I argue that 'deep' ecology (as exemplified by the work of Arnie Naess) involves three inter-related commitments: (1) to an ethics of nature or axiological anti-humanism in which natural entities, processes or systems can possess intrinsic value independently of human beings; (2) a metaphysical naturalism or anti-humanism in which human beings are themselves conceptualized as natural products; (3) a transformative aspect. Although (3) is sometimes cast in personal or psychological terms, I think the idea can be given a properly philosophical (...) reconstruction along the lines of a kind of Ideologiekritik. I give the examples of Heidegger and Adorno to show how deeply our understanding of nature has been corrupted, and hence the depth of conceptual transformation required correctly to conceive nature. But both these thinkers simultaneously demonstrate a hostility to metaphysical naturalism and therefore have ultimately limited value for deep ecology. I then outline three possible relations of axiological to metaphysical commitments: (a) the abandonment of naturalism about values; (b) a projective or transcendentally idealist account of values; (c) an account of values as themselves lodged within the operation of natural systems. My reconstruction of the Ideologiekritiker shows them belonging to (b). So that if deep ecology is to avoid (a), it must embrace (c). Deleuze is much touted by environmental philosophers as contributing to (c). I argue that this is correct, but that the axiological commitments Deleuze manifests in his account of nature are ultimately quite different from those to which deep ecologists appear sympathetic. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, in the first section, that Schopenhauer was a direct perceptual realist. I think Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant in the Appendix to WWR 1 is largely bound together by his view that Kant was still welded to a pre-critical indirect perceptual realism which creates the various points of tension or compromise formations that Schopenhauer enumerates. In the second section I go on to argue that this perceptual direct realism sheds light on his account of compassion, in (...) particular making it more plausible that he is a direct realist about our perception of the emotions, or wills, of others (at least in the appropriate circumstances). This helps to resolve a problem identified in the literature, especially by David Cartwright. In the last section I address an objection, and show that far from being an objection, it in fact strengthens my position. (shrink)

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic the moral problem (...) of freedom, but spends much of its time telling a mystical-metaphysical story about the creation of the world that attempts to paint a picture of a kind of irreducible metaphysical contingency in nature. What is the relation between the moral and the metaphysical elements of the Freedom essay? It has never been obvious. But some recent Anglophone scholarship suggests an answer. In her Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (2006) Michelle Kosch presents a strong case for the view that Schelling’s Freedom essay is motivated by a critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in ethics. The idea is that Kant’s problems start not if he fails to show that it is rational to be moral, but if he succeeds. For if he does, then it is irrational to be immoral, and hence it is impossible for a rational agent to act immorally: an act not in conformity with duty is evidence of irrationality (perhaps one’s rational agency has been thwarted by pathological inclinations). This is broadly the Socratic position: evil, as a knowing immoral act, is not possible. Officially Kant rejects the classical view, most explicitly in his 1793 Religion with the Bounds of Mere Reason, for a Christian position in which freedom is understood as the freedom to choose between good and evil without thereby abandoning one’s agency. But he has no obvious means for doing so. Kosch attempts to show that Schelling comes, by 1809, to identify his early work with something like this Kantian dilemma: we are as badly off when it comes to our freedom if we are pushed around by reasons as if we are pushed around by causes: the Hegelian ruse of reason is as inimical to our agency as phenomenal determinism. The Freedom essay is the result of Schelling’s attempt to defend a muscular, Christian conception of the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, for Kosch, Schelling’s move to the metaphysical level is still problematic: just where one would expect an account of norms that does not infer them from our rational autonomy, we get, puzzlingly, a cosmology. I will argue that Kosch’s matrix for interpreting Schelling in fact does give us a way of understanding Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency. In broad outline, Schelling’s argument is that our choice of metaphysical schema is constrained by a correct understanding of agency: the world cannot be causally determined because that is inconsistent with our understanding of ourselves as agents; but equally the world cannot be rationally determined, and for the same reason. Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency is an unpacking of the consequences of this inference, and not a botched attempt to ground values outside of rational autonomy. (shrink)

Badiou claims Deleuze’s thinking is pre-critical metaphysics that cannot be understood in relation to Kant. I argue that Deleuze is indeed a metaphysical thinker, but precisely because he is a kind of Kantian. Badiou is right that Deleuze rejects the overwhelmingly epistemic problematics of critical thought in its classical sense, but he is wrong to claim that Deleuze completely rejects Kant. Instead, Deleuze is interested in developing a metaphysics that prolongs Kant’s conception of a productive synthesis irreducible to empirical causation. (...) Where Badiou’s criticism might tell however is in the risk that Deleuze’s strategy runs of contaminating his new metaphysics with a new kind of transcendental idealism. This reading has recently been developed by Ray Brassier and I explore and evaluate it, concluding that in Difference and Repetition this accusation may be correct, but that by the time of Anti-Œdipus, Deleuze (now with Guattari) has the intellectual resources to resist it. (shrink)

Thomas Reid launched a scathing attack on David Hume in his first book: "An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense" published in 1764. But this was ineffective and his arguments failed to persuade Hume to rethink his philosophy. Till the end of his life Hume remained unconvinced by Reid's criticisms of him. In this paper I examine: (1) what Hume thought of Reid's book, (2) why Hume was unshaken by Reid's arguments against him, (3) whether (...) the arguments of Reid's later book published after Hume died in 1776 were any stronger, and (4) why Reid failed to confront Hume with better arguments before 1776. (shrink)

Extremism is a perennial problem in our civilisation. It has constantly impeded our progress by leading to unnecessary wars, conflicts, enmity and hatred. Understanding the middle way between these two extremes helps us to clarify what extremism is and how it arises. Such an understanding can be made part of the education system so that children are taught from an early age to detect extremist tendencies in their own thinking and to control them for their own good and the good (...) of society. This paper extends the views expressed in my book, The Promise of Dualism (Almostic Publications) and other papers on the subject of extremism. It is focused on the following table which shows how the middle way stands between the extremes of too much power and too much belief. After the introduction, the rest of this paper explicates this table’s contents in considerable detail – line by line and word by word – in explanatory notes. (shrink)

his paper argues that we will never get rid of the extremist mentality unless the dualist view prevails and is taught as part of the educational system. The dualist view takes account of both sides of an argument whereas the extremist view promotes one side unequivocally without considering the merits of the opposing view. The merits of the dualist view can be taught in schools so that everyone learns to recognise that mentality when it is evident not only in other (...) people’s behaviour but also in their own thinking about things. The dualist view is a flexible one involving trial-and-error processes as we work our way through life. That view is contrasted with the monist view that focuses on one point of view to the exclusion of all others. The extremist’s view is usually monistic and is intolerable of views that contradict or dispute their dogmatic view of things. This paper therefore examines these two contrasting views. It outlines the spectrum between monist and dualist ways of thinking, and it concludes that systematic form of dualism is possible that takes the middle way between the extremes of dogmatic and sceptical thinking. Only through dualist studies will the dualist view be more thoroughly developed, as is outlined here. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is often thought of as a “philosopher’s philosopher,” with a specialist rather than generalist appeal. One reason for Schelling’s lack of popularity is that he is something of a problem case for traditional narratives about the history of philosophy. Although he is often slotted in as a stepping stone on the intellectual journey from Kant to Hegel, any attention to his ideas will show that he does not fit this role very well. His later (...) philosophy suggests a materialism and empiricism that puts him outside of idealism proper; his connection with the romantic movement suggests an aestheticism that challenges traditional philosophy as such; and his mysticism allies him with medieval, pre-critical philosophies considered antiquated by the 19th century. And if Schelling was not entirely at home with his contemporaries, he seems, on the face of it, to have fared little better with his future: there has been no Schelling school, he has had no followers. No historical trajectory announces Schelling as its point of departure. -/- And yet Schelling’s influence has been an extraordinary one. He has inspired physicists, physicians, theologians, historians and poets. A wildly diverse set of philosophers have claimed that their ideas have resonance with his. Perhaps the question of Schelling’s influence can be approached by looking at what Kant says about works of genius -- that they should give rise to inspiration, not imitation. Paradoxically, to imitate genius is not to produce an imitation but a new creative work. Whether or not Schelling should be strictly viewed as a genius, Kant’s notion suggests a sense in which Schelling should be understood as a “philosopher’s philosopher”; he inspired creativity, not repetition. In this perspective, the lack of a “Schelling school” is a sign of strength; Schelling is continually being rediscovered, and his works have retained a fresh and untimely character. If Schelling does not have any obvious historical successors, it is because his influence cannot be charted by the usual methods. New philosophical tools are needed in order to understand his philosophical significance, his impact on contemporary thought and relevance for contemporary concerns. (shrink)

The story of eternity is not as simple as a secularization narrative implies. Instead it follows something like the trajectory of reversal in Kant’s practical proof for the existence of god. In that proof, god emerges not as an object of theoretical investigation, but as a postulate required by our practical engagement with the world; so, similarly, the eternal is not just secularized out of existence, but becomes understood as an entailment of, and somehow imbricated in, the conditions of our (...) practical existence. -/- The sections that follow discuss some of those central figures in modern European philosophy whose views prominently feature some consideration of eternity. I start with Kant in section I. Kant’s critique of speculative theology is well-known, and this hostility would appear to make it unlikely that the eternal, with all its theological baggage, would feature prominently in Kant’s critical philosophy. But in fact Kant’s transcendental idealism endorses no fewer than three different concepts of the eternal, including what turns out to be the most historically influential idea: that practical reason involves a kind of eternal, non-temporal action. Kant shifts this notion of a non-temporal act from its original theological context of god’s actus purus to a practical context, setting the stage for Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s later development of this theme. Before detailing this trajectory however, section II is devoted to Hegel, the philosopher whose radical historicism is perhaps more than any other thinker responsible for making “the nineteenth century preeminently the historical century.”4 Hegel is not fertile soil for the concept of the eternal, but his historicism does turn out, at a crucial moment in the philosophy of nature, to presuppose a certain conception of eternity as an eternal present. Perhaps more importantly for the further development of eternity in nineteenth century thought however is that both Schelling and Kierkegaard situate their views of the eternal in the context of a collective rejection of Hegel. Section III discusses Schelling, who returns to Kant’s conception of non-temporal choice, seeing human capacities for free eternal self-creation as rivaling god’s. Such powers are required, Schelling argues, to resist the sublimation of the individual human person into the blankness of the Absolute. Section IV briefly consider Schopenhauer’s view that the in-itself of everything is an endlessly striving will. Section V concerns Kierkegaard who is strongly committed to the eternal, and indeed criticizes Hegel for compromising his conception of the eternal by thinking it temporally; but he is obsessed by the paradoxical question of our practical “access” to the eternal within a particular temporal moment: the decisive moment, imbued with significance that can turn life around and create a new person, pushing Schelling’s concerns even further. The remaining, shorter sections, present briefer accounts of more recent figures who make important use of some conception of the eternal: Nietzsche’s eternal return (section VI), Agamben’s (1942-) theory of sovereignty (section VII) and finally Alain Badiou’s unapologetic attempt to resuscitate eternity as the condition of revolutionary political change (Section VIII). I end with a concluding meditation (Section IX). (shrink)

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a system philosopher in the grand tradition of classical German idealism. Broadly an adherent of Kant’s transcendental idealism, he is now most noted for his belief that Kant’s thing in itself can best be described as ‘will’, something he argued in his 1819 work The World as Will and Representation (WWRI 124/H 2:119). Schopenhauer’s term ‘will’ does not refer primarily to human willing, that is, conscious striving towards a goal. Following Kant he argues that willing remains (...) conditioned by the forms of representation and therefore cannot be identified with the thing-in-itself. To reach the thing-in-itself, all forms of representation must be removed to arrive at a conception of will as striving without a goal. This conception is at the root of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: willing is experienced by conscious beings as suffering; and the world, including each of us, is in-itself endless willing without the possibility of satisfaction. Only two things hold out the prospect of any relief: the disinterested contemplation of works of art provides temporary respite from the striving will for the many; and a very few saintly beings may be able to still or quiet the will completely and achieve a state that Schopenhauer identifies as nirvana. These concerns—with suffering, meaning, asceticism and renunciation—are already problems in moral philosophy in a wide sense. But Schopenhauer also has a moral philosophy in the ‘narrower’ sense (WWRII 589/H 3:676; Cartwright 1999) that addresses questions such as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the proper criterion for right action, moral motivation, and the virtues and vices. Indeed Schopenhauer makes a distinctive and quite contemporary contribution to virtue theory, advocating compassion (Mitleid) as the source of all human virtues. (shrink)

Schopenhauer positions himself squarely within the tradition of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and his first sense of the metaphysical comprises the synthetic cognition a priori that makes experience possible within transcendental idealism. This is Schopenhauer’s transcendental metaphysics. As he developed philosophically however, Schopenhauer devised a second sense of the metaphysical. This second sense also depends, albeit negatively, on transcendental idealism because its central claim—that the thing in itself should be identified with will—looks like precisely a species of transcendent metaphysics, a claim (...) that goes beyond the possibility of experience into the cognitively forbidden realm of things in themselves. I shall argue however that this second sense of the metaphysical can be formulated much more independently of transcendental idealism, following a recent similar interpretation of Kant due to Rae Langton, and that this makes for some surprising connections to contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

Deleuze does not mention Schopenhauer very frequently. Certainly Schopenhauer does not appear to be in the counter-canon of life-affirming philosophers that Deleuze so values – indeed, far from it. Nor does he appear to be even a favoured ‘enemy’ as he describes Kant, or as he sometimes appears to view Hegel. Nevertheless, I think Schopenhauer’s break from Kant is crucial for understanding not only Deleuze’s account of Nietzsche, but also for a proper grasp of the core Deleuzian distinction between the (...) actual and the virtual, at least in its guise as the distinction between desiring-production and social production in Anti-Oedipus. (shrink)

The objects of science education are transformed, degraded and disappeared for many reasons, and sometimes take other things with them when they go. This close reading of an undergraduate physiology laboratory report demonstrates how the kymograph was never a stand-alone instrument, but intertwined with conceptual frameworks and technical skills, laboratory amenities, materials, animal supply, technicians. Replacing the obsolete kymograph entails changing all of that, though our usual stories are focussed on progress associated with better measurements with fewer complications, not complications (...) themselves. Such interconnectedness between progress and demise raises uncomfortable challenges for laboratory pedagogy, and for museum practice: what is laboratory education really about, and what kinds of heritage should museums, libraries and archives preserve to document it? (shrink)

This paper argues that the transcendence (most obviously theological) has skewed much of Western thinking by forcing material complexity to be interpreted as the intervention of something immaterial. Contemporary terms in the anglophone world that can play this role are: intentionality (privatised teleology), representation and semantics. Deleuze launches a powerful critique of residually theological reasoning that has wide application in both philosophy and science. This critique converges with and deepens, perhaps surprisingly for a French philosopher, similar critiques that are being (...) offered today in evolutionary biology, cognitive science and robotics. (shrink)

This essay series explores the human costs and policy challenges associated with the displacement crises in the Mediterranean and Andaman Seas. The essays explore the myths or misconceptions that have pervaded discussions about these two crises, as well as the constraints or capacity deficiencies have hampered the responses to them.

Schelling and Schopenhauer both operate in the German idealist tradition initiated by Kant, although both are critical of some of its developments. Schelling's interest in evil – which is at its most intense in his 1809 Freedom essay – stems from his belief that Kant's account of morality. In the Freedom essay Schelling links these theories with the traditional Christian conception of evil as a privation, and attempts by contrast to develop a concept of "radical" or "positive" evil that grounds (...) both our freedom and individual personality. Evil as folly is a corollary of the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge. The distinguishing feature of the free-will defenses is that god is logically constrained to permit moral evil if God creates a world with moral freedom. It is consistent with such defenses that God is (in some sense) responsible for creating evil, but God's actions are all things considered justified. (shrink)

The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving (...) from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a reading of the 1790 Introduction to the Critique of Judgement intended to show that the Critique of Judgement itself attempts to make good a serious deficit in the argumentation of the Critique of Pure Reason. In effect, the conditions outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason could be fulfilled without experience being constituted. There must therefore be additional conditions for the possibility of experience. And an account of these is to be found in the (...) Critique of Judgement, despite the repeated insistence in the text itself that its strictures operate on the level of a merely 'reflective' judgement, quite distinct from the 'determinant' judgements underwriting the time-determination of logical operations in the first Critique. The new transcendental elements for the condition of possibility of experience turn out, through an analysis of the concept of affinity, to table a novel, transcendental, conception of matter irreducible to the experiential understanding of matter and conditioning its possibility. In conclusion, I suggest that the structure of reflective judgement can itself be understood as a description of the operation of this transcendental matter in the special case of the transcendental spontaneity required by the Kantian subject to constitutive experience. (shrink)

‘Romanticism’ is one of the more hotly contested terms in the history of ideas. There is a singular lack of consensus as to its meaning, unity, and historical extension, and many attempts to fix the category of romanticism very quickly become blurry. As a result, the great historian of ideas, Arthur Lovejoy, famously concludes that: ‘the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal (...) sign’ But his pessimistic advice has not stopped scholars from trying to define romanticism. If anything, it has brought renewed vigour to the determination with which critics try to pinpoint the term. There are several approaches to take, for those who attempt to do so. One class of critics tries to enumerate the features shared by the authors and texts generally considered romantic. An alternative approach would try to identify the fundamental unity that informs romanticism and gives rise to the empirical commonalities. But what would this essential feature be? Both of these approaches take an external perspective on romanticism, seeing it as the object of inquiry. An alternative approach, which we will pursue, looks at romantic subjects, and romanticism as a self-constituting category, rather than merely as an externally imposed one. In other words, we will take as basic neither an (empirical) array of candidate properties constituting romanticism, nor a supposed underlying (rationalist) essence from which properties can be derived, but rather we will focus on how the romantics themselves took up the idea of romanticism and transformed it into a self-conscious movement. We will treat the question of romanticism with respect to England, but above all Germany. Although romantic movements arose and flourished elsewhere in Europe (and in France in particular), German and English romanticism were uniquely theoretically sophisticated and philosophically nuanced. (shrink)

In this essay I take issue with the ease which the work of Sade has been, since Roland Barthes, integrated into academic discourse and try to reawaken a sense for what is unacceptable in Sade, but without lapsing into moralism. I try to give a reinvigorated account of the materialism of Sade's writing (as opposed to formalist appropriations of Sade like Barthes') which I then apply to the two characteristic Sadian devices: first, the encyclopedic enumeration and the (quite separate) philosophical (...) discourse. The encyclopedic enumeration is not only a kind of anti-literature but also comprises an irreducibly counter-conceptual geometry of affect whose structure I explore. I evaluate Bataille's claim that at the philosophical and discursive level Sade is primarily a thinker of transgression and defend, using the special case of blasphemy, the notion against critics who view it is puerile or self-defeating. In so doing, I unearth a profound pragmatism in Sade aimed at 'deprogramming' him from Western, Christian values, a move that anticipates Nietzsche in crucial and interesting ways. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze was born in 1925, and died by his own hand 70 years later. He taught philosophy in the French lycée system, at the University of Lyon, and then—after the institutional fragmentation that was the government‟s response to the student-driven near-revolution of 1968—at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes). Although his work is only now coming to prominence in the Anglophone world, he has achieved great notoriety in France: he is widely credited with inaugurating the post-structuralist movement with his (...) 1962 Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as with providing its definitive text, the 1972 Anti-Oedipus (co-written with Félix Guattari). His colleague and friend, Michel Foucault, has gone so far as to suggest that 'perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian'. (shrink)

n Part I of this essay I take a canonical case of political theology, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty (1985; 1922), and show how Agamben derives his account of sovereignty from an interpretation of Schmitt that relies on the interesting theological premise of an atemporal act or decision, one that is traditionally attributed to god’s act of creation, and that is only ambiguously secularized in the transcendental moment of German Idealism. In Part II I show how this reading of Schmitt can (...) be used to avoid a certain kind of negative political theology associated with deconstruction because Agamben’s reading of Schmitt explains the emergence of certain specific temporal structures associated with the sovereign political decision: the sovereign political decision cannot be represented as having a beginning, and hence recedes phenomenologically into a kind of a priori past; and the sovereign decision cannot be represented as completed, and hence it is experienced as a ‘perpetual expenditure of energy’ that lacks comprehensible relation to a goal. In Part III I defend Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty as a transcendental act from Negri’s objection that Agamben simply equates without argument Negri’s radically democratic conception of revolutionary constituent power with Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty (1999, p. 13). My defense relies on identifying Agamben’s ‘paradox of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, pp. 15ff.) with a ‘paradox of democracy.’ (Mouffe 2000; Whelan 1983) In Part IV I realize a corollary of the identification of the two paradoxes, of sovereignty and democracy: that political borders are the spatial site of the application of the act of political sovereignty, and possess a kind of transcendental spatiality akin to the special temporality associated with sovereignty. I apply this understanding to the privileged special case of the US-Mexico border: the structures implicit in Agamben’s analysis explain some crucial features of this case of walling: its manifest failure to achieve, even in principle, the purpose for which it is allegedly intended; the failure of democratic polity to address those affected by the wall; the appeal to sovereign powers in the legal legitimation of border policy. I defend Agamben’s analysis against other apparently competing views, especially those of Wendy Brown (2010) and argue that the transcendental act of sovereignty comprises a kind of primary political repression that opens up the space for ideological understandings of the wall, but does not itself comprise one. In Part V I address the question whether Agamben’s derived category of ‘bare life’ can also be used in the context of the border, arguing that it can. I conclude with some critical remarks about the limits of Agamben’s view. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze was born in 1925, and died by his own hand 70 years later. He taught philosophy in the French lycée system, at the University of Lyon, and then—after the institutional fragmentation that was the government‟s response to the student-driven near-revolution of 1968—at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes). Although his work is only now coming to prominence in the Anglophone world, he has achieved great notoriety in France: he is widely credited with inaugurating the post-structuralist movement with his (...) 1962 Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as with providing its definitive text, the 1972 Anti-Oedipus (co-written with Félix Guattari). His colleague and friend, Michel Foucault, has gone so far as to suggest that 'perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian'. (shrink)

Much has been written about Schopenhauer’s use of Kant’s aesthetics as well as Schopenhauer’s adherence to and departures from Kant’s theoretical philosophy, not least by Schopenhauer himself. The hypothesis I propose in this paper combines these two research trajectories in a novel way: I wish to argue that Schopenhauer’s main theoretical innovation, the doctrine of the will, can be regarded as the development of an aspect of Kant’s aesthetic theory, specifically that the intransitive, goalless striving of the will in Schopenhauer (...) is the intellectual air to Kant's understanding of the mental processes required for the appreciation of beauty as 'conforming to law without a law'. (shrink)

Three thoughts of culture: (1) the logogram: high-level software, the ROM BIOS of civilisation, the ‘best that has ever been thought and written’ (Matthew Arnold), secular theology, social phylum, explicitly ideal rampart against philistine disaggregation and the entropy of commodification, desperate and universal cognitive erection in the face of the massive loss of integrity brought about by capital; (2) the decay of the logogram: low-level shoring-up routine, localised resistance mediated through patchy and fragmented attempts at reconstitution, quotidian custom and regional (...) habit nostalgically valorised at the point of their historical evaporation, instantly fit only for museums, tourists and markets; (3) the death of the logogram: evacuation of the hard-wired constraint of organic programming, reinterfacing of cognition and culture with the machine, technological reprogramming of consciousness driven by intensive economic shifts. (shrink)

Theoretical response to technical development tends to come in two overall forms: that technology is either transparent or opaque to society. The transparency thesis lays its cards directly on the table: technology is essentially neutral and has merely instrumental relation to the social. The opacity thesis suggests that technology is not essentially neutral, but has effects of its own on social life. This thesis itself subdivides clearly into two: those who denigrate and those who celebrate the effects of technology. The (...) former category is the one that has been most filled by philosophers and theoretically-minded social commentators, and includes, among others, Heidegger's analysis of technology, the Frankfurt School and Max Weber. The latter category is associated primarily with two movements, of dubious socio-political sensitivity: futurism and North-American techno-libertarianism. Far from contesting the premise of the transparency arguments, these views still think of technology as instrumental. It's just that instrumentality is regarded as a problem by denigrators, whereas sheer increase in prosthetic capacity is regarded as a blessing by the celebrators. (shrink)

Essay on Transcendental Philosophy presents the first English translation of Salomon Maimon's principal work, originally published in Berlin in 1790. In this book, Maimon seeks to further the revolution in philosophy wrought by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by establishing a new foundation for transcendental philosophy in the idea of difference. Kant judged Maimon to be his most profound critic, and the Essay went on to have a decisive influence on the course of post-Kantian German Idealism. A more recent admirer (...) was Gilles Deleuze who drew on Maimon's Essay in constructing his own philosophy of difference. This long-overdue translation makes Maimon's brilliant analysis and criticism of Kant's philosophy accessible to an English readership for the first time. The text includes a comprehensive introduction, a glossary, translators' notes, a bibliography of writings on Maimon and an index. It also includes translations of correspondence between Maimon and Kant and a letter Maimon wrote to a Berlin journal clarifying the philosophical position of the essay, all of which bring the book's context alive for the modern reader. (shrink)

This thesis is an interrogation of the viability of transitive production, which I associate with the Aristotelian term hylomorphic. The central axiom of hylomorphic production that will be targeted for critique is that the agent of production must be distinguished absolutely from the product. The thesis follows the thought of production primarily-but not exclusively-in its characteristically modem instantiation in the Kantian transcendental. The argument seeks to demonstrate that the productive aspect of the operator of transitive production is incompatible with the (...) transcendental element, and that Kant was himself increasingly aware of this problem. The Third Critique, under the rubric of an aesthetics, it will be argued, manifests this awareness in its problematic of a manifold of empirical laws. That this constitutes a difficulty for transcendent idealism means that the transcendental operators of the First Critique have failed to constitute experience in a relevant and important way. Furthermore, it is possible to see in some of the famous slogans of the Third Critique, an indication of another mode of production which is immune to the difficulties of the axiom of transitive production. In conclusion I suggest that the consequences of this new mode of intransitive production, associated with materiality, is destructive of the thought of the axiomatic otherworldliness of production operators. Production is not operated at all. Some suggestions are then made as to the explanation of the error embodied in the axiom of transitivity. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically, Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “transla- tion” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regard to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call “sound (...) symbolism”. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emotional import of literary devices deployed in fiction. Reflecting on the often-favored approach in the analytic tradition that locates fictional characters, events, and narratives as sources of readers’ emotions, I attempt to broaden the scope of analysis by accounting for how literary devices trigger non-cognitive emotions. I argue that giving more expansive consideration to literary devices by which authors present content facilitates a better understanding of how fiction engages emotion. In doing so, I also explore the (...) somatic dimension of reading fiction. (shrink)

This collection of eight essays arises, albeit indirectly, from the founding of the Indian section of the Schopenhauer Society in 2003: it contains a selection of papers from their conference in New Delhi in February 2005 on the subject of ‘Schopenhauer and Indian Thought’ as well as from two further conferences held on a similar theme in Mainz in 2005 and 2006.

Kosch attempts to show that post-Kantian German idealism duplicates and exacerbates a kind of intelligible determinism that is incompatible with a muscular conception of human freedom. Schelling, in his Freedom essay of 1809, finally recognized this; and his attempt to reconfigure idealism from within was motivated by his recognition of the need to provide a place for human freedom. The attempt failed (even if interestingly) but is taken up again and more successfully by Kierkegaard. While the account of Kant draws (...) on a quite familiar interpretive matrix, the application of this matrix to Schelling and Kierkegaard is novel, fruitful, compelling and extremely rigorously laid out. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the ideal. (...) Second, we need to trust others, and trust makes us vulnerable. In particular, we need to trust experts whose expertise lies beyond our individual ability to vet. So we must rely on various imperfect signals and proxies, like institutional affiliation, to manage our trust. We are forced to use these imperfect and exploitable forms of reasoning, in order to cope with a cognitively overwhelming world. I present the hostile epistemology framework as a counterbalance to vice epistemology, which tends to locate responsibility for bad beliefs in the character of the believer. I draw two conclusions from my analysis. First: suppose we accept that that only communities and institutions can know about the world. This deeply social approach doesn’t solve the problem of expert identification. The individual still faces a problem: given their incomplete understanding, how should the individual pick which group to trust? Second: we might have hoped to get some kind of static picture of the right principles of reasoning — but hostile epistemology presents a different picture. We have to use risky heuristics and shortcuts, which hostile forces can game and exploit. We can respond by shifting to a different set of heuristics, but this simply shifts the location of our vulnerabilities. These new heuristics are also exploitable. There is no end to this, only a constant struggle to adapt. Limited beings in a hostile epistemic environment are locked in an unending epistemic arms race. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. (...) Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. (...) Game-playing, then, illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. Game play shows that our agency is significantly more modular and more fluid than we might have thought. It also demonstrates our capacity to take on an inverted motivational structure. Sometimes we can take on an end for the sake of the activity of pursuing that end. (shrink)

Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values (...) shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure. (shrink)

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...) Regan maintains that they have an additional possible source of satisfaction that nonrational beings do not have and, consequently, the lives of rational beings turn out to have greater value.. (shrink)

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they (...) can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early — before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categorizations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories maintain that consciousness involves the having of higher-order thoughts about mental states. In response to these theories of consciousness, an attempt is often made to illustrate that nonhuman animals possess said consciousness, overlooking an alarming consequence: attributing higher-order thought to nonhuman animals might entail that they should be held morally accountable for their actions. I argue that moral responsibility requires more than higher-order thought: moral agency requires a specific higher-order thought which concerns a belief about the rightness (...) or wrongness of affecting another’s mental states. This “moral thought” about the rightness or wrongness is not yet demonstrated in even the most intelligent nonhuman animals, thus we should suspend our judgments about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of their actions while further questioning the recent insistence on developing an animal morality. (shrink)