If possible worlds are conjunctions of states of affairs, as in David Armstrong’s combinatorial theory, then is the empty world to be thought of as the null conjunction of states of affairs? The proposal seems plausible, and has received support from David Efird, Tom Stoneham, and Armstrong himself. However, in this paper, it is argued that the proposal faces a trilemma: either it leads to the absurd conclusion that the actual world is empty; or it reduces (...) to a familiar representation of the empty world in which the concept of a null conjunction plays no role; or it needs to make room for the null individual of certain non-classical mereologies. (shrink)

An empty world can be seen as the opposite of the trivial world. This chapter demonstrates that: (a) the empty world should not be conflated with the trivial world, and (b) the empty world is as useful in philosophical analysis as any other possible or impossible world. In particular, the empty world serves to understand nothingness.

This paper argues that David Chalmer's new epistemic interpretation of 2-D semantics faces the very same type of objection he takes to defeat earlier contextualist interpretation of the 2-D framework.

Drawing inspiration from the ethical pluralism of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, I contend that one empty world can be morally better than another. By ?empty? I mean that it is devoid of concrete entities (things that have a position in space or time). These worlds have no thickets or thimbles, no thinkers, no thoughts. Infinitely many of these worlds have laws of nature, abstract entities, and perhaps, space and time. These non-concrete differences are enough to make (...) some of them better than others. 1I thank Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, John Carroll, and Gideon Rosen for their comments and suggestions. (shrink)

We argue that genuine modal realism can be extended, rather than modified, so as to allow for the possibility of nothing concrete, a possibility we term ‘metaphysical nihilism’. The issue should be important to the genuine modal realist because, not only is metaphysical nihilism itself intuitively plausible, but also it is supported by an argument with pre-theoretically credible premises, namely, the subtraction argument. Given the soundness of the subtraction argument, we show that there are two ways that the genuine modal (...) realist can accommodate metaphysical nihilism: (i) by allowing for worlds containing only spatiotemporal points and (ii) by allowing for a world containing nothing but the null individual. On methodological grounds, we argue that the genuine modal realist should reject the former way but embrace the latter way. (shrink)

Emptiness is a central concept in Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy; however, it has multiple meanings. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the most prominent meanings of emptiness in Mahāyāna Buddhism and highlight some important interpretive disputes. This chapter is also an exercise in comparative philosophizing; it discusses similarities between the emptiness concept and some Western philosophical ideas. The Madhyamaka assertion that all things are empty means that they are all dependently originating; they lack or are empty of (...) autonomous existence because they are reliant on causes to bring them into and sustain their existence. Another concept of emptiness occurs in the buddha‐nature teaching. The chapter presents Yogācāra as a form of ontological idealism, which claims that the external world of objects is actually a creation of the mind. It explains that the concept of emptiness in Mahāyāna Buddhism is contested and open to a variety of interpretations. (shrink)

Empty names vary in their referential features. Some of them, as Kripke argues, are necessarily empty -- those that are used to create works of fiction. Others appear to be contingently empty -- those which fail to refer at this world, but which do uniquely identify particular objects in other possible worlds. I argue against Kripke's metaphysical and semantic reasons for thinking that either some or all empty names are necessarily non-referring, because these reasons are (...) either not the right reasons for thinking that a name necessarily must fail to refer, or they are too broad -- they make every empty name necessarily non-referential. Plausibly, the explanation for the necessary non-reference of fictional names should be semantic, yet the explanation should not rule out a priori the contingent non-reference of certain other empty names. In light of this, I argue that a name's semantic value needs to carry information about its referential potential. I claim that names do so by encoding information about the way they were introduced into discourse. Names that are fictional will be marked as being non-referential -- they will fail to refer as a matter of their semantics. In contrast, names that are contingently empty will be marked as referential, but they will be failed referential names that could have been successful. The reason, then, for the non-referential status of a fictional name, will be semantic, as our intuitions suggest it should be. Likewise, the reason for the non-referential status of other empty names, those created by acts of failed attempts to refer, will be metaphysical, again, in keeping with our intuitions. (shrink)

Sengzhao (374?−414 CE), a leading Chinese Mādhyamika philosopher, holds that the myriad things are empty, and that they are, at bottom, the same as emptiness qua the way things truly are. In this paper, I distinguish the level of the myriad things from that of the way things truly are and call them, respectively, the ontic and the ontological levels. For Sengzhao, the myriad things at the ontic level are indeterminate and empty, and he equates the way things (...) truly are at the ontological level with emptiness. This paper explicates the ontic status of the myriad things and the ontological notion of emptiness and elucidates the relationship between them. I read Sengzhao as dismissing the idea that reality has a mind-independent structure that comprises discrete entities waiting to be captured by concepts. I show that his notion of emptiness points to a subject-object unity wherein both the subject and the myriad objects are conceptually undifferentiated. It will be seen that Sengzhao’s overall theory of emptiness is philosophically interesting in terms of its relevance for ontology and the relationship between language and reality. It provides a refreshing and challenging perspective on how we may perceive the world and understand our relationship to it. (shrink)

Emptiness is a strange phenomenon that haunts us in many ways. Most of us have felt empty at one time or another, though we don’t often talk about it. We have a sense that something is missing in life. This absence extends beyond human experience to the physical world. As contemporary science has revealed to us on both a macroscopic and subatomic level, curiously, the vast majority of the universe is composed mostly of nothing but empty space. (...) Emptiness is “abundant” and beckons for our attention. Drawing on the Judeo-Christian wisdom of the Bible, in conversation with Eastern and Celtic thought, David Arthur Auten offers us an eye-opening and profoundly practical examination of the much neglected gift of absence. Nothing, ironically, turns out to be endlessly fascinating and significant. (shrink)

Mental files, in Recanati's framework, function as 'singular terms in the language of thought' ; they serve to think about objects in the world (and to store information about them). But they have a derived, metarepresentational function : they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. To account for the metarepresentational use of files, Recanati introduces the notion of an 'indexed file', i.e. a vicarious file that stands, in the subject's mind, for another (...) subject's file about an object. Using that notion, he argues, one can provide an analysis of attitude ascriptions and the conniving use of empty singular terms. (shrink)

In his recent book, Jae-Seong Lee argues that not only Eastern thoughts but also Western philosophy lead us to transcend our ordinary, binary, reflexive thought and become one with the truth, namely, Emptiness, or the true self. But this aspect has not been thoroughly considered in Western metaphysics. After considering Heidegger’s failure to get to the bottom of transcendence through his “Dasein,” Lee looks to the French postmodern ethicists, in particular, Levinas, in this regard. Just like the Mahayana Buddhist philosopher (...) Nāgārjuna did almost two thousand years earlier, Lee suggests that Levinas too may have hit upon the insight that genuine subjectivity can be reached through an openness to the Other as the wholly exterior. Throughout the entire book, Jae-Seong Lee shows a strong interest in postmodern ethics, Daoism, Buddhism, theology, and literature, but in the end, he concludes that Buddhist philosophy, with its focus on Emptiness, would be the best approach to a merging of Eastern and Western Ways of thinking in our search for the ultimate and absolute. Finally, Lee suggests that the general philosophical theory he introduces and develops actually works for literary works including the Book of Job, Count Dracula and Frankenstein. (shrink)

A pivotal focus of exegesis of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārïkā (MMK) for the past half century has been the attempt to decipher the text's philosophy of language, and determine how this best aids us in characterizing Madhyamaka thought as a whole. In this vein, MMK 24:18 has been judged of particular weight insofar as it purportedly insists that the concepts pratītyasamutpāda (conditioned co-arising) and śūnyatā (emptiness), both indispensable to Buddhist praxis, are themselves only "nominal" or "conventional," that is, they are merely labels (...) that do not referentially signify anything that can be taken to be an ontologically ultimate reality. In various guises, as a result of this explication, Nāgārjuna's thought has been seen to embrace an overarching linguistic nominalism or conventionalism in which words, whether they are used for the purposes of theory or practice, though they serve as commonly accepted currency in the transactions of worldly business (vyavahāra), are in the end only ideas (prajñapti) or metaphysical fabrications (prapanca). This interpretation is largely due to tenaciously inaccurate translations and expositions of MMK 24:18 and their dependence on Candrakīrti's peculiar analysis of this verse in his Prasannapadā. This essay will attempt to correct both the diction of the major translations of MMK 24:18 and the fictions of nominalism and conventionalism that the consequent interpretations of this stanza have perpetuated. The argument that will be developed in the course of this essay is that Candrakīrti's reading of this verse proffers a strong form of linguistic nominalism that Nāgārjuna himself does not embrace. It will be shown, based on everything else found in the MMK, that Nāgārjuna, rather than advocating the mere nominal or conventional status of terms such as pratītyasamutpāda and sunyata, demands they be accepted as both pedagogically useful and even referentially accurate descriptions of the world as it is. (shrink)

Nāgārjuna, one of the most important Indian Buddhist philosophers, argues that all things, methods included, are empty. Many contemporary Mahāyāna Buddhists accept the doctrine, but not all of them apply it to sciences and scientific methods. Some of them might more or less take the authority of science for granted and/or think that science has nothing to do with religious beliefs. However, if Nāgārjuna is right, then sciences and scientific methods are no exception. That is to say, sciences and (...) scientific methods are dependently originated, impermanent, and empty of intrinsic nature. This paper aims to support that claim by drawing from Paul K. Feyerabend, one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, and to elaborate on the issue of means of knowledge and on the emptiness of the statement that all things are empty. Feyerabend’s use of proliferation can be regarded by contemporary Buddhists as a first step towards the realization that all things, sciences in particular, are empty. Although liberation is attained through the halting of proliferation and the extinguishment of hypostatization engendered, Feyerabendian proliferation can also be of use afterwards in everyday life. Lastly, the implications of emptiness for naturalistic Buddhism and for the entangled world are briefly addressed. (shrink)

The Mahāparinirvāṇamahāsūtra (MPNMS) is arguably the earliest Buddhist scripture available to propound the doctrine of the tathāgatagarbha. However, the notion of “empty/emptiness” (śūnya/śūnyatā) in this important scripture has been underexplored. This paper identifies four distinct yet interrelated senses of the term “empty/emptiness” in the portion of the MPNMS shared between its two Chinese translations and the Tibetan translation. First, the term “empty” has the mundane sense of “desolate”, which describes how the world would appear to the (...) Buddha’s disciples after his passing. Second, “empty/emptiness” pertains to the idea of lacking a self and is considered an expedient or preliminary teaching to the ultimate doctrines on the self and the tathāgatagarbha in the MPNMS. Third, “empty/emptiness” signifies non-existent/non-existence, which is sometimes termed “nothing whatsoever” (ākiṃcanya) or “absolute emptiness” (atyantaśūnyatā). This notion is vehemently rejected by the MPNMS as a proper description of the actual state of the Buddha and the tathāgatagarbha. Fourth, “empty” refers to the relational property of being free from certain contents. In particular, the liberation of buddhas is declared to be empty in that it is free from the entire saṃsāra, which is the only sense of the term that receives full endorsement in the MPNMS. (shrink)

The _Mahāparinirvāṇamahāsūtra_ (MPNMS) is arguably the earliest Buddhist scripture available to propound the doctrine of the _tathāgatagarbha_. However, the notion of “empty/emptiness” (_śūnya/śūnyatā_) in this important scripture has been underexplored. This paper identifies four distinct yet interrelated senses of the term “empty/emptiness” in the portion of the MPNMS shared between its two Chinese translations and the Tibetan translation. First, the term “empty” has the mundane sense of “desolate”, which describes how the world would appear to the (...) Buddha’s disciples after his passing. Second, “empty/emptiness” pertains to the idea of lacking a self and is considered an expedient or preliminary teaching to the ultimate doctrines on the self and the _tathāgatagarbha_ in the MPNMS. Third, “empty/emptiness” signifies non-existent/non-existence, which is sometimes termed “nothing whatsoever” (_ākiṃcanya_) or “absolute emptiness” (_atyantaśūnyatā_). This notion is vehemently rejected by the MPNMS as a proper description of the actual state of the Buddha and the _tathāgatagarbha_. Fourth, “empty” refers to the relational property of being free from certain contents. In particular, the liberation of buddhas is declared to be empty in that it is free from the entire _saṃsāra_, which is the only sense of the term that receives full endorsement in the MPNMS. (shrink)

Mental files have a referential role—they serve to think about objects in the world—but they also have a meta-representational role: when ‘indexed’, they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. This additional, meta-representational function of files is invoked to shed light on the uses of empty singular terms in negative existentials and pseudo-singular attitude ascriptions.

The John Cage that the world came to know made his dramatic entrance in 1952, a year that Cage scholars generally refer to as his landmark year. Artistically, three of his works, in particular, stand as points of arrival, Music of Changes (1951), 4’33” (1952), and the multi-media Black Mountain Piece (1952), but these works could also be seen as important vehicles through which Cage conveyed his new vision shaped by Eastern philosophies and Zen, particularly as taught by the (...) Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki. Of the teachings that Suzuki had imparted to his American audience, Cage seemed to have appropriated at least three: kegon, satori (enlightenment), śūnyatā (Emptiness). I will examine Cage's use of them by focusing on two religious texts that Cage had read and known: (1) the Heart Sutra for its key teaching on Emptiness; (2) The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a classic Zen pictorial depiction of the stages of Zen discipline that a Bodhisattva necessarily undergoes. I show that for all of Cage's lofty intentions, he had only romanced the idea of Shunyata in particular, and Buddhism in general. (shrink)

Frank Kermode uses the term aevum to question the links between origin, order, and time, associating experience with spatial form. Without end or beginning, aevum identifies an intersubjective order of time where we participate in the “relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the ‘real’ history of that world”; being “in-between” time is a primary quality of the aevum. Regarding cinema, aevum identifies this third duration (...) as emotional experience, occuring as traumatic time. It facilitates thinking beyond lived temporal experience of everyday life to a philosophy of experience that accounts for alternative sensoria of time, similar to the traumatic encounter. The cinematic aevum is equally not of the material, corporeal world; concurrently associating human reality with the myths of the human condition. To say that a cinematic aevum exists following traumatic scenes, is to specify a visual “time-fiction” in film, to recognise a spatial form that belongs neither to the finite time of the film's narrative, or of the “eternal” time outside the film's diegesis, but participates in the order (and linking) of both. Wilfred Bion's psychoanalytic works are used to discuss the traumatic symptom of “empty time”: the inability to recollect, to make links between memory and experience, demonstrating a version of empty time that works as an external violence to spectator perception. Bion's theories offer fresh psychoanalytic perspective on trauma and its relationship to time by challenging classical ways of thinking about inner and outer perception. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Theodor Herzl once contemptuously remarked that he regards Freiland as a joke. This statement surprises if one compares his novel Altneuland to Theodor Hertzka's Freiland. To say the least, both utopias share many themes and narratives structures. While Altneuland became the world-renowned manifesto of Zionism, Freiland cherished popularity only at the time of its publication. Both novels are products of Vienna's fin-de-siècle modernism. Herzl's utopia is set in Palestine, Hertzka places Freiland in the empty space of East (...) Africa. His vision of a new civilization in Africa coincided with European colonialism, nationalism and the surge of anti-Semitism in Vienna. In the following, the essay investigates if Hertzka merely criticizes the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, or, if he produces a unique alternative? (shrink)

This dissertation contextualizes the emergence of the Church of Light by Tadao Ando within the Japanese religio-philosophical tradition of nothingness. The idea of nothingness was revived during the first half of the twentieth-century by Kitaro Nishida with two cultural ramifications in the post-war period: a series of dialogues on the points of convergence and divergence between nothingness and the God of Christianity, and an architectural art movement called Monoha, or l'Ecole de Choses. Under the concept of "structuring emptiness," Monoha attempted (...) to restore perceptual depth where dichotomous semiotic representation is overcome through shintaisei, the co-originating corporeal fabric between the subject and object. This two-fold mapping, theological and architectural, not only illuminates the post-war cultural milieu from which Ando's church of spatial emptiness emerged, but also locates the church within the legacy of Nishida's nothingness. ;Nishida's philosophy of nothingness offers a perceptual theory of the "dialectic of self-negation" enacted by shintai, "the actively knowing body." Shintai is the agent of emptying selfhood by functioning as 'the sensational capacity to be filled by' the world. Shintai concretizes the perceptual matrix of co-emergence between the interiority of selfhood and the outside world. When its sensational capacity overflows, shintai enters into the realm of creative action to accommodate the surplus. The figure thus created is not a sign embodying subjective intentions, but constitutes the corporelly-inscribed, pre-reflective experiential datum of the world. Nishida called such a figure "the pure body of the artist," implying its apprehension not as the other in unknowable confrontation, but as the extended self. ;The dissertation examines how this notion of self-renunciatory perception through shintai opens a new hermeneutic horizon for the Church of Light. The church presents an unprecedented conjunction between emptiness, based on the reductive removal of signs, and the cross of light. This seemingly contradictory integration confronts the modern degradation of the cross into an atrophied sign of Christianity and seeks to retrieve its fully efficacious symbolic power. The emptiness contributes to the revival of a deeper communicative mode as shintai by negating the habituated perception pivoted upon the dichotomy between the deciphering subject and the semiotic elements. The perception of light, a natural thing rather than a sign, which infiltrates the cross, is a preliminary ritual to save the perception from the paradigm of the semiotic representation. Shintai, the self-emptying corporeality, resonates with and becomes penetrated by, rather than subjectivizes, the light. On this restored perceptual depth, the cross is perceived not as a sign, but as a part of the pre-reflective, ontological datum constructed and apprehended by shintai. This perceptual experience endorses the associational similarity between the pre-Christian datum predicated upon shintai as the agent of the self-renunciatory subjectivity and Christianity with its theology of the self-transcending love of kenosis. (shrink)

The twenty-first century is characterized by drastic changes in epistemology, as a result of academical shifts in important fields since the 60s. The decline of metanarratives – defined by Lyotard as grand-narratives about narratives (which, in turn, legitimate historically-situated events) – provided a fertile research ground for new methodological practices based on sharp critiques of Enlightenment rationality. One of the founding authors of the “postmodern condition” (as Lyotard labels it) is Michel Foucault. Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical project regarding epistemology redefined (...) our conceptual approach to knowledge and its legitimation, by situating both concepts in specific historical contexts, at specific historical times. Recurring themes in the Foucauldian project involve skepticism about objective truths, anti-historicism and subjectivity. In this dissertation, I seek to answer the question “Why is Foucauldian methodology relevant in the (post-)modern world, especially in light of the decline of metanarratives?”. The main goal is to address the role of Foucault’s works in the rethinking of historically given narratives and expose the contingency of practices embroiled in power-knowledge relations, while keeping in mind the dispersibility of the origins of those narratives. This is particularly relevant under the framework of an emptying of over-arching narratives about knowledge and the human condition, i.e., the Lyotardian metanarrative. Human societies are usually seen in a context of a larger narrative to which each of our lives in an element. The metanarrative serves as an umbrella for smaller narratives in which other epistemic and moral narratives find their place. There seems to be a clear intersection in Lyotard and Foucault’s works: the former studies the conditions in which the metanarratives empty themselves, while the latter occupies himself with the archaeological/genealogical study of the narratives within the metanarratives that, in turn, occupy the vacuum left by the original metanarrative. There is, nonetheless, a distinction between both authors: while Lyotard sees this replacement as normative-laden, Foucault focuses on a strictly analytical view of discourse and practice. (shrink)

Yet this widespread agreement as to the contingency of fact conceals an important possibility of disagreement. For there is a common assumption by which the doctrine of the exclusiveness of factual truths is trivialized. This is the assumption that the excluded alternative can be merely negative. Thus: there are elephants, there might have been no elephants; there is a world, there might have been no world. What the positive fact necessarily excludes, then, is only a privation: in short (...) it may exclude literally nothing. But to exclude nothing is not really, I suggest, to exclude. Real transactions are not concerned with non-entity, and exclusion is in some sense a real transaction. If I am just here, I prevent you from being here. If elephants exist, then, in certain portions of the world at a given moment, other large animals cannot exist, for the space they might occupy is otherwise occupied. The non-being of wild elephants in North America is a partly positive fact, for it means that every portion of the land surface of that continent is covered either by some solid object different from an elephant, or by empty air. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 163-179 [Access article in PDF] Emptiness and Dogma Joseph S. O'Leary Sophia University The controversial Vatican document Dominus Iesus reasserts that non-Christian religions are objectively in a defective situation as regards salvation.Etymologically, salvation (soteria salus) means health. Here I should like to reflect on apparent symptoms of ill health in Christian theology and ask if Buddhist wisdom can help us formulate a diagnosis and bring (...) the issues into perspective in a healing way. I shall take as my guiding thread an idea familiar to readers of this journal, namely, that Christian theology has suffered from a delusive clinging to substance and identity, and that the Buddhist teachings of dependent co-arising, emptiness, and non-self may provide an antidote.Biblical and Christian traditions are rich in resources for a critique of substantialist conceptions of God and self. The God of the Bible is constantly shattering the fixated, idolatrous images his worshippers form of him, and the Johannine language of God as Spirit, light, love, locates God in a dynamic realm of communal contemplation from which it would be difficult to distill a well-defined divine substance suited to metaphysical analysis. As for self, Paul, and later Luther, present the Christian self as an existential and relational event, not a substantial self-contained soul.What of Christian theology as shaped from Greek metaphysics? Is it irredeemably substantialist, prey to naive reification and objectification? The definition of God as ipsum esse subsistens("being itself subsisting") sufficiently eludes objectification to include the Plotinian sense of God as "beyond being." The idea adopted from Aristotle that "the soul [as knower] is in a manner all things" suggests that metaphysical theology also developed a nonobjectifying conception of human being. The Christological debates of the early Christian centuries rely of necessity on substance language, yet in placing that terminology at the service of a revealed mystery beyond the grasp of language or thought, they introduce a ferment of paradox into the play of concepts and make of it a dance of traces, following the contours of a reality that cannot be brought under substantialist rubrics.Some might see the brilliant relational fireworks of Thomist trinitarian speculation as deconstructing logocentric images of divinity. However, the Trinity in itself is probably best seen as an abstract remainder concept, postulated as a dim background of the revealed phenomenon of Father, Jesus Christ, and Spirit, so that to spin stories of theories about it is futile, a form of misplaced concreteness. Robert Magliola finds [End Page 163] Nagarjunian resonances in the trinitarian logic of the Council of Florence, notably in the decree it addressed to the Copts in 1442 (Magliola, 85-89). The Copts were given an extra dose of the logic that had caused profound unease among the Greek delegates three years earlier (see Gill, 227-232; 325). How much of this later logic did the Latins read back into the patristic texts they cited? Though unbeatable in the fifteenth century, how convincing is it today? Theology has to face the hermeneutical task, and an ongoing one, of assessing the status and function of this trinitarian logic and referring it back to the biblical basis.The desubstantializing tendencies just noted can be drawn on in a contemporary "overcoming of metaphysics" in theology. But the mainstream of the tradition invested massively in substance and identity. It was by strong affirmations of substantial identity that Christianity made its way in the world. Dogma determined the identities of Father, Son, and Spirit as consubstantial hypostases of the one God, the identity of Jesus Christ as true God and true man united in one hypostasis, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the unity, sufficiency, infallibility of the Church and its Scriptures, the continuity of the episcopal and papal ministries as transmitted from the apostles. The substantiality of what was proclaimed was matched by the total conviction of the faith that proclaimed it. Theologians might tinker with speculative elaborations, but the core of faith and dogma was untouchable, never subjected to doubt or questioning.It is a kind of metadogma that all... (shrink)

Light and darkness transform city buildings into surreal structures: an ordinary gray concrete building in plain daylight changes at night into a mysterious monolith or, under a blue-tinted lens, into an ethereal edifice. Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff harnessed these transformative powers of light to create a powerful spectacle that presents Chicago architecture from a wholly original perspective in this collection of striking photographs. Red Empty is the latest in a series of urban-centered works spanning from Bangkok to (...) Santa Fe in which von Hausswolff set 1000-watt red spotlights against the architecture of run-down, abandoned buildings to generate spectral real-world monochromes. His images explore intermediate realms through these otherworldly images—worlds traced by psychic residue that rewrite the history of particular sites. Red Empty is a compelling visual work that transforms Chicago architecture into sculptures of light, shadow, and stone. (shrink)

Human perception is often believed to function holistically, especially in the tradition of Gestalt psychology, involving a focused item and its surrounding. This holistic approach can allow us to explain something that is not directly experienced in our perception, meaning that the absence as well as the presence of something can have a significant impact on how we perceive the world. The way we perceive the presence is more or less the same cross-culturally, but the prominence of the absence, (...) or what is termed emptiness in this volume, varies considerably from one culture to another. The aim of this volume is to identify what emptiness is like and how different cultures incorporate this concept from various perspectives. It turns out that emptiness plays a key role in identifying socio-cultural diversity in a broader sense, including arts and languages. This volume consists of contributions from different fields covering a wide range of topics such as history, literary studies, mythology, film studies, architecture, linguistics, social-anthropology, ethnology and cognitive science. Due to the range covered in this volume, studies presented here are highly interdisciplinary, but all chapters deal with the sense of emptiness, which suggest that the underlying idea of the significance of emptiness is pervasive. Yet, this topic has not previously been systematically compared across different disciplines. It is hoped that this volume will offer a first overview of the pervasiveness and integration of disciplines concerning the sense of emptiness. (shrink)

Because of the outward openness of Platonov's world, and the existence in it of recognizable, seemingly deliberately enhanced motifs, one can easily be misled or in any event confused, never getting to the source of this diversity of meanings which, however, by being repeated over and over again, becomes a kind of monotone calling upon us to make sense of it as well. Something similar may also be identified in Dostoevsky: one and the same element, repeated incessantly, creates an (...) "emblematic theme" or an "ontological schema" the contours of which are discernible in almost all his major writings. (shrink)

Este estudio pretende indagar en el trato de la España vacía; mientras que este asunto se ha tratado ampliamente desde las ciencias sociales, no se ha tenido en cuenta la potencial labor de las humanidades en revertir este proceso de despoblación. El cielo gira, documental de Mercedes Álvarez,trata sobre los últimos habitantes de Aldealseñor, un pueblo soriano al borde de su extinción. Además de ofrecer un novedoso enfoque sobre el problema del abandono rural, el documental de Álvarez ha convertido a (...) Aldealseñor en un pueblo con reconocimiento internacional al que han viajado espectadores procedentes de todo el mundo. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Nishitani Keiji’s 西谷啟治 early and late thinking, in the discourse on world history and modernity during wartime and the postwar meditation on emptiness and historicity in Religion and Nothingness. Following the first part of the analysis, I will trace Nishitani’s critical indebtedness to Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological analysis of historicity in Being and Time, and thereby analyze how Nishitani attempts to solve the aporia of modernity by recourse to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. The essay will conclude (...) with some critical remarks that discern the limits and hidden dangers in Nishitani’s philosophical project. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that a name should be associated with a reference condition, rather than with a referent, just as a sentence should be associated with a truth condition, rather than with a truth value. The suggestion, to be coherent, needs to be set in a freelogical framework (following Burge). A prominent advantage of the proposal is that it gives a straight-forward semantics for empty names. A problem discussed in this paper is that of reconciling the rigidity (...) of names with seeming truths of the form “there might have been such a planet as Vulcan.”. (shrink)

This article undertakes a comparative study of Ingarden and Derrida in regards to literature. It is being shown that the former’s concepts of ‘spots of indeterminacy’ and ‘empty spots’ resemble the latter’s notions of ‘spacing’ and ‘blanks’. Yet, although they both share a background in Husserlian phenomenology, it is argued that their ideas can hardly be equated to one another. Moreover, Derrida seemed to have avoided any association with Ingarden. This is due to their fundamentally different take on the (...) literary work. Whereas Ingarden mainly considered the ontological nature of literature, Derrida took into account the broader context of the world in which literature takes place. For Ingarden, Derrida would have strayed too far from the subject matter. For Derrida, Ingarden hardly understood its complexity and only examined a small fragment of the issue: the question what makes us grasp literature as such. To Ingarden, those aspects were essential. To Derrida, they were merely objective rules. (shrink)

During the past few decades a growing interest in what is often called the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy has evidenced itself here and there in the West, especially in discussions of comparative religious thought and in the pages of journals which are sensitive, in the post-colonial world, to the value of giving attention to contemporary thought that originates outside the Anglo-American and continental contexts. What has made the so-called Kyoto School especially interesting is the fact that those thinkers identified (...) with it obviously possess a wide acquaintance with Western thought but also have a programme of clarifying points at which they, as Japanese philosophers, find Western philosophy either in sum or in its parts inadequate or objectionable. Moreover, inasmuch as the philosophers of the Kyoto School have deliberately reached back into the Mahayana Buddhist component in Japanese civilization in order to find terms, perspectives, and even foundations for their own analyses and constructions, Western students of comparative religion and comparative thought have in the study of this school a unique aperture for observing how a group of thinkers, while sharing modernity and its problems with us, reates both of these to a religious tradition which is in many ways strikingly different from that of the West. (shrink)

Despite the amount of public investment in nanotechnology ventures in the developed world, research shows that there is little public awareness about nanotechnology, and public knowledge is very limited. This is concerning given that nanotechnology has been heralded as ‘revolutionising’ the way we live. In this paper, we articulate why public engagement in debates about nanotechnology is important, drawing on literature on public engagement and science policy debate and deliberation about public policy development. We also explore the significance of (...) timing in engaging the public, and we make some suggestions concerning how to effectively engage publics. Our conclusions indicate the significance of scientific researchers, policy makers and representative consumer groupings in public reasoning towards a better public policy framework for debate about technological development. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Western bioethics is after God. There has been a nearly wholesale rejection of traditionally religious, especially Christian, accounts of moral obligations. A rationalism has been embraced that seeks to produce a morality justified through discursive human reason. Faith in moral philosophy has taken the place of God. Even among many purportedly Christian scholars, philosophical analysis has come to be seen as more important for bioethics than a mystical encounter with the living God. Such scholarship, (...) however, is shortsighted. It fails to take seriously God’s real presence in the world. Christian bioethics, I argue, must challenge the substance and content of secular bioethics. It must underscore core differences between Orthodox and heterodox, between Christian and non-Christian, while providing forthrightly traditional Christian guidance for the practice of medicine. In short, Christian bioethics must be openly framed within the theological commitments of Orthodox Christianity so as to provide proper orientation toward God. (shrink)

We often view emptiness as a negative condition, a symptom of depression, despair, or grief—an assessment furthered by authors like Franz Kafka or the existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Offering an alternative view, _A Philosophy of Emptiness_ reclaims these hollow feelings as a positive and even empowering state, an antidote to the modern obsession with substance and foundation. Digging through early and non-Western philosophy, Gay Watson uncovers a rich history of emptiness. She travels from Buddhism, Taoism, and religious mysticism (...) to the contemporary world of philosophy, science, and art practice. Though most Western philosophies are concerned with substance and foundation, she finds that the twentieth century has seen a resurgence of emptiness and offers reasons why such an apparently unappealing concept has attracted modern musicians, artists, and scientists, as well as preeminent thinkers throughout the ages. Probing the idea of how a life without foundation might be lived—and why a person might choose this path—_A Philosophy of Emptiness_ links these concepts to contemporary ideas of meditation and the mind, presenting a rich and intriguing take on the concept of emptiness and the history of thought. (shrink)

The article proposes to consider Hegel's “Science of Logic” as a project, where the most important thing is not to describe the “laws of thinking”, but rather to propose a more precise definition of the theoretical level at which thinking itself becomes the subject of its own description. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel reveals the paradox that lies at the basis of the logic as a philosophical discipline, and on the other, seeks to show the possibility of the existence (...) of the logic in the extreme conditions of this paradox. Within the framework of this approach, logic is inseparable from the theory of knowledge — it is assumed that the configuration or “form” of thinking cannot be “neutral” with respect to its content. Therefore, according to Hegel, in reality there is not the logic of isolated operations occurring in the mind, but the logic of “the object itself”, which shows and directly embodies itself in these operations. At this level, there is no gap between the thinking consciousness and objects of the external world separated from it. We are talking about a special — “pre-ontological” — dimension, where the subject's sensory experience is not yet launched and distinguished, and a subject of the thinking process and thinking itself form a single whole. Such a dimension is developed in the historical experience of philosophical thought, starting from Antiquity, and is captured by Hegel under the name of “Ultimate knowledge”. The article raises the question of why this dimension repeatedly eludes us, acquiring a “semi-mystical” status in the minds of Hegel's interpreters, and yet how it is still possible to infiltrate into it. (shrink)

According to the most ancient Greeks, the planet Earth was created by a battle among gods. That battle happened before human beings were put on Earth. On 11 September 2001, a battle, said to be between the god of Muslims and the god of Jews and Christians, removed 3,000 humans from the earth. "Praise Allah!" said the Muslim terrorist, "for helping us kill that many." "Thank God," said the Jew and the Christian, "for saving so many others." What a misuse (...) of religion! God does not fly airplanes and God does not save people. God does not decide who is to die and who is to be saved. God gave one thing to the human species: the capacity to make decisions and lay out a path for their life to follow. Ironic, is it not, that the architect of the World Trade Center, Minora Yamasaki, was also the architect for Saudi Arabia's King Fahed International Airport and its magnificent mosque, so beloved by Muslims of the Eastern Provinces. Ironic, too, is that a world trade center owes its history to the ancient Arabian caravansary. The ironical is what cannot be explained by cause and effect. The irony of all ironies is the slaughter of innocents in the name of God. (shrink)

If new Platos or Buddhas were to appear today, what would they say about the nature of reality, the human condition and the way to happiness?The period 800-200 b.c.e. the so-called Axial Age was the time when Old World pioneering philosophers and religious teachers laid down the basic ideas by which people have been living ever since. Today those great religious and cultural traditions are coming to an end. We are entering a new Axial Age.Don Cupitt observes that this (...) second Axial Age is one of communication. Everything is accessible to everyone, and everyone can make a contribution. The world is therefore made and remade not by the individual genius, but by a change in the general consensus. Cupitt describes the emergent religion and philosophy of the new Axial Period in clear and accessible language. He predicts that, while it may seem very strange at first, we will learn to love it. (shrink)

The many discussions of power, from ancient India, China, through modern writers such as Nietzsche, theologies, ending up with postmodern essayists, locating power in discourses, there is hardly any hint why this theme became so prevalent. Apart from power as means of survival, every discussion discloses an excess of power beyond any need for survival. An emperor, possessing everything in excess – everything in his empire, including his subjects, why does he send armies to appropriate all? What is the purpose, (...) apart from such an irrational inscription: “I came, I saw, I conquered”. The text addresses this question at many levels, leading to the issue of “emptiness”. Many texts, both worldly and theological reveal a peculiar “desire:” emperors, gods, conquerors want to be worshiped. The subjects must pray to their Lords, must celebrate their victories, must kneel before them, thank them for life and “gifts”, beg for protection and forgiveness. The desire for worship is regarded as universal and hence power is used to extend the domain of the Lord across the universe. With every conquest more slaves are brought to worship the Lord. The mere mentioning of his name evokes fear a worship. But then the question must be answered: what such worship gets the Lord? (Lord here can be anyone: God of Gods, King with divine rights, dictator, famous name). First level: arbitrariness; he need not obey any rules since every uttered wish is the rule. Second, the wish is to be a possessor of all females as his. One famous variant: harem which includes convents whose inhabitants are married to some heavenly Lord. The disruption of this possession is the power of eros which cannot be reduced to possession. The text, then, opens to the personality types “hungry” for power. Their make-up is resentment, narcissism, populism, hypocrisy (usually using religion), cynicism, dramatic insecurity, and search for populist affirmation. (shrink)

In this book—the first volume in his groundbreaking trilogy on the emergence of western political thought—Francis Oakley explores the roots of secular political thinking by examining the political ideology and institutions of Hellenistic and late Roman antiquity and of the early European middle ages. By challenging the popular belief that the ancient Greek and Roman worlds provided the origins of our inherently secular politics, Oakley revises our understanding of the history of political theory in a fundamental and far-reaching manner that (...) will reverberate for decades. This book lays the foundations for Oakley's next two volumes, which will develop his argument that it is in the Latin middle ages that we must seek the ideological roots of modern political secularism. (shrink)

Margaret Archer is probably the critical realist who has most significantly affected the debate around the relationship between social structure and agency. In the volume, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, she aims to better define what is meant by the properties and causal powers of agency itself, i.e., self-consciousness and reflexivity. In this paper, this theoretical attempt is reviewed through the critical standpoint of Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna’s philosophy appears to be a particularly compelling tool for criticizing Archer’s theory. Claiming the (...) emptiness of everything, the founder of the Buddhist Madhyamaka school provides a critical perspective for revising the distinctiveness of human properties and causal powers. Specifically, Nagarjuna’s rejection of the intrinsic nature of all entities reveals that Archer’s attempt to discern something as inherently human is questionable. If our sense of self emerges from embodied practice in the natural world, it may be that it cannot be demolished by social and linguistic forces. However, this does not mean that it can be regarded as a sui generis human property and power. That same embodied practice in the world makes human beings empty of inherent nature. Nevertheless, since emptiness itself is empty, we cannot conclude that human beings are inherently empty, but merely conventionally empty. (shrink)

Ockham's razor is popularly phrased as a prohibition against multiplying entities beyond necessity. This prohibition should extend to the receptacle for these entities. To state my thesis more positively and precisely, both qualitative and quantitative parsimony apply to space, time, and possibility. All other things equal, we ought to prefer a hypothesis that postulates less space. Smaller is better. Admittedly, scientists are ambivalent about economizing on the void. They praise simplicity. Yet astronomers have a history of helping themselves to as (...) much empty space as they wish—staggering common sense with the vastness of the universe. This largesse is abetted by an aesthetic bias for sublime hypotheses. Whereas abductions based on beauty converge with parsimony, abductions based on the sublime diverge from parsimony. Awe stifles our inner accountant. Both types of abduction are popular. Both are dubious because we lack independent assurance that the universe is beautiful or sublime. The analogy between space and time supports an extension of parsimony to time. Uniformitarian geologists regarded time as a free resource. However, geologists and cosmologists must justify their postulation of an immense past. Possibility follows suit. Contrary to David Lewis, possible worlds should be minimized. Parsimony about possibilities provides a rationale for parsimony about absences. Absences are possibilities that are not actual. So proliferation of absences entails proliferation of possibilities. We should admit only those absences which do explanatory work. (shrink)

In Mahāyāna Buddhism, and following Nāgārjuna, there is a familiar paradox, which may be put, following Candrakīrti, as: all things have one nature, that is, no nature. In the first half of the paper, I will explain the paradox, endorsing the thought that there is a genuine contradiction here. In the second half, I will provide a formal model of this in the paraconsistent logic second-order LP, showing that the contradictions do not spread into more mundane areas.

This paper presents an original semantic theory of proper names that aims to cover both non-empty and empty proper names. According to the theory, proper names have simple assignable hyperintensions as their content. This content provides the referent (if there is one) for which the proper name stands. The paper further describes the role of the proposed content of (empty) proper names within the compositional semantics of problematic sentences. I stress the difference between the content of a (...) sentence (i.e. its hyperintension) and the proposition (i.e. a mapping from possible worlds to truth values) denoted by that sentence. (shrink)

The ontology of talent management and the semantic emptiness of talent is my focus in this chapter. From an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on methods and insights from cognition, social psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and sociology, I will demonstrate how a lack of semantic clarity in talent management in fact is a semantic emptiness and represents an ontological problem that questions the very existence of talent in the actual world. The implications of the semantic emptiness of talent has created an (...) accidental ontology of talent management and led to a significantly high subjective bias and inadequacy in talent management, particularly in talent recruitment, causing considerable failure in companies’ talent management. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Dialectics of Emptiness: Overcoming Nihilism and Combatting Mechanization in Nishitani Keiji’s Postwar ThoughtGriffin WernerIn his postwar writings on nihilism in modernity, Nishitani Keiji (1900–90) does not explicitly articulate the structure of the relationship between the mechanization of the world and nihilism. Instead, he discusses mechanization with respect to his critique of modern worldviews such as atheism, scientism, and liberalism and how they have contributed to the (...) advent of nihilism and the loss of human autonomy in modern Europe and Japan.1 According to Nishitani, before the advent of scientism and the subsequent progression of unfettered technological development, pre-Western-Enlightenment and pre-Meiji-period worldviews consisted of a fundamental embodied connection between a people or culture and their spiritual traditions. In Europe’s case, due to the death of God and the subsequent shift from a Christian worldview to an atheistic and scientistic one, a historical period of nihilism began. Modern mechanistic worldviews like Descartes’s, Nishitani argues, present the world as consisting of dead matter that is fundamentally separated from the indubitable ego. No longer is the world considered to be “alive” in the sense of there being a fundamental connection between human life and the living, breathing world around it. Rather, from the perspective of the ego, the modern world is simply a cold and lifeless world of dead machines.As discussed in Religion and Nothingness, the development of structurally Cartesian worldviews led to or caused the advent of nihilism in Europe. Consequently, European culture lost its cultural ground in Christianity and individuals lost their foundational meaning which supported their understanding of themselves in relation [End Page 129] to others, the world, and a transcendent God. As Japan began to modernize, or, arguably, “Westernize,” it inherited a Cartesian-like worldview and, over time, subsequently lost touch with its traditional philosophical and religious ground as well. As a result, the modern period of nihilism began in both Europe and Japan as both peoples lost touch with the traditional meaning that supported them.While this description between mechanization and nihilism implies a causal relationship, I argue that the relationship between nihilism and the mechanization of the world can be more accurately articulated in terms of a dialectical relationship. In the modern context, not only does the mechanization of the world lead to or exacerbate a culture’s plunge into nihilism or an individual’s confrontation with the abyss of nihility, but nihilism also reinforces and exacerbates the mechanization of the world. As partners in this dialectical oscillation, each reinforces the other as one (culture or person) continuously spirals deeper and deeper into meaninglessness, ultimately to the culminating point that Nishitani calls the “mechanization of man.”2Just as Nishitani argues that the problem of nihilism can only be solved by way of radicalizing nihilism to the “field of emptiness,” the structural oscillation between nihilism and mechanization will continue at the levels of the individual and the culture unless nihilism and mechanization are overcome. However, rather than only overcoming nihilism to reach emptiness in the individual, and that leading to social and political change, I argue that overcoming the dialectical tension between nihilism and mechanization will require a “dialectics of emptiness.” Such a dialectic will combat nihilism and mechanization with a mutually reinforcing tension between personal transformation, which overcomes nihilism by way of stepping back to the field of emptiness, and socio-political transformation by way of a politics of emptiness. Solving the problem of nihilism in modernity—insofar as it is always already in relation to mechanization—will require more than individual existential confrontation and transformation. Through one’s individual overcoming of nihilism, one must also aim to “empty” those institutions which contribute to the mechanization of the world. While Nishitani highlights the individual’s religious quest as the impetus for the social and political change necessary to overcome the problem of nihilism at the cultural level, an analysis of how that might be done and what [End Page 130] may be politically necessary in order to do so is missing from his thought.As such, my aim in this article is twofold: I attempt to shed light on the structure of nihilism and... (shrink)

Drawing on Gary Snyder’s notion of the wild, which he uses to describe the Chinese term dao, or the way of Great Nature, this essay takes up through a series of comparisons with such diverse thinkers as Eihei Dōgen, Martin Heidegger, and Alphonso Lingis, the fundamental question of what it means to be human. More specifically, it is an inquiry into the activity of being human, that is, what does it mean to move and dwell on the Earth. Focusing on (...) the concept of emptiness, in both its Buddhist and Western connotations, the activity of traveling and dwelling—here described as walking—is considered in relation to what it means to be among other non-human entities and elements such as animals, mountains, water, and sky. The resulting reorientation from such interaction, which is becoming more alien in our increasingly technological world, is necessary if we are to retain, or recover, a sense of what it means to be fully human. (shrink)