In this essay I shall try to offer an outline of an answer to the question of which subject matter and which methodological peculiarities of cosmology caused cosmology only in this century to be transformed into one of the scientific branches of physics in spite of the fact that cosmological considerations on the Universe, and particularly on its origin, are present in the most archaic cultures and so belong to some of the oldest springs of human thought.

The paper has outlined a broad perspective of references for the (particular and general) theory of relativity to various domains of human knowledge and to technique. These references are presented both in their current and historical dimension. The following issues are discussed: 1) the place of the theory of relativity in the development of physics and cosmology, 2) its contribution to the development of mathematics, 3) the significance of the theory of relativity in the development of technique, and 4) the (...) role of the theory of relativity in the development of philosophy. The theory of relativity is – aside to quantum mechanics – one of the two basic paradigms (relativistic paradigm) of contemporary physics. Likewise it plays a fundamental role in further development of physics, astronomy and cosmology, contributing at the same time to the development of mathematics and philosophy. The author indicates that it is groundless to refer to the theory of relativity in the efforts to relativise and subjectivise cognitive and axiological questions. The theory of relativity does not relativise all its concepts of magnitudes, but it even confers the absolute status on certain magnitudes, which have been deemed relative before. (shrink)

In Just This Is It: Dongshan and the Practice of Suchness, Taigen Dan Leighton has written a rich introduction to the teachings of Dongshan Liangjie, one of the Chinese founders of the Caodong branch of Chan/Zen Buddhism. Drawing on his expertise as both a scholar and a Zen teacher, Leighton analyzes Dongshan's Recorded Sayings, especially its encounter dialogues, the teaching poem "Jewel Mirror Samādhi," and the doctrine of the five degrees, while also taking up anecdotes about Dongshan that appear (...) in koan collections. Given the historical fog surrounding classical Chan figures and their texts, Leighton's focus is "not the literal historical personage of Dongshan, but... (shrink)

Teachings on the practice of things-as-they-are, through commentaries on a legendary Chinese Zen figure. The ninth-century Tang dynasty Chinese master Dongshan is an important ancestor of the Zen tradition that has spread widely throughout the world in the twentieth century. He features prominently in koan texts and teaching stories, but he's not been written about or translated much in English yet. Dan Leighton comes to the rescue with this excellent book that takes the texts and teachings attributed to Dongshan, as (...) well as the teaching stories and koan cases about him, and provides commentary for understanding the teaching of the House of Caodong he's associated with, particularly as it relates to "suchness"--tathata, the absolute and true nature inherent in all appearance--focusing on the practical relevance of the teachings Dongshan represents to the practice and life of us folks today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wildman's Effing Theodicy:The Problem of Suffering, the Ground of Being, and the Worship of SuchnessDemian Wheeler (bio)I. Confronting Suffering: Fictional Gods, Monstrous Evils, and Ghostly WhisperersWesley J. Wildman—"the comparing inquirer,"1 "the man who receives too many emails,"2 "the most original, audacious, creative, encyclopedic, and integrative thinker working within and across the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and the scientific study of religion in our time"3—is now a novelist! His (...) recently published first novel, The Winding Way Home, is an astounding and achingly beautiful story about a family searching for healing in the face of unspeakable tragedy and crushing grief. Our protagonist is Jesse, a strangely familiar philosopher, polymath, and professor, whose six-year-old daughter, Becca, is abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Needless to say, Becca's disappearance totally shatters the lives of Jesse, his beloved partner Alexandra, and their two boys, Matt and Josh.On the verge of a complete mental breakdown, and desperate to manage the anxiety, uncertainty, terror, and encroaching despair, Jesse begins to engage in a severe form of meditation, deliberately dwelling on images of what Becca might be enduring, however gruesome and devastating. He pictures her dead in the woods, sold to the highest bidder, imprisoned in an attic, abused physically and sexually, buried alive in a crate desperately praying to be rescued, treating each possible future "as a shard-like perspective on a fear-inducing, darkly humming [End Page 20] crystalline monstrosity." For Jesse, this visualization practice is an act of solidarity, not masochism, a way to love his precious little girl as she really is, no matter what she went through or is still going through. Anything less feels like a betrayal, like a "spineless retreat from the reality of Becca's life." Facing the brutal truth about Becca also becomes an integral part of his piety, his worship. As the saga unfolds, Jesse embarks on a weird but wild spiritual quest, a quest to see and surrender to the world in all its wonder and ambiguity, grace and threat, the world that gave him the greatest gift imaginable, Becca, a "beautiful, perfect little being," only to take her away and hand her over to a fate worse than death.4Later in the story, Jesse and Alexandra become foster parents to an abduction survivor named Maddy. Their worst nightmares about what probably happened to Becca actually did happen to Maddy. Stolen from her family at a young age and chained up in a cold, lonely basement, Maddy was subjected to years of torture, malnourishment, deprivation, disease, and rape, forced to bear the children of her captors. Shortly after Maddy and her kids move in, Jesse schedules a meeting with Father Jimmy, "his favorite delusional priest." Jesse admires and appreciates Father Jimmy's intelligence, lovingkindness, and nonjudgmental nature. But he is not bashful about challenging his "supernatural mumbo-jumbo."5 On this particular occasion, they gather to talk about the theological implications of Maddy's horrific life and whatever unthinkable horrors befell Becca. The conversation gets quite heated. Growing increasingly irate, Jesse asks Father Jimmy if he prays for Maddy, Becca, and other missing children and trusts in a God who permits their dreadful circumstances and could do something to ameliorate them. Father Jimmy nods in the affirmative and gently asks a question of his own: "Why would you be angry at a God you don't believe in?" Jesse thunders back:I'm not angry at your fictional God! … I'm angry at you. You worship and pray to a being who allowed Becca and Maddy to be raped and tortured, and in Becca's case probably murdered. And then you offer solace to me and my family in the form of prayers to change this deity's mind about what to do. As if that's supposed to make any of us feel better! Can't you see? You're commending to me a God whose behavior and decisions are so utterly appalling, so completely opposed to the good as I understand it, that I would devote my life to morally resisting this God's depravity... (shrink)

Many philosophical views have the surprising implication that, within the boundaries of each human being, there is not just one mind, but many: anywhere from two (the person and their brain, or the person and their body) to trillions (each of the nearly-entirely-overlapping precise entities generated by the Problem of the Many). This is often treated as absurd, a problem of ‘Too Many Minds’, which we must find ways to avoid. It is often thought specifically absurd to allow such a (...) multiplication of conscious subjects, even if we could accept it for physical objects. I consider metaphysical, phenomenological, and moral arguments for this asymmetry, and show that they all fail: many overlapping conscious minds is no more problematic than many overlapping physical objects. Theories that imply such a multiplicity may or may not be true, but they cannot be rejected simply for implying it. (shrink)

Despite the bombardment of AI ethics frameworks (AIEFs) published in the last decade, it is unclear which of the many have been adopted in the industry. What is more, the sheer volume of AIEFs without a clear demonstration of their effectiveness makes it difficult for businesses to select which framework they should adopt. As a first step toward addressing this problem, we employed four different existing frameworks to assess AI ethics concerns of a real-world AI system. We compared the experience (...) of applying the AIEFs from the perspective of (a) a third-party auditor conducting an AI ethics risk assessment for the company, and (b) the company receiving the audit outcomes. Our results suggest that the feel-good factor of doing an assessment is common across the AIEFs that can take anywhere between 1.5 and 20 h to complete. However, each framework provides different benefits (e.g., issue discovery vs. issue monitoring) and is likely best used in conjunction with one another at different stages of an AI development process. As such, we call on the AI ethics community to better specify the suitability and expected benefits of existing frameworks to enable better adoption of AI ethics practice in the industry. (shrink)

The relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis of the assumptions concerning (...) the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity. (shrink)

People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, apologize for their own beliefs. In many mundane cases, people are morally criticized for their beliefs. Intuitively, then, beliefs seem to sometimes wrong people. Recently, the philosophical literature has picked up on this theme, and has started to discuss it under the heading of doxastic wrongdoing. In this paper we argue that despite the strength of such initial intuitions, at the end of the day they have to be rejected. If (...) it can be ever truthfully asserted that beliefs wrong, this is always derivative – beliefs wrong only in virtue of other things (like evidence-gathering actions) wronging. We distinguish between modest and ambitious doxastic wrongdoing theories (the former deny, while the latter accept, the possibility of a morally wrong yet epistemically permissible belief); we argue that each of these options faces insurmountable problems; and we offer partly debunking explanations of the intuitions purportedly supporting doxastic wrongdoing. (shrink)

Gay marriages (as such) are not as yet allowed anywhere but the demand for them is increasing. Most countries take a liberal attitude towards marriage: few obstacles are put in its way. But objections to gay marriages continue to be raised. These objections are refuted and the case for gay marriage is assessed through the prism of various forms of liberalism. The normative argument for allowing gay marriage is shown to be both strong and consistent with many of the values (...) upheld by the opponents of such unions. (shrink)

Is There Such a Thing as Populism? calls into question our common understanding of populism. Taken on their own, commonplace references to the people, leaders, or elites are more like dog whistles or false positives of populism than part of a serious attempt to address the phenomenon. Scholars asked themselves, "What is populism?" without realizing that this assumed there was such a thing and that we just needed to figure out what it meant. That was a mistake. Benjamin Arditi proposes (...) that we put this certainty on hold and start from a different premise, asking, "Is there such a thing as populism?" This doesn't rule out its existence or take it for granted. Structured as a set of polemical interventions and theoretical proposals, Arditi addresses key theoretical, methodological, and comparative questions in the study of populism. These include the limitations of formal definitions of populism, the importance of context and the conjuncture, polemics, the situated gaze, and issues concerning strategic relations and governing from below. Five subject experts, Nadia Urbinati, José Luis Villacañas, Carlos de la Torre, Anthoula Malkopoulou, and Anthony Spanakos, react to Arditi's theses in captivating conversations on how to study populism and the way in which populism has been used in contemporary comparative analysis. Refreshingly different and thought-provoking, Is There Such a Thing as Populism? is the ideal departure for the exploration of this diverse and fascinating political movement. (shrink)

There have been two recent strands of argument arguing for the pro tanto impermissibility of fully autonomous weapon systems. On Sparrow's view, AWS are impermissible because they generate a morally problematic ‘responsibility gap’. According to Purves et al., AWS are impermissible because moral reasoning is not codifiable and because AWS are incapable of acting for the ‘right’ reasons. I contend that these arguments are flawed and that AWS are not morally problematic in principle. Specifically, I contend that these arguments presuppose (...) an incoherent conception of an AWS as somehow making genuine decisions but not being morally responsible for those very same decisions. Rather than conceiving of AWS in this way, I argue that an AWS is either a socially-constructed institution that has been physically instantiated or it is a genuine agent. If it is the former, then we should treat AWS as we do any other collective action problem. If it is the latter, then we should treat AWS as responsibility-bearers, but also as bearers of rights and/or interests. To reject this disjunction is not only conceptually incoherent but also potentially morally dangerous. (shrink)

This year is the centenary of the birth of philosopher John Rawls and the semi-centenary of his monumental A Theory of Justice. This essay explores the differences between political opposition and political resistance as reflected in his work. Rawls is remembered for the careful conditions he imposed in the Vietnam-War era upon justifiable civil disobedience in “nearly just” societies. It is less well known that he came to regard the United States as a fundamentally unjust society. The nation has shown (...) itself not merely unserious about political equality—the cornerstone of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness—but hostile to it. The Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence sanctifies spending as speech and denies Congress the power to try to level the electoral playing field. In the Supreme Court’s Constitution, substantive political equality is of no value. The upshot is that civil disobedience, conceived as an appeal to a just constitution, is no longer possible in the United States. Political resistance may be permissible, however, within the bounds of right, “in such ways as promise some success.” This essay ekes out Rawls’s suggestive remarks about the justification of political resistance and attempts to extend them to current conditions. (shrink)

In Mizrahi (2025a), I sketch two arguments against the claim that LLMs should be granted the status of epistemic authorities worthy of epistemic respect. Hauswald (2026) objects to the second premise of each of these arguments and asks, “Why shouldn’t there be reliable bullshit machines?” In this paper, I respond to his objections and answer his question. Basically, if bullshitting is not a reliable, truth-conducive process, then there should not, indeed could not, be reliable bullshit machines.

Im zehnten Buch seiner Confessiones befaßt sich Augustinus mit der Frage der Selbsterkenntnis oder mit der "Suche nach dem wahren Leben". Obwohl er davon ausgeht, daß jeder Mensch sich selbst besser kennt, als andere ihn kennen, hält er dafür, daß diese Selbstsicherheit kein Garant sein kann für das Gelingen eines guten Lebens, das für ihn - wir schreiben das Mittelalter - nur dann seine Erfüllung erlangt, wenn der Handelnde die moralischen Vorgaben einhält, die Gott dem Menschen gesetzt hat. Denn Augustinus (...) ist sich dessen bewußt, daß die Selbsteinschätzung des einzelnen unsicher und fehlerhaft sein kann und er eigentlich nicht in der Lage ist, sein eigenes Sein ganz erfassen zu können. Thema ist in 'Confessiones 10' daher die Suche nach der Antwort auf die Frage, wie der einzelne, dessen Würde gerade darin besteht, aus Freiheit und in eigener Verantwortung zu handeln, dazu gelangt, in seinem Handeln nicht rein egoistischen Interessen zu folgen, sondern das hohe Ziel zu erreichen, aus eigener Einsicht und eigenem Antrieb ein gottgefälliges Leben zu führen, will sagen: den von Gott gesetzten Geboten zu genügen. Nach Augustinus können lediglich die Menschen die göttliche Vollendung, auf die hin alle geschaffen sind, erlangen, die trotz ihrer Endlichkeit den Weg wohlwollender, nichtegoistischer Liebe suchen. Christus gilt ihm als Brücke, die von Gott zu den Menschen führt, sobald sie diesen - trotz ihrer Bedürftigkeit, Schwäche und Endlichkeit - den Weg zu einem Leben der "Heiligkeit" bahnt. (shrink)

It is, or was, the received wisdom amongst British anthropologists that one cannot do group worldview description in liberal Britain (but there is a decorated exception who is keen on this, namely Dame Marilyn Strathern - they don’t listen to her on this crucial matter, despite the appearance of a cult). I have my view and you have your view and he has his view and she has her view, and that is all you can say, rather than "They all (...) have this view." A view here is a proposition one can justifiably ascribe to a group (any set of individuals). Let us include should/ought statements as expressing such propositions, e.g. "I should not have laughed at the cross-looking woman who bobbed out of that little house." Now we find that individuals diagnosed with autism are functioning members of some communities, for example the stand-up comedy community here in the city of Manchester, UK (or they were until a couple of months ago?). Simon Baron-Cohen says that autistics display an extreme instance of the male brain, even if they happen to be female. The male brain is oriented towards systematizing over empathizing: creating or analysing systems, systems being composed of rules or laws (laws of nature or society). The majority of human males have it, hence its name, but if one has the dispositions, then one also has it. The best explanation for the success of these autistic comedians, it seems, is that they have a reliable grasp of the rules of comedy in this community. An example of such a rule might be: "If this joke is the favourite of this kind of audience (e.g. your Mum), then you should not make it at the large gong show called Beat the Frog, at the Frog & Bucket." ("Every time you make a joke, Terence, you violate a local taboo!"? I don't think it is a good idea to find the audience for that and do it at home, Mr. Oedipus.) It seems available to the anthropologist to specify these rules. Is this a worldview, or is it not? Well, the main clash between traditional group worldview description and focusing on diverse individuals is that the individuals don't share anything, or enough, to pursue the former project, but in the case under consideration one can describe these shared rules, whatever one calls the final report: a description of a shared worldview, shared rule system, a model for doing comedy, etc. (The details might matter in other contexts, by the way.) The title of this contribution quotes a song by the band Jane's Addiction. (My friend introduced me to them in school. The artist's touch!). (shrink)

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the (...) culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars. (shrink)

Abstract:In this essay, I argue against the bright-line distinction between ideal and nonideal normative political theory, a distinction used to distinguish “stages” of theorizing such that ideal political principles can be deduced and examined before compromises with the flawed political world are made. The distinction took on its familiar form in Rawls and has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the past few years. I argue that the idea of a categorical distinction — the kind that could allow for a (...) sequencing of stages of theorizing — is misconceived, because wholly “ideal” normative political theory is a conceptual mistake, the equivalent of taking the simplifying models of introductory physics (“frictionless movement in a vacuum”) and trying to develop an ideal theory of aerodynamics. Political organization and justice are about moral friction in the first instance. I examine both logical and epistemological arguments for the position that we need the uniquely idealizing assumptions of ideal theory in order to arrive at, or to know, a genuine theory of justice or political morality; and I find them wanting. Such assumptions as full compliance, consensus, and the publicity principle of universal knowledge about consensus can sometimes be useful, if used carefully and with justification; but they are not categorically different from other idealizing and abstracting assumptions in generating normative theory. What is referred to as “nonideal” theory is all that there is, and it is many kinds of theory, not one — the many ways in which we learn about justice and injustice, and seek to answer questions of practical reason about what ought to be done in our political world. (shrink)

The question of whether or not there is such a thing as "Chinese philosophy" is seldom explicitly raised, but the implicit answers to this question--although different in China and the West--dominate institutional and academic decisions. This article not only constructs a typology to recognize, differentiate, and evaluate various answers to this question, but it also takes the sensitivity of this matter seriously by comparing it with one's attachment to something as sensitive, arbitrary, and meaningless as a family name.

‘There is no such thing as a language,’ Donald Davidson tells us. Though this is a startling claim in its own right, it seems especially puzzling coming from a leading theorizer about language. Over the years, Davidson’s important essays have sparked the hope that there is a route to a positive, nonskeptical theory of meaning for natural languages. This hope would seem to be dashed if there are no natural languages. Unless Davidson’s radical claim is a departure from his developed (...) views, the Davidsonian program appears to have undermined itself.In a recent book, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An Introduction, Bjorn Ramberg promises to establish that Davidson's startling claim is not an aberration. Rather, it 'emerges as a natural development of his theory of meaning'. He reads the claim that there is no such thing as a language as the claim that the concept of a language has no useful theoretical role. Like the concepts of meaning and reference, it is a 'ghost of reification' which Davidson attempts to 'exorcise' from our philosophical thinking about linguistic communication. All three concepts can be seen as mere ladders to be kicked away once the edifice of a Davidsonian theory of linguistic communication is properly erected on the sole foundation of the concept of truth. The result, he assures us, ‘is not a theory which undercuts itself, but a comprehensive, coherent account of the phenomenon of linguistic communication’. (shrink)

It is frequently alleged that a round plate viewed from an oblique angle looks elliptical, and that when one tree is in front of another that is the same intrinsic size, the front one looks larger than the rear one. And yet there is also a clear sense in which the plate viewed from an angle looks round, and a clear sense in which the two trees look to be the same size. According to the Dual Content Theory (DCT), what (...) explains these and other similar phenomena is that perceptual experiences present us with two different sorts of spatial properties: intrinsic and perspectival spatial properties. I will argue that the Dual Content Theory is false because it rests on flawed phenomenological descriptions of the experience of spatial properties. The only conditions under which a plate tilted away and an ellipse look alike, or two objects which are different in size look the same size, is when at least one of the objects being compared is misperceived. I will consider several responses to the arguments I present, and conclude by suggesting that abandoning DCT would constitute an improvement upon Noë’s enactive theory of perception. (shrink)