For over two decades the authors of this chapter have explored the nexus between religious faith and family relationships in the American Families of Faith research project. Generativity, one of the most optimistic and hope-filled concepts in the social sciences, has been of particular interest to them. The need for meaningful theory on generativity and religion suggests the need for conceptual frameworks to guide research. Therefore, this chapter briefly overviews recent, relevant empirical work on religious generativity (intergenerational transmission) and then (...) takes a deep conceptual dive into the theory of generative devotion that is grounded in more than 150 published empirical studies from the American Families of Faith project. (shrink)

How do individuals and communities respond to negative aesthetic experience? Historically, philosophical aesthetics has devoted much thought to positive aesthetic experience, including the beautiful, agreeable, charming, and tasteful. But this is only a partial picture. Some aesthetic experience displeases: the ugly, disgusting, and horrific are but a few examples with which aestheticians have grappled in recent decades. The aversive and visceral nature of disgust has generated particular interest. But as Carolyn Korsmeyer points out in _Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the (...) Fair in Aesthetics_, there is also a paradoxical attraction to that which arouses disgust. Following Kant and Korsmeyer from the Western philosophical tradition, I claim that the aversive-attractive response is integral to disgust’s power to motivate aesthetic engagement. On the one hand, people might feel its force and refuse to engage with that which disgusts. On the other hand, unshakeable interest may spur active responses including the exchange of judgments of taste; protests of a given artist, work, or exhibition; or even violent actions intended to damage or destroy a particular work. While the negative dimension of disgust response is often regarded as a liability from an aesthetic standpoint, disgust also has a corresponding productive dimension that has important implications for communities. In this chapter, I coin the term “generative disgust” in order to explain the productive capacity of disgust to inspire communal, often subcultural, activity. On my view, generative disgust has two orientations – destructive and constructive. Both forms activate the community in question based upon the valence of the group’s comportment towards a particular work of art. As such, destructive generative disgust galvanizes the community and spurs increased activity based upon negative response to art, whereas constructive generative disgust galvanizes the community and spurs increased activity based upon positive response to art. I explore two examples that reveal the dual character of generative disgust in communities: Andres Serrano’s _Immersion (Piss Christ)_ (destructive deployment) and Bryan Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (constructive deployment). In the case of _Piss Christ_, the intensity of generative disgust spurred some Christians to police moral-religious boundaries and restrict aesthetic expression in order to protect a community. Their activity culminated in vandalism and destruction of Serrano’s photograph. In the case of Hannibal, the intensity of generative disgust, combined with hedonic ambivalence inspired the “Fannibals” (the Hannibal fandom) to forge community, make art, and to try to find the show a new home when it was not renewed by NBC. Both instances manifest how generative disgust can incite aesthetic engagement and increase organized activity on the part of subcultural groups. (shrink)

In multi-scenario corporate deployments, generative artificial intelligence is frequently packaged as an “AI colleague/assistant”. While such framing can increase collaboration efficiency, it may also trigger responsibility diffusion, weaken prudential judgment, and erode organizational integrity. Grounded in virtue ethics and the concept of organizational virtue, this study employs policy analysis and qualitative content analysis to code and compare China’s relevant governance texts with international frameworks including UNESCO, OECD, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF), and the EU AI Act. (...) We examine how institutional mechanisms—transparent notice, human oversight, risk assessment, and traceable remedies—are institutionalized to promote prudence, responsibility, and fairness. We find that policies generally emphasize “controllability, accountability, and noticeability/explainability”, yet devote insufficient attention to attributional shifts caused by anthropomorphic narratives. We therefore recommend incorporating anthropomorphic-design risks into risk-assessment checklists, strengthening cues that reinforce human ultimate responsibility and internal accountability matrices, and refining requirements for transparency and uncertainty communication in conversational systems. (shrink)

This volume is devoted to a major chapter in the history of linguistics in the United States, the period from the 1930s to the 1980s. It offers detailed discussions of the key issues and developments in the transition from (post-Bloomfieldian) structural linguistics to early generative grammar.

This essay is devoted to the analysis of the conceptual grounds of Heidegger’s and Fink’s interpretations of the relation between generations as a factical (anthropological) concretization of being-with-one-another. It is shown, that the cosmological teaching of Fink overcomes a systematic negativity of the existential analysis of Heidegger concerning the following questions: 1) what kind of infinity is accessible for human being in its fundamental finitude? 2) how is constituted the authentic being-with-one-another? 3) what kind of attunement is decisive for human (...) being? These three moments are considered in their interconditionality which is clarified in the frame of the phenomenological description of the interrelation between parent and child. (shrink)

The study is devoted to the problem of the relationship between the methods of two contemporary philosophical trends: experimental and computer philosophy. Both of these trends are distinguished by the fact that they depart from the principles of “armchair” philosophy, although they do not break with it completely, turn to empirical data, etc. The key principles of experimental philosophy are considered, which allow integrating the methodological structure of experimental philosophical research with approaches in the field of computer philosophy. It is (...) also demonstrated that with the help of computer philosophy, such classical philosophical methods as conceptual analysis and thought experiments can be transformed. This, among other things, allows integrating them into experimental philosophical research. Four groups of computer technologies are distinguished that can be used in conjunction with philosophical methods. These are data analysis technologies, computer modeling (multi-agent systems, etc.), generative technologies, computer games. In the context of philosophical research, the results obtained with the help of these technological tools receive a semantic interpretation. This paper proposes the problematic of a potential experimental philosophical study devoted to the problem of confirmation/proof in the field of evidence-based medicine and medical activity. Options are offered for how the methods of computational philosophy could be used to conduct such a study. (shrink)

The generative and governing "idea" of radical modernity is spawned by the technique of mathematical construction deployed and interpreted by the major early-modern thinkers and their legatees. ;Chapter I is a survey of this legacy as it appears in Vico, Kant, Fichte, Marx and Nietzsche and in the post-Nietzschean inheritance of contemporary philosophy, hyperbolic in the case of Derrida et al., elliptical, in the case of Carnap and Goodman. ;In Chapter II I try to show how the pre-modern mathematical (...) tradition, represented by Euclid, aimed at keeping the enticements of technical facility in check by means of didactic phronesis and how the post-Kantian interpretation of "existence" in Euclid as constructibility betrays his usage and self-understanding. I suggest that his focus in the postulates and elsewhere is on the undistorted iterability of graphic evocations of the items already intelligible thanks to the definitions or to the pre-understanding shared by the teacher and student. ;In Chapter III, devoted to Descartes the principal claims of modern constructivism are brought to sight. After examining Descartes' fabulous autobiography and its emphasis on self-origination, I turn to the style, contents and under-pinnings of the Geometry in an effort to extract from that text what he once referred to as "the metaphysics of geometry." The latter yields the conditions of successful problem-solving, i.e., dimensional homogeneity and kinematic continuity. These conditions, in turn, find their justification in Descartes' theses in the Rules concerning order, measure and the uniformity of "mental" activity. In the final section I apply the lessons learned from the Geometry and the Rules to one critical issue in the later Meditations, the transition from essence to existence. Descartes' "solution" generates a sequence of perplexities with Hobbes, Leibniz, Kant and other radical moderns continue to wrestle. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the description of the differences in the conceptualization of space observed in informants, large language models and computer vision models capable of generating a text describing what they “saw”. We use the concept of a cognitive agent and substantiate the distinction between “natural vs artificial cognitive agent”: the first is understood as a person, the second is an AI model capable of making decisions and performing tasks adequately in a given situation. The aim of the (...) study is to compare the ways of understanding the location of an object in space in natural cognitive agents and artificial cognitive agents of two types: large language models and models created for Image to Text task. The main methods are the method of linguistic experiment and the method of semantic description based on the theory of topological semantics by L. Talmi. As an incentive material, six paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum were used, divided into three groups: portraits, monofigure paintings on mythological or religious themes, and multifigure compositions. The participants of the experiments were: 63 informants (Mean age = 19.1, 48 females, 15 males), 5 LLMs, 6 Image to Text models based on computer vision technology and capable of generating descriptions of recognized images in English. Using the typology of configurational topological schemes and “figure – background” type schemes, we compared the ways of understanding space that the models rely on. As a result, we have formulated a number of conclusions, the most important of which is that natural cognitive agents differ from artificial cognitive agents in its ability to integrate the process of conceptualization of an object in space into other cognitive processes: entity recognition and categorization, attention mechanisms, awareness of cause-and-effect relationships. Artificial cognitive agents are only learning such integrativity and mutual coordination, for example, when generative models conceptualize those objects in which they are not sure, since these are products of hallucination, as objects with fuzzy boundaries, and Image to Text models combine into a single heterogeneous human object and the most striking original detail of its environment, because they “believe” that this is the most important thing for description tasks. (shrink)

The study is devoted to the influence of Western and Eastern understanding of space and form on design. In the Russian design theory, design was linked with the space by O. I. Genisaretsky. Based on his ideas, the authors believe that, due to the fact that the result of design is form, form is a result of 'projectivity'. The purpose of the study is to identify the regional specifics of understanding space and form in Western (including Russian) and Eastern cultures (...) (using China and Japan as an example) based on the reflection of architects and designers. Comparing different understandings of space and form in Western and Eastern countries, the authors trace their relationship and their specifics, transferring the above to the design. If the Western designers relied on a rational understanding of space, they scanned the environment like an X-ray, that was reflected in the perspective, as well as in the universal and "evolving" form, then the Russian design culture is characterized by bidirectionality - not only outward, but also inward, that was reflected in the desire of desiners to spiritually transform the real world. In this regard, in Russian form-making was not only the avant-garde, but also an artistic form that has an "image-face". The Chinese, relying on the Yin-Yang logic developed the need to constantly "turn the situation around", and - following the logic of inhalation and exhalation, began to perceive the surrounding world as a "body", as structural "force-forms". The Japanese were more interested in the state of the world before the division into Yin and Yang, in the generative emptiness, so space began to be perceived by them as layered, enveloping emptiness. Thus, an aesthetic emerged the principle of simplification "Shin-Gyo-So". (shrink)

The article is devoted to the description of the differences in the conceptualization of space observed in informants, large language models and computer vision models capable of generating a text describing what they “saw”. We use the concept of a cognitive agent and substantiate the distinction between “natural vs artificial cognitive agent”: the first is understood as a person, the second is an AI model capable of making decisions and performing tasks adequately in a given situation. The aim of the (...) study is to compare the ways of understanding the location of an object in space in natural cognitive agents and artificial cognitive agents of two types: large language models and models created for Image to Text task. The main methods are the method of linguistic experiment and the method of semantic description based on the theory of topological semantics by L. Talmi. As an incentive material, six paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum were used, divided into three groups: portraits, monofigure paintings on mythological or religious themes, and multifigure compositions. The participants of the experiments were: 63 informants (Mean age = 19.1, 48 females, 15 males), 5 LLMs, 6 Image to Text models based on computer vision technology and capable of generating descriptions of recognized images in English. Using the typology of configurational topological schemes and “figure – background” type schemes, we compared the ways of understanding space that the models rely on. As a result, we have formulated a number of conclusions, the most important of which is that natural cognitive agents differ from artificial cognitive agents in its ability to integrate the process of conceptualization of an object in space into other cognitive processes: entity recognition and categorization, attention mechanisms, awareness of cause-and-effect relationships. Artificial cognitive agents are only learning such integrativity and mutual coordination, for example, when generative models conceptualize those objects in which they are not sure, since these are products of hallucination, as objects with fuzzy boundaries, and Image to Text models combine into a single heterogeneous human object and the most striking original detail of its environment, because they “believe” that this is the most important thing for description tasks. (shrink)

I conclude this—more generative than conclusive—study, drawing together the themes discussed in previous chapters to consider how yoga thought and practice can contribute to environmental ethics, as inseparable from yoga-related animal ethics. From a devotional (bhakti) yoga perspective, I consider the Bhagavadgītā’s “sacrificial wheel” as a model for appropriate human engagement with the environment when performed in a yogic—and hence nonviolent—manner. Then, returning to the narrative teaching approach of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, I consider Krishna’s famous Govardhan līlā as a (...) modeling of “servant-leadership,” necessary for meaningful positive change in human culture for the sake of the environment. I then reflect on yoga as cultural renewal, available for everyone to deepen anticipatory community life. Finally, I revisit the three approaches to animal ethics outlined by Matthew Calarco, all perceivable in aesthetic terms from a yoga perspective, inspiring “beautiful action” that serves the well-being of all beings. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to Albert the Great’s theoretical treatment of fatherhood and motherhood, male and female genders, in the generation of the vegetabilia. While animals reproduce by the mating of female and male individuals, plants do not display a sexual distinction through a male and female configuration. Moreover, in the generation of plants, the maternal and paternal functions are not performed by individuals of the same species as what is generated. To fulfill the generative process, plants require the (...) external agency of the Sun and the ground, traditionally deemed as “pater et mater plantarum”. The question of the generation of plants is dealt with at length in Albert’s De vegetabilibus et plantis, where he gives an extensive treatment of plants’ life modeled after the epistemology of Aristotle’s works on animals. This theoretical approach is not confined to Albert’s natural philosophical works but extends also to his theological investigation. By adopting an interdisciplinary standpoint, this essay will show how Albert progressively develops an explicative model for plants generation that, through the comparison with animal generation, aims at identifying the respective domains of matter and form, fatherhood and motherhood, male and female genders, also in the generation of plants. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to the reconstruction of some substantial categories of the epistemology of education in two of its components: generative transmission and conditionality theories, which are rooted on base ontologies. It is understood that both components set the conditions for the later formation of rationalities which are representative of the disciplinary domains. The study is carried out in two distinctly differentiated educational contexts - Biology and Educational Science courses of study. Este ensayo se dedica a la reconstrucción (...) de algunas categorías sustanciales de la epistemología de la educación en dos de sus componentes: las teorías de la transmisión generativa y las de la condicionalidad, que arraigan en ontologías de base. Se asume que ambos componentes dan condiciones para la posterior conformación de racionalidades propias de los campos disciplinares.El estudio se sitúa en dos contextos formativos manifiestamentediferenciados, los profesorados en biología y en ciencias de la educación. (shrink)

Most biologists and some cognitive scientists have independently reached the conclusion that there is no such thing as learning in the traditional “instructive‘ sense. This is, admittedly, a somewhat extreme thesis, but I defend it herein the light of data and theories jointly extracted from biology, especially from evolutionary theory and immunology, and from modern generative grammar. I also point out that the general demise of learning is uncontroversial in the biological sciences, while a similar consensus has not yet (...) been reached in psychology and in linguistics at large. Since many arguments presently offered in defense of learning and in defense of “general intelligence‘ are often based on a distorted picture of human biological evolution, I devote some sections of this paper to a critique of “adaptationism,‘ providing also a sketch of a better evolutionary theory. Moreover, since certain standard arguments presented today as “knock-down‘ in psychology, in linguistics and in artificial intelligence are a perfect replica of those once voiced by biologists in favor of instruction and against selection, I capitalize on these errors of the past to draw some lessons for the present and for the future. (shrink)

Let us recapitulate here. A unified learning process is presented here, the principles of which are consistently applied through three distinct periods; the acquisition of knowledge, the analytical examination of it and a third stage where knowledge might be called wisdom. The last stage has been referred to as a synthetic function of memory, the stage where the significance of knowledge is revealed; an understanding of the whole, the capacity for understanding details within the whole, a generative stage of (...) knowledge similar to language, a revelatory knowledge, metaphysical, samadhi, heightened perception, vision.Throughout these stages the passive aspect of mind is emphasized as a practical learning technique in acquisition, analysis and understanding. That is exploited at a physical level in asanas, in the three thinking processes and in metaphysical realization. Quotes illustrate this aspect as a basic principle of the mind, of metaphysics and of the acquisition of knowledge at different levels. This principle is used to explain aesthetic experience and ultimate realization. The reason for its predominance and the metaphysical presuppositions that perhaps cleared the way for systematic training in this technique have been given. It is of interest to note that systematic training in this technique still occurs in India today.This process is a peculiar union of memory and perceptive capacities. Essentially, the haphazard memory fund is eliminated for a form of creative and exact thinking or knowledge. This unification of memory and perception has given this paper its name. This learning process has as its aim not the accumulation of knowledge but guidance in correct thinking. It stems from the realization that our perception is conditioned by our memory, that is, the limitations of our knowledge. That conditioning, like ajñāna, prevents us from knowing what we do not know. The transformation involved requires an instantaneous understanding which, while remaining aware of the objects of perception and the process of perception, really centres in the perceiver himself.An old Lapp song brings out the paradox in memory: And its we too, Our memory, memory of ourselves... Disappears, disappears... We remember and we've forgotten. We are both old.The Chandogya states: smaramupāssva Ch. U 7.13.1, devoted yourself to memory. (shrink)

This unusual book takes the form of a dialogue between a linguist and another scientist. This unusual book takes the form of a dialogue between a linguist and another scientist. The dialogue takes place over six days, with each day devoted to a particular topic--and the ensuing digressions. The role of the linguist is to present the fundamentals of the minimalist program of contemporary generative grammar. Although the linguist serves essentially as a voice for Noam Chomsky's ideas, he is (...) not intended to be a portrait of Chomsky himself. The other scientist functions as a kind of devil's advocate, making the arguments that linguists tend to face from those in the "harder" sciences. The author does far more than simply present the minimalist program. He conducts a running argument over the status of theoretical linguistics as a natural science. He raises the general issues of how we conceive words, phrases, and transformations, and what these processes tell us about the human mind. He also attempts to reconcile generative grammar with the punctuated equilibrium version of evolutionary theory. In his foreword, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini says, "The vast number of readers who have been enthralled by Goedel, Escher, Bach may well like also this syntactic companion, a sort of 'Chomsky, Fibonacci, Bach.'". (shrink)

Clarifying the nature of possibility is crucial for an evaluation of the phenomenological approach to ontology. From a phenomenological perspective, it is ontological possibility, and not spatiotemporal existence, that has pre-eminent ontological status. Since the sphere of phenomenological being and the sphere of experienceability turn out to be overlapping, this makes room for two perspectives. We can confer foundational priority to the acts of consciousness over possibilities, or to pre-set possibilities over the activity of consciousness. Husserl’s position on this issue (...) seems to change over time. Ultimately, the establishment of a phenomenological perspective must involve a rejection of any hypostatization of pre-set possibilities, but not all implications of this theoretical step seem to be drawn in Husserl’s texts. This paper is devoted to an illustration of how the phenomenological notion of possibility should change when we reject the hypostatization of possibility, that is, when we reject the idea that all acts of consciousness are to be conceived as realizations of pre-set “ideal forms”. We examine this question, first, by trying to clarify the conceptual constellation of “possibility” in Husserl’s texts. This leads to an overall classification of the features of constituted possibilities. Then we distinguish such constituted possibilities from their constituting conditions, which outlines a different sense of “possibility”. In the last instance two “possibilizing” dimensions are shown to lie at the root of all ontic possibilities. This leads to a final suggestion on the nature of the relation between experience and possibility. Actual experiences create the room for possibility: they are possibilizations. In this sense, experience is to be taken as a generative sphere which goes beyond the customary boundary between epistemic and ontological. From this point of view all experience is to be conceived as emergence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dewey's Art as ExperienceThe Psychological BackgroundRichard Shusterman (bio)IThe year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of John Dewey's birth and also the 75th anniversary of the publication of his aesthetic masterpiece Art as Experience—a book that has been extremely influential within the field of aesthetics, not only in philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic education but also in the arts themselves.1 I am honored to commemorate this double Deweyan anniversary with an (...) essay that reexamines Art as Experience by briefly tracing some of its major themes and clarifying its generative context of production and philosophical roots, while also suggesting, in passing, how some of these themes and roots contribute to its continuing philosophical relevance. Before going further, I should offer two preliminary cautions. First, Dewey's aesthetic magnum opus is obviously too rich and masterful in ideas and influence for any brief commemorative essay to hope to do it sufficient justice. Second, as Dewey defined philosophy as "a criticism of criticisms," so my remarks will include a critical dimension.2 This in no way denies my immense admiration for Dewey's achievement in Art as Experience, just as my noting of some formative influences on this work is in no way meant to diminish the impressive originality of his contribution.Dewey's Art as Experience first established pragmatist aesthetics on the philosophical map, yet his text makes no mention of pragmatism. There are good reasons for Dewey's reluctance to highlight the term. The pragmatic is closely linked to the practical, precisely the idea against which the aesthetic has, since Kant, been traditionally contrasted and often oppositionally defined as purposeless and disinterested. To describe his new aesthetic [End Page 26] explicitly as pragmatist might have aroused too much skepticism to insure Dewey's views a fair hearing. Moreover, the pragmatist movement did not yet have a real tradition of philosophical aesthetics on which Dewey could securely rely, a suspicious lack that encouraged the presumption that pragmatism had nothing worthwhile to offer the arts and no real interest in them. Neither C. S. Peirce (who first conceived and baptized pragmatism) nor William James (who made it an internationally famous movement and converted Dewey to it) provided any treatises on aesthetics in their voluminous and wide-ranging writings.It would be wrong to conclude, however, that these first prophets of pragmatism dismissed the aesthetic dimension as unimportant and that they contributed nothing to our understanding of art and criticism. As the originator of semiotics, Peirce significantly advanced the theory of symbols and interpretation in ways that enrich aesthetics. Appreciative of the role of play in creative expression and thought (which he tried to capture through an intriguing concept he called "musement"), Peirce also emphasized the immediately felt quality of experience (so crucial to aesthetics) as his first category of consciousness or "Firstness." Finally, Peirce urged the continuity and collaboration of aesthetics and ethics, even going so far as "making Ethics dependent upon Esthetics" and treating "the morally good … as a particular species of the esthetically good." If "Ethics is the science of the method of bringing Self-Control to bear to gain" what we desire, "what one ought to desire … will be to make [one's] life beautiful, admirable. Now the science of the Admirable is true Esthetics."3William James, whose keen aesthetic taste, wide culture, and love of art inspired his first career choice for painting, offered almost no theorizing in philosophical aesthetics because he was convinced that its abstract formal principles and discursive definitions necessarily failed to capture (and even tended to obscure) the crucial nameless subtleties of art that make all the difference in actual aesthetic experience. But James held the aesthetic dimension of experience (its immediately and distinctively felt but nameless qualities and the appeal that such qualities exercised on our minds and behavior) to be extremely important, well beyond the field of fine art. Maintaining that such aesthetic considerations deeply pervaded one's ethical and philosophical perspective, he even argued that contentions between rival worldviews rested largely on "aesthetic" discords or conflicting temperaments.4 James also devoted specific attention to the aesthetic emotions as "subtler emotions" (along with intellectual and moral... (shrink)

Interpretation has been a key theme in pragmatist aesthetics, but its centrality in neopragmatist thinking goes far beyond the field of art. Its influence extends into epistemology, ontology, and the philosophies of language, history, selfhood, and culture. Joseph Margolis devoted many articles and even an entire book to this topic, which he titled Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly. My critical examination of Margolis’s theory of interpretation shows how it is radical not only in terms of its robust relativism. It is (...) also radical in the etymological sense of “radical” as “forming the root” of his philosophical thought in general. The logic of interpretation that Margolis developed for aesthetics is the original, generative source of his relativism, but its influence and relativist logic then extended ever more widely and deeply into his themes of anti-essentialism, historicism, and flux that pervade his metaphysics of culture and philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

The chapter starts out by explaining the taxonomy of kinds of memory used in analytic philosophy. Following this, it offers a tentative analysis of the kind of memory analytic philosophers discuss the most—propositional memory. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to the discussion of three questions in the epistemology of memory: Is memory a form or a source of knowledge? Is memory merely a preservative source of justification and knowledge or can it also function as a generative source? (...) Do we have reasons to trust our memories? The last section of the chapter deals with the dependence of memory on personal identity through time. (shrink)

This article explores narrative as a feature of medical research writing and a means of incorporating patient-authored “perspectives” into the discourse of health and medicine. Focusing on published case reports that include a distinctive section devoted to the patient’s perspective, I specifically examine how practitioner and patient narratives configure cases in different ways: the former based on conventions associated with clinical reporting; the latter based on embodied experience with illness and clinical care. My analysis shows how these perspectives can be (...) both generative and limiting. On the one hand, they broaden the reach of patient narratives via inclusion in the research literature, and on the other hand, they have potential to conceptualize patient experience as mere perspective, supplementing the practitioner’s sanctioned account rather than adding explanatory value to the case on its own terms. Acknowledging these challenges, I theorize narrative as a site of rhetorical possibility that recognizes the value of patient stories without unduly placing practitioners and patients on opposing sides of an expert/non-expert divide. The article concludes by suggesting avenues for development in areas of research, education, and clinical practice. (shrink)

The topic of this seminar will be the notion of language as it is employed in the philosophy of language. The seminar will be divided into two parts, of somewhat unequal length. The first part will be devoted to the change in the conception of language that marked the transition from structural linguistics to generative linguistics (the so-called "Chomskian revolution"). We will approach this not only as a chapter in the philosophy of language, but also as an important chapter (...) in the philosophy of science, in large part because much of the discussion centers around to what extent, and how, the study of language can be understood as a scientific inquiry, continuous with the other natural sciences. From this discussion, which will be devoted to reading some of the classic literature from the mid-50's to the mid-70's (largely by Chomsky), an articulation of the subject matter of the study of language will emerge, and in particular this will involve an articulation of the relation of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. This will lead us to explore, in the second part of the seminar, the most influential work, that of Grice, especially in "Logic and Conversation" devoted to articulating this distinction. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the basic concepts of artificial intelligence models that can be used to generate high-quality, realistic digital content. The ideas and design principles of the main families of approaches will be discussed and graphically illustrated, including Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders, Autoregressive models, Diffusion techniques, and Multimodal Large Language Models. Particular attention will be devoted to the control that the user can apply to influence the generation since this is of paramount importance in any co-creation process between (...) humans and AI. (shrink)

In times of crisis, connections among people, cultures, and societies seem to be the main antidotes available against the risks of individualism, auto-referentiality, and a revenge culture. Connectivity offers opportunities to nurture human generativity (Santi, 2021) in the service of better futures and cosmopolitan scenarios, contrasting the delusion of autarchical economies, the rhetoric of political nationalism, and the reinforcement of social polarization by way of competition/marginalization, which applies to education as well. The pandemia that occurred in 2020 brought both risks (...) of isolation and opportunities for connection: it has been a paradoxical and even paroxysmal situation that has challenged us to think about forms of dependence, especially in instructional contexts. The stimulus for an inquiry that was carried out with 817 students at the University of Padova was the provocative title of an album by well-known musicians: “Declaration of Dependence.” The aim was to think about dependencies in the form of regular roles such as “study/student” that are important for our human existence, and which were profoundly upset by the “sindemia” (Singer, 2009). Our aspiration was to explore what it means to belong to a thriving university whose over-arching goal is to serve the dependencies of people in a generative community of future horizons. Our efforts led to the drafting of the “Declaration of Dependence,” a shared manifesto by the research group that enumerated a thorough list of the students' self-declared dependencies, and which was later shared with the university community in multiple languages. This led, in turn, to the use of the Declaration to launch multiple focus groups, which discussed these dependencies in a setting devoted to dialogue and the practice of complex thinking. Subsequently, in a workshop carried out in 2020 at the 20th Biennial Conference of the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC) in Tokyo, we opened an international dimension on the reflections that had preoccupied us in the Padova University context. Here, the aim was to reflect on the personal, collective and educational dependencies of the present historical moment through the practice of community of philosophical inquiry, which offers a paradigmatic time and space for sharing, listening, questioning, and gaining perspective. The conference workshop offered an international group of scholars and practitioners from various socio-political contexts the opportunity to deliberate on how the pandemic has impacted both their local and the global community. Considering the new educational and philosophical challenges presented by the pandemic, the group expressed an urgent need to deconstruct established boundaries and return to “origins.” Invoking metaphors taken from the natural world (Roversi et al, 2022), an inquiry into the nature and scope of our fundamental dependencies reminds us that we are part of a socio-cultural ecology that is grounded and nurtured in our relationship with others. A community that understands its dependencies as gifts that call us to the design of a better future could in fact represent a foreshadowing of a better tomorrow. (shrink)

Classical Athens assimilated and disenfranchised a large, free immigrant population of “metics” on the basis of blood, generation after generation. Yet immigration politics remain a curiously displaced context for interpreting ancient Greek political thought and its instructive criticisms of democratic citizenship. Accordingly, Euripides’s Ion—the only classical text devoted to exploring the founding myth Athens used to naturalize metics’ exclusion from citizenship–is underexamined by political theorists. Attending to the play’s metic figurations and historical-poetic contexts, this essay argues that the Ion is (...) a hitherto unappreciated immigration fable about the paradoxes of blood-based citizenship. Drawing ultimately on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, it shows that the tragedy is a still-relevant political critique of the practices of concealment and disclosure—so dominant in today’s U.S. immigration rights debate—that make political status look prior to and generative of citizenship practice. (shrink)

The paper aims to clarify the sense of contemporary fascism, particularly from the example of the Brazilian Bonsolarism, defining it as an anti-systemic, anti-institucional, anti-juridical and infralegal perspective with a personalist, devoted, voluntarist, spontaneous and militant character which starts from inside judiciary and in terms of subversion of the relation among law, politics and moral, and that, by means of politicization and partisanship of law, branches to the political system, serving as instrument to the fratricide political war among parties, from (...) there linking to civil society in the form of constitution of a digital-social mass-militia of acclamation oriented to an anti-systemic posture. In this dynamic, the fascism has two constitutive and streamlining cores: on one side, it subverts the correlation of human rights and law, delegitimizing and truly destroying the ontogenetic primacy, the separation, the differentiation, the self-referentiality and the overposition of law in relation to politics and moral, as the subsidiarity of them regarding law; on other, it leads to the deconstruction from inside to judiciary and political system of the highly institutionalist, legalist, technical, formal and depersonalized perspective which is proper to them, eliminating the centrality of the judiciary and, them, delegitimizing its regulator role regarding to political system and to the social dialectics, normalizing the totalizing regression caused by political-moral colonization of the democratic law. By reconstructing the pluralist and universalist democracy’s meta-normative and generative basis as a public system of law, that is, the co-originality of universality of human rights, pluralism and law, the condition of ontogenetic primacy, independence, self-subsistence and overposition of law in relation to politics and moral, as the subsidiarity of these regarding to law, we will point to the renewal of this systemic, systematic, procedural, mediated, instancial, progressive and publicized perspective of the public system of law, in the interrelation, separation and overposition of judiciary and political system, demarcated by a strong ideal of methodological-procedural-axiological institutionality, legality, technicality, formality and depersonalization, which eradicates the politicization and partisanship of law and, by devolving the complete integrality to law-judiciary, confines the democracy’s political system and civil society to their true limits which are its structural basis: the human rights, the legal process and the public system of law, with the necessity of full translation of politics and moral to law, delimitating the pluralist and universalist democracy as a public system of law oriented to the production of universality in/as/by legality. (shrink)

One legacy of post-Enlightenment dualism in the universe of academic discourse is the presence of two approached to notions of duality championed by two differing camps. One camp might arbitrarily be called debunkers; the other might be labeled rationalists. The strategies of the camps are conditioned by traditional notions of inside and outside. Debunkers consider themselves outsiders, beyond a deceptive show filled with tricky mirrors. Rationalists, by contrast, spend a great deal of time among mirrors, listening to explanations from the (...) overseers, attempting to absorb sideshow language, hoping to provide acceptable analytical accounts. If debunkers are intent on discovering generative and, presumably, hidden ideological inscriptions of a given discourse—its situation on what Amiri Baraka calls the “real side” of economic exchange and world exploitative power—rationalists are concerned to study discursive products, to decode or explain them according to forms and formulas that claim to avoid general views or judgments of ideology. Differentiating the camps also is what might be called a thermal gradient: the heat of the debunker’s passion is palpable. It is unnecessary to command him, in the manner of the invisible man’s tormentor, to “Get hot, boy! Get hot!” Rationalists, by contrast, do not radiate. They appear to have nothing personal at stake and remain coolly instructive and intelligently unflappable in their analyses.This tale of an Enlightenment legacy, as I have told it, contrasts a debunking body and rationalist soul. As I have suggested in my opening sentence, however, what is at issue is not so much two actual and substantially distinctive camps as two metonyms for dual approaches to a common subject—namely, notions of duality. My claim is that the Enlightenment reflexivity of academic discourse, devoted to, say, “the Other” and conceived in dualistic terms of self-and-other, expresses itself as an opposition. Thos whom I have called debunkers gladly accept the Other’s sovereignty as a bodily and aboriginal donnée; rationalists work to discover the dynamics of “othering” engaged in by a self-indulgent Western soul. The difficulty of producing usefully analytical or political results for either camp is occasioned by their joint situation within a post-Enlightenment field. Houston A. Baker, Jr. is the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a poet whose recent volume Blues Journeys Home appeared in 1985. He is also the author of a number of studies of Afro-American literature and culture, including the forthcoming Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2005 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. Adeney, SecretaryThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Philadelphia on November 18, 2005. The theme of the program was visual and aural expressions in Christianity and Buddhism and their relationship to religious practice.The focus of the first session was visual images of sacred art. Victoria Scarlett presented the paper "The Iconography of Compassion: Visualizing (...) Guanyin and the Virgin Mary." She noted that meditation exercises that explore visual imagery can mediate the experience of the holy in both Buddhism and Christianity. By comparing and contrasting the images of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary through both commentary and slides, she pointed toward the qualities of compassion, healing, empathy, generosity, and selfless love presented in both Buddhism and Christianity. Scarlett stressed the role of visualization in generating compassion and taking responsibility for cultivating and living the devotional life. Engaging the religious imagination in those visual ways, she said, can help us generate compassion in our world today.Alice Keefe presented the second paper, "The Visual Dimension of Religion in Comparative Perspective." She challenged the assumption that visual experience is a derived or secondary aspect of religious life. As Tibetan Buddhism clearly shows, through its depiction of Buddhas, lamas, bodisattvas, and deities, the divine is form as well as formless. In Christian Orthodox traditions, the icon is viewed as material and glory, the transcendent visible to the human eye. Visual images in both Buddhist and Christian traditions indicate the possibility of transformation as one imagines one's own body as a body of light.Keefe challenged us to bring the centrality of the visual in Buddhism and some portions of Christianity into our academic discussion. Western thinkers present the body in opposition to the spiritual, sometimes understanding images as idolatrous. We assume that the generative locus of meaning is in the subjective consciousness and seek out ideas, ignoring the body. However, communicating an idea is not the [End Page 181] object of visual attention to an icon—rather, it involves the constitution of a self in relation to others. Through practices that activate the visual dimension of religions, we come to know ourselves as part of a pantheon of beings.Rita Gross responded to both papers, focusing on the biases of Western religion in the study of Buddhism. The prohibition of idolatry in Western religion has been identified with the sense of sight, rather than hearing or the use of words. Furthermore, idolatry is always a category defined by outsiders, Gross asserted. People who use the sense of sight to reach beyond themselves to the sacred know what they are doing. The papers and visual images presented gave the attendees insight into how that might happen in Buddhism and Christianity.Michael Monhart and Jisho Shizuka opened the second session with their presentation of "Chanting as Practice: Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sutra Chant." After a brief history of the Shingon sect, the presenters focused on a central aspect of Shingon chanting practice: a realization of one's inherent Buddha-nature in this life. Through activating the mysteries of the ritual activities of the body, voice, and mind, chanting develops the specific connection between Buddha-nature and human nature. An explanation of the chanting itself—its modes, patterns, and energies—led to the conclusion that sound and word become reality through their use by the practitioner of ritual, a conclusion that was demonstrated by the chanting of three sutras.Bill McJohn and Joseph Anderson next presented their work, "The Aural Dimension of Religion: Chanting Psalms in Gregorian Chant." McJohn focused on the history of chanting the Psalter, beginning in the monasteries of the fourth century. Singing the Psalms was motivated by a desire to pray constantly, and as the monastic communities developed, a practice of working through the 150 psalms developed. A shorter version, which eventually became the rosary, also developed. Anderson noted that the recitation of the Psalms is the analog to Buddhist chanting of the sutras. One is actually speaking as the Christ in recitation of the Psalms. Both also find a balance between time and timelessness as they are re-created in different ways... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From First Hesitation to Scenic ImaginationOriginary Thinking with Eric GansAndrew Bartlett (bio)Taken together, the publication of Eric Gans’s The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day (2008), the recent release of Adam Katz’s anthology The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry (2007),1 and the organization of three international gatherings devoted to generative anthropology2 suggest a recent infusion of vital energy into the forward (...) movement of generative anthropology. The goal of this review essay is to add a little to that infusion. The essay surveys the six major books of Eric Gans in which the originary hypothesis is defined, developed, tested, and taken onto various intellectual terrains. It has been composed with the readers of Contagion in mind. Insofar as it has a definable stance, that stance emphasises elements of generative anthropology that might encourage scholars and students familiar with the ideas of René Girard but more or less unfamiliar with the thinking of Eric Gans to begin studying Gans free of inhibitions about discontinuities between his way of thinking and that of Girard. This essay’s mode is one of affirmative exposition rather than critical suspicion. Its multiple suggestions are advanced in the conviction that neglecting one thinker for the sake of the other does an injustice to both. [End Page 89]IThe person ready to study the book where generative anthropology began—The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981)—should be set for an extraordinary experience. It stands as the most austere, abstract, and taxing of Gans’s books; but by virtue of those very qualities, the most rewarding and the best basis for understanding subsequent elaborations of the hypothesis. The Origin of Language may feel odd to readers who come to it working “backward” from later volumes or articles. In it, key terms in the later works, such as “resentment,” “mimetic,” “scenic,” even the adjective “originary,” do not figure prominently. In expositions where Gans explains the differences between René Girard’s institutional theory of representation (which proposes that language evolved somehow as a side effect of ritual) and Gans’s formal theory of representation, there is an odd thickness of cautious deference, a propriety verging on a reluctance to disagree. In Girard’s thought, the maximal form of human culture, the institution of ritual as it evolved from episodes of collective murder, is foundational; by contrast, in Gans, the minimal form of human culture, linguistic exchange as it has evolved in a dialectic of desire and representation, is foundational. Nor for Gans are the earliest “victims” of collective violence human ones; Gans’s hypothesis puts an object initially of appetite (most easily figured as food), transfigured by the sign into a desire-object, into the center of the scene of representation. The humans in generative anthropology are less murderous and more hungry than those in mimetic theory; the economic-consumerist element of human beings enjoys a privilege in Gans’s system that it does not have in the system of Girard, with its more orthodox otherworldliness.Generative anthropology is about human language. It takes linguistic exchange, the deferral of violence through representation, as the essence of the human. The title The Origin of Language reflects this. Gans’s hypothesis is that human language began with a communally mediated abortive gesture of appropriation toward a central object of appetite in a scenic event; that abortive gesture of appropriation is the gesture of originary thinking. Originary thinking now, even as I am doing it here, does what it did then at the beginning of human thought: it reflects on its own origin. The emission of the first human sign, that first abortive gesture of appropriation, is the object of the hypothesis. The mimetic paradox of rivalry and imitation familiar to students of Girard precedes the emission of the first ostensive gesture-sign, generating the double-bind circumstances that make possible its being chosen. For Gans, the collective violence familiar to students of Girard follows the emission of the first ostensive [End Page 90] sign; indeed, violence is intensified by the abortive gesture of appropriation—because what was an object merely of appetite before the... (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to show that cognitive science, while dealing with the special subject of the mind, can nonetheless fit into the same general model that Bas van Fraassen provides for the natural sciences. The dissertation focuses specifically on the nature of explanation in the cognitive sciences. ;Chapter One makes clear what I take cognitive science to be in the work. The two central cases here are Noam Chomsky's theory of generative syntax, and David Marr's computational (...) theory of vision. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to setting out the structure of the two theories, in order to provide concrete case studies in the sorts of explanations they give. ;Chapter Two sets out the model of explanation employed by considering the relative virtues of several recent approaches--Hempel's classic D-N model, Salmon's statistical relevance model, and Stalnaker and Lewis' counterfactual approach--and concluding with van Fraassen's pragmatics-oriented model. Like many accounts, van Fraassen's takes explanations to be answers to "Why?" questions, and emphasizes the pragmatic machinery at work in question-asking. ;Chapter Three considers two influential views of explanation in cognitive science. Such explanations are often said to be functional or dispositional. I look at proposals of each sort and argue that none of the explanatory strategies singled out can count as the central one in cognitive scientific explanation, because cognitive science has no central explanatory strategy. ;In Chapter Four I hold instead that cognitive science uses all the relevance relations found in natural science. The odd features of cognitive scientific explanation turn instead around the sorts of objects and processes that get posited in its theories--abstract, multiply-instantiable objects that can act as representations, and abstract processes of transformation on these objects. I do not, then, deny that we get new sorts of explanation in cognitive science--only that the source of this novelty has been properly located. (shrink)

In this book, Katz details, extends, sharpens, and, in comparatively minor ways, amends the notion of semantic theory that he has maintained through the last decade. Philosophers will be interested in the views that Katz derives about logic, analyticity, opacity, natural language, and intensionality; and the main focus is on these topics throughout the book, though considerable attention is given the technical apparatus of semantic markers, projection rules, and so on. The work concludes with a chapter that criticizes the equation (...) of deep syntactic structure and semantico-logico form recently proposed by the "generative semanticists." Separate chapters are devoted to the logic of questions and "temporal specification, state, process, and the converse relation;" but these chapters are taken up with the notion of presupposition and difference in meaning, and so relate to the basic argument of the book quite directly. This is a complicated, forthright, and imaginative work, though some readers may find it puzzlingly incomplete on a few points. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hannah Arendt and Theology by John KiessGregory WilliamsHannah Arendt and Theology John Kiess NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY T&T CLARK, 2016. XI 1 249 PP. $21.99Of the great secular Jewish thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, none has occasioned quite so much recent attention among Christian theologians as Hannah Arendt. Arendt's popularity is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the ongoing revival of Augustine's thought in (...) political theology, and it is unlikely to subside any time soon. This is why John Kiess's most recent volume, Hannah Arendt and Theology, is of importance to the field of Christian ethics.After providing an intellectual biography of Arendt, the bulk of Kiess's text is devoted to the key loci that theological authors have highlighted in her work, [End Page 210] specifically her concepts of evil, citizenship, action, and thinking. In writing about each of these, Kiess articulates the ways in which theologians have underestimated Arendt. For example, in defending Arendt vis-à-vis Eric Gregory, Kiess argues that "Arendt points to a kind of love that Augustine appears to have overlooked, one which, if falling short of the love of God and neighbor, reaches higher than the love of self to the good of what is common to all" (121).At the same time, Kiess also points out the places where Arendt underestimates Christian theology. Possibly his biggest critique is that, in arguing that the evils of totalitarianism not only transcend but completely "break" traditional definitions of evil, Arendt assumes tradition to be a static article passed on intact from one generation to the next. Against this view, Kiess holds up Alasdair MacIntyre's definition of a tradition as an ongoing argument and shows how Arendt's efforts actually demonstrate the way traditions operate dynamically in contexts of ongoing crisis.Both of these examples also point to broader metaethical questions. In particular, Kiess's statement that Augustine "overlooked" the existence of a nonsalvific love that still rises above the level of the lust for domination that constitutes the telos of the earthly city, or even the love of human glory that gives rise to its greatest virtues, seems to elide the fact that neither Augustine nor his contemporary interpreters have simply forgotten about such a possibility; rather, a chief insight of Augustinian political thought is to deny it. This is precisely why Augustine, as Kiess notes, "longed for a more transformative founding" than Arendt does in her stress on human natality (178). Kiess, it seems, wants to have it both ways on this point. Either the loves of the earthly city can amount to something more than an ethics domination or glory, in which case Augustine's doubts about the founding of political entities based on those loves is overly pessimistic, or the loves and the goods of the earthly and heavenly cities are incommensurable, in which case Arendt's amor mundi, however noble its outcomes, is not immune to the degradations of the earthly city as a whole and must be regarded as one more penultimate earthly virtue.This brings us back to the question of tradition. For all his emphasis on how Arendt exemplifies the dynamism and responsiveness of traditions, Kiess never actually specifies to which tradition Arendt belonged. To put it bluntly, he does not treat it as relevant that Arendt was not a Christian. While she is an extensive and extremely helpful commentator on the Christian theological tradition, she wrote as a critic and an outsider. We can expect certain basic differences between Arendt and her Christian interlocutors to remain irresolvable because that is the nature of interreligious difference. That does not mean, however, that dialogue is not fruitful, and it is because of this that Kiess's text is, and is likely to remain, extremely generative. [End Page 211]Gregory WilliamsDuke UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Language, Thought, and LogicGabriele PooleLanguage, Thought, and Logic, by John M. Ellis; x & 163 pp. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993, $29.95.It is John Ellis’s contention that notwithstanding the enormous amount of energy that has gone into language studies not very much progress has been achieved and our theory of language remains vastly fragmented and contradictory. Language, Thought, and Logic is presented as an effort to overcome this (...) impasse. Many ideas are discussed, but the fundamental themes are the following four: the priority of categorization over communication, the functional nature of most categories, the attack on the severance of grammar from meaning which characterizes generative grammarians, and the dismissal of the debate on the relationship between language and thought as a meaningless issue.In chapters two and three, Ellis—after having convincingly argued for the logical priority of (language induced) categorization over communication—proceeds to illustrate the difference between “real” and “functional” categories. He states that a few categories, such as chemical classes, have their base in “reality.” Most categories, however, (Ellis uses the example of poison) are not based on intrinsic characteristics of its members (poisons differ widely in chemical structure) but on the collective purposes of the speakers (identifying dangerous substances). The former are “real” categories, the latter functional ones, and on the basis of this opposition Ellis attacks “naive realists” who claim that most linguistic categories are grounded in the extra-linguistic world. Ellis’s dichotomy however is not fully convincing: reality, of course, includes human beings and their interactions with the world. Once we concede that the chemical structure of a given substance is a real fact, then we have to admit that the interaction of a given substance with the human body is equally “real,” and [End Page 142] that a category based on a given type of interaction is grounded in “reality” just as one based on a given type of chemical structure.Chapter five instead is devoted to the traditional question of the relationship between thought and language. Ellis’s contention is that this discussion is in itself logically absurd, since language is an essential part of thought. This “initial logical misstep” inevitably leads thinkers such as John Lyons, Max Black, Eric Lenneberg, and no doubt countless others, to “astonishing” and “bewildering” statements, pseudoproblems,” and “comic” errors (pp. 56–58). In this case, too, Ellis’s position is not particularly convincing, and one wishes that he had devoted some of his unforgiving examination of the logical integrity of other people’s positions to his own arguments. For readers are bound to ask themselves why on earth does the fact that language is part of thought make it “not possible” to speak of the relationship between the two. Is it logically “not possible” to speak of the relationship of the part to the whole? Is it “not possible,” for example, to speak of the relationship of the heart to the rest of the human body?In general, by denying the possibility of discussing the relationship of thought and language, Ellis ends up completely ignoring the tension between the more standardized and collective aspects of language (grammar, and denotation, in particular) and the various ways it becomes articulated within individuals, through its inevitable enmeshment in their different experiences. This is a pity, because in many ways Ellis is trying to carve a commendable path between the Scylla of “deep structures” and the Charybdis of “linguistic determinism,” between the severance of language from meaning, and their absolute identification. It is perhaps inevitable that in shying away from the latter peril he ends up contradicting himself. After having declared the logical impossibility of speaking of the influence of the structure of language on thought, he subsequently states that it is certainly not true that everything in our mental life is completely determined by the structure of our language” (p. 61).Ultimately one is left with the impression that what would have best been offered as a refinement and integration of other positions has been polemically presented as a radical alternative, with the risk of helping to perpetuate the fragmentation of linguistic studies it was meant to overcome. Thus, as far as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heuretics: The Logic of InventionTom ConleyHeuretics: The Logic of Invention, by Gregory L. Ulmer; xiv & 267 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $40.00 cloth, $13.95 paper.Heuretics designates areas of logic devoted to discovery and invention. This book sets out to reconfigure the metaphors that have dominated investigation since the advent of print-culture and the Columbian voyages. Adventure, quest, risk, discovery: Francis Bacon’s analogy of scientific research (...) to oceanic travel established the stereotypes that Ulmer strives to dismantle. In 1962 Claude Lévi-Strauss noted in The Raw and the Cooked that in our time: “It is no longer a question of sailing toward other lands: only the voyage is real, not the earth, and the routes have been replaced by the rules of navigation.” With the advent of hypermedia, creation becomes an art of selection and combination. Truth gives way to discovery. Creation is likened to a programmed mélange of material ordered by negotiation, intuition, and strategy.Ulmer performs his proof—and proves his performance—by constructing a virtual staging of a multilayered commemoration he fashions from cinema, architecture, Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, American history, and autobiography. The result is a collage of signifiers that apposes literary theory, memory-arts, Gary Cooper’s persona in Beau Geste (dir. William Wellman, 1939), Columbian voyages, Platonic dialogues, and a canon of postmodern writings. Ulmer divides the book into four parts, the first of which crafts the overall method from Cartesian reason and Surrealist practices of juxtaposition and automatism. Part two offers a dynamic definition of choreography, the study of local, inherited, and originary areas in which subjectivity is born. In part three Ulmer [End Page 147] sets forth textual rehearsals, based on Lee Strasner’s Method (via Stanislavsky), that mobilize the space and time of his chosen materials. Part four, “Yellowstone Desert,” bring together the strands of the narrative embroidery into a gag-joke (a “puncept” on Custer and custard) that explodes in the author’s face.A good deal of the work turns on Ulmer’s treatment of chora. Exploiting its signifying potential (chora, corps, choral, chorus, coral) he discovers that the myth of the world’s creation recounted in the Timaeus begins when the demiurge makes an X from two strands of plasma. The chi is folded as colures of a sphere that becomes the globe. Nonetheless the presence of the self as an unknown (x) is inferred (in I, or ich). Ulmer shows that “in subordinating mystery to memory, and arguments to paradigms,” choreography will “engage the users’ premises in the process of learning, opening a mutually transforming circuit between judgment and theory, and hence affect not only (...) institutional practices (...) but human subjectivation as well” (p. 202). Patterned constructions replace the creation and resolution of enigmas. Hypermedia becomes the technology of new creation, while choreography comprises “the institutional practice for augmenting the intuitions of inference, for writing with the logic of the unconscious” (p. 224).Heuretics extends the field of play staked out in Ulmer’s Teletheory. Here is offered a scheme for creating multileveled texts that are both creative and critical and infinitely generative, and that invite readers to connect electronic media to the unconscious. Most readers will not fail to appreciate the wit of the exposition and the clarity of the creative method. Others will pause over some of its assumptions. Certain critical paradigms, such as the antithetical ontologies of Lacan and Derrida, appear easily reconciled. The unnameable traumas of history (genocide) and psychogenesis (the birth and growth of subjectivity) are glossed with an effortless art of citation (pp. 114, 233). The unconscious is assimilated into an easily “accessed” logic, the latter effortlessly “logging in” to the former. The redesign of the Columbian quincentenary indirectly ratifies some of the modes of control that flexible capitalism seeks to impose upon the unconscious. These four points require greater space of exchange in the rich and problematic dialogue that informs Ulmer’s stunning performance of theory.Tom ConleyUniversity of MinnesotaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This work explores the relationship between logic and semiotics, situating it within a historical and theoretical lineage that includes Wittgenstein, Peirce, and Greimas. In this context, Greimas’s semiotic square is reconsidered and reformulated as a generative mechanism capable of producing both the syntactic and logical architecture of semantic universes. Particular attention is devoted to the processes through which contraries and duals emerge, and to the role of inner negation in structuring polarized fields. The analysis distinguishes between square generating operators (...) at the predicate versus sentence level, examining how each contributes to different articulation of logical relations. Bipolar and tripolar deep structures are introduced as the two alternatives in the organization of semantic spaces. In the conclusion, an attempt to outline some anthropological implications of these structures will be made, especially in relation to the supposed universality of the ethical universes shaped by the tripolar opposition between obligations, prohibitions and choices. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on a disturbing characteristic of certain contemporary groups, movements, and political ideologies: their fanatical nature. What does it mean to characterize a group, movement, or ideology as fanatical? According to the _generative_ view of group fanaticism, a group qualifies as fanatical if and only if it promotes individual fanaticism. How might a group promote individual fanaticism? One mechanism for encouraging individual fanaticism is by advancing a group narrative that fuels the emotion of _ressentiment—_a vengeful, impotent hatred directed (...) at those perceived as wronging you. The chapter explores the tendency of fanatical groups to promote ressentiment among their members, and it analyzes the ways in which ressentiment feeds individual fanaticism. (shrink)

In his Philosophy of Devotion, Paul Katsafanas argues that some of our deepest, most identity-defining commitments are marked by “dialectical invulnerability” – that is, they are recalcitrant in the face of reflection that reveals them to be unjustified. If Katsafanas is right about this, it appears to undermine an account of identification offered by Richard Moran, since for Moran such recalcitrance is a mark of the attitude’s alienation. In these comments, I attempt to show what I think is right (...) in Katsafanas’ account, while still defending the fundamental Moranian insight regarding the nature of identification and alienation. (shrink)

Devoted sports fandom has been defended as a worthwhile undertaking that lends meaning to people’s lives and shapes their very identities; on the other hand, fanaticism is widely decried as morally troubling. We sketch the similarities between fandom and fanaticism and argue that sports fandom is often a form of fanaticism. We use the fact that fandom is often regarded as a valuable thing to suggest a value-neutral account of fanaticism and argue that, in cases where the object of (...) class='Hi'>devotion is not problematic, it is the vulnerability to exploitation that can explain some of the evils of fanaticism. Fanaticism turns sour when the devotion fans have for their team is systematically preyed upon and exploited to disastrous effect. We illustrate this with two prominent examples of the exploitation of sports fans. Firstly, fandom leaves them open to commercial exploitation. Secondly, it explains the power and prevalence of sportswashing, a moral phenomenon that has recently had a major impact on global sports. A comparison with cults helps to highlight this evil. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to test how far the concepts of depth psychology can be used to further understanding of religiously motivated acts of violence that occurred in another age and another cultural environment. The particular behaviour studied is the violence exhibited in the lives of the Tamil Saiva saints of Southern India who lived in the sixth to eighth centuries CE. The relevant historical evidence is the account of their lives recorded in the hagiographical epic known as (...) the Periya Purānam of Cēkkilār (fl. 1133-1150 CE). The term “depth psychology” is here taken to denote both the psycho-analytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and their successors, and the analytical psychology of the Jungian school. It will be shown that in spite of the methodological difficulties, psychological concepts drawn from these sources can be used to throw light on the religiously motivated behaviour here considered. (shrink)