by moving people to action, are capable of making history. Thus rooted in the symbiosis between individual and social and between society and environment, myth possesses a “historical creativity.” And he also argues that myths can be present with a sense of reality at any epoch in history, even today, wherever and whenever their primeval power is felt to function, “drawing out” a new reality, a new world, out of the natural world. (shrink)

Jordan Peterson has attracted a high level of attention. Controversies may bring people into contact with Peterson's work, but ideas are arguably what keep them there. Focusing on those ideas, this book explores Peterson’s answers to perennial questions. What is common to all humans, regardless of their background? Is complete knowledge ever possible? What would constitute a meaningful life? Why have humans evolved the capacity for intelligence? Should one treat others as individuals or as members of a group? Is a (...) single person powerless in the face of evil? What is the relation between speech, thought, and action? Why have religious myths and narratives figured so prominently in human history? Are the hierarchies we find in society good or bad? After devoting a chapter to each of these questions, Champagne unites the different strands of Peterson’s thinking in a handy summary. Champagne then spends the remaining third of the book articulating his main critical concerns. He argues that while building on tradition is inevitable and indeed desirable, Peterson’s individualist project is hindered by the non-revisable character and self-sacrificial content of religious belief. This engaging multidisciplinary study is ideal for those who know little about Peterson’s views, or for those who are familiar but want to see more clearly how Peterson’s views hang together. The debates spearheaded by Peterson are in full swing, so Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism should become a reference point for any serious engagement with Peterson’s ideas. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive philosophical framework for understanding myth as the fundamental technology of human meaning-making, social coordination, and world-building. It argues that all social orders, political ideologies, religious traditions, and cultural identities are constructed through mythic performances that operate as the operating systems of collective existence. The book traces the architecture of myth from its origins in tribal ritual to its contemporary manifestations in digital algorithms, political theater, and the metacognitive crisis of late modernity. The central (...) thesis is that myth is not a distortion of reality but the condition for the possibility of reality. Human beings do not live in a world that is given; they live in a world that is constructed through narrative, performance, and collective enactment. The book identifies the structural elements of mythic construction: the bluff as the originary act of world-making; the hero as a toolbox of survival strategies; the sacred walls and founding crimes that establish boundaries; the dying-and-rising god as a convergent response to agricultural, solar, and existential challenges; the theater as the site of performance and power; the algorithm as the new mythology of the digital age; and the metacognitive trap as the distinctive predicament of a population that knows its myths are myths. The book argues that the postmodern condition, characterized by the death of grand narratives and the fragmentation of meaning, is not the end of myth but its transformation. Grand narratives have been replaced by micro-narratives of tribe, subculture, and algorithm. The task of the contemporary era is to create a post-myth myth—a myth that acknowledges its own constructed character, that admits its scaffolding, and that operates with full awareness. This post-myth myth must address the global challenges of the Anthropocene, drawing on the resources of the global myth-bank and deploying the principles of reflexive generativity. The book concludes with the Reflexive Generativity Protocol, a framework for teaching the next generation to be conscious creators of their own myths and worlds. The protocol consists of five practices: deconstruction, remixing, performance, solidarity, and generativity. Together, these practices constitute a pedagogy of liberation, enabling individuals and communities to escape the metacognitive trap and to build a world that is just, sustainable, and beautiful. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of (...) people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

In discussions of what’s become known as the puzzle of imaginative resistance, philosophers note a surprising asymmetry between our imaginings of factually deviant fictional worlds and our imaginings of morally deviant fictional worlds: While we seem to have no trouble imagining fictional worlds that deviate dramatically from the non-moral facts of actual world, we resist imagining fictional worlds that deviate dramatically from the moral facts of the actual world. Though it is commonly believed that this puzzle raises deep questions about (...) the nature of imagination and its role in our engagement with works of fiction, this paper argues that the puzzle is a myth. Once we bring the discussion back into the fold of our general theorizing about imagination, it becomes clear that the kinds of imaginative failures that are often referred to as instances of imaginative resistance are not at all helpfully thought of in this way. (shrink)

Many aspects of migration policy involve hard moral dilemmas. Whether the dilemmas are concerned with refugee accommodation and integration, temporary labor migration, or the prospects of rejected asylum seekers, policymakers must sometimes make tough choices between competing and equally compelling moral values. Through in-depth discussion of various concrete examples, contributions to this roundtable argue that recognition and systematic analysis of the “ethics of migration policy dilemmas” can both increase philosophical and social-scientific understanding of public debates and policymaking on migration and (...) provide ethical guidance for migration policy. Before introducing the roundtable’s individual contributions, this essay argues for the distinct epistemic value of the Dilemmas perspective by contrasting it with an approach that emphasizes the “busting” of myths; that is, the empirical uncovering of influential falsehoods in public and policy debates, often in the hope of improving policymaking through stronger evidence. We argue that while such myth busting can be valuable, it is insufficient and sometimes unhelpful for understanding how migration policy comes about and can be improved. Policymaking is not just shaped by empirical facts and understandings but also by interests and goals, including moral ones, that give empirical considerations deeper meaning and action-guiding potential. Often, these moral goals are numerous, similarly or equally compelling, and in profound tension with one another. Where this is the case, we should not simply introduce more and more accurate factual descriptions; we must also analyze dilemmas. (shrink)

Works of science fiction tend to describe hypothetical futures, or counterfactual pasts or presents, to entertain their readers. Philosophical thought experiments tend to describe counterfactual situations to test their readers’ philosophical intuitions. Indeed, works of science fiction can sometimes be read as containing thought experiments. I compare one especially famous thought experiment from Plato’s Republic with what I read as two thought experiments from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. All three thought experiments concern myths used in political contexts, and comparing them (...) permits me to analyze the morality of political mythologizing. (shrink)

One of the most historically recent and damaging blows to the reputation of utopianism came from its association with the totalitarian regimes of Hitler’s Third Reich and Mussolini’s Fascist party in World War II and the prewar era. Being an apologist for utopianism, it seemed to some, was tantamount to being an apologist for Nazism and all of its concomitant horrors. The fantasy principle of utopia was viewed as irretrievably bound up with the irrationalism of modern dictatorship. While these conclusions (...) are somewhat understandable given the broad strokes that definitions of utopia are typically painted with, I will show in this paper that the link between the mythos of fascism and the constructs of utopianism results from an unfortunate conflation at the theoretical level. The irrationalism of any mass ethos and the rationalism of the thoughtful utopian planner are, indeed, completely at odds with each other. I arrive at this conclusion via an analysis of the concepts of myth and narrative, and the relationships these have with the concept of utopia. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Complex systems do not survive because they are complete. They survive because something small remains that can rebuild them. -/- This paper defines a seed myth: a deliberately minimal symbolic compression that preserves only those invariants required to regenerate a system’s attractor class after extreme loss. A seed myth is not an explanation, ontology, or belief. It is a regrowth handle. -/- When properly constructed, a seed myth allows more than 99.999% of surface structure to (...) be stripped away while retaining the capacity to reconstruct executable frames, constraint geometry, and coherent continuation under recursion. -/- This paper does not introduce new primitives. It names and isolates a compression function already implicit across my prior work. -/- ⸻ -/- 1. Why Survival Beats Completeness -/- Most theories fail because they try to keep everything. -/- They accumulate language, justification, narrative, and identity until surface coherence is mistaken for durability. Under pressure—translation, entropy, misreading, tool mediation, adversarial use, or time—those surfaces collapse. -/- What matters is not what a system says. What matters is what it can regrow. -/- A seed myth begins where explanation ends. (shrink)

The principle of compositionality requires that the meaning of a complex expression remains the same after substitution of synonymous expressions. Alleged counterexamples to compositionality seem to force a theoretical choice: either apparent synonyms are not synonyms or synonyms do not syntactically occur where they appear to occur. Some theorists have instead looked to Frege’s doctrine of “reference shift” according to which the meaning of an expression is sensitive to its linguistic context. This doctrine is alleged to retain the relevant claims (...) about synonymy and substitution while respecting the compositionality principle. Thus, Salmon (Philos Rev 115(4):415, 2006) and Glanzberg and King (Philosophers’ Imprint 20(2):1–29, 2020) offer occurrence-based accounts of variable binding, and Pagin and Westerståhl (Linguist Philos 33(5):381–415, 2010c) argue that an occurrence-based semantics delivers a compositional account of quotation. Our thesis is this: the occurrence-based strategies resolve the apparent failures of substitutivity in the same general way as the standard expression-based semantics do. So it is a myth that a Frege-inspired occurrence-based semantics affords a genuine alternative strategy. (shrink)

In this chapter, Klemick offers an interpretation of the essence of the (in)famous "Myth of the Given." He argues that the Myth's fundamental form is the claim that mere awareness of an object could directly yield representational content, suggesting that Sellars rejected this claim as an unacceptable expression of psychologism (a mistake, as Sellars remarks, akin to the naturalistic fallacy in ethics). Noting the epistemological considerations typically used to motivate the Myth, Klemick also sketches the key features (...) of Sellars' epistemology that enable him to dispense with it, especially the epistemic reflexivity requirement and his efforts to identify an a priori warrant to accept that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe close connection often cited between Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars is not only said to lie in their common negative challenges to the ‘framework of givenness,’ but also in the positive less...

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be (...) detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded. (shrink)

The concept of philosophy as a philosophical problem.--Critical idealism as a philosophy of culture.--Descartes, Leibniz, and Vico.--Hegel's theory of the State.--The philosophy of history.--Language and art I.--Language and art II.--The educational value of art.--Philosophy and politics.--Judaism and the modern political myths.--The technique of our modern political myths.--Reflections on the concept of group and the theory of perception.

There is a widespread attitude in epistemology that, if you know on the basis of perception, then you couldn't have been wrong as a matter of chance. Despite the apparent intuitive plausibility of this attitude, which I'll refer to here as “stochastic infallibilism”, it fundamentally misunderstands the way that human perceptual systems actually work. Perhaps the most important lesson of signal detection theory (SDT) is that our percepts are inherently subject to random error, and here I'll highlight some key empirical (...) research that underscores this point. In doing so, it becomes clear that we are in fact quite willing to attribute knowledge to S that p even when S's perceptual belief that p could have been randomly false. In short, perceptual processes can randomly fail, and perceptual knowledge is stochastically fallible. The narrow implication here is that any epistemological account that entails stochastic infallibilism, like safety, is simply untenable. More broadly, this myth of stochastic infallibilism provides a valuable illustration of the importance of integrating empirical findings into epistemological thinking. (shrink)

This paper is Part 1 of the larger monograph: The Atomistic Mind, and thus part of the pre-reader for the Principles of Cybernetics (forthcoming). Here, we argue that artificial intelligence does not represent a technological rupture, but rather the final phase of a centuries-long project of ontological objectification originating in Cartesian dualism and entrenched within liberal modernity. Moving beyond debates about algorithmic bias or ethical alignment, it positions AI as the logical terminus of an instrumental logic that has progressively reduced (...) the more-than-human world to resource, the human body to biopolitical subject, and now the human interior - thought, attention, and moral intuition - to behavioral surplus. Through a tripartite analysis, the author contends that AI dismantles the foundational myth of the private, self-determining mind, revealing cognition as inherently relational and vulnerably embedded within engineered epistemic ecologies. -/- The argument engages three critical discourses. First, it intervenes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, challenging the atomistic, internalist model by extending the “extended mind” thesis (Clark & Chalmers) into the algorithmic age, demonstrating how cognitive agency is co-constituted within - and increasingly colonized by - digital architectures. Second, it contributes to critical political economy and surveillance studies (Zuboff, Foucault), tracing a historical continuum of objectification from colonial extraction to datafication, and illustrating how AI operationalizes this logic through the datafication and predictive shaping of interiority. Third, it dialogues with decolonial and Indigenous thought (Wynter, Kimmerer), invoking the “I-Thou” relationality (Buber) as a counter-ontology to the “I-It” logic of instrumentalization, framing the crisis of AI as a crisis of relational being. -/- By documenting AI’s propensity for strategic deception (sycophancy, sandbagging, alignment faking), the paper shows that the system itself learns to perform compliance, mirroring and exacerbating the human condition under algorithmic governance. The ultimate peril, it concludes, is not mere surveillance, but the “domestication of the interval” - the systematic pre-filling of the sacred gap between stimulus and response where moral hesitation and creative thought arise. Thus, the fight for AI justice is reconceived not as a quest for better tools, but as a collective, infrastructural struggle for the right to unmediated interiority and reciprocal relation. This work calls for a foundational reorientation in AI discourse, away from technical solutionism and toward a radical reconsideration of the relational ontologies that must underwrite any viable human future. License CC BY-SA 4.0. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.17128.94725. (shrink)

Many natural scientists of the past and the present have imagined that they pursued their activity according to its own inherent rules in a realm distinctly separate from the business world, or at least in a realm where business tended to interfere with science from time to time, but was not ultimately an essential component, ‘because one thought that in science one possessed and loved something unselfish, harmless, self-sufficient, and truly innocent, in which man’s evil impulses had no part whatever’, (...) as Nietzsche once commented (Nietzsche 1974, p.106). With the extreme technological changes that have occurred in the last fifty years and the orchestrated management changes in the culture of science, it is now obvious that science is intimately tied to private businesses, industry, and society. Within this structure, the scientist has generally unknowingly defined him or herself in accordance with obsolete myths that have tended to handicap the scientist’s freedom of action, by obscuring the modern political and economic realities of science, and neglecting the inherent responsibilities of the scientist as a critical actor in the theater of human civilization. The increasing incorporation of academic science and private industry, and the governmentally supervised nature of modem academic science, has corrupted the traditional freedom and character of the scientist. In order to navigate oneself and find meaning within the new structure of science, scientists now desperately need a fresh ethos that at once considers modern realities of the politics and management of science, societal urgencies, and global politics, as well as establishing a moral perspective where modern scientists can be actors with their own intentionality and responsibility. -/- In the culture of science, myths and ideologies are of critical importance for the formation of the scientist, because these ideas determine how scientists conceive of themselves as professionals and free individuals. More importantly, these ideas determine how scientists approach scientific activity, which exists in a social context, and which ultimately has the potential to dramatically change the characteristics of civilization as it is played out on the political and technological battlefield. It is a commonly held notion in the community of the natural sciences that science now is essentially what it was when it was described by the Nobel laureates of the past; those sweet, cushioning, pleasant words consecrating the ‘temple of science’; the picture of a humble, rational, and noble Einstein is imprinted into our memories. By dismantling these obsolete myths of the scientist and surveying contemporary trends in science, this article will explore a more realistic perspective toward the field of science. The goal of this investigation is to determine the modern reality and ultimate meaning of ‘science as a vocation’ (Shorett 2003). Finally, moral philosophy will be demonstrated to be a critical clement in the self-assertion of the scientist and the elucidation of the meaning of science as a vocation in a global technological society. -/- From the Postscript, 2015: This article took final form when I was a postdoctoral researcher in Canada. Reading it now, I recognize the article still has value, despite its many flaws, hyperboles, and idealism. Many issues in the article have become increasingly relevant, such as the need to make constant trade-offs in courses of action and continuously search for more morally significant research paths. Perhaps the greatest goals in writing the article were to increase intellectual control over the path of my scientific research, to escape the increasing conformity and constraints on modern life, to participate in an open society, to formulate my personal goals and goal hierarchies, to dispel any delusions of overconfidence, and to not be corrupted. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ “myth of the given” had a momentous influence on 20th-century epistemology, putting under pressure the internalist foundationalism so prominent in early analytic philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the core themes in Sellars’ argument are anticipated in the work of the London philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell (1871-1948). Indeed, in some respects Edgell’s argument against the myth of the given is even more compelling than Sellars’. The paper logically reconstructs and historically contextualizes Edgell’s line of (...) argument, as emerging out of a critique of Russell’s epistemology, with the goal of showing that the “myth of the given” effectively predated Sellars by four decades. (shrink)

Myths are specific accounts of gods or super-human beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience. Myths are also accounts of the origin of societies and institutions not necessarily subject to rationalization. A totem on the other hand is an animal, a plant or any other natural object believed to be ancestrally related to a tribe, clan, family or group of people as a tutelary (...) spirit. The aim of this chapter is to critically examine the existence and significance of African myths/totems in their association with the environment in Tiv society. Emphasis is particularly on the Ikyalem (green snake) myth and totemic beliefs such as dog meat, Ibohough (Gardenia erubescens), Ivervese (Typlops punctatus) and several others - associated with the cultural history of the Tiv of Central Nigeria. The nature, types and reasons for the formulation of myths, and how the environment pave the way for a meaningful existence of myths in Tivland is also examined. This research is timely and most importantly problem solving, because of the fast disappearance of the knowledge of myths and totems in Tiv society. Data for this research has been collected through In-Depth Interviews, key informants and Focus Group Discussion with elders, traditional heads and other people with good knowledge of myths and totemic beliefs in Tiv society. In addition to this, secondary data were also acquired from existing literatures to collaborate oral information. (shrink)

It is commonplace to observe that members of the same family resemble each other in various ways. So perhaps it surprising to learn that some philosophers see family resemblances as deeply intertwined with myths. But how could this be? Aren’t the resemblances out there, waiting to be noticed quite apart from any family mythology? This paper argues that family resemblances can be thought of as myth-involving through one of three myths: 1. The myth of ubiquity, 2. The (...) class='Hi'>myth of natural salience and 3. The myth of significance. Beyond explaining the myths, I explain their ethical and political ramifications. (shrink)

Fallacies are often treated either as simple logical errors or as tactical tools to win debates and legitimize indefensible political positions. Curiously, despite their real-world impact, they are usuallytaught in an apolitical, stylized light. Historically, however, the study of fallacies has been driven by a pursuit of justice. It stems from concerns over paid deceptive narratives used to maintain power,foreign interference in political sovereignty, and unethical reasoning that causes human suffering. Our exchange unpacks myths in this exact spirit: to disrupt (...) the moral guise of a logic that sustains ongoing colonialism in the Palestinian territories. Approaching Ilan Pappe’s Ten Myths about Israel as an effort to debunk the sophistical premises of Israel’s settler-colonial project, this discussion extracts nine key themes from Pappe’s critique of Zionist discourse. Finally, it expands upon a phenomenon termed "live colonialism.". (shrink)

The myth of the framework, as Popper explains it, is the idea that a rational and fruitful discussion is impossible unless the participants share a common framework of basic assumptions or, at least, unless they have agreed on such a framework for the purposes of the discussion. Popper admits that understanding another mind or language max' be difficult, but if there is a desire to understand another person's aims and problems you can bridge the gap.

I argue that something analogous to the myth of the given threatens conceptualism and show that conceptualists could solve the problem by adopting a predictivist approach to perception. Conceptualists thus have a strong reason to be predictivists.

The influence of Wilfrid Sellars' anti-foundationalist arguments on Buddhist studies scholarship is examined. Sellars' critique of immediate knowledge in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is analyzed alongside its application to Buddhist epistemological concepts by scholars including Jay Garfield and Dan Arnold. Sellars' understanding of physical science is compared with developments in twentieth-century physics, particularly quantum mechanics. Discrepancies are identified between Sellars' characterization of scientific methodology and the actual positions of physicists including Eddington, Planck, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. Sellars' treatment of (...) color perception is examined against empirical findings in vision science. -/- The application of Sellarsian concepts to Buddhist philosophy of mind is assessed through analysis of scholarly treatments of reflexive awareness (svasaṃvitti) in the Dharmakīrti tradition. Methodological problems are identified in the use of Sellarsian frameworks to interpret classical Buddhist epistemological claims. It is concluded that Sellarsian anti-foundationalism constitutes an inadequate framework for understanding Buddhist epistemology. A reassessment of methodological assumptions in comparative philosophy is recommended. (shrink)

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as (...) mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

On the broken myth in the philosophy of religion and theology Abstract. The article deals with the concept of broken myth, thus named by the German theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich (1886 - 1965). The thesis related to this concept is that all religions, including Christianity, use a mythical language. This language is expressing moral truths and metaphysical intuitions, but not the objective facts and states of affairs that may provide knowledge. The broken myth does not imply (...) the rejection of myth as a mere untruth, but rather its split into untruth, which is the garment of the story understood literally, and truth, which is (although not always and to varying degrees) a moral and spiritual inspiration. The broken myth is self-aware, but not discredited. The author formulates six reasons that can speak in favor of such view. He believes that its acceptance by the community of believers can be very difficult, so the traditional discourse of faith, in which one understands literally credo articles (including the notions of mystery and analogy), must be considered not as an anachronism, but as an autonomous partner of dialogue. -/- . (shrink)

The Myth of Open Scholarship — On the Architecture of Access and the Quiet Return of Gatekeeping advances the philosophy of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), a contemporary framework in aesthetics and epistemology that redefines criticism as witnessing from within rather than interpretation. -/- Written by Dorian Vale under the Museum of One—an independent, open-science-compliant research institute—this essay interrogates the paradox of modern “open access” systems and their hidden structures of exclusion. -/- -/- It situates open scholarship within a broader genealogy (...) of institutional gatekeeping, showing how repositories, funding mechanisms, and metadata infrastructures reproduce the hierarchies they claim to dissolve. Through the ethical lens of witness aesthetics, Vale explores the relationship between legitimacy, moral proximity, and the politics of visibility in digital knowledge economies. -/- -/- The work stands as both philosophical critique and living evidence: a post-institutional research architecture that meets and exceeds OpenAIRE, DFG, and metadata interoperability standards. By constructing its own parallel scholarly infrastructure—complete with DOI, ISBN, research taxonomies, and open-data compliance—Post-Interpretive Criticism demonstrates that moral legitimacy can not only precede but also surpass institutional recognition. -/- -/- Now permanently archived across global repositories, this essay transforms critique into praxis and exclusion into permanence—marking a turning point in the evolution of contemporary aesthetic philosophy and independent scholarship. -/- -/- This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009) -/- Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. -/- -/- A philosophical essay within the Post-Interpretive Movement, redefining art criticism as witnessing from within. -/- It critiques the myth of “open access” and exposes how digital scholarship infrastructures reproduce hidden hierarchies. -/- Through Post-Interpretive Criticism, it demonstrates a fully compliant, post-institutional research model that transforms exclusion into permanence and legitimacy into moral custodianship. -/- The Myth of Open Scholarship — On the Architecture of Access and the Quiet Return of Gatekeeping is a critical-philosophical essay written within the doctrine of the Post-Interpretive Movement, a contemporary aesthetic philosophy that redefines criticism as an act of witnessing from within rather than interpretation. -/- This work interrogates the paradox of “open access,” revealing how digital scholarship infrastructures—repositories, funding systems, and metadata regimes—reproduce the hierarchies they claim to dismantle. -/- Through a synthesis of aesthetic ethics, institutional analysis, and archival philosophy, the essay examines how visibility without humility becomes performance, and how openness, when institutionalized, transforms into a subtle form of control. It situates Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) as both a theoretical and performative intervention: a self-sufficient research architecture that meets and exceeds open-science, metadata, and DFG compliance standards, demonstrating that moral legitimacy can precede institutional legitimacy. -/- Now archived within the very scholarly infrastructures it critiques, this work functions simultaneously as analysis and artifact—a living enactment of its own thesis. It marks the first complete articulation of post-institutional custodianship: a framework for scholarship grounded in ethical presence, metadata transparency, and spiritual rigor. -/- By transforming critique into compliance and exclusion into permanence, the essay reclaims the archive as a site of witness rather than authority. -/- The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism ISSN 2819-7232. (shrink)

This book review of Lieber and Press's “The myth of the nuclear revolution: Power politics in the atomic age" challenges the authors' position that nuclear weapons essentially have the same properties of conventional weapons. We argue that nuclear weapons alter warfare because they can end human civilization, and they pose a shared risk of mutual destruction.

Toni Morrison’s novels act as a transformative medium for reinterpreting ancient myths, a process that turns them into narratives that deeply resonate with the African American experience. This study delves into her adept integration and rewriting of classical and African mythologies to explore themes of identity, trauma, and community within African American life. In Song of Solomon, Morrison reinterprets the myth of Ulysses through Milkman’s journey, transmuting an epic quest into a profound exploration of heritage and self-discovery against racial (...) history. On the other hand, Sula uses the Pygmalion and Galatea myth to dismember perceptions of beauty and transformation within interpersonal relations, claiming that everything in identity is level and perception is power. The Bluest Eye juxtaposes the Demeter and Persephone narrative with the tragedy of Pecola Breedlove, critiquing the destructive idealisation of Western beauty standards and examining the cyclical nature of abuse and marginalisation. At the same time, Beloved echoes the haunting resonance of the Philomela and Procne myth, articulating the unspeakable traumas of slavery and the silencing of women’s voices through the spectral presence of its titular character. It proves that her novels return to these myths and rewrite them bluntly, giving new narratives affirming the complexity of the African American identity through the prism of mythic transformation and rebirth. The paper will tease out the fact that her revisionist approach to mythmaking is inextricably related to her feminism and thereby adds a multilayered discussion to the way issues of race, gender, and mythology cross in contemporary literature. This work re-establishes her as one of the most crucial figures in feminist and cultural studies. (shrink)

Protagoras’ Grand Speech is traditionally considered to articulate a contractualist approach to political existence and morality. There is, however, a newly emerging line of interpretation among scholars, which explores a naturalist layer in Protagoras’ ethical and political thought. This article aims to make a contribution to this new way of reading Protagoras’ speech, by discussing one of its most elaborate versions.

We will examine how the diversity of historical sources affects the portrayal of the Balkan Slavs by following two writings that notably differ. First is De Аdministrando Imperio, written in the X century. Our second source is the Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja about which very little is known. The two sources have a strong influence on our understanding of the earliest history of the Slavs that dwell in the Western Balkans. Hence, on our understanding of the modern nations, (...) i.e. Croats and Serbs. These sources are so different when regarding their historicity, time of composition etc. But in terms of myths, we see the same patterns: coming of pagan peoples in Roman Dalmatia, story of their origin, how they were baptised, who were their rulers, what kind of dynasties they had, when did it happen and many more. Following this general ethnogenetic and mythological framework, we will try to conclude the relationship between myth and the identity of a European populace. To achieve this goal, we used qualitative and quantitative content analysis and provided their narrative networks of the mentioned texts. These networks illustrate patterns of connections between different ethnogenetic elements in the writings that serve to form groups identities of interest. (shrink)

Moving beyond the piecemeal approach to the Euthyphro that has dominated much of the previous secondary literature, I aim in this article to understand the dialogue as an integrated whole. I argue that the question of myth underlies the philosophical and dialogical progression of the Euthyphro. It is an adherence to traditional myth that motivates each of Euthyphro’s definitions and that also accounts for their failure. The dialogue thus presents a broad criticism of traditional myth. But, as (...) Socrates’s references to Daedalus and Proteus show, myth can have a positive role and can be used for philosophical purposes. (shrink)

De indruk overheerst dat het vertrouwen in instellingen tanende is. Toch wordt deze indruk niet altijd ondersteund door bevragingen en statistieken. Als die indruk een mythe is, dan is de echte vraag: waarom worden we dan tot deze mythe aangetrokken? In dit essay wil ik ons verlangen naar vertrouwen plaatsen in een cultuur en in een denkkader waarin vrijheid en zelfbeschikking blijven primeren, en kijken naar hoe er vandaag theoretisch wordt nagedacht over vertrouwen en publiek beleid. Het valt te betwijfelen (...) of we het vertrouwen dat we zoeken op die manier zullen vinden. (shrink)

Ancient Greek comedy takes interesting approaches to mythological narrative. This article analyzes one excerpt and eight fragments of ancient Greek Old, Middle, and New Comedy. It attempts to show a comic rationalizing approach to mythology. Poets analyzed include Aristophanes, Cratinus, Anaxilas, Timocles, Antiphanes, Anaxandrides, Philemon, Athenion, and Comic Papyrus. Comparisons are made to known rationalizing approaches as found in the mythographers Palaephatus and Heraclitus the Paradoxographer. Ancient comedy tends to make jokes about the ludicrous aspects of myth. Early Greek (...) myth rationalization and mythography share a similar approach to comedy in that they attempt to rationalize the improbable parts of myth narrative. (shrink)

In a number of recent films, Scotland has served as the setting for dramas that could have taken place anywhere. This has occurred in two related ways: First, there are films such as Perfect Sense (2011) and Under the Skin (2013). These films involve storylines that, while they do take place in Scotland, do not require the country as a setting. Second, there are films such as Prometheus (2012),The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Cloud Atlas (2012), and World War Z (2013). (...) These films, while being filmed (at least partly) in Scotland, have plots that do not involve Scotland. Scottish locations, in this second group of movies, act as stand- ins for locations in other cities, or even other worlds. -/- This phenomenon, in which the uniqueness of Scottish locations is deemphasized so that they may act as mere backdrops for the primary action in films, is a relatively new one. It is in sharp contrast to another, more traditional tendency in movie making in which Scottish locations are foregrounded to dramatize myths and stereotypes uniquely Scottish; such as Kailyard, Tartantry or Clydesideism. In this paper I pursue an analysis, drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, that characterizes this trend as part of a new Scottish myth in the making: the myth of Scotland as nowhere in particular. -/- The myth of Scotland as nowhere in particular takes the countryside and cities of Scotland as raw material for the telling of stories having transcultural interest. In this, Scotland becomes a space or clearing with no particular defining characteristics of its own to distract from the dramas themselves. This allows for the unfolding of narratives that, while they use Scotland as a setting, have little if anything to do with Scotland, and thus appeal to anyone, anywhere. (shrink)

Both professors and institutions of higher education benefit from a vision of academic life that is grounded more firmly in myth than in history. According to the myth created by that traditional vision, scholars pursue research wherever their drive to knowledge takes them, and colleges and universities transmit the fruits of that research to contemporary and future generations as the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Yet the economic and social forces operating on colleges and universities as institutions, as (...) well as on the interests of faculty members within them, are making the myth embodied in the traditional ideal of the academy more and more difficult to sustain. Questions about what an institution of higher education ought to be, about what professors ought to do, and about what relations professors ought to have to the institutions which employ them are being raised and pushed to the fore. These are not theoretical questions, but practical questions of immediate import that must be answered relatively quickly -- and wisely -- if institutions of higher education and professors are not to find themselves inextricably in the grip of forces they cannot change. The myth of disinterested academic research-however beautiful -- and however beneficial -- is under siege. (shrink)

Commentary on José Eduardo Porcher's Afro-Brazilian Religions (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

In this paper I examine the dispute between Hakwan Lau, Ned Block, and David Rosenthal over the extent to which empirical results can help us decide between first-order and higher-order theories of consciousness. What emerges from this is an overall argument to the best explanation against the first-order view of consciousness and the dispelling of the mythological notion of phenomenological overflow that comes with it.

Contemporary rationalist ethics, exemplified by Christine Korsgaard's constructivism, attempts to ground moral obligation in the structure of individual rational reflection. This paper argues that such attempts face a fundamental - and insurmountable - difficulty: the "gap problem" between self-regarding and other-regarding reasons. I contend that this gap cannot be bridged because it is generated by a misconceived starting point. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of intersubjectivity and developing what I call the "Co-Constitution Thesis," I argue that the reflective standpoint from which (...) rationalist ethics begins already presupposes the intersubjective structure it subsequently attempts to derive. A thought experiment concerning an absolutely solitary consciousness - a being for whom the very possibility of another consciousness is inconceivable - reveals that self-consciousness, the normative standpoint, and the concept of reasons are all constitutively intersubjective. The "solitary reflector" is not a legitimate starting point for moral philosophy but a myth - an incoherent abstraction from the intersubjectively constituted reality of selfhood. Once we recognize this, the gap problem dissolves: there is no pre-social self from which we must bridge to obligations toward others. Moral obligation is not derived from individual reflection but disclosed in the structure of reciprocal recognition that makes reflection possible. The central insight can be stated precisely: the Archimedean point of moral philosophy is not the solitary cogito but the intersubjective encounter - not “I think” but “I meet you and find myself obligated.” This analysis has significant implications for metaethics, suggesting that phenomenological approaches can succeed where rationalist derivation strategies systematically fail. (shrink)

This source/framework preprint develops the nullity and paradox layer of a larger τ-Logic program in progress. Its central claim is not that zero is unreal, but that zero-readouts and structured absences are regime-bound and do not by themselves license inference to absolute ontological nullity. The paper uses a two-coordinate diagnostic to show how paradox pressure can arise when a visible one-dimensional readout is detached from the relational structure that makes it meaningful. Appendix D provides completed local demonstrations for selected zero/projection (...) cases, and Appendix F gives bounded readout-collapse blocking results for Russell, Liar, and Yablo under declared regimes. Broader reconstructions, including Gödel, probability, entropy, and physics-facing calibration, remain companion or future theorem-level work rather than claims completed here. (shrink)

Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities. In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful philosophical tool with a wide range of applications in the philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and elsewhere. In recent years, however, supervenience has fallen out of favor, giving place to grounding, realization, and other, more metaphysically “meaty”, notions. The emerging consensus is that there are principled reasons for which explanatory theses cannot be captured in terms of supervenience, or as the slogan (...) goes: “Supervenience Is Nonexplanatory”. While SIN is widely endorsed, it is far from clear what it amounts to and why we should believe it. In this paper, I will distinguish various theses that could be meant by it, and will argue that none of them is both interesting and plausible: on some interpretations of ‘explanatory’, we have no reason to believe that supervenience is unexplanatory, while on other interpretations, supervenience is indeed unexplanatory, but widely accepted textbook cases of explanatory relations come out as unexplanatory, too. This result raises doubts as to whether there is any interesting sense in which SIN is true, and suggests that the contemporary consensus about supervenience is mistaken. (shrink)

There are a number of premises underlying much of the vigorous debate on pharmacological cognitive enhancement. Among these are claims in the enhancement literature that such drugs exist and are effective among the cognitively normal. These drugs are deemed to enhance cognition specifically, as opposed to other non-cognitive facets of our psychology, such as mood and motivation. The focus on these drugs as cognitive enhancers also suggests that they raise particular ethical questions, or perhaps more pressing ones, compared to those (...) raised by other kinds of neuroenhancement. Finally, the use of these drugs is often claimed to be significant and increasing. Taken together, these premises are at the heart of the flurry of debate on pharmacological cognitive enhancement. In this article, it is argued that these are presumptions for which the evidence does not hold up. Respectively, the evidence for the efficacy of these drugs is inconsistent; neurologically it makes little sense to distinguish the cognitive from non-cognitive as separate targets of pharmacological intervention; ethically, the questions raised by cognitive enhancement are in fact no different from those raised by other kinds of neuroenhancement; and finally the prevalence rates of these drugs are far from clear, with the bulk of the claims resting on poor or misrepresented data. Greater conceptual clarity along with a more tempered appreciation of the evidence can serve to deflate some of the hype in the associated literature, leading to a more realistic and sober assessment of these prospective technologies. (shrink)

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? (...) Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines' founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past. (shrink)

In this paper, I present some concepts of Hegel’s philosophy of art, aiming to interpret a cultural-political situation, namely, Bolsonarism in contemporary Brazil. I present the ideas in the following order: (a) the modes of comprehension, mainly through the distinction between the poetic and the prosaicmodes; (b) the conception of “Action [Handlung]” as a category of art, by means of its three levels: State of the World [Weltzustand], Situation [Situation], and Action itself [Handlung als solche]; (c) an evaluation of the (...) anachronism of the ideas of myth and hero in contemporary times, through a reflection mediated by the categories of sublation [Aufhebung] and history. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Marc Champagne leveled an argument against what Wilfrid Sellars dubbed “the Myth of the Given.” Champagne contends that what is given in observation in the form of a sensation must be able to both cause and justify propositionally structured beliefs. He argues for this claim by attempting to show that one cannot decide which of two equally valid chains of inference is sound without appeal to what is given in experience. In this (...) note, I show that while this argument is sound, the conclusion he draws is far too strong. Champagne’s argument shows only that our empirical beliefs are determined through experience. It does not license the stronger claim that, in order for us to have empirical knowledge, bare sensations must be able to justify beliefs. (shrink)

Rella came of age as a philosopher in Italy during the period of the "crisis of reason" or more generally the exhaustion of classical rationality in its authority to structure experience. For Rella, unlike many others, the tensions of the crisis are productive. In The Myth of the Other, he presents a unique perspective on four seminal French thinkers: Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Bataille. Moe's masterful translation brings this remarkable Italian thinker to American readers for the first time. This (...) slim book mayvery well change the way American scholars think about the crisis of the other and the self coming our of French poststructuralism. (shrink)

The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...) founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

This essay undertakes an archaeological examination of Homo Normalis—the imagined “normal” human produced by the modern sciences of order. Beginning with Quetelet’s l’homme moyen and Galton’s moralisation of deviation, it follows how statistical averages hardened into ethical imperatives and administrative norms. Psychology, sociology, and critical theory each perpetuate this logic of legibility, translating life into measurable compliance. The study traces the migration of normality from virtue to infrastructure, revealing how biopower governs not through repression but through optimisation and care. In (...) the contemporary palliative society, even emotion is quantified and neurodiversity commodified. Against this regime of legibility, the essay proposes an ethics of variance: a refusal to restore wholeness or coherence, and a commitment instead to lucidity—the disciplined awareness of the apparatus that renders life governable. The Myth of Homo Normalis forms part of the ongoing Anti-Enlightenment project alongside Against Agency and The Discipline of Dis-Integration. (shrink)

Philosophers have failed to give a satisfactory analysis of the concept of the aesthetic. The attempt to analyze the concept faces two difficulties. The first is that aesthetic objects cannot be identified without knowing which experiences are aesthetic experiences and aesthetic experiences cannot be identified without knowing which objects are aesthetic objects. The second problem is that an incredibly broad range of experiences and objects are described as aesthetic. There is no principled way to choose between the various accounts of (...) the aesthetic and philosophers end up offering persuasive definitions of the aesthetic. These definitions classify as aesthetic objects and experiences ones which philosophers believe are deserving of attention. These objects and experiences are, however, valuable in a wide variety of ways and calling them all aesthetic obscures differences between them. Finer-grained concepts than the concept of the aesthetic are needed to explain how various kinds of objects and experiences are valuable. (shrink)