From the very beginning German dentists and their scientific and professional organizations were involved in the disastrous developments following the Nazi assumption of power of 1933. After purging and both organisational and ideological streamlining which had been comparatively rapidly accomplished in 1933/34 a development started which was characterized by extreme professional confrontation and lust for power in close entanglement with Nazi health policy objectives and deformation of scientific dentistry. A decisive role was assigned to the Reichszahnärzteführer Ernst Stuck (...) (1893-1974) who was the highest representative of the dental profession throughout the Nazi Regime. However, up to the present his life and position has not been thoroughly researched. What is more, history of dentistry has been looking at his activities in a merely cursory and appeasing way.In fact, his function as Reichszahnärzteführer needs to be critically scrutinized and evaluated. (shrink)

Wars and armed conflicts have a devastating impact at the economic, social, and individual level. Millions of children and adolescents are forced to bear their disastrous consequences, also in terms of mental health. Their effects are even more complicated when intertwined with those of other disasters such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. To help them face such adverse events, lay adults can be supported by psychoeducational interventions involving simple tools to assist children and adolescents emotionally. Hence, we planned and (...) implemented two public communication campaigns concerning wars to support adult carers such as parents, teachers, educators, psychologists, first responders, and others interested in young people’s wellbeing. We developed psychoeducational materials to help children and adolescents cope with negative emotions related to indirect and direct exposure to wars. This study had the objective to identify the content for two pamphlets, testing their comprehensibility, usability, and utility, and monitoring their dissemination. First, based on classifications of coping strategies and on a previous campaign about COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to include in the psychoeducational materials basic information on news about wars and common reactions to wars, respectively; on emotions that might be experienced; and on coping strategies for dealing with negative emotions. For the first pamphlet, we identified the strategies involving 141 adults. They completed an online survey with open-ended questions concerning ways to help children and adolescents cope with negative emotions associated with the Russia-Ukraine war. For the second pamphlet, we selected the contents based on Psychological First Aid manuals. Through content analyses, we chose 24 strategies. Second, data gathered with 108 adults who had consulted the psychoeducational materials supported their comprehensibility, usability, and utility. Third, we monitored the visibility of the campaigns after the release of the pamphlets, using Google Analytics™ data from the HEMOT® website through which we disseminated them. To conclude, our findings supported the comprehensibility, the usability, and the utility of the two pamphlets, to be disseminated as psychoeducational materials in the early phase of a disaster. (shrink)

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book offers a devastating look at deeply flawed development processes driven by international finance, African governments and the global consulting industry. It examines major river basin development underway in the semi-arid borderlands of Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan and its disastrous human rights consequences for a half-million indigenous people. The volume traces the historical origins of Gibe III megadam construction along the Omo River in Ethiopia-in (...) turn, enabling irrigation for commercial-scale agricultural development and causing radical reduction of downstream Omo and (Kenya's) Lake Turkana waters. Presenting case studies of indigenous Dasanech and northernmost Turkana livelihood systems and Gibe III linked impacts on them, the author predicts agropastoral and fishing economic collapse, region-wide hunger with exposure to disease epidemics, irreversible natural resource destruction and cross-border interethnic armed conflict spilling into South Sudan. The book identifies fundamental failings of government and development bank impact assessments, including their distortion or omission of mandated transboundary assessment, cumulative effects of the Gibe III dam and its linked Ethiopia-Kenya energy transmission 'highway' project, key hydrologic and human ecological characteristics, major earthquake threat in the dam region and widespread expropriation and political repression. Violations of internationally recognized human rights, especially by the Ethiopian government but also the Kenyan government, are extensive and on the increase-with collaboration by the development banks, in breach of their own internal operational procedures. A policy crossroads has now emerged. The author presents the alternative to the present looming catastrophe-consideration of development suspension in order to undertake genuinely independent transboundary assessment and a plan for continued development action within a human rights framework-forging a sustainable future for the indigenous peoples now directly threatened and for their respective eastern Africa states. Claudia Carr's book is a treasure of detailed information gathered over many years concerning river basin development of the Omo River in Ethiopia and its impact on the peoples of the lower Omo Basin and the Lake Turkana region in Kenya. It contains numerous maps, charts, and photographs not previously available to the public. The book is highly critical of the environmental and human rights implications of the Omo River hydropower projects on both the local ethnic communities in Ethiopia and on the downstream Turkana in Kenya. David Shinn Former Ambassador to Ethiopia and to Burkina Faso Adjust Professor of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington D.C. (shrink)

This book outlines and analyzes the economic development of China between 1949 and 2007. Rather than being narrowly economic, the book addresses many of the broader aspects of development, including literacy, morality, demographics and the environment. The distinctive features of this book are its sweep and that it does not shy away from controversial issues. For example, there is no question that aspects of Maoism were disastrous but Bramall argues that there was another side to the whole (...) programme. More recently, the current system of government has presided over three decades of very rapid economic growth. However, the author shows that this growth has come at a price. Bramall makes it clear that unless radical change takes place, Chinese growth will not be sustainable. This large, comprehensive text is relevant to all those studying the economic history of China as well as its contemporary economy. It is also useful more generally for students and researchers in the fields of international and development economics. (shrink)

This is at once a fascinating, illuminating, perceptive, and perplexing book. It has many virtues. There are probably few intellectuals in any "discipline" who can write about the sweep of Western civilization with such scope, insight, and perceptiveness. Nisbet has attempted to write a history of a metaphor which has exerted an enormous influence on Western thinking from the Greeks until our time. It is the metaphor of organic development as applied to the understanding of social development. According (...) to Nisbet we find this basic metaphor at the root of Greek thinking about cycles, the Christian idea of epic, and the modern idea of development as progress. The first part subtly sketches the variations on the metaphor of organic growth in The Greeks, The Christians, and The Moderns. This in turn establishes a background for exploring the theory of social development articulated from the eighteenth century to the present. Although Nisbet is modest in his claims about his distinctive contribution to each of these historical chapters, he does bring fresh insight to bear and exposes numerous myths that have cluttered our historical understanding. Given the scope of his treatment, there is plenty that "specialists" may question, although even where one disagrees with his interpretations, one can't help admiring his command of the material. It is the final chapter that leaves one perplexed. For while Nisbet has made an excellent case for showing how deep the metaphor of organic development has been in Western thought, he seems to be genuinely ambivalent about its significance and pragmatic value. Operating in this chapter is a dichotomy between the "literal" and the "metaphoric" that is never fully explicated. Nisbet seems to think that with proper judiciousness, the metaphor can be revealing when applied to large scale units such as "civilization" and "culture," but that it is disastrous and dogmatic when used to account for specific instances of social behavior. The book ends with a rather sharp polemical attack on contemporary functionalists. It would seem that Nisbet set out to trace the variations of the metaphor of organic development in order to show how it still influences contemporary "sophisticated" thinking and to expose the abuses and irrelevance of the metaphor for understanding social behavior, but in the course of his masterful exploration he has succeeded in laying the groundwork for a serious questioning of his own polemical conclusions.--R. J. B. (shrink)

How can the world as it appears to us, the world we live in, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That is our fundamental problem, encompassing all others of science, thought, and life. Academic philosophy ought to have developed as the discipline that keeps alive imaginative and critical thinking about this problem—about how it interacts with more particular and specialised problems—in universities, and in cultural and social life. If philosophy had developed in this way, (...) as Critical Fundamentalism, it would have noticed, and highlighted long ago the bad philosophy dominating academic inquiry. But philosophy has not, and still does not, put Critical Fundamentalism into practice. Modern philosophy began well: Descartes’ Cartesian dualism is an early attempt at solving our fundamental problem. But then an extraordinary thing happened. Philosophers after Descartes rejected Cartesian dualism but, instead of returning to the problem that Descartes tried, and failed, to solve, namely our fundamental problem, they continued to struggle with problems generated by Cartesian dualism, the very doctrine they had rejected! That is the post-Cartesian blunder; it had a disastrous impact on subsequent academic philosophy. It blinded academic philosophers to the damaging irrationality of knowledge-inquiry. (shrink)

Out of what the West now terms contemporary art, some would construct the synthesis and final accomplishment of every civilization, of all the great forms of art that have followed one another, blending and overlapping ever since man has existed and began expressing himself, like a fugue with innumerable developments that always returns to focus on the same theme, headed in the same direction. This evolution, as strangely loaded with analogies as it is rigidly anachronous, has borne, followed and determined (...) without failing, the mutations in our image. Art of the West in particular, in all its principal incarnations from ancient mythologies all the way to Rodin, from the Romanesque pilgrimage down to Daumier and Picasso—moving through culminating points of extreme harmony or tension: Rembrandt, Goya, Soutine—is presented as the great figure of a God in human appearance. Around this figure has been formed an entire world in which the real has continually been re-invented as art renewed its statements of it. Did this God and this world lose soul and memory on the day when the photographer's lens, a disastrously incorruptible witness, indicated the limits of very strict anthropomorphism? (shrink)

The Sundarbans represent the largest remaining tract of coastal mangrove wetlands in tropical Asia. The dynamics of the fish communities are poorly understood, and current research indicates a fragile ecology. Various development projects have had serious negative impacts on the estuarine fishes in nearby parts of Bangladesh. Impacts on the fisheries tend to affect the poorest elements of the society, the landless subsistence fishermen. The record of development assistance agencies is poor, with respect to the environment in general (...) and fisheries in particular. Taking steps to rectify the problem would include environmental review of projects prior to and during project implementation. Given the lack of a pure research base in the tropics, applied research is often modeled on temperate systems, which can be disastrous. Thus, it is also suggested that basic research on the environment be supported in order to build an understanding of tropical ecosystems prior to any attempts at manipulation of these ecosystems. (shrink)

Philosopher, physicist, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was one of the most unconventional scholars of his time. His book Against Method has become a modern classic. Yet it is not well known that Feyerabend spent many years working on a philosophy of nature that was intended to comprise three volumes covering the period from the earliest traces of stone age cave paintings to the atomic physics of the 20th century – a project that, as he conveyed in a letter to Imre (...) Lakatos, almost drove him nuts: “Damn the,Naturphilosophie.” The book’s manuscript was long believed to have been lost. Recently, however, a typescript constituting the first volume of the project was unexpectedly discovered at the University of Konstanz. In this volume Feyerabend explores the significance of myths for the early period of natural philosophy, as well as the transition from Homer’s “aggregate universe” to Parmenides’ uniform ontology. He focuses on the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity, which he considers a disastrous development, and the associated separation of man from nature. Thus Feyerabend explores the prehistory of science in his familiar polemical and extraordinarily learned manner. The volume contains numerous pictures and drawings by Feyerabend himself. It also contains hitherto unpublished biographical material that will help to round up our overall image of one of the most influential radical philosophers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper examines the development of British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s. In a 1951 report for the World Health Organization Bowlby contended that the mother is the child's psychic organizer, as observational studies of children worldwide showed that absence of mother love had disastrous consequences for children's emotional health. By the end of the decade Bowlby had moved from observational studies of children in (...) hospitals to animal research in order to support his thesis that mother love is a biological need. I examine the development of Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s, a central period in the evolution of his views and in debates about the social implications of his work. I argue that Bowlby's view that mother love was a biological need for children influenced discussions about the desirability of mothers working outside the home during the early Cold War. By claiming that the future of a child's mind is determined by her mother's heart, Bowlby's argument exerted an unusually strong emotional demand on mothers and had powerful implications for the moral valuation of maternal care and love. (shrink)

This text develops a novel methodology for social investigation into the Flint (Michigan, USA) water crisis by using classical Husserlian phenomenology as its point of departure. To develop a proper method in a case like this, the author uses as primary data the experiences of the affected community. The text investigates philosophically how a water crisis happens as well as the structures of power responsible. This book grounds contemporary theories of power in a phenomenology of social experience. Key to that (...) grounding is the careful elaboration of subject positions in power structures as partially constitutive of lifeworlds (lebensumwelten) for consciousness. The applied phenomenological tools unravel the central enigma of how a community’s concerns and the dictates of power can become so disastrously estranged. This text appeals to researchers and students working not just in phenomenology and philosophy but also to those working in the field of environmental humanities and on social justice issues. (shrink)

Some environmentally disastrous events lead to significant institutional change while others do not. Consider that the volume of oil spilt at Guadalupe Dunes, California was twice that of the Exxon Valdez accident. Few have heard of the former while the latter has led to significant legislation to control oil pollution. Organizational institutionalists are ambivalent about why events lead to change or even whether they do. Some theorists argue that shocking events break the status quo but what constitutes shocking is (...) unclear. Others argue that events do not by themselves cause change. Instead, individuals or groups who seek change look for events merely as a tool to publicize a problem and recruit support. The central goal of this dissertation therefore is to understand why and how events that arise from industrial accidents that harm the environment lead to significant institutional change. This study is focused on the claims that key actors make in establishing shared meanings that compel the new institution. By devising a comparative case study of four environmental accidents, I have developed a theory to explain why and how events lead to significant institutional change. I find that institutional change occurs when a few people perceive that an industrial accident has disrupted their lives and make claims to problematize the accident as causing an undesirable condition that must be alleviated. These people, labeled problem providers, then engage others, labeled solution providers, to create new meaning or symbolize the event. Such meanings further persuade others to create new institutions to effectively enforce a new order. (shrink)

Nel Noddings, one of the central figures in the contemporary discussion of ethics and moral education, argues that caring--a way of life learned at home--can be extended into a theory that guides social policy. Tackling issues such as capital punishment, drug treatment, homelessness, mental illness, and abortion, Noddings inverts traditional philosophical priorities to show how an ethic of care can have profound and compelling implications for social and political thought. Instead of beginning with an ideal state and then describing a (...) role for home and family, this book starts with an ideal home and asks how what is learned there may be extended to the larger social domain. Noddings examines the tension between freedom and equality that characterized liberal thought in the twentieth century and finds that--for all its strengths--liberalism is still inadequate as social policy. She suggests instead that an attitude of attentive love in the home induces a corresponding responsiveness that can serve as a foundation for social policy. With her characteristic sensitivity to the individual and to the vulnerable in society, the author concludes that any corrective practice that does more harm than the behavior it is aimed at correcting should be abandoned. This suggests an end to the disastrous war on drugs. In addition, Noddings states that the caring professions that deal with the homeless should be guided by flexible policies that allow practitioners to respond adequately to the needs of very different clients. She recommends that the school curriculum should include serious preparation for home life as well as for professional and civic life. Emphasizing the importance of improving life in everyday homes and the possible role social policy might play in this improvement, _Starting at Home_ highlights the inextricable link between the development of care in individual lives and any discussion of moral life and social policy. (shrink)

When asked about humanity’s future relationship with computers, Marvin Minsky famously replied “If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets”. A number of eminent authorities continue to argue that there is a real danger that “super-intelligent” machines will enslave—perhaps even destroy—humanity. One might think that it would swiftly follow that we should abandon the pursuit of AI. Instead, most of those who purport to be concerned about the existential threat posed by AI default to worrying about what (...) they call the “Friendly AI problem”. Roughly speaking this is the question of how we might ensure that the AI that will develop from the first AI that we create will remain sympathetic to humanity and continue to serve, or at least take account of, our interests. In this paper I draw on the “neo-republican” philosophy of Philip Pettit to argue that solving the Friendly AI problem would not change the fact that the advent of super-intelligent AI would be disastrous for humanity by virtue of rendering us the slaves of machines. A key insight of the republican tradition is that freedom requires equality of a certain sort, which is clearly lacking between pets and their owners. Benevolence is not enough. As long as AI has the power to interfere in humanity’s choices, and the capacity to do so without reference to our interests, then it will dominate us and thereby render us unfree. The pets of kind owners are still pets, which is not a status which humanity should embrace. If we really think that there is a risk that research on AI will lead to the emergence of a superintelligence, then we need to think again about the wisdom of researching AI at all. (shrink)

Scientific and technological progress might change people’s capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; or some economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable (...) world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the “semi-anarchic default condition”. Several counterfactual historical and speculative future vulnerabilities are analyzed and arranged into a typology. A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance. The vulnerable world hypothesis thus offers a new perspective from which to evaluate the risk-benefit balance of developments towards ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order. (shrink)

Nel Noddings, one of the central figures in the contemporary discussion of ethics and moral education, argues that caring--a way of life learned at home--can be extended into a theory that guides social policy. Tackling issues such as capital punishment, drug treatment, homelessness, mental illness, and abortion, Noddings inverts traditional philosophical priorities to show how an ethic of care can have profound and compelling implications for social and political thought. Instead of beginning with an ideal state and then describing a (...) role for home and family, this book starts with an ideal home and asks how what is learned there may be extended to the larger social domain. Noddings examines the tension between freedom and equality that characterized liberal thought in the twentieth century and finds that--for all its strengths--liberalism is still inadequate as social policy. She suggests instead that an attitude of attentive love in the home induces a corresponding responsiveness that can serve as a foundation for social policy. With her characteristic sensitivity to the individual and to the vulnerable in society, the author concludes that any corrective practice that does more harm than the behavior it is aimed at correcting should be abandoned. This suggests an end to the disastrous war on drugs. In addition, Noddings states that the caring professions that deal with the homeless should be guided by flexible policies that allow practitioners to respond adequately to the needs of very different clients. She recommends that the school curriculum should include serious preparation for home life as well as for professional and civic life. Emphasizing the importance of improving life in everyday homes and the possible role social policy might play in this improvement, _Starting at Home_ highlights the inextricable link between the development of care in individual lives and any discussion of moral life and social policy. (shrink)

According to Russellian monism, consciousness is constituted at least partly by quiddities: intrinsic properties that categorically ground dispositional properties described by fundamental physics. If the theory is true, then consciousness and such dispositional properties are closely connected. But how closely? The contingency thesis says that the connection is contingent. For example, on this thesis the dispositional property associated with negative charge might have been categorically grounded by a quiddity that is distinct from the one that actually grounds it. Some argue (...) that Russellian monism entails the contingency thesis and that this makes its consciousness‐constituting quiddities epiphenomenal—a disastrous outcome for a theory that is motivated partly by its prospects for integrating consciousness into physical causation. We consider two versions of that argument, a generic version and an intriguing version developed by Robert J. Howell, which he bases on Jaegwon Kim's well‐known “exclusion argument.” We argue that neither succeeds. (shrink)

Jared Diamond and other leading scholars have argued that the domestication of animals for food, labor, and tools of war has advanced the development of human society. But by comparing practices of animal exploitation for food and resources in different societies over time, David A. Nibert reaches a strikingly different conclusion. He finds in the domestication of animals, which he renames "domesecration," a perversion of human ethics, the development of large-scale acts of violence, disastrous patterns of destruction, (...) and growth-curbing epidemics of infectious disease. Nibert centers his study on nomadic pastoralism and the development of commercial ranching, a practice that has been largely controlled by elite groups and expanded with the rise of capitalism. Beginning with the pastoral societies of the Eurasian steppe and continuing through to the exportation of Western, meat-centered eating habits throughout today's world, Nibert connects the domesecration of animals to violence, invasion, extermination, displacement, enslavement, repression, pandemic chronic disease, and hunger. In his view, conquest and subjugation were the results of the need to appropriate land and water to maintain large groups of animals, and the gross amassing of military power has its roots in the economic benefits of the exploitation, exchange, and sale of animals. Deadly zoonotic diseases, Nibert shows, have accompanied violent developments throughout history, laying waste to whole cities, societies, and civilizations. His most powerful insight situates the domesecration of animals as a precondition for the oppression of human populations, particularly indigenous peoples, an injustice impossible to rectify while the material interests of the elite are inextricably linked to the exploitation of animals. Nibert links domesecration to some of the most critical issues facing the world today, including the depletion of fresh water, topsoil, and oil reserves; global warming; and world hunger, and he reviews the U.S. government's military response to the inevitable crises of an overheated, hungry, resource-depleted world. Most animal-advocacy campaigns reinforce current oppressive practices, Nibert argues. Instead, he suggests reforms that challenge the legitimacy of both domesecration and capitalism. (shrink)

I argue that philosophers are vulnerable to an occupational hazard that I call ‘epistemic idealism.’ This is the assumption that a practice in our epistemic lives with harmful political consequences is best made sense of as the outcome of false beliefs and the attendant assumption that we should primarily address the practice and associated problems by correcting those beliefs. Epistemic idealism can often lead to misunderstanding the target practice, obscure better material explanations, and produce misguided solutions that risk exacerbating harms. (...) I develop my account of epistemic idealism by analyzing philosophical discussion of the balance norm in US journalism – the principle that equal representation for different sides in a politically contentious dispute is crucial. Philosophers have argued that this norm is mistaken, even disastrously so, and is a product of journalists’ well-intentioned but false beliefs regarding the nature of balance. I argue that these accounts misdiagnose why such norms exist. Modern journalistic norms arose primarily as a defensive measure by private owners of media to thwart increased public oversight and public alternatives to for-profit media. These philosophical accounts therefore represent illustrative examples of epistemic idealism and its shortcomings. I then point to broader lessons for non-ideal epistemology. (shrink)

_From Mastery to Mystery_ is an original and provocative contribution to the burgeoning field of ecophenomenology. Informed by current debates in environmental philosophy, Bannon critiques the conception of nature as?“substance” that he finds tacitly assumed by the major environmental theorists. Instead, this book reconsiders the basic goals of an environmental ethic by questioning the most basic presupposition that most environmentalists accept: that nature is in need of preservation. Beginning with Bruno Latour’s idea that continuing to speak of nature in the (...) way we popularly conceive of it is ethically and politically disastrous, this book describes a way in which the concept of nature can retain its importance in our discussion of the contemporary state of the environment. Based upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the concept of nature developed in the book preserves the best antihumanistic intuitions of environmentalists without relying on either a reductionistic understanding of nature and the sciences or dualistic metaphysical constructions. (shrink)

The precautionary principle holds that we should not allow scientific uncertainty to prevent us from taking precautionary measures in response to potential threats that are irreversible and potentially disastrous. Critics of the principle claim that it deters progress and development, is excessively risk-aversive and is unscientific. This paper argues that the principle can be scientific provided that the threats addressed by the principle are plausible threats, and the precautionary measures adopted are reasonable. The paper also argues that one (...) may use epistemic criteria, such as consistency, coherence and explanatory power, to determine whether a threat is plausible, and that one may use practical considerations, such as effectiveness, proportionality, cost-effectiveness, realism and consistency, to determine whether a response to a threat is reasonable. (shrink)

One of the ironies of our time is the sparsity of useful analytic tools for understanding change and development within technology itself. For all the diatribes about the disastrous effects of technology on modern life, for all the equally uncritical paeans to technology as the panacea for human ills, the vociferous pro- and anti-technology movements have failed to illuminate the nature of technology. On a more scholarly level, in the midst of claims by Marxists and non-Marxists alike about (...) the technological underpinnings of the major social and economic changes of the last couple of centuries, and despite advice given to government and industry about managing science and technology by a small army of consultants and policy analysts, technology itself remains locked inside an impenetrable black box, a deus ex machina to be invoked when all other explanations of puzzling social and economic pheoomena fail. The discipline that has probably done most to penetrate that black box in recent years by studying the 1 internal development of technology is history. Historians of technology and certain economic historians have carried out careful and detailed studies on the genesis and impact of technological innovations, and the structu-re of the social systems associated with those innovations. Within the past few decades tentative consensus about the periodization and the major traditions within the history of technology has begun to emerge, at least as far as Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth century are concerned. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical essay on the sun. It draws on Georges Bataille’s theories of the general economy and the violence of the nonhuman and demonstrates their relevance to a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Since Antiquity, the sun has played an essential role in our utopian imaginations – either as the ultimate source of energy, or as the symbol of the state sovereignty. The attitude towards the sun has shifted historically, from praising it as (...) a supreme god to exploiting it as the most powerful fuel. In capitalism, both economic growth and green sustainable developments imply infinite expansion and colonization, with disastrous consequences on the cosmic scale. According to Bataille, an alternative is suggested by the sun itself, which gives without reciprocation. Timofeeva argues that this alternative can be taken as the model for human societies, and she locates the grounds for solar politics in solidarity with nature, treated neither as a master nor as a slave, but rather as a comrade. The book will be appeal to students, academics, artists and other readers interested in the philosophy of nature, ecology, social and political theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and the humanities generally. (shrink)

John Venn has the “uneasy suspicion” that the stagnation in mathematical logic between J. H. Lambert and George Boole was due to Kant’s “disastrous effect on logical method,” namely the “strictest preservation [of logic] from mathematical encroachment.” Kant’s actual position is more nuanced, however. In this chapter, I tease out the nuances by examining his use of Leonhard Euler’s circles and comparing it with Euler’s own use. I do so in light of the developments in logical calculus from G. (...) W. Leibniz to Lambert and Gottfried Ploucquet. While Kant is evidently open to using mathematical tools in logic, his main concern is to clarify what mathematical tools can be used to achieve. For without such clarification, all efforts at introducing mathematical tools into logic would be blind if not complete waste of time. In the end, Kant would stress, the means provided by formal logic at best help us to express and order what we already know in some sense. No matter how much mathematical notations may enhance the precision of this function of formal logic, it does not change the fact that no truths can, strictly speaking, be revealed or established by means of those notations. (shrink)

In much of pre-Qin political philosophy, including those thinkers usually labeled Confucian, Daoist, or Mohist, at least part of the justification of the political state comes from their views on morality, and the vision of the good ruler was quite closely tied to the vision of the good person. In an important sense, for these thinkers, political philosophy is an exercise in applied ethics. Han Fei, however, offers an interesting break from this tradition, arguing that, given the vastly different goals (...) of moral theory and political theory, it would be disastrous to rely upon the former to undergird the latter. He develops a distinctly amoral political philosophy that avoids many of the problems he sees as arising from a reliance on particular virtues on the part of the ruler or others within the state. In this paper, I analyze the source of normativity in Han Fei’s political philosophy, arguing that he demonstrates a keen understanding of the problems inherent in any system that relies upon moral standards to develop a strong, stable, and prosperous state. Rather, he demonstrates how an understanding of human nature, along with a recognition of facts about the natural world, allows for the development of a non-moral political philosophy that relies on a systematic bureaucracy and an inviolate system of law, one which will be much more successful, he believes, than anything his competitors can construct. (shrink)

If a possible-worlds semantic theory for modal logics is pure, then the assertion of the theory, taken at face-value, can bring no commitment to the existence of a plurality of possible worlds (genuine or ersatz). But if we consider an applied theory (an application of the pure theory) in which the elements of the models are required to be possible worlds, then assertion of such a theory, taken at face-value, does appear to bring commitment to the existence of a plurality (...) of possible worlds. Or at least that is so if the applied theory is adequate. For an applied possible-worlds semantic theory that is constrained to contain only one-world models is bound to deliver results on validity, soundness and completeness that are apt to seem disastrous. I attempt to steer a course between commitment to the existence of a plurality of possible worlds and commitment to such a disastrous applied possible-worlds semantics by noting, and developing, the position of one who asserts such a theory at face-value but who remains agnostic about the existence of other (non-actualized) possible worlds. Thus, a novel interpretation of applied possible-worlds semantics is offered on which we may lay claim to whatever benefits such a theory offers while avoiding realism about (other) possible worlds. Thereby, the contention that applied possible-worlds semantics gives us reason to be realists about possible worlds is (further) undermined. (shrink)

In this paper I want to show that consumer concerns can be implemented in food chains by organizing ethical discussions of conflicting values that include them as participators. First, it is argued that there are several types of consumer concerns about food and agriculture that are multi-interpretable and often contradict each other or are at least difficult to reconcile without considerable loss. Second, these consumer concerns are inherently dynamic because they respond to difficult and complex societal and technological situations and (...) developments. For example, because of the rising concern with global warming, carbon dioxide absorption of crops is now attracting public attention, which means that new requirements are being proposed for the environmentally friendly production of crops. Third, there are different types of consumers, and their choices between conflicting values differ accordingly. Consumers use different weighing models and various types of information in making their food choices. Changing food chains more in accordance with consumer concerns should at least take into account the multi-interpretable, dynamic, and pluralist features of consumer concerns, for example, in traceability schemes. In discussing usual approaches such as codes, stakeholder analysis, and assurance schemes, I conclude that these traditional approaches can be helpful. However, in cases of dynamic, pluralistic, and uncertain developments, maintaining some pre-existing evaluating scheme or some clear cut normative hierarchy, such as codes or assurance schemes, can be disastrous in undermining new ethical desirable initiatives. Instead of considering ethical standards and targets as fixed, which is done with codes and schemes, it is more fruitful to emphasize the structure of the processes in which ethical weighing of relevant consumer concerns get shaped. The concept of “Ethical Room for Maneuver” (ERM) is constructed to specify the ethical desirable conditions under which identification and weighing of paramount values and their dilemmas can be processed. The main aims of the ERM are making room in all the links of the food chain for regulating and implementing the relevant consumer concerns by (1) balancing and negotiating, (2) supporting information systems that are relevant and communicative for various consumer groups and (3) organizing consumer involvement in the links of the food chain. The social and political context of agriculture and food production, particularly in Europe, gives ample opportunity for implementing several types of Ethical Rooms for Maneuver. Finally, I discuss several types of Ethical Rooms for Manoeuvre in the food chains that can be communicated by means of specific traceability schemes to less involved stakeholders with the potential consequence that the stakeholders will be motivated to be more involved. (shrink)

The ecological crisis in the world necessitates the reconfiguration of the hegemony of modern science, theology, politics, economics and technology – the root cause of a pending ecological catastrophe. The aim is to redress a growing culture of apathy in the context of devastating weather conditions, social and political discord, and unrelenting violent wars. Public theology serves as a conceptual framework with transversal rationality as an interlocutor between the different theological (systematic, ethics, pastoral care and eco-theology), religious and philosophical perspectives. (...) The theological ontology of care is presented followed by the role of communities of critical prophetic discourse. The notion of earth as a community leads to the prospect of a new eco-theology. Finally, the pending ecological catastrophe is reconceptualised in and through Christian eschatology. This is an inter- and intra-disciplinary discussion on the disastrous consequences of modernity and anthropocentric behaviour in terms of the current environmental crisis. Various scholars offer valuable insights into what the problem is, who responsible is for the environmental crisis, and how Christian communities should forge an accountability of care for the earth and vulnerable human beings. The eschatological reality of God’s preferred future remains a constant of hopeful and sustainable life in the Anthropocene age. It is recommended that we change the way we exist by transforming modernity as developed and sustained through theology, socio-political, economic and technological ‘advances’. Contribution: This article focussed on the ecological crisis because of anthropocentrism and distorted theological, political and socio-economic paradigms to serve human interests despite the consequences for the earth. We need to reconfigure interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary scientific approaches to embrace earth as a key scientific interlocutor. The ecological crisis should be conceptualised within the reality of Christian eschatology – Jesus Christ is ultimately, the eschaton. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

One of Han Fei’s most trenchant criticisms against the early Confucian political tradition is that, insofar as its decision-making process revolves around the ruler, rather than a codified set of laws, this process is the arbitrary rule of a single individual. Han Fei argues that there will be disastrous results due to ad hoc decision-making, relationship-based decision-making, and decision-making based on prior moral commitments. I lay out Han Fei’s arguments while demonstrating how Xunzi can successfully counter them. In doing (...) so, I argue that Xunzi lays out a political theory restricting the actions of the ruler through both the use of ritual and law, which allows him to develop a theory that legitimizes government while at the same time constraining itself. Xunzi’s political theory makes important strides in its attempt to recognize the importance of the ruler as a moral exemplar while also restricting his control in the political process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Environmental Goodness and the Challenge of American CultureSandra Jane Fairbanks (bio)Until recently, Western virtue ethics has never recognized nature-focused virtues. This is not surprising, since western philosophies and religions have promoted the ideas that humans are superior to nature and that there are no moral principles regulating our relationship to nature. Environmentalists call for a radical change in our attitude towards nature if we are to meet the challenge (...) posed by today’s environmental problems. Thus, recognition of new virtues governing human attitudes and behavior towards nature is highly desirable, both by way of addressing an egregious lacuna in western thought, and as a necessary condition for anything like a viable planet. Unfortunately, a capitalist, consumer culture such as that of the United States presents a variety of serious obstacles to the successful inculcation of any new environmental virtues. Hence, inculcation of environmental virtues should not be the sole focus of environmental education. Such education should also appeal to human self-interest, at least until such time as the very idea of environmental virtue will not seem contrarian relative to prevailing views of the good life.IntroductionWhile there is room for disagreement over details and cases, it is safe to say that traditional Western philosophies and religions have generally [End Page 79] promoted domination and exploitation of the environment. Traditional, predominantly anthropocentric views such as Christianity or Greek philosophy, conjoined with a consumerist model of the good life, have conditioned the attitudes, values, and beliefs of human beings, with disastrous consequences for the environment. As a result, we face a variety of environmental problems—global warming, destruction and depletion of natural resources and wilderness areas, explosive population growth, toxic waste, and so on—that are serious right now, and that may well be catastrophic for future generations. Environmental philosophers, including biocentrists, ecocentrists, and ecofeminists, call for a shift away from anthropocentric theories to theories that emphasize the intrinsic value of nonhuman life, or that of nature in general.All of these environmental philosophies call for a radical change in our attitude towards nature if we are to meet the challenge posed by today’s environmental problems. Since this change in attitude is intended to ground novel and more adequate ways of behaving toward the environment, environmentally-sensitive writers are in the business, implicitly or explicitly, of promoting a new environmental virtue, or a new set of environmental virtues.1 Until recently, Western virtue ethics has never recognized a nature-focused virtue. This is not surprising, since western philosophies and religions have generally promoted the ideas that humans are superior to nature and that there are no moral principles regulating our relationship to nature, except (as, famously, in Kant2) for indirect duties toward humans. The idea that nature, including nonhuman life, natural objects, and ecological wholes has intrinsic value and, hence, moral standing, is a very recent development in Western philosophy.Thus recognition of new virtues governing human attitudes and behavior towards nature is highly desirable, both by way of addressing an egregious lacuna in Western thought, and as (almost certainly) a necessary condition for anything like a viable planet. Unfortunately, as I will argue, a capitalist, consumer culture such as that of the United States—on which I will focus due to its paradigm status—presents a variety of obstacles to the successful inculcation of any new environmental virtues. Thus, inculcation of environmental virtues should not be the sole, and perhaps not even the primary, focus of environmental education, at least in the short term. As I will argue, such education should also appeal, importantly, to human self-interest, at least until such time as the very idea of environmental [End Page 80] virtue will not seem contrarian relative to prevailing views of the good life.The structure of the discussion is as follows: First, I develop a brief sketch of an environmentally good person. I do so by compiling a set of environmental virtues recommended by various prominent biocentrists, ecocentrists and ecofeminists. Second, I address problems posed by American culture for the development of these environmental virtues. Finally, I conclude with practical suggestions for influencing American culture in the direction of environmental awareness and... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Rousseau is an important precursor of the Counter-Enlightenment. To this end, I will examine the parallels between his partial critique of the Enlightenment and that of Joseph de Maistre, whose work represents one of the most comprehensive and systematic indictments of the central ideas and objectives of the Enlightenment. Despite his frequent denunciations of Rousseau's ideas and influence, Maistre shares with him a profound concern for what he takes to be the disastrous social (...) and political ramifications of eighteenth-century ideas, and he selectively appropriates many of Rousseau's arguments to support his own, more radical critique of the Enlightenment. Between 1749, when Rousseau's Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts first appeared, and the publication of Maistre's Soir?es de Saint-Petersbourg in 1821, a movement gradually developed against the Enlightenment, culminating in a complete rejection of its central ideas and assumptions by many writers of the early nineteenth century. Rousseau is a crucial figure in this movement. His writings, beginning with his first discourse, contain one of the earliest major critiques of the Enlightenment project. In a sense, Maistre's works are the consummation of many of the ideas and arguments first directed against the Enlightenment by Rousseau. (shrink)

After a sketch of the optimism and high aspirations of History and Philosophy of Science when I first joined the field in the mid 1960s, I go on to describe the disastrous impact of "the strong programme" and social constructivism in history and sociology of science. Despite Alan Sokal's brilliant spoof article, and the "science wars" that flared up partly as a result, the whole field of Science and Technology Studies is still adversely affected by social constructivist ideas. I (...) then go on to spell out how in my view STS ought to develop. It is, to begin with, vitally important to recognize the profoundly problematic character of the aims of science. There are substantial, influential and highly problematic metaphysical, value and political assumptions built into these aims. Once this is appreciated, it becomes clear that we need a new kind of science which subjects problematic aims - problematic assumptions inherent in these aims - to sustained imaginative and critical scrutiny as an integral part of science itself. This needs to be done in an attempt to improve the aims and methods of science as science proceeds. The upshot is that science, STS, and the relationship between the two, are all transformed. STS becomes an integral part of science itself. And becomes a part of an urgently needed campaign to transform universities so that they become devoted to helping humanity create a wiser world. (shrink)

A large literature on the ontology of fictional entities has developed in recent decades. These ontologies can be categorized into different groups, ranging from realist to anti-realist approaches. The philosophers of this literature, despite their fundamental differences, agree that whatever can be said about the metaphysics and ontology of fictional entities can also be extended to mythical entities. However, if we look at the characteristics of mythical entities based on the mythologies of the last century, we can conclude that these (...) entities have a function in the real world, include some collective and unconscious dimensions, and can be realized in different realizers. These characteristics require implications for an appropriate ontology to extend to mythical entities. Applying these implications to the ontologies of fictional objects, it becomes clear that these ontologies cannot be extended to mythical entities. Accordingly, ontologists of mythical objects have to create their distinctive literature based on mythological research and analytical tools. Introduction The literature of fictional entities is one of the literatures in analytic philosophy. Despite great differences in the analysis of fictional objects, they all have in common that the extension of this analysis to mythical objects isn’t problematic. To assess this claim, we first introduce these approaches to fictional objects and then apply the implications of non-analytic mythological theories to these approaches to determine the legitimacy of these extensions. Fictional Entities in Analytic Tradition Some analytic theories of fictional objects emphasize that the fictional object exists as an abstract entity created by writers. These approaches may be creationist or abstractionist (Kroon, 2015), or conclude their existence based on easy arguments from common sense or ordinary language (for example, in (Thomasson, 2015) and (Schaffer, 2009)), and/or consider fictional objects as possible objects without any interaction with the real world (Hart, 2012). Antirealist approaches that deny the existence of fictional entities include viewing fictional works as props in a make-believe game (in the pretense account of Walton (Walton, 1990) or the syncretistic account of Voltolini, although he accepts creationism (Voltolini, 2006)), concluding the nonexistence of fictional entities due to the lack of explanatory value in adding them to the world (i.e., fictionalism) (Brock, 2015), considering fictional entities as mere grammatical objects created only from language (Crittenden, 1991), and appealing to speech-act theory to justify metaphysics for fictional statements (Pavel, 1986). Neo-Meinongian approaches, with their distinction between objectivity and existence, make room for nonexistent objects, such as fictional objects. They use the distinction between nuclear and extra-nuclear properties (Parsons, 1980), or the ambiguity of predication in natural language (Zalta, 1988; 2023), or the possible and impossible worlds (Priest, 2005). In these views, fictional objects have only the nuclear properties that the author ascribes to them, or encodes these properties, and/or have them as real objects, only in the worlds of fictional works. Myth’s Features in Mythological Research On the other hand, in non-analytic mythologies, especially in the 20th century, various approaches to myths are presented. These approaches include Freudian and Jungian psychological approaches, sociological approaches based on Durkheim’s achievements, from Malinowski to the present day, combined approaches using both psychological and sociological approaches, structuralist approaches of Levi-Strauss and his followers, existentialist approaches of Junas, Bultman and Hatab, and finally postmodern and deconstructivist approaches to mythology.1 Despite the diversity of their findings, they all agree that 1) myth has a function in culture, society, the mind or psyche of human beings; 2) this function has a collective aspect;3) The individuation and identification of a mythical object does not depend on its temporary and usually accidental realizers from story and real or apocryphal history; 4) a myth is related to an unconscious or preconscious situation. Analyzing the Competency of Ontological Theories of Fictional Entities for Mythical Entities These results inevitably lead to some implications for the theory of mythical objects in analytic philosophy. A) The function of myths in the real world influences ontological decisions about myths. B) Regarding the collectivity of myths, merely individualistic accounts of the existence and persistence of mythical objects seem problematic. C) The unconsciousness of myths precludes any explanation of myths that appeals to merely conscious activities, such as everyday language and common sense. D) Any theory of the identity of mythical objects must explain how a mythical object can reproduce itself in different stories and histories. Applying these implications to the extension of analytic theories of fiction to myths, it seems that these extensions are disappointing. The reasons are as follows: 1) The ontologies that try to prove the existence of fictional objects on the basis of natural language cannot prove mythical objects in the same way. These ontologies don’t care about the unconscious process of myth. 2) Questioning the process of conscious creation of mythical objects, characters, and entities, they exclude the extension of creationism and abstractionism of fictional entities to mythical ones. They consider the mythical object as the creation of a kind of individual creative process. In the same way, mythical objects aren’t just unreal grammatical objects created by writings. 3) From the function of myths in the real world, the extended version of the theory of pretense, which regards a myth as a mere make-believe game, should be rejected. In this way, a myth can’t also be a grammatical object. Moreover, a myth has an explanatory value in the world against the extension of fictionalism to mythical objects. 4) The functionality of the myth and its causal interaction with the entities of the real world argue against the extensions of fictional ontologies that regard the mythical entity as a non-existent object or merely an (im)possible object in (im)possible worlds. 5) The functionality of myths also implies that the mythical discourse, as discussed in mythologies, is fundamentally different from fictional discourse. Indeed, even if fictional discourse belongs to a different category of speech acts than ordinary assertoric sentences, this can’t be said for mythical ones. 6) The nature of the co-identity of mythical objects does not limit the co-identity of entities to a particular work, time, or place, and intention of the author or audience. Thus, the most realist and antirealist theories of fiction, which don’t satisfy this implication, cannot be extended to mythical entities. Conclusion Therefore, there is no theory in the analytic ontology of fictional objects that can be conservatively extended to mythical objects without disastrous deviations. Accordingly, analytic philosophy must develop separate theories of mythical entities, independent of theories of fictional objects. (shrink)

SummaryHumans are now entering a post-human era. Through technological advancements and their applications for humans themselves, humans as homo sapiens might change into a different species. Depending on individual decisions about whether to embrace certain technologies, the co-existence of humans and post-humans is also possible. Christians and theologians must ponder this trajectory for the technology will affect all domains, including religions, in society at large. In this regard, this article introduces and examines transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement based on the (...) convergence of ideology and scientific technology which aims to liberate humans from their biological constraints (i. e., disease, aging, and death), thereby bringing about human well-being. This article argues that the transhumanist ideology should be critically examined while its technology can be embraced and even supported from a theological perspective because this ideology determines the direction of technological advancement and application. Regarding ideological problems, I highlight transhumanists’ disembodiment propensity, optimistic belief in the progress of human civilization, and individualism. These features are embedded in and originate from transhumanism’s succession of classical humanism and the Enlightenment. If these features are not rectified, transhumanism and its technology might repeat disastrous incidents in human history such as eugenics and exacerbate social inequality. As a theologian, I critically examine the ideological features of transhumanism, proposing an alternative understanding with regard to human beings and existence. This effort helps to remedy potential problems of transhumanism in the future, relieve anxiety relating to these problems, and prepare a dialogue between transhumanism and Christian theology. This dialogue will eventually contribute to the robust development of transhumanism and the opening of a new era of the post-human. (shrink)

From my ongoing "Metalogical Plato" project. The aim of the diagram is to make reasonably intuitive how the Socratic elenchos (the logic of refutation applied to candidate formulations of virtues or ruling knowledges) looks and works as a whole structure. This is my starting point in the project, in part because of its great familiarity and arguable claim to being the inauguration of western philosophy; getting this point less wrong would have broad and deep consequences, including for philosophy’s self-understanding. (i.) (...) is the first pass at elenchos in which the Socratic interlocutor does not reflect on knowledge being the crux of the problem. (ii.) is the second, rarer, reflective pass in which they are, making the investigation explicitly about knowledge. Its centrality in the Charmides makes that neglected dialogue of superlative importance. This structure is also the gateway through which the discussion/dialectic crosses into the Agathology (discussion of the form of the good) at Republic 505. The problem of elenchos, then, grasped as a whole structure, is that it seems that knowledge can neither satisfactorily be included in nor excluded from its own scope. The development of the ti esti (“what is ---?”) question leads to the introduction of knowledge into its own scope (i. implicitly, as goodness contrasted with blind rule-following ii. explicitly qua knowledge) while the development of the dual peri tinos (“----about what?) question leads to K’s elimination from its own scope. The introductions are motivated to avoid contradiction, but produce regress; the eliminations are motivated to avoid regress, but produce contradiction. In scholarship, and in the history of philosophy, the ti esti question is universally recognized, to the point of being identified with philosophy’s origin and essence; the peri tinos question is neglected textually and never recognized as the equal dual to the ti esti. This, I claim, has blocked the development of a nontrivial logical appreciation of what Plato's Socrates is up to. (One rather disastrous effect of this neglect is taking Aristotle as the beginning of the development of logic, rather than, correctly, for the beginning of logic’s fatal separation from mathematics and dialectic.) Further, because of this monopticism of the ti esti, the function of consistency in the elenchos has not been understood, even with respect to the ti esti. The ti esti is actually in search of completeness, given a norm of consistency; the peri tinos is in search of consistency, given a norm of completeness. Only appreciating the two questions as dual allows space in the structure to clarify these different orientations relative to consistency. (And, dually, to completeness, whose function in the elenchos is generally entirely missed by scholars and relegated to discussions of eros; it's not out of place there, of course, but its significance is secured here.) Recognizing the duality of the ti esti and peri tinos questions is thus the royal road, in the Socratic-Platonic context, to catching sight of what we post-Cantorians can recognize as the metalogical duality of consistency and completeness. (The salutary disruptive effects of this Plato-Cantor proximity have, of course, been traced in complementary ways by Badiou.) Note that the diagram is supposed to provide a relatively accessible orientation, not to stand on its own, and certainly not to be the last word on any subject. An important qualification (telegraphed in the previous paragraph) is that what elenchos shows is not finally circular or paradoxical, though the problem first presents as such (stubbornly, obdurately, as "difficult" Plato's Socrates always says with characteristic understatement). What is depicted here is meant, at a first pass, to be the shape of that first presentation, the form of the problem of elenchos, rather than of its solution. It's not an accident that this problem strongly resembles "Russell's paradox" (not Russell's not a paradox.) Problem is to solution as RP is to the diagonal theorems. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend initially both accepted Popper's philosophy of science, but then reacted against it, and developed it in different directions. Lakatos sought to reconcile Kuhn and Popper by characterizing science as a process of competing research programmes, competing fragments of Kuhn's normal science. Feyerabend emphasized the need to develop rival theories to facilitate severe empirical testing of accepted theories, but then, as a result of a disastrous mistake, came to hold that theories that are incompatible with (...) one another cannot be compared empirically. He ended up rejecting method in science. All four philosophers, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend missed the decisive defect in Popper's philosophy of science: persistent acceptance of unified theories only when endlessly many empirically more successful disunified rivals are available means that physics makes a big, highly problematic metaphysical assumption about the nature of the universe: it is such that some kind of underlying unity exists in nature. We need to adopt a new conception of science. In order to subject this implicit metaphysical conjecture to sustained critical assessment in an attempt to improve it, we need to see science as making a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions about the knowability and comprehensibility of the universe, these assumptions becoming less substantial and more likely to be true as we ascend the hierarchy. Elements of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos are to be found in this picture, but it also differs radically from all three. It more closely resembles Einstein's mature views about the nature of science. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is now widely recognized as the most influential philosopher of the Twentieth Century. Until the late 1960's, this impact derived mainly from his early magnum opus, 1927's Being and Time. Many of this century's most significant Continental thinkers---including Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Gadamer, Marcuse, Habermas, Bultmann, and Levinas---acknowledge profound conceptual debts to insights first elaborated in this text. But Being and Time was never finished, and Heidegger continued to extend, develop, and in some places revolutionize his own thinking for (...) another fifty years. This "later" Heidegger's prolific body of work has decisively influenced the next generation of Continental thinkers, shaping the concepts and concerns of important figures such as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Blanchot, and Baudrillard. Despite this unparalleled impact, several basic aspects of Heidegger's later philosophy remain shrouded in mystery, confusion, and controversy. ;The End of Onto-Theology: Understanding Heidegger's Turn, Method, and Politics explains four central aspects of Heidegger's later thought: his controversial understanding of metaphysics as onto-theology, his famously recondite Kehre, his heretofore overlooked philosophical methodology, and his appalling misadventure with Nazism. ;Chapter I introduces the basic structure and unifying thesis of the text. Chapter II clarifies and periodizes Heidegger's mysterious Kehre or "turn," the philosophical transformation which distinguishes his "early" and "later" work. Chapter III uncovers another sense of Kehre, connecting this "turning" to Heidegger's infamous political misadventure. Chapter IV reconstructs Heidegger's famous Destruktion of the history of metaphysical foundationalism, showing how this "deconstruction" both disabused Heidegger of his own politically disastrous metaphysical ambition to recover a "fundamental ontology" and provides the necessary philosophical background for understanding Heidegger's later philosophy. Chapter V explicates Heidegger's later methodology, "ontohistorical placement through hermeneutic altercation," using the case of Nietzsche to demonstrate how Heidegger developed and deployed this method to situate other philosophers' contributions to the history of intelligibility. Chapter VI addresses the complex intersection of Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche's nihilistic legacy with his failed bid to assume philosophical leadership of the National Socialist "revolution," isolating its philosophical sources and establishing the important philosophical lessons Heidegger learned from his "great political error.". (shrink)

The crisis of our times is science in a world without wisdom. The immense intellectual success of modern science and technology have given some of us unprecedented powers to act, which has led to all the great benefits of the modern world, and to the grave global crises we now face. Before modern science, we lacked the power to do too much damage to ourselves or the planet; now we have science, wisdom has become, not a private luxury but a (...) public necessity. Unless we learn to become a bit wiser, sooner or later we will destroy ourselves. But how can we learn to become wiser? We can learn from the last place many would look - namely science! We can learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards a wiser world. This is in fact an old idea. It goes back to the 18th century French Enlightenment. But, in developing the idea, the philosophes of the Enlightenment made three gross blunders. They failed to capture correctly the nature of the progress-achieving methods of science; they failed to generalize these methods properly; and, most disastrously of all, they applied their misconstrued scientific method, not to the social world directly, not to the task of making social progress towards an enlightened world, but instead to the task of improving knowledge of social phenomena, to the task of developing social science. This botched version of the profound Enlightenment idea was developed throughout the 19th century, and built into universities in the early 20th century with the creation of disciplines of social science. As a result, academic inquiry today is a botched version of what we need. Instead of giving priority to problems of living, and devoting itself to helping humanity acquire a bit more wisdom, academia today devotes itself to the pursuit of knowledge. That is the key disaster of our times. Our institutions of learning seek knowledge, but fail disastrously to devote themselves to helping humanity acquire a bit more wisdom. If the world is to acquire global wisdom, it needs institutions of learning rationally devoted to the task. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes, not just to acquire knowledge, but to seek and promote social wisdom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 109-123 [Access article in PDF] The Problem of Finding a Positive Role for Humans in the Natural World Ned Hettinger As necessary as it obviously is, the effort of "wilderness preservation" has too often implied that it is enough to save a series of islands of pristine and uninhabited wilderness in an otherwise exploited, damaged, and polluted land. And, further, that the pristine (...) wilderness is the only alternative to exploitation and abuse. So far, the moral landscape of the conservation movement has tended to be a landscape of extremes.... On the one hand we have the unspoiled wilderness, and on the other hand we have scenes of utter devastation—strip mines, clear-cuts, industrially polluted wastelands, and so on. We wish, say the conservationists, to have more of the one, and less of the other. To which, of course, one must say amen. But it must be a qualified amen, for the conservationist's program has been embarrassingly incomplete. Its picture of the world as either deserted landscape or desertified landscape has misrepresented both the world and humanity. If we are to have an accurate picture of the world, even in its present diseased condition, we must interpose between the unused landscape and the misused landscape a landscape that humans have used well. Wendell Berry (1995, 64) [End Page 109] Introduction If one wants to identify what has gone wrong with humans' relationship to the natural world, there is probably no better place to look than in Eric Katz's (1997) fine collection of essays, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community. 1 Many key insights for understanding our disastrous attitudes toward nature can be found in this compilation of twenty years of merciless criticism of anthropocentrism. Katz's articulation of the source of our moral obligations to nature is deeply on target: Nature is a subject owed moral concern fundamentally because of its independence from humanity and its autonomy from human domination and control.What cannot be found in Nature as Subject is a vision of a positive role for humanity in the natural world. My worry is that Katz's views about the value of nature and our obligations to it leave no room for such an account. I fear that Katz's conceptualization of how humans have wronged nature may entail that all human activity toward nature wrongs nature. This would undermine the possibility of envisioning an environmentally just future in which humans live in the natural world in a morally appropriate way. This is a serious problem, because environmental philosophy needs an ethic for the use of nature, as well as for its nonuse. We need a vision of a constructive human relationship with nature, in addition to a characterization of our past failures of relationship. The question I pose is whether Katz's ideas allow for an account of how humans can be flourishing members who contribute to natural community.This is a problem not just for Eric Katz, but for all of us who accept a broadly preservationist environmental philosophy. If one believes that natural value is fundamentally a function of nature's autonomy from humanity and that a major goal of environmentalism should be to preserve nature relatively uninfluenced by humans, one will have to work hard to explain what positive role humans might have in nature. The alternatives of either minimizing human influence on nature, or sacrificing natural value for human goods, fail to provide for such a positive role. Katz's conceptualization of these matters brings out this problem poignantly. After a brief characterization of the wealth of ideas in Nature as Subject, I will explore this difficulty in some detail. In explaining why this is a problem for Katz and in exploring ways he can avoid it, I hope to set a path that preservationist environmental philosophers can follow if they are to develop a positive vision of humans' place in nature. [End Page 110] A Sketch of Katz's Position Katz defends a nonanthropocentric, holist, and communal environmental philosophy that treats... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lorenzo Valla on the Problem of Speaking about the TrinityCharles TrinkausLorenzo Valla was a major Renaissance humanist critic of scholasticism, and a proponent of empirical and language-based thought. He also ventured into the field of theology with his humanistic preconceptions that not ancient philosophy but the literary arts and philology should provide the proper model for its study. Salvatore Camporeale in his major studies of Valla, and in a (...) recent notable article comparing the humanistic method of theologizing of Valla with the scholastic method of Thomas Aquinas, established the major features of this new mode of theologizing as based on Biblical philology and study of the Church Fathers. 1 This was taken up by Erasmus and given its fully developed form. 2 Valla was rash enough to apply his methodology to the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity, not without some disastrous results in his first effort in the 1439 redaction of his Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, but with greater doctrinal acceptability in his later revised versions of 1448 and 1452. 3 Like all theological mysteries, the Trinity defied both ordinary human language and the most rudimentary rules of thought, i.e., grammar, logic, and “common sense.” 4 Hence there was a [End Page 27] great challenge and a real danger of falling into error in talking about the Trinity either to establish its true “nature,” or to defend it against criticism. Valla’s efforts may be considered likely paradigms of some of the ways language study played a role in unraveling one of the Christian religion’s central mysteries.It was one of Lorenzo Valla’s main convictions that the theology and religious and moral thought of his own age (namely Aristotelian scholasticism) should be purged of philosophy, which he regarded as a seedbed of heresy. Yet he himself, though a rhetorician, was not entirely pure of philosophy...just as elements of philosophical thought remained as indispensable ingredients of the rhetorical teachings of Cicero and Quintilian. Thus Valla, following them, especially Quintilian, found it necessary to retain some simplified elements of systematic thought in his primordia of linguistic theory. Nevertheless, he intended to demonstrate that a more satisfactory description of the Trinity could be attained by adhering to these rules of language than that arrived at by the scholastics seeking to affirm it by metaphysical principles.I: The Repastinatio of 1439Valla in his proem to the 1439 redaction of the Repastinatio stresses the libertas a philosopher should have to think and express his own thoughts and protests the compulsion to think in Aristotelian modes manifested by scholastic philosophers:Why therefore should we fear to contradict this man, especially while following the approved custom of freely stating what we believe? Certainly they treat themselves badly who commit themselves to some sect in which it is necessary to praise everything of the one they follow, whatever it is. We have insisted on that liberty in other books and will hold to it in these. 5In keeping with these sentiments Valla in this first redaction boldly sets forth his own views. For reasons which will be seen he becomes more careful to refute his opponents and justify his own views in the later two redactions. In this first redaction he begins by setting forth his reduction of the ten Aristotelian/Porphyrian/Boethian categories to three “elements,” using a term found in Quintilian. These are “substance,” “quality” and “action.” He follows this up by reducing the so-called six transcendentals to the one, multi-meaninged term res, or “thing,” which is that about which one is talking, or the subject that can comprise substance, quality and action. 6 [End Page 28]Because the res or “thing” is never substance only, since substance can never be perceived except by means of its qualities or actions which are manifest to the perceiver, Valla proposes a new term for the combination of substance, quality and action: “consubstance.” “There are two species of [consubstance],” he writes, “ ‘soul’ and ‘body.’ A third which is composed of both of these may be added, which is ‘animal.’” 7Just before introducing the term “consubstance” for things in their combination of the three elements, and without... (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a foreclosed (...) home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

In a large number of cases the conflicts that have arisen in recent years in various parts of the world, with their diversity, rapid development and their disastrous consequences for man and human society in general have led to the conclusion that a more careful and precise perspective on the conflict as a whole, is needed, an interdisciplinary research of the variety of causes, effects, and possible solutions that can be found in such cases, and that can prove (...) to be really effective.The general target of this work constitutes a possible beginning of that type of research. It is an attempt to understand and highlight, from a cultural and spiritual point of view, the causes of conflicts, the various consequences of their emergence and maintaining, as well as the possible solutions that Orthodox tradition and spirituality, including, of course, the evangelical message, as well as the patristic sources, have offered over the ages in order to overcome the conflict on a personal level, as well as on a general, social level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will?Don LeviWhen Pharaoh was reeling from certain later plagues he agreed to free the Israelites. But each time after the plague stopped, God stiffened Pharaoh's heart, and he refused to let them go. Since it was God who did it, Pharaoh had to refuse to release the Israelites; he could not have let them go. So, he was deprived of free will by (...) God.In this article I question this reasoning. I question whether we can conclude from the fact that God did it that Pharaoh could not release them; and from the fact that Pharaoh could not release them, that he did not have free will. I also question whether it is possible to understand what the free will is that God is supposed to have given to all of us and taken from Pharaoh.IThe Exodus is the story of how the Israelites escaped from slavery and constituted themselves as a people. "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage" (Exodus 20.2).1 This is how God introduces the Ten Commandments: He is the One who led the Israelites out of Egypt; they are the people whom He freed.The stiffening motif underscores how much more powerful God is than Pharaoh. God tells Moses that Pharaoh will let the Israelites go "only because of a greater might" (3.19), and Pharaoh, replies: "Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go?" (5.2). That God is by far the more powerful is underscored by having God say that He will "stiffen Pharaoh's heart so that he will not let the people go" (4.21), and by having Him do so, in the cases of several later plagues. After [End Page 58] each plague Pharaoh agrees to release them, only to change his mind when the plague lifted (or, in the case of the final one, when he has released the Israelites), either because he or God stiffened his heart. The disastrous consequences of these reversals reveal him to be concerned with his status as a god-king rather than with the welfare of his people. The motif is part of the developing argument in the Tanakh for a state ruled, not by a Pharaoh or king, but by God and His laws, as transmitted by His prophet, Moses.The problem of whether God deprived Pharaoh of free will by stiffening his heart is a version of the Problem of Evil, albeit with a focus on what God did, not what He did not do. And this focus on God's apparent misbehavior is not an isolated phenomenon. As Kaufman points out, "The Bible ascribes to God actions that, to our way of thinking, lack moral grounds, or even run counter to our moral sense. Indeed, at times they seem to reflect a ruthless, capricious, demonic being."2 To make God more powerful than Pharaoh the text seems to make God too much like Pharaoh.A different understanding of the story arises if we think of the Israelites as its audience, and if we remind ourselves that it is a stage in their developing relationship with God. As Kaufman explains it, the things said about God in the Exodus story as well as elsewhere "express in their own way boundless adoration and reverence of the One" (Religion, p. 75). Later, the Israelites may find different ways of expressing that adoration and reverence. However, what Kaufman is saying is that by making God's behavior towards Pharaoh seem supramoral and demonic, the Torah really is finding a way to express its awe of Him.Nevertheless, in what follows we will try to understand the text as telling us about God, independently of that developing relationship. We will confine our attention to the question of how God's actions deprived Pharaoh of free will. Is that what stiffening someone's heart does; or is it the fact that God did the stiffening? What is interesting is that those who have tried to offer solutions to the problem do not try to answer these questions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (2005) 269-285 [Access article in PDF] Oedipus The King: Temperament, Character, and Virtue Grant Gillett Robin Hankey University of Otago I Recent discussions of ethics and literature suggest that there is a relationship between reading (or, better, immersing oneself in) literature (in particular, fiction) and the virtues. Nussbaum goes so far as to claim not only that good literature is conducive to moral sense and (...) sensibility but also that "the well-lived life is a work of literary art."1 The character development in most substantial fictional work that aims to engage us through its realism and truth to the human condition suggests that there is such a thing as a quasi-stable character and that an agent's character plays a significant role in the way not only that the person acts but also in the kinds of thing that happen to him or her. For a certain kind of virtue theorist, the internal harmony of character required for a person to do the right thing in a diverse range of situations involves cultivating exactly those skills required to live well. This thesis amounts to a claim that there is a close, indeed conceptual, relationship between right living and good living and that the type of character which results from cultivating the virtues is a character conducive to getting the best out of the situations that life throws in our way, whereas the vicious character reveals itself by causing strife, harm, and even tragedy.Gilbert Harman, criticizing virtue ethics on the basis of some key experiments in social psychology which have led to the idea of a "fundamental attribution error," argues that people do not have enduring character traits of the type required to sustain such a position.2 His critique has itself been attacked on the basis that what the experiments show is not the absence of character traits but their ability [End Page 269] to be influenced by the demands of a situation.3 Our objection is against the conception of virtues being attacked and also his sweeping conclusion about human nature and it has two strands. First we argue that phronesis, as the hallmark of a virtuous character, is a mix of skills, abilities, and attitudes honed in such a way as to allow the person to act fittingly in different life situations. Second, character runs true to type in an individual and even runs in families.We find support for both claims in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. This is, of course, a myth but one that has spoken to human beings across the ages and it recognizes both that different individuals show certain regularities in their modes of relationship and their conduct and that these tendencies are often familial, contributing significantly to the events marking family stories and traditions. Phronesis or practical wisdom is the skill to negotiate the challenges that life produces when fate deals one a hand of this (genetic and genealogical) kind. In the process of making the case we will support the claim that fiction "can significantly contribute to moral understanding by revealing what certain situations amount to" and therefore that it "can bring home to us the force of, for example, moral dilemmas" and indeed moral concepts, and we will use the Oedipus story to reflect on the lessons emerging from one version of virtue ethics.4We approach the Oedipus myth through Sophocles' tragedy in which an oracle about patricide and incest plays itself out in the lives of certain characters. The relevance for virtue ethics arises from the ways in which characters in the play react to their predicament and try to cope with the situations they must face. In moral life, individuals need to find strategies to deal with challenges they face both as individuals and as persons-in-relationships-with-others. The reactions portrayed in Oedipus make vivid not only the idea of character traits but also the role of virtue in moderating what we might do in situations that interact with our characters in potentially disastrous ways. II Harman's challenge begins... (shrink)

This article explores the issue of jus contra bellum as a particular development within just war thought. At its heart, the jus contra bellum amounts to an attempt to apply the principles of jus in bello (discrimination and proportionality) in order to negate the jus ad bellum. This approach was rather prevalent throughout the Cold War era, as concerns over the prospective use of nuclear weapons facilitated an increasingly sceptical attitude towards the use of force. Whereas the vast majority (...) of just war thinkers have tended to overlook this phenomenon, James Turner Johnson has adeptly recognised the perils of jus contra bellum, and its rather disastrous implications for just war thought. In this respect, Johnson's analysis of this issue constitutes one of his most significant contributions to the tradition. However, as this article will suggest, his assessment of this approach, and consequent efforts to counter it, do not go far enough. As will be noted, the roots of the jus contra bellum can be traced to the prevailing structure of just war thought – a structure which has been consistently championed by virtually every just war thinker. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study of the “electric hypothesis” of the causes of earthquakes, which emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century as part of the first studies of seismology. This hypothesis was related to Franklin’s views on atmospheric electricity and developed in a period when electric phenomena were widely studied, and was essentially based on solid empirical evidence and confirmed by model experiments. Even though it resulted from scientific reasoning, the theory remained strongly empirical, and was (...) supported by Italian scholars who were familiar with seismic events. Among these, Giuseppe Saverio Poli, a follower of Franklin, was able to provide a careful and comprehensive explanation of the disastrous earthquake of 1783, which occurred in Calabria, a region of southern Italy, and the St. Anne earthquake of 1805, by drawing not just upon the electric evidence, but all the relevant phenomenology available. We outline here the emergence, the development, and the later evolution (up to the beginning of the nineteenth century) of the “electric earthquake” paradigm by focusing on different works by Poli, including a previously unknown manuscript containing a thorough account of the Calabria earthquake prepared by the Neapolitan scholar for the Royal Society. The present case study therefore offers the opportunity to illustrate how electrical science shaped earthquake science to a degree not usually appreciated in the literature, and is also supported to some extent by the transition from Enlightenment scientific ideals to the Romantic conception of unity in the natural world, in search of common causes among phenomena belonging to different fields. (shrink)

This review seeks to evaluate certain aspects of “healthcare governance” during the Covid 19 pandemic, in particular the damage caused by policies based on unscientific views. Indeed, in addition to a health crisis, the pandemic coincided with a crisis of global governance that undermined scientific medicine, health systems and the communication of scientific data. This was partly driven by scientific denialism, exhibited most prominently by then-US president Donald Trump, with disastrous results in terms of health policy. Here we examine (...) articles appearing in Science, N Engl J Med, Sci Am and Front Public Health that adopt a political stance against such denialism, breaking with their traditional neutrality. The analysis addresses the effects of the pandemic on health systems and the general population, as well as on the ways in which science is produced and applied, together with its contradictions. It looks at how political and economic considerations resulted in inconsistent and contradictory models of scientific development that were to have disastrous effects on citizens’ health. In response to scientific denialism and the damage it can cause, we commend the OECD report entitled PISA 2018 Assessment and Analytical Framework, which highlights the role of education in the development of scientific literacy in the younger generations. We also consider the work of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which recognises and celebrates the value of science in ensuring accessibility to knowledge and scientific endeavour in society. Our analysis suggests that scientific knowledge should be a fundamental tenet, equal to that of individual freedom, of political governance. In this way, health policies can respond more adequately to global threats. (shrink)

Many conservatives, including some conservative scholars, blame the ideas and influence of John Dewey for what has frequently been called a crisis of character, a catastrophic decline in moral behavior in the schools and society of North America. Dewey’s critics claim that he is responsible for the undermining of the kinds of instruction that could lead to the development of character and the strengthening of the will, and that his educational philosophy and example exert a ubiquitous and disastrous (...) influence on students’ conceptions of moral behavior. This article sets forth the views of some of these critics and juxtaposes them with what Dewey actually believed and wrote regarding character education. The juxtaposition demonstrates that Dewey neither called for nor exemplified the kinds of character-eroding pedagogy his critics accuse him of championing; in addition, this paper highlights the ways in which Dewey argued consistently and convincingly that the pedagogical approaches advocated by his critics are the real culprits in the decline of character and moral education. (shrink)

We have always been Cyborgs … Computers are becoming smaller and penetrating our bodies so that we can become upgraded people who can interact efficiently with their environment in smart cities and have the means to cope with aging, the world’s worst mass murderer. This development is accompanied by new challenges related to digitisation, with the emergence of the Internet Panopticon being the most serious of all. I will show that by promoting freedom as a moral, social and legal (...) norm, we can benefit from the advantages of the digital age, while its problematic aspects do not unfold their potentially disastrous implications. (shrink)