Losing Touch: Rethinking Contingency As Common Tangency in Continental Thought
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The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris
China Media Research, 13(4), 2017 http://www.chinamediaresearch.net The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris Janell Watson Virginia Tech, USA Abstract: Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres challenge the binary logic of Western philosophy very differently, Derrida through a philosophy of discourse, Serres through a philosophy of things. Serres has begun to draw more international readers thanks to a recent shift in critical emphasis from words to things. The difference between deconstruction’s word-orientated acosmism and the newer versions of thing-oriented cosmism can be fruitfully explored by comparing Derrida to Serres on the basis of their readings of Plato’s cosmogony, focused on the figure of chora in Timaeus. [Janell Watson. The Urban Chora, from Pre-Ancient Athens to Postmodern Paris. China Media Research 2017; 13(4): 28-37]. 4 Keywords: Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Peter Eisenman, Plato, chora Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres share the critical concern about human-nonhuman relations ambition of overcoming the dualist, binary logic of non- manifests itself in ecocriticism, new materialism, contradiction which, they complain, has dominated animal studies, posthumanism, anthropocene studies, Western philosophy since Plato. However, they object-oriented continental philosophy, the challenge non-contradiction very differently, Derrida architecture of the fold, actor-network theory, and the through a philosophy of discourse, Serres through a concept of vibrant matter. Once again, matter matters. philosophy of things. These two thinkers, both born in As Serres puts it in his recently translated Geometry, 1930, overlapped at the École normale supérieure in the cosmos has returned as “philosophy’s paradigm, Paris, and thus come from the same intellectual time and its real model,” as in the time of the ancients, but with place. -
Some Thoughts About Natural Law
Some Thoughts About Natural Law Phflip E. Johnsont My first task is to define the subject. When I use the term "natural" law, I am distinguishing the category from other kinds of law such as positive law, divine law, or scientific law. When we discuss positive law, we look to materials like legislation, judicial opinions, and scholarly anal- ysis of these materials. If we speak of divine law, we ask if there are any knowable commands from God. If we look for scientific law, we conduct experiments, or make observations and calculations, in order to come to objectively verifiable knowledge about the material world. Natural law-as I will be using the term in this essay-refers to a method that we employ to judge what the principles of individual moral- ity or positive law ought to be. The natural law philosopher aspires to make these judgments on the basis of reason and human nature without invoking divine revelation or prophetic inspiration. Natural law so defined is a category much broader than any particular theory of natural law. One can believe in the existence of natural law without agreeing with the particular systems of natural law advocates like Aristotle or Aquinas. I am describing a way of thinking, not a particular theory. In the broad sense in which I am using the term, therefore, anyone who attempts to found concepts of justice upon reason and human nature engages in natural law philosophy. Contemporary philosophical systems based on feminism, wealth maximization, neutral conversation, liberal equality, or libertarianism are natural law philosophies. -
Scientific Explanation
Scientific Explanation Michael Strevens For the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition The three cardinal aims of science are prediction, control, and expla- nation; but the greatest of these is explanation. Also the most inscrutable: prediction aims at truth, and control at happiness, and insofar as we have some independent grasp of these notions, we can evaluate science’s strate- gies of prediction and control from the outside. Explanation, by contrast, aims at scientific understanding, a good intrinsic to science and therefore something that it seems we can only look to science itself to explicate. Philosophers have wondered whether science might be better off aban- doning the pursuit of explanation. Duhem (1954), among others, argued that explanatory knowledge would have to be a kind of knowledge so ex- alted as to be forever beyond the reach of ordinary scientific inquiry: it would have to be knowledge of the essential natures of things, something that neo-Kantians, empiricists, and practical men of science could all agree was neither possible nor perhaps even desirable. Everything changed when Hempel formulated his dn account of ex- planation. In accordance with the observation above, that our only clue to the nature of explanatory knowledge is science’s own explanatory prac- tice, Hempel proposed simply to describe what kind of things scientists ten- dered when they claimed to have an explanation, without asking whether such things were capable of providing “true understanding”. Since Hempel, the philosophy of scientific explanation has proceeded in this humble vein, 1 seeming more like a sociology of scientific practice than an inquiry into a set of transcendent norms. -
Two Concepts of Law of Nature
Prolegomena 12 (2) 2013: 413–442 Two Concepts of Law of Nature BRENDAN SHEA Winona State University, 528 Maceman St. #312, Winona, MN, 59987, USA [email protected] ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE / RECEIVED: 04–12–12 ACCEPTED: 23–06–13 ABSTRACT: I argue that there are at least two concepts of law of nature worthy of philosophical interest: strong law and weak law . Strong laws are the laws in- vestigated by fundamental physics, while weak laws feature prominently in the “special sciences” and in a variety of non-scientific contexts. In the first section, I clarify my methodology, which has to do with arguing about concepts. In the next section, I offer a detailed description of strong laws, which I claim satisfy four criteria: (1) If it is a strong law that L then it also true that L; (2) strong laws would continue to be true, were the world to be different in some physically possible way; (3) strong laws do not depend on context or human interest; (4) strong laws feature in scientific explanations but cannot be scientifically explained. I then spell out some philosophical consequences: (1) is incompatible with Cartwright’s contention that “laws lie” (2) with Lewis’s “best-system” account of laws, and (3) with contextualism about laws. In the final section, I argue that weak laws are distinguished by (approximately) meeting some but not all of these criteria. I provide a preliminary account of the scientific value of weak laws, and argue that they cannot plausibly be understood as ceteris paribus laws. KEY WORDS: Contextualism, counterfactuals, David Lewis, laws of nature, Nancy Cartwright, physical necessity. -
Ast#: ___Science Knowledge Study Guide Physical
Name: ______________________________ Pd: ___ Ast#: _____ Science Knowledge Study Guide Physical Science Honors Provide a short response to the following prompts. 1. Describe how scientific knowledge is affected by new evidence (if the new evidence does NOT support the current understanding). Scientific knowledge grows and changes as new evidence is uncovered. 2. What is scientific knowledge built from? (list 3 things) Continuous testing and observation Debate (argumentation) All contribute to the EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE Confirmation (repetition & replication) 3. Why is it important that we use phrases such as “the results suggest…” or “the evidence supports…” rather than using words such as “prove” or “proof”? Using words such as “prove” violate the tentative nature of science. They imply that scientific knowledge is concrete and unchanging. However, scientific knowledge must remain open to change. 4. Under what circumstances will a scientific theory become a law? Explain. A scientific theory will NEVER become a scientific law; it cannot, nor is it supposed to. A scientific theory and a scientific law are two different things with different purposes (an apple will never become an orange). 5. Why are scientific theories rarely discarded (completely abandoned), even when new evidence doesn’t fit within the current theory? Scientific theories are rarely completely discarded because they are heavily-tested and well-supported explanations. It is rare that new evidence completely invalidates a theory; rather, it is more likely that the theory can be “tweaked” or changed slightly to accommodate the new evidence. 6. What represents the BEST explanation that science can offer? Scientific theories represent the best explanations science has to offer. -
Fall 2013 UG Course Descriptions.Docx
UNDERGRADUATE SPRING 2019 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS PHI 100 (B, HUM) Concepts of the Person, Main Focus An historical introduction to philosophy through readings and discussions on topics such as human identity, human understanding, and human values. PHI 100.01 MWF 12:00-12:53 A. Bernstein In this class, we will ask the question, “What does it mean to be a person?” We will explore the question by making our way through challenging and fascinating texts, whether they are classically considered “philosophy” or not. The question of personhood is always broadly philosophical, but we will investigate whether that which is institutionally called “philosophy” is up to the task of answering the question. We will explore these things through the lenses of media, technology, culture, psychology, literature, and more. Through these interventions, we will try to get a handle on to what extent the concept of personal identity is even still sustainable in our postmodern, “post-truth” society. This class interrogates concepts of the person. PHI 100.02 MWF 10:00-10:53 J. Sares What is Thinking?: The Human Between Animal and Machine The course examines what it means to be a human being in terms of the capacity for conceptual thought and subjectivity. In part one, we will compare the human being to nonhuman animals, questioning whether there is a continuity or radical break between human and nature. Topics in this section may include: Aristotle’s definition of the human being as a ‘rational animal,’ Descartes’ substance dualism, Hobbes’ materialism, the philosophies of nature of Schelling and Hegel, and psychoanalytic accounts of the human being. -
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD and the LAW by Bemvam L
Hastings Law Journal Volume 19 | Issue 1 Article 7 1-1967 The cS ientific ethoM d and the Law Bernard L. Diamond Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Bernard L. Diamond, The Scientific etM hod and the Law, 19 Hastings L.J. 179 (1967). Available at: https://repository.uchastings.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol19/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Hastings Law Journal by an authorized editor of UC Hastings Scholarship Repository. THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE LAW By BEmVAm L. DIivmN* WHEN I was an adolescent, one of the major influences which determined my choice of medicine as a career was a fascinating book entitled Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. This huge volume, originally published in 1897, is a museum of pictures and lurid de- scriptions of human monstrosities and abnormalities of all kinds, many with sexual overtones of a kind which would especially appeal to a morbid adolescent. I never thought, at the time I first read this book, that some day, I too, would be an anomaly and curiosity of medicine. But indeed I am, for I stand before you here as a most curious and anomalous individual: a physician, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and (I hope) a scientist, who also happens to be a professor of law. But I am not a lawyer, nor in any way trained in the law; hence, the anomaly. The curious question is, of course, why should a non-lawyer physician and scientist, like myself, be on the faculty of a reputable law school. -
190 Dale M. Schlitt Two Centuries Ago in Berlin Classrooms, Some
190 Book Reviews Dale M. Schlitt German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy. Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 2016. Pp. x + 445. Hb, $95. Two centuries ago in Berlin classrooms, some now famous philosophers of re- ligion prosecuted contending systematic treatments of the Trinity that, for cer- tain, challenged their students. Today these philosophies are still taught and prove as daunting as ever for students and teachers alike. With Dale Schlitt’s new book on German Idealism’s Trinitarian legacy, we have an expert teacher to guide us all. This multifariously praiseworthy text’s chief merit lies in its pedagogical sensibility. Schlitt’s introduction concisely lays out how the book resulted from decades of teaching at St. Paul University in Ottawa and Oblate School of The- ology in San Antonio. Even better, the introduction presents a lucid, welcom- ing justification for the reader for the slate of ten thinkers to be treated later, and an equally clear statement on method. Then with an eye to future scholars’ potential contributions, Schlitt states that he offers this text as a celebration of the Idealist legacy, which should impel continuation of the Idealist Trinitarian adventure (see the detailed suggestions for further study in the book’s conclu- sion). Schlitt’s pedagogical sensibility manifests itself in each chapter with his judicious selection of examples and representative texts. Given the subject’s difficulty, this is absolutely worth lauding. The book has four parts. The first recounts the beginning of the Trinitarian adventure with Johann G. Fichte, Georg W.F. Hegel, and Friedrich W.J. -
Attached: the Object and the Collective
Bernhard Siegert Attached: The Object and the Collective 1 Cultural Techniques in 1983, 2000, 2020 As one of the reports written in the course of Friedrich Kittler’s Habilitation pro- cedure attests, in 1983 in the context of the humanities, the term “cultural tech- niques” carried the stigma of being unscientific. Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985, translated as Discourse Networks 1800/1900) was regarded as belonging to a type of book that might be labeled “kulturtechnisch,” which included other works such as Hans-Dieter Bahr’s Über den Umgang mit Maschinen (1983, “On interacting with machines”), Jean Baudrillard’s L’Échange symbolique et la mort (1976, Symbolic Exchange and Death), Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981, History and Obstinacy), Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert (1983, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century), or Jacques Derrida’s La carte postale (1980, The Post Card). What these books have in common (if nothing else) is that they appear to suspend “the proven foundations of scientific knowl- edge.”1 Kittler himself had made use of the term “cultural techniques” at the end of the summer of 1983 in the preface he was pressured to write (which was later suppressed) for Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. “Even écriture, which has in the meantime become a hermeneutic slogan, does not use the term ‘cultural tech- niques’ to mean cultural techniques.”2 Describing reading and writing as cultural techniques meant, -
ON HYPERSTTION in THEORY Armen Avanessian
REINVENTING HORIZONS nize the imbalanced nature of their relationship, so grows their ACCELERATING ACADEMIA: demand for equality and their technical capacity to be in charge of their destiny. This realization opens up a space for intervening ON HYPERSTTION in history and for creating new horizons of possibility.22 IN THEORY Armen Avanessian Recall that hype is the ratio of expected earnings to earnings (EE/E), whereas the above impressions are based on the ratio of capitalization to earnings (K/E). The latter number refects both hype and the discount rate (K/E = H/r), so un- less we know what capitalists expect, we remain unable to say anything specifc about hype. But we can speculate[…] —Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan1 The new realist and materialist philosophy and the new po- litical theory which it explicitly inspired, assert that reality can be known and that change is possible. Rather than spell out here what this entails in the various currents of thought that range from New Materialism via Speculative Realism to 22. A diferent version of this essay was originally presented as part of Ashkal Alwan’s Home 1. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder, Works 7, a Forum on Cultural Practices in Beirut on November 18, 2015. (Milton Park: Routledge, 2009), 190. 76 77 REINVENTING HORIZONS AVANESSIAN—ACCELERATING ACADEMIA Accelerationism, I would like to look at the discursive framework logical. This common folkloristic mystifcation of the past is best and background information that have led to their engagement countered with an accelerationist perspective on the origins of with the scientifc and (fnancial-) economic phenomena that the modern research university. -
Schelling's Narrative Philosophy and Ankersmit's Narrative Logic
Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 2021; 2(2): 237–257 Katarzyna Filutowska* Schelling’s Narrative Philosophy and Ankersmit’s Narrative Logic – Is There Any Philosophy to Narrative? https://doi.org/10.1515/jtph-2021-0013 Published online June 4, 2021 Abstract: This paper considers the problem of a narrative philosophy according to F. W. J. Schelling and narrative logic according to Franklin Ankersmit. Referring to these examples, I ask whether there is any philosophy to narrative at all. First, I discuss Schelling’s views from his unfinished work “The Ages of the World,” as well as his later dialectics of mythology of revelation from the system of the ages of the world. I focus on a dialectics of figurative and speculative order, which is at the core of Schelling’s project to tell philosophy in the form of poetry and demonstrate the origins of Schelling’s narrative philosophy in his early, transcendental thought. Next, I juxtapose my findings with Ankersmit’s analysis of historians’ language. I also consider whether, and how, some of these ideas can be applied in contemporary narrative research. Keywords: narrative philosophy, F.W.J. Schelling, German idealism, Franklin Ankersmit, narrative logic 1 Introduction Although Schelling, along with Kant and Fichte, is considered one of the most prominent representatives of transcendentalism, his philosophy is in fact irre- ducible to the typically systematic, negative thought that is characteristic of thinkers in this school. In his second, positive period, which began in 1809 with the famous treatise devoted to human freedom, he passed into the position of a so- called living system. -
Thought and the Eucharist Philosophical Models and Their Theological Appropriation
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 86/1 (2010) 83-106. doi: 10.2143/ETL.86.1.2051611 © 2010 by Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. All rights reserved. Thought and the Eucharist Philosophical Models and Their Theological Appropriation Joris GELDHOF K.U.Leuven The history of the relationship between Thought and the Eucharist is long and complex. Theology, resorting to concepts and the formation of philosophical thought, has never ceased to attempt an understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist. Theologians have certainly reflected on “the sacrament of sacraments”, lyrically described by Vatican II as “a sacra- ment of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Pascal banquet”1 inas- much as it is “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life”2. But philosophers themselves have thematized and examined the Eucharist, too, not only as a social ritual or a religious practice but also as a constitu- tive element of Christian faith. Xavier Tilliette demonstrates this in his recent volume on “Eucharistic philosophies”3. This fundamental observa- tion invites theologians to meticulously study what the philosophers have written, and then to make a critical and constructive assessment. In the current context, the task of dedicating the necessary energy to the deepen- ing of relationships between thought and the Eucharist has become of utmost importance. How is it possible to contemplate the Eucharist with- out being absorbed in a strictly scientific and rationalistic discourse on the one hand, or on the other hand, without spiritualizing it – which would finally and inevitably end up in a refutation of theology itself? This article presents an authentic exercise of theological thought which confronts each of these two positions.