This volume studies the origin and evolution of philosophical interest in Aristotle's Categories, and illuminates the earliest arguments for Aristotle's approach to logic as the foundation of higher education.

In 1988 the philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked that throughout his career he had always been 'circling around' a concept of nature. Showing how Deleuze weaves original readings of Plato, the Stoics, Aristotle, and Epicurus into some of his most famous arguments about event, difference, and problem, Michael James Bennett argues that these interpretations of ancient Greek physics provide vital clues for understanding Deleuze's own conception of nature. "Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics" delves into the original Greek and Latin (...) texts and situates Deleuze's interpretations in relation to contemporary scholarship on ancient philosophy. It reveals that these readings are both more complex and controversial than they may at first appear. Generating both new critical analyses of Deleuze and an appreciation for his classical erudition, this book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy, Deleuze's philosophical project, or his unique methodology in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil makes the prevention of gratuitous evil a necessary condition on moral perfection. I argue that, on any analysis of gratuitous evil we choose, the standard position on moral perfection and gratuitous evil is false. It is metaphysically impossible to prevent every gratuitously evil state of affairs in every possible world. No matter what God does—no matter how many gratuitously evil states of affairs God prevents—it is necessarily true that God coexists with (...) gratuitous evil in some world or other. Since gratuitous evil cannot be eliminated from metaphysical space, the existence of gratuitous evil presents no objection to essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially morally perfect, and necessarily existing beings. (shrink)

At Aristotle,MetaphysicsE.1, 1026a14, Schwegler’s conjectural emendation of the manuscript reading ἀχώριστα to χωριστά has been widely adopted. The objects of physical science are therefore here ‘separate’, or ‘independently existent’. By contrast, the manuscripts make them ‘not separate’, construed by earlier commentators as dependent on matter. In this paper, I offer a new defense of the manuscript reading. I review past defenses based on the internal consistency of the chapter, explore where they have left supporters of the emendation unpersuaded, and attempt (...) to strengthen their appeal. I challenge Schwegler’s central case, developed by Ross and others, that the construction μὲν ἀλλ’ οὐκ demands an implausible ‘logical antithesis’ between inseparability and mobility. This is arguably the fundamental obstacle to the manuscript reading, and counterexamples have not to date convinced emenders. I offer a new, systematic review of Aristotle’s use of the phrase, including relevant cases from theRhetoric, to show how its usual meaning in Aristotle supports the transmitted text; I also reply to possible objections. Finally, I explore the implications of this defense for the classification of the sciences in E.1. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari’s manner of distinguishing science from philosophy in their last collaboration What is Philosophy? (1991) seems to imply a hierarchy, according to which philosophy is more adequate to the reality of virtual events than science is. This suggests, in turn, that philosophy has a better claim than science to truth. This paper clarifies Deleuze‘s views about truth throughout his career. Deleuze equivocates over the term, using it in an “originary” and a “derived” sense, probably under the influence of (...) Henri Bergson, who does similarly. Moreover, William James and pragmatism were to Bergson what the early analytic philosophers Frege and Russell are to Deleuze: excessively scientistic foils whose confusions about truth arise as a result of failing to distinguish science from philosophy. By situating Deleuze’s conception of truth in relation to the early Heidegger’s, which it to some extent resembles, the paper concludes by suggesting that, surprisingly, neither kind of truth Deleuze licenses applies to science, while both apply to philosophy. Science is indifferent to truth in the way that some of Deleuze‘s readers have incorrectly wanted to say that he thinks philosophy is. (shrink)

Barbara Cassin’s “sophistic” reading of the history of philosophy can be applied to Lucretius. In contrast to other readers, like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres, Cassin says relatively little about ancient Greek atomism. Yet her perspective illuminates significant aspects of Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things, for several reasons: in particular, because Cassin’s distinction between sophistic practice and ontology maps onto the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy and because Lucretius’ verses revel in sonic wordplay which defies the philosophical (...) requirement of univocal meaning. Much recent enthusiasm for Lucretius treats his perspective as a materialist ontology. For Cassin, however, the sophists showed that ontology itself depends on the disavowed play of signifiers she calls “logological,” and the corresponding reading of atomism is, by her own admission, consistent with a kind of linguistic idealism. The interpretation of Lucretius offered here therefore challenges the widespread opinion that he is a precursor of contemporary materialism. (shrink)

James J. Gibson is one of the best known and perhaps most controversial visual theorists of the twentieth century. Writing in the vein of the American functionalists, and immersed in their profound sense of pragmatism, Gibson sought to establish a more rigorous foundation for the study of vision by reworking its most fundamental concepts. Over the five decades of his distinguished career, Gibson brought new clarity to the old problems of the tradition. He offered an alternative theory of perception (...) - one that could accommodate the experimental insights of contemporary research programs. He characterized this new theory as a version of direct perception in order to distinguish it from the traditional indirect approach of Rene Descartes. On Descartes' account, our perceptual awareness of reality comes through the representations we have formed of it within ourselves. In contrast, Gibson's theory of direct perception states that the environment contains all of the information needed to specify its properties. Hence, perceiving these properties is a matter of detecting the information available in the environment. This theory avoids the difficulty of explaining how the mind organizes holistic perceptions from atomic sensations. In what follows, I will attempt to make good these claims by situating the concept of "structure" at the heart of the ecological program. I will argue that this concept is significant precisely because it allows Gibson to locate the moving, perceiving body at the heart of meaningful perceptual experience; an experience which emerges in the dynamical structures that cross the body and the world. (shrink)

In their paper exploring patient ambivalence in the context of medical decision-making Bryanna Moore, et al. state, “While bioethicists have not paid much attention to ambivalence and related menta...

Explorations of relationships between Haidt’s Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) and indices of moral decision-making assessed by the Defining Issues Test have been limited to correlational analyses. This study used Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority and Purity to predict overall moral judgment and individual Defining Issues Test-2 (DIT-2) schema scores using responses from 222 undergraduates. Relationships were not confirmed between the separate foundations and the DIT-2 indices. Using the MFQ moral judgment items only, confirmatory factor analyses confirmed higher order constructs called Individualizing (...) and Binding foundations. Structural models using these higher order factors fitted the data well, and findings indicated that the Binding foundations significantly positively predicted Maintaining Norms and negatively predicted both overall moral judgment (N2) and the Postconventional Schema. Neither Individualizing nor Binding foundations significantly predicted Personal Interest. While moral judgments assessed by DIT-2 may not be evoking the MFQ foundations, findings here suggest the MFQ may not be a suitable measure for capturing more advanced moral functioning. (shrink)

The arguments of the Stoic Chrysippus recorded in Cicero's De Fato are of great importance to Deleuze's conception of events in The Logic of Sense. The purpose of this paper is to explicate these arguments, to which Deleuze's allusions are extremely terse, and to situate them in the context of Deleuze's broader project in that book. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on the Stoics, I show the extent to which Chrysippus' views on compatibilism, hypothetical inference and astrology support Deleuze's claim that (...) the Stoics developed a theory of compatibilities and incompatibilities of events independent of corporeal states of affairs. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Epicurean atomism, and explicates his claim that it represents a problematic idea, similar to the idea exemplified in early, “barbaric” accounts of the differential calculus. Deleuzian problematic ideas are characterized by a mechanism through whose activity the components of the idea become determinate in relating reciprocally to one another, rather than in being determined exclusively in relation to an extrinsic paradigm or framework. In Epicurean atomism, as Deleuze reads it, such a mechanism of (...) determination can be found in the famous atomic “swerve”. It is necessary to bear this interpretation of Epicurean atomism in mind when understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s promulgation of a new image of thought in What is Philosophy?, which has an explicitly Epicurean inspiration. The paper argues that this inspiration is particularly evident to the extent that Deleuze and Guattari identify the sub-representative feature that lies at the heart of their new image of thought with “chaos”, defined as “infinite speed”. I claim that infinite speed, this otherwise puzzling feature of What is Philosophy?, ought to be understood in the light of Deleuze’s interpretation of Epicurus. Moreover, the Epicurean distinctions between different speeds must be read together with Deleuze’s appropriation of the metaphysics of the ancient Stoics, who, although widely recognized as Deleuze’s Hellenistic counterparts, lack important theoretical resources that the Epicureans provide for Deleuze. (shrink)

This paper reports on a case study which aims to recreate the hearing voices symptom in schizophrenia. The case study was submitted for a co-curricular module at King’s College London by a first-year undergraduate Music student, Bethany James, and was created using the web application, Mahara. The core of the case study consists of a soundscape of both everyday and unusual sounds, in conjunction with an original musical composition. The paper describes the case study and discusses it using chaos (...) narrative as an analytical lens. The paper argues that the case study effectively evokes the hearing voices symptom, conveying a lucid sense of the experience to non-sufferers and thus potentially creating use value for clinicians and care workers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Texts and Icons in Heidegger’s Metaphysical TraditionMichael James Bennett (bio)[End Page 26]This essay is about texts that draw attention to themselves as texts, that is, as material, graphical figures, rather than as more or less efficiently pellucid semantic relays. In other words, it is about what happens when texts behave like images. In what follows I examine a series of philosophical contexts where this question appears to be (...) at issue. I claim that one way of understanding what’s going on in these contexts is that here the image-form of a text becomes a kind of icon. I begin by reflecting on a prejudice that belongs, according to Heidegger, to the “history of metaphysics”: the notion that it would be better, clearer, and less ambiguous to replace all reliance on images with self-effacing, transparent words. My goal here is to demonstrate the existence of an alternative historical trend that defends an opposite view. I compare a defense of iconography by Byzantine patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople, as well as the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, with works by two latter-day Heideggerians, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, who respond to the inherited problematic of non-referential, iconic texts. These responses suggest that non-semantic image-creation, as much as non-semantic verbal play, is the pre-conceptual condition of conceptuality. This essay presents a new way of understanding the philosophical issues that connect ancient and medieval discussions about icons and images with twentieth-century concerns about language.In her study of medieval European manuscript illumination, Animating the Letter (1999), Laura Kendrick emphasizes the non-semantic character of illuminated texts. Kendrick argues that the basic distinction between text and image is fundamentally at stake in illumination, and that the distinction is inherited from the Christian church fathers who opposed text and image, privileging the former and denigrating the latter. According to this traditional view, texts are better suited than images to a consideration of the divine on account of writing’s ethereal quality, its “transparency,” which leads the reader beyond the material sign to the immaterial concept. The problem with images, on the other hand, is their materiality, which may lead viewers down a dark path toward an ultimately heretical veneration for the mere image instead of for its referent. It seems to me that we find in Kendrick’s argument an exact homology with the discourse on the icon in the Byzantine Christian church. Emperor Constantine V, for instance, at the time of the “first iconoclast crisis” (the mid-eighth century CE), expresses wariness about the potentially heterodox metaphysics underpinning iconophilia. He objects to icons on the basis that their veneration would be acceptable only if the icon were to share the essence of that of which it is an icon (God), but that this is impossible; infinite divine nature cannot be encompassed within the finite line of human composition. The Byzantine iconophile’s response to this objection is not to deny the infinite, uncircumscribable nature of God, but to affirm that the icon, bound though it is to the register of images, nevertheless does not function in the same manner as an ordinary image. That is, the icon does not refer to its model by means of resemblance alone. In the language of Nikephoros of Constantinople (758–828 CE), the character of the icon consists in consubstantiality (homoousia) prior to resemblance (homoiōsis).1 [End Page 27]The problem of the limits of reference unites the discourse on the icon and the flourishing of the illuminated text. Just as the icon does not refer in the normal way to its referent, so Kendrick contends that the “animated letter” is not reducible to its pure semantic quality, is not to be understood as if it were just a kind of significative relay through which a sublime quantity of something called “meaning” is obliged to pass. “Meaning,” conceived of in what I am inclined to call the narrowly economic sense as the cargo of material vehicles called “words,” meaning that is gambled in words and then “cashed out” again, is not always what is at stake when one writes. Something else is... (shrink)

Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory gathers together contributions by many of the central theorists in Deleuze studies who have led the way in breaking down the boundaries between philosophical and biological research. They focus on the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with evolutionary theory across the full range of their work, from the interpretation of Darwin in Difference and Repetition to the symbiotic alliances of wasp and orchid in A Thousand Plateaus. In this way, they explore the anthropological, social and (...) biopolitical significance of the convergences and divergences between philosophy and evolutionary science. (shrink)

This paper investigates the connection between Henri Bergson’s biological epistemology and his moral theory. Specifically, it examines the distinction between the morality of what Bergson calls “closed” and “open” societies in his late work Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). I argue that “open” morality provides the moral correlate of a non-instrumentalizing orientation toward nature. Here Bergson’s thought is disposed toward a very specific kind of environmental ethic, an aesthetic one. Bergson’s characterization of open morality, especially in the image (...) of the mystic individual, indicates that through artistic consciousness open morality imitates the creative evolution of life. (shrink)

Humanity and its gods evolved collinearly to the cultures, capabilities, politics, climates, and conditions that influenced it. Causes and effects always precede one another, history tells us how things turned out and gives us an opportunity to reflect on what might happen next. Where religious history is concerned, this is apparently not the case. Humanity has been manipulated, fooled, and denied the chance to know what really happened to it during its long struggle with understanding God’s Will and His place (...) in our lives. Given the chance to know the truth, how eagerly would we embrace it? Fortunately, the news is good. The Kingdom of Israel, led to the heights by Solomon, fell to a desperate and brutal culture, the Assyrians. Their God, Ammon, later called Yahweh, was forced upon them as was His fickle, often violent temperament. This led to almost a thousand years of stark changes in Hebrew religious practices which resulted in the myths and legends of the Deuteronomy, what modern Jewry calls the Torah. The ideas, poems, and scriptures of Solomon, a devotee of the Evening Star Goddess Ishtar, most of which are focused on ways to revel in this lifetime offer a sharp contrast to the disaster-prone way of life of the Jews in the Torah, and the harsh rules-based way of life Yahweh expected of them in exchange for His Refuge. So said a man named Moses who left not one word of fact or truth behind him. Still he had advocates, as did Saul of Tarsus, the man who created Christianity, at least until his colleague, St. Mark-Peter gave us Christ’s Commandments as a Pole Star to guide us out of the madness of all the false prophets of the past. St. Matthew said it well about St. Mark’s Vision of Christ: “Upon these Words, all other words hinge.” This Essay, the Last Word frees us from the lies we have been told about our religious past, gives us the Truth and as with all truths, an amazing opportunity to find our way: A planet where neighbors love one another and give Thanks to God for the chance. (shrink)

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment represents a turn toward experience, that is, toward the experiencing subject. Still the Enlightenment involves an aspiration toward objective truth in the ideals of the newly emerging sciences and in the experiments in democracy that were beginning to transform the political landscape of Europe and America. Immanuel Kant's towering philosophical achievement in his critical works helps to reformulate a meaning of objectivity that is congenial to the climate of inquiry and freedom in that remarkable century, a meaning (...) that is unburdened of the metaphysical commitments of many of his predecessors. Kant's revolution in philosophical thought gives us an objectivity that is crucially related to epistemic conditions rooted in subjectivity, a correlation between subjectivity and objectivity that carries over as well into his critical treatises concerned with ethics and aesthetics. This book of essays explores the tension between subjectivity and objectivity as it develops in the Enlightenment in Winkelmann, Hume, and Kant. The focus is upon aesthetic theories concerning the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque. The question by two of the authors as to whether aesthetic enjoyment of the blues is morally justified underscores an interest in these essays in the connection between aesthetics and ethics. This concern of the relation of aesthetics to judgments in cognition and in morality underlies an area of peculiar interest to Kant, and therefore to many of these essays. Finally the authors examine a turn toward the subjective in the Postmodern world of art and aesthetic theory, a turn that represents a relaxation of the original Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and objectivity. It also represents perhaps a grotesque turn toward the extreme of subjectivity in the realm of Postmodern theory, an extreme toward which at least one of the authors casts a critical eye. (shrink)

The problem of whether perception is direct or if it depends on additional, cognitive contributions made by the perceiving subject, is posed with particular force in an Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. It is evident from the recurrent treatment it receives therein that Berkeley considers it to be one of the central issues concerning perception. Fittingly, the NTV devotes the most attention to it. In this essay, I deal exclusively with Berkeley's treatment of the problem of indirect distance (...) perception, as it is presented in the context of that work. (shrink)

Postmodern alienation -- Jameson's dialectical levels -- Baudrillard's hostile worlds -- Foucault's system of thought.

Singh conflates diverse religious statuses into a single category that includes practitioners with roles that differ significantly from empirical characteristics of shamans. The rejection of biological models of trance and conspicuous display models misses the evolutionary roots of shamanism involving the social functions of ritual in producing psychological and social integration and ritual healing.

Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth traces the historical development of the ethics of authenticity in relation to the rise of social freedom and individualism. Traversing the German Idealists, Habermas, Foucault, and MacIntyre, Shuttleworth proposes a socio-existential account of ethical authenticity, using Taylor and Sartre. Moving beyond virtue ethics, discourse ethics and Foucauldian notions of self-care, The History and Ethics of Authenticity constructs a practical ethics of authenticity which makes use of contemporary reference points, including the rise of social media, (...) capitalist branding, and competing appeals to identity, resulting in a presentation of the ethics of authenticity as an achievable ethical ideal. (shrink)

In this paper, an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity is developed in dialogue with the Norwegian environmentalist Arne Naess and the Japanese ethicist Watsuji Tetsurō. More specifically, Naess’s concept of Self-realization is supplemented and supported with Watsuji’s ethic of authenticity and phenomenology of climate. And the ecological potential of Watsuji’s thought is realized in relation to Naess’s ideas of human responsibility and symbiosis. After establishing an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity, the practical application of this concept is then demonstrated in (...) relation to satoyama and the preservation of nature in Japan. Whilst the intended outcome is to develop an ecologically extended ethic of authenticity, a secondary aim is to illustrate the benefit and importance of cross-cultural dialogue to advance philosophical thought and understanding. (shrink)

In the second volume of Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsurō focuses on developing his notion of betweenness through the ethical organisations of family, local commun...

In this translation, Watsuji Tetsurō sets out to clarify that which is entailed by “national character”. In his analysis of this idea, Watsuji critically analyses the Marxist interpretation from the perspective of Martin Heidegger. After articulating Heidegger’s concept of being-there [Dasein], Watsuji then criticizes Heidegger’s approach in three regards. Firstly, Watsuji questions whether the most accessible way of encountering things in the world is through concern with work and use. Watsuji’s counter-claim is that protection from the cold itself is more (...) primordial that wearing clothes. Secondly, Watsuji questions whether within-the-world is only to be found in equipment. Watsuji claims that although the cold can be treated as equipment, it is more primordially encountered directly, such as in the form of a cold breeze. And thirdly, Watsuji asks whether being-in-the-world should only be grasped as concern. For Watsuji, we not only encounter things in the world to be used, such as for protection against the cold, but also in terms of “enjoyment” or “sensation.” The importance of this essay is that it provides a link between Watsuji’s early engagement with Heidegger and the development of Watsuji’s own concept of fudō (風土). In this regard, this translation fills a gap in the primary sources available in English and provides the means to understand Watsuji’s critique of Heidegger and how this critique shapes the development of Watsuji’s mature thought. (shrink)

The application of AI in healthcare has dramatically changed the practice of medicine. In particular, AI has been implemented in a variety of roles that previously required human physicians. Due to AI's ability to outperform humans in these roles, the concern has been raised that AI will completely replace human physicians in the future. In this paper, it is argued that human physician's ability to embellish the truth is necessary to prevent injury or grief to patients, or to protect patients’ (...) feelings. Such embellishments are usually defined as “white lies,” which not only include intentionally providing false, incomplete, or misleading information to patients, but also withholding information. White lies are not uncommon in medical practice, especially in some particular cultures, such as Asia; and to some particular patients, such as children. Here, white lies are defended based on the position of weak paternalism. And although medical AI may surpass human physicians in diagnostic accuracy, efficiency, and treatment, they cannot intentionally lie to patients, which is necessary to prevent injury or grief or to protect patients’ feelings in some cases. From this perspective, it is further argued that AI cannot completely replace human physicians. (shrink)

The following translation is an extract from the third chapter of Watsuji Tetsurō’s Hidden Japan [埋もれた日本] 1951. The translation is composed of two sections: “Until I met Sōseki” [漱石に逢うまで], and “Sōseki’s Character” [漱石の人物]. The former section discusses Watsuji’s indirect encounters with Natsume, namely, reading Natsume’s work as it was serialized in literary magazines during the Meiji era (1868–1912) and the impression Watsuji formed of Natsume as a teacher at Tokyo First Higher School (Ichikō). The latter section discusses Natsume as Watsuji’s (...) personal acquaintance. Here the focus is on how Watsuji came to know Natsume through participating in the famous Thursday Club [木曜会], which was held at Natsume’s home, Sōseki Sanbō [漱石山房]. The contributions of this translation to the literature are threefold: it i) provides a multidimensional account of Natsume, ii) offers insight into the legendary Thursday Club, and iii) also tells us about Watsuji himself. (shrink)

In this article, an ecological ethic is developed from the ethical philosophy and environmental phenomenology of the Japanese ethicist Watsuji Tetsurō. More specially, it is illustrated that reading Watsuji’s ethics and concept of fūdo (風土) in tangent and drawing out the implications of his ontology of emptiness, provides the means to overcome the ecological issue of anthropocentrism. The ecological ethic developed here also goes beyond Watsuji’s account by criticising his focus on land and advocates the importance of the sea for (...) environmental ethics. Not only is it argued that a fully functional ecological ethic must account for all habitats, but that the sea can be seen to be more fundamental than the land in the formation of Watsuji’s concept of fūdo. (shrink)

This book, formed as a series of essays in honour of Professor Carl Baudenbacher, addresses the very art of judicial reasoning, and features contributions from many of the foremost current or former national, supranational, or international judges. This unique volume is intended first and foremost for legal scholars, but its approachable style makes it readily accessible for students and for those with a general interest in the application of the law and justice in today’s multi-layered world. The collection of essays (...) is rather more philosophical and reflective as opposed to doctrinal. Each contribution focuses on the nature and operation of justice, the independence of the judiciary, and on judicial style primarily from the perspective of the judges themselves. The book provides perspectives on what it means to be accountable and independent as a judge, the role of language and languages in the quest for justice, while other contributions acquaint readers with the some of the structures of courts themselves, or indeed question for whom judgments are written. Each chapter has been written by a presiding judge, or head of an institution and the book is divided into three parts: - Part I Art and Method - Part II Justice and the Judiciary - Part III Reasoning and Language. (shrink)

Background There is no definition of what constitutes a lie when working with people with moderate to severe dementia. Lies are often defined as therapeutic with no evidence of how therapeutic value is gauged. There is no previous research that observes lies being told or the impact the lies have on people with dementia. Aim The aim was to develop a taxonomy of lies for use when supporting people with moderate to severe dementia and then use this to develop a (...) model, which could be used to explore the impact of lie telling. Research design Ethnography was used, with the researcher observing and recording lies told to people with moderate to severe dementia, by professional caregivers. Data analysis was based on Burnard’s thematic analysis. Ethical consideration Ethical approval for the study was obtained from Northumbria University, the Research Ethics Committee (REC) and the Health Research Authority (HRA) in the United Kingdom. Study number 227508. Findings Six categories of lie were identified; blatant, avoidance, familiarity, props, banter and going along with. Spontaneous and planned lies were observed. Motivation, validation and genuineness were key in terms of how the person with dementia responded. These affective domains were used to develop the Lie ARM (affective reflective model). Discussion Planned and spontaneous lies are an effective intervention for people with moderate to severe dementia. Healthcare professionals need to be aware of their motivation for using lies, as well as the impact they have on patients. Conclusion The taxonomy is an objective way to categorise lies. It supports increased reflection, particularly if used in conjunction with the Lie ARM. The Lie ARM is a useful tool to help staff reflect on practice or to predict whether a proposed lie is likely to be therapeutic. (shrink)

The motif of Mars taking revenge has already arisen in this book with respect to the interpretations of Lucretius; in this chapter it takes centre stage as a kind of justification for them. For readers of Lucretius and Roman imperialists alike the same question arises: what can justify going to battle? In the case of the former, it is a question about the battle over the meaning of De rerum natura. As I will argue in this chapter, both groups also (...) have an answer in common: the fight was started by an enemy who represents a greater danger than whatever violence is called for in response. For Lezra, the methodological dispute plays out over the question of the value of “historicism”—roughly, appealing to a specific historical context as a cause or a reason why something is the way it is—which is part of the more general topic of the limits of reading Lucretius according to the conventions of an academic discipline. (shrink)

The interpretations of Lucretius offered by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze are in some ways antithetical to one other. For Bergson, De rerum natura is a melancholic poem, while for Deleuze it is life-affirming; Bergson thinks that Lucretius cannot help evoking transcendence, while Deleuze treats his vision of nature as one of immanent diversity. Despite the differences, their readings, which I discuss in depth in this chapter, introduce motifs that recur in explicit and implicit ways among the new Lucretians. Bergson, (...) for example, describes a divergence between Lucretius’s point of view and that of his hero Epicurus, and Deleuze enlists Lucretius in an exercise of canon-formation, establishing a critical counter-tradition of demystifiers in the history of philosophy. According to this second suggestion, echoes or versions of the same Lucretian thoughts resonate transhistorically, if not anachronistically, at other times and places, especially in the philosophy of Spinoza sixteen centuries later. (shrink)

In Part Two of this book, I have considered historiographic methods or approaches to reading the history of philosophy that may lie behind the interpretations of Lucretius offered by Nail, Bennett, Morfino, and Lezra. These provide several potential answers to the demand for justification: why or on what basis do they appeal to Lucretius in support of their materialist arguments today? The last methodological possibility I want to consider may have suggested itself already to many readers. The four materialists I (...) have focused on could simply be using Lucretius creatively, rather than in a way that is supposed to be historically true or accurate. Richard Rorty characterizes Geistesgeschichte, the genre of philosophical historiography I suspect the new Lucretians generally work in, as both creative or experimental and as affirming the importance of philosophical heroes, but if creativity is, ultimately, the best explanation for the new Lucretians’ uses of Lucretius, then in this respect their foremost precursor is Deleuze, who advocates an unusual blend of creativity and disinterestedness. New Lucretian hero-worship can be problematic, but it is ultimately a very Lucretian theme. (shrink)

According to Émile BréhierBréhier, Émile, the history of philosophy is a constant revival or rebirth of interrupted currents of thought. Such a revival has recently taken place in materialist critical theory, where the ideas and arguments of the ancient Roman didactic epic De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”) and its author the Epicurean poet Lucretius enjoy remarkable pre-eminence today. Inspired by the poem’s vision of matter in motion and the generativity of nature, contemporary materialists in comparative literature, political (...) thought, and continental philosophy refer appreciatively to Lucretius as an important predecessor and attribute to him views that anticipate their own innovative work in their respective fields—a suggestion which may seem, on the surface of it, unexpected or implausible. The purpose of this book is to interpret and assess this phenomenon. Why is Lucretius so prominent in contemporary materialisms, and what is at stake in his transformation into a kind of precursor or ancient double? (shrink)

On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra distinguishes the materialism of the encounter proper from the so-called “new materialism” of Jane Bennett. As a critic of the “new materialists,” Lezra might bristle at being associated in this book with contemporary readers of Lucretius like Bennett and Thomas Nail. Yet Lezra and Bennett are in substantive agreement about at least two things: their adherence to Althusser’s version of the historical counternarrative involving Lucretius—even though this might not be as obvious in (...) Bennett’s case—and their willingness to affirm the way their interpretations of Lucretius inevitably swerve away from the poet’s original meanings. Lezra and Bennett are at loggerheads, however, when it comes to Marxism. Lezra critiques Bennett in a way typical of Marxist-style ideology critique, while Bennett problematizes this kind of demystifying gesture, advancing a self-consciously naïve or uncritical new materialism for which the use of Lucretius is ambiguous. (shrink)

In the last chapter I suggested that part of the appeal of the return to Lucretius today could be the sublime persuasiveness of the idea that there’s an “underground current” of his influence flowing beneath the surface of the history of philosophy. Even non-Althusserians have converged on versions of the same subterranean image. Deleuze, for example, refers to a second, “volcanic” line of argument in the scholia of Spinoza’s Ethics, which persists “underneath” the one articulated in the propositions and expresses (...) the theme of demystification in the name of joy that Deleuze also associates with Lucretius (1988: 28–29). Likewise, Serres describes the persistence of ancient models in the history of science being like a vast “tectonic plate” and a current of magma with very great viscosity (2000: 162). A good place to start my discussion of the four representative twenty-first-century readers of Lucretius, the titular “new Lucretians” who adopt and adapt elements of the interpretations I have discussed in the last two chapters, is therefore with the theme of marvellous natural wonders. Morfino makes it the subject of his most extensive discussion of Lucretius in the essay “Lucretius and Monsters,” originally published in 2013. (shrink)

Thomas Nail offers by far the most ambitious and comprehensive interpretation of Lucretius of all the new Lucretians considered in this book. He has published three entire volumes on De rerum natura advancing a unified and detailed reading of that text, and these volumes form part of a much larger project vindicating what Nail calls the ontological “primacy of motion.” According to Nail’s account of the history of ontology in Being and Motion (2019), motion was almost always subordinated, treated as (...) secondary to some more fundamental or universal principle like space, eternity, force, time, or even the indestructible atom. Lucretius, however, is an exception to the rule. In fact, Nail boldly states that “Lucretius rejected entirely the notion that things emerged from discrete particles. To believe otherwise is to distort the original meanings of the Latin text” of De rerum natura, and he claims that, rather than atoms, what Lucretius was describing in that poem was the motion of being as Nail himself conceptualizes it. Nail’s interpretations of Lucretius are tendentious and unconvincing on their own terms, but their emphasis on Lucretius’s originality relative to Epicurus resonates with Henri Bergson’s interpretation. Nail provides an updated version of the theme of antilucrèce chez Lucrèce for what he calls our “Age of Motion.”. (shrink)

Whatever the complications involved in appealing to Michel Serres, a votary of Venus and peace, in support of the war-like textual politics of Mars ultor, his work is an essential reference for the anachronism or anti-historicism of contemporary materialist interpreters of Lucretius. Leo Strauss is not such a reference—there is no evidence that the new Lucretians are alluding to, drawing on, or reading Strauss—and yet the anti-historicist streak in their writings is reminiscent of certain aspects of his highly influential and (...) controversial work. In this chapter I flesh out the comparison by discussing Strauss’s approach to interpreting the works of the so-called “greatest writers” of the past, including Lucretius, and considering how Strauss’s method of “reading between the lines” provides a distinct kind of justification for the new Lucretians’ gesture. Drawing on critics of Strauss, I also raise concerns about the weaknesses or limitations of a Straussian approach—in particular, the extent to which its justificatory function is inseparable from a tendency to generate viciously motivated or self-confirmatory readings. If the new Lucretians can sometimes be quasi- or para-Straussian, then Strauss provides an instructive parallel and a cautionary tale for their use of Lucretius. (shrink)

From the concern that truth is at stake if the empirical conclusions about the past made by interpreters of the history of philosophy are unduly self-interested, this chapter moves to reflect on the relationship between the new Lucretians and the discipline of philosophy, which seems uniquely reverential toward truth. Philosophers writing about their discipline’s history in the so-called “analytic” tradition have theorized various styles or genres of that kind of historiography, such as “rational reconstruction” and “Geistesgeschichte,” which provide more potential (...) sources of justification for the new Lucretians’ use of Lucretius. (shrink)

Perhaps even more energetically than Deleuze’s work, Althusser’s late text on the “Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” also assembles a philosophical counter-tradition in which Epicurus and Lucretius play leading roles. Yet Althusser disagrees substantially with Deleuze about how Lucretius’s Epicurean physics should be understood and about what is valuable about the alternative materialist way of thinking it inaugurates. Deleuze emphasized the critical theme of demystification and the liberating challenge Lucretius, along with Spinoza and Nietzsche, posed to practically (...) incapacitating affects like resentment, but he understood the speculative physics of the Epicureans, including the swerve of atoms as a relation between “differentials of matter,” in terms of the determination of problematic ideas—explicitly not in terms of freedom from determination or indeterminacy. For Althusser, in contrast, the indeterminate character of swerves in Epicurean physics is what makes his “materialism of the encounter” an affirmation of chance and contingency that stands at odds with the more teleological variants of materialism typical of Marxist political theory. (shrink)

These 17 essays covers all aspects of Bernard Stiegler's work, from poststructuralism, anthropology and psychoanalysis to his work on the politics of memory, 'libidinal economy', technoscience and aesthetics, keeping a focus on his key theory of technics throughout. Stiegler brings together key concepts from Plato, Freud, Derrida and Simondon to argue that the human is 'invented' through technics rather than a product of purely biological evolution. Stiegler is a thinker at the forefront of our contemporary concerns with consumerism, technology, inter-generational (...) division, political apathy and economic crisis. His ambitious project is to go beyond these sources of social distress to uncover and examine precisely 'what makes life worth living'. Contributors include: Stephen Barker, University of California Irvine and translator of Steigler; Richard Beardsworth, American University of Paris and translator of Stiegler; Miguel de Beistegui; University of Warwick; Marc Crepon, Ecole normale superieure and co-founder of Stiegler's think tank, Ars Industrialis and Daniel Ross, co-director of 'The Ister', the award-winning film on Heidegger, and translator of Stiegler. (shrink)