The flesh of all that is: Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, and Julian’s ‘showings’

Julian of Norwich (b. 1342) anticipated the ontological and epistemological work on sexed embodiment pioneered in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the 20th century. Her epistemology of sensual ‘showings’ helped reconfigure women’s embodiment and speech acts (‘bodytalk’): by recognizing cognitive emotions and the knowledge-producing body; and by envisioning the intertwining of human flesh with All That Is. The paper next examines Merleau-Ponty’s somatic discourse on the chiasmic flesh, which leads to a discussion of Irigaray’s work on poetic mimesis.     

Saving Mach’s View on Atoms

According to a common belief concerning the Mach-Boltzmann debate on atoms, the new experiments performed in microphysics at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries confirmed Boltzmann’s atomic hypothesis and disproved Mach’s anti-atomic view. This paper intends to show that this belief is partially unjustified. Mach’s view on atoms consists in fact of different kinds of arguments. While the new experiments in microphysics refute indeed his scientific arguments against the atomic hypothesis, his epistemological arguments are unaffected. In this regard, Mach’s epistemological approach remains relevant for today’s discussion on the status of the notion of atom.     

Discussions

Summary  In their paper, ‘When are thought experiments poor ones?’ (Peijnenburg and David Atkinson, 2003, Journal of General Philosophy of Science 34, 305-322.), Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson argue that most, if not all, philosophical thought experiments are “poor” ones with “disastrous consequences” and that they share the property of being poor with some (but not all) scientific thought experiments. Noting that unlike philosophy, the sciences have the resources to avoid the disastrous consequences, Peijnenburg and Atkinson come to the conclusion that the use of thought experiments in science is in general more successful than in philosophy and that instead of concocting more “recherché” thought experiments, philosophy should try to be more empirical. In this comment I will argue that Peijnenburg’s and Atkinson’s view on thought experiments is based on a misleading characterization of both, the dialectical situation in philosophy as well as the history of physics. By giving an adequate account of what the discussion in contemporary philosophy is about, we will arrive at a considerably different evaluation of philosophical thought experiments.

For I am convinced that we now find ourselves at an altogether decisive turning point in philosophy, and that we are objectively justified in considering that an end has come to the fruitless conflict of systems. We are already at the present time, in my opinion, in possession of methods which make any such conflict in principle unnecessary. What is now required is their resolute application. (Schlick, ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’, 1930/1959, p. 54).

     

John Dewey’s teaching methods in the discussion on german-language kindergartens — a case of non-perception?

At the beginning of the 20th century, German-language kindergartens were completely overshadowed by Friedrich Froebel’s tradition. The search for new forms of teaching started mainly by taking over the body of thinking developed by teaching reformers. John Dewey’s work was only accorded marginal examination. The person who got to grips most intensively with John Dewey and the American tradition of kindergarten teaching during the first half of the 20th century is Emmy Walser, one of the leading personalities in the kindergarten movement in Switzerland. As a result, the “free working method” developed in Switzerland as the new method. Dewey’s educational philosophy was reduced to the methodology of the free working method which had the effect of giving new life to Froebel’s ideas.     

An Ontological Critique of the Trans-Ontology of Enrique Dussel

Enrique Dussel has developed a sweeping philosophical critique of the eurocentricity of Western habits of thought and action, with the aim of articulating an ‘ethics of liberation’ that takes the part distinctively of ‘the victims’ of the world system. The heart of Dussel’s effort is an ostensibly new method, ‘analectic’ or ‘anadialectic,’ which comes about through the ‘revelation’ of the other, and goes beyond the self-enclosure that, Dussel asserts, typifies dialectic in Western ontology. Thus, he takes his position to have gone beyond ontology: it is a trans-ontology, a genuine meta-physics. I question whether analectic does go beyond Western thinking of being, and propose an ontological critique that is classically Western or, as I would prefer to say, historically Western yet (along with its analogues in other philosophical traditions) classically relevant even in our ‘age of globalization and exclusion.’     

On Mill,Infallibility, and Freedom of Expression

Philosophers have tended to dismiss John Stuart Mill’s claim that ‘all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility’. I argue that Mill’s ‘infallibility claim’ is indeed open to many objections, but that, contrary to the consensus, those objections fail to defeat the anti-authoritarian thesis which lies at its core. I then argue that Mill’s consequentialist case for the liberty of thought and discussion is likewise capable of withstanding some familiar objections. My purpose is to suggest that Mill’s anti-authoritarianism and his faith in thought and discussion, when taken seriously, supply the basis for a ‘public interest’ account of ‘freedom of expression as the liberty of thought and discussion’ which is faithful to Mill in spirit, if not to the precise letter. I outline such an account, which – as I say in conclusion – can serve as a valuable safeguard against ad hoc, reactive legislation, and the demands of a spurious communitarianism.     

Foucault amongst the theologians

This article critically examines some of the theological and Neo-Orthodox readings of Foucault. An exploration of some key texts reveals limitations in, e.g., Milbank’s account, and is developed further through an examination of Sharon Welch’s discussion of feminist liberation theology. A deeper engagement with Foucault’s work emerges, clarifying issues of power, disclosure, truth and ‘agonism’. The paper proposes that Foucault’s work is not an expression of ‘nihilism’ but rather is important for the self-critique and integrity of theology.     

Deconstruction is not vegetarianism: Humanism,subjectivity, and animal ethics

This essay examines Jacques Derrida’s contribution to recent debates in animal philosophy in order to explore the critical promise of his work for contemporary discourses on animal ethics and vegetarianism. The essay is divided into two sections, both of which have as their focus Derrida’s interview with Jean-Luc Nancy entitled “‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject.” My task in the initial section is to assess the claim made by Derrida in this interview that Levinas’s work is dogmatically anthropocentric, and to determine whether Levinas’s conception of ethics leaves a place for animals. In the second half of the essay I turn to an analysis of Derrida’s discussion of vegetarianism and its critical relation to the humanism and anthropocentrism that he is calling into question. The main argument that I seek to advance here is that deconstruction should not be strictly identified with vegetarianism (as certain of Derrida’s readers have suggested), but rather that what is needed is a thorough deconstruction of existing discourses on vegetarianism, a project that remains largely to be developed.     

Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment

According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. One important implication of Haidt’s model is that in giving reasons for their moral judgments people tend to confabulate – the reasons they give in attempting to explain their moral judgments are not really operative in producing those judgments. Moral reason-giving on Haidt’s view is generally a matter of post hoc confabulation. Against Haidt, we argue for a version of rationalism that we call ‘morphological rationalism.’ We label our version ‘morphological’ because according to it, the information contained in moral principles is embodied in the standing structure of a typical individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments. The manner in which the principles play this role is via ‘proceduralization’ – such principles operate automatically. In contrast to Haidt’s intuitionism, then, our view does not imply that people’s moral reason-giving practices are matters of confabulation. In defense of our view, we appeal to what we call the ‘nonjarring’ character of the phenomenology of making moral judgments and of giving reasons for those judgments.

Liberalism,Abstract Individualism,and the Problem of Particular Obligations

In the following I take issue with the allegation that liberalism must inevitably be guilty of ‘abstract individualism’. I treat Michael Sandel’s well-known claim that there are ‘loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are’ as representative of this widely held view. Specifically, I argue: (i) that Sandel’s account of the manner in which ‘constitutive’ loyalties function as reasons for action presupposes the possibility of there being (what I call) ‘underivable particular obligations’, but that such obligations are, in fact, a logical impossibility; and (ii) that Sandel’s account of the self as necessarily ‘encumbered’ presupposes an account of personal identity which confuses identification with definition, and which is, therefore, fundamentally flawed. For their constructive and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the following: Clare Chambers, Roger Crisp, Cécile Fabre, Paul Kelly, David Lloyd-Thomas. Thanks also go to Res Publica’s two anonymous referees.     

Knowing thyself ... in private: Masturbation and philosophy

Karl Marx once compared philosophy to masturbation, essentially seeing both as privative, idealistic, and impractical activities. Indeed, many lay folk see philosophers as “wankers.” While the present state of universities does throw doubt on the liberatory character of contemporary philosophy, Marx’s jibe nonetheless mischaracterizes masturbation. This paper is a brief attempt to correct Marx’s characterization of masturbation by drawing on the work of a thinker ofter associated with “intellectual onanism”: Martin Heidegger. Speaking ontologically, Heidergger’s theories can be developed to show that masturbation it is not privative, but “stretched” in time and place. Moreover, masturbation plays a practical role in the creative development of the self, including the self’s essential bodiliness. While not necessarily defending philosophy against Marx’s charges, this paper does show how even so-called “onanistic” philosophy might be redeemed. “Only a being which, like man, ‘had’ the word... can and must ‘have’ ‘the hand’” —Martin Heidegger “I have a dangerously supple wrist.” —Friedrich Nietzsche     

The drama of being: Levinas and the history of philosophy

The motif of the ‘drama of being’ is a dominant thread that spans the entirety of Levinas's six decades of authorship. As we will see, from the start of his writing career, Levinas consciously frames the tension between ontology and ethics in a dramatic form. A careful exposition of this motif and other related theatrical metaphors in his work–-such as ‘intrigue,’ ‘plot,’ and ‘scene’–-can offer us not only a better appreciation of the evolution of Levinas's thought, but also of his proper place within the western philosophical tradition. Levinas accuses western philosophers of being exclusively attuned to what he calls the ‘drama of existence.’ And even then, philosophers have eluded the implications of the tragic fatalism that define this drama. Philosophers are generally unaware of an ‘other scene’ that radically alters the fatalistic logic of the ontological drama. Levinas calls this other scene the ‘ethical intrigue.’     

Narratives of Mastery and Resistance: Lay Ethics of Nanotechnology

This paper contributes towards a lay ethics of nanotechnology through an analysis of talk from focus groups designed to examine how laypeople grapple with the meaning of a technology ‘in-the-making’. We describe the content of lay ethical concerns before suggesting that this content can be understood as being structured by five archetypal narratives which underpin talk. These we term: ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’; ‘kept in the dark’; ‘opening Pandora’s box’; ‘messing with nature’; and ‘be careful what you wish for’. We further suggest that these narratives can be understood as sharing an emphasis on the ‘giftedness’ of life, and that together they are used to resist dominant technoscientific and Enlightenment narratives of control and mastery which are encapsulated by nanotechnology.     

Quantifiers and propositional attitudes: Quine revisited

Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the problem of ‘suspended judgement with continued belief’. I argue that this criticism fails to take account of a crucial presupposition of Quine’s about the connection between thought and language. The aim of the paper is to defend the spirit of Quine’s account of attitudes by offering solutions to these two problems. See also chapters four and five of Word and Object (Quine, 1960) and ‘Intensions Revisited’ (Quine, 1977).     

Anthropological Approaches to ‘Primitive’ Religions

The study of religion by social anthropologists, as distinct from the classical philosophical approach of the Greeks and their medieval heirs, began in the late 19th century with Edward Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1871). Tyler’s approach was completely a priori in style in that it did not rest on systematic field work or empirical observation. The same approach characterized James Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough (1891). Baldwin Spencer, the founding father of Australian anthropology, was persuaded by Frazer to see the sophisticated religious beliefs and rites of the Aboriginal groups he studied in central Australia as mere ‘magic’. By the 1960s, a new generation of anthropologists, influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and English thinkers like E. Evans Pritchard, had arrived on the scene. This new ‘turn’ in anthropology led a number of contemporary scholars to the radical position that Western anthropology itself is a socio-cultural phenomenon that can be investigated in a broadly anthropological way. To see what this involves, it is worthwhile examining a number of crucial misunderstandings of Australian Aboriginal beliefs and practices that have been the artefactual result of various anthropological approaches.

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Illness Meanings in the Context of Cancer: An Indian Perspective

Attempts at meaning-making are considered an integral part of the process of psychological adjustment following the diagnosis of a major illness. The present study aimed at examining the applicability of Lipowski’s illness meaning framework and the utility of a card-task and an interview method for the assessment of illness meanings in an Indian sample of cancer patients (n=100). ‘Challenge’, ‘value’, ‘punishment’ , ‘weakness’ and ‘enemy’ were the five categories from the Lipowski’s framework that were found to be applicable in the current study sample whereas ‘strategy’, ‘relief’ and ‘loss’ were not applicable in the sample. Five new categories of illness meanings emerged namely; ‘burden’, ‘part of life’, ‘God’s plan’, ‘fate’ and ‘low threat’. Subgroups of patients formed on the basis of four broad categories of illness meanings (positive, negative, fate and low threat) differed significantly on depression, anxiety and quality of life, supporting the convergent validity of the interview based assessment. The study highlights that the card-task for assessment of meanings has significant limitations and that Lipowski’s illness-meaning framework requires expansion to capture the breadth of illness experiences in Indian patients.     

Taking Care of the Symbolic Order. How Converging Technologies Challenge our Concepts

In this article we briefly summarize how converging technologies challenge elements of the existing symbolic order, as shown in the contributions to this special issue. We then identify the vision of ‘life as a do it yourself kit’ as a common denominator in the various forms of convergence and proceed to show how this vision provokes unrest and debate about existing moral frameworks and taboos. We conclude that, just as the problems of the industrial revolution sparked off the now broadly established ideal of sustainability the converging technologies should be governed by the ideal of ‘human sustainability’. The essence of this ideal is formed by the ongoing discussion about the extent to which we may, or should want to, ‘make’ our environment and ourselves, and when it is better to simply accept what is given and what happens to us.     

How Causal is Downward Causation?

Summary  The purpose of this paper is to lay bare the major problems underlying the concept of downward causation as discussed within the perspective of the present interest for phenomena that are characterized by self-organization.In our discussion of the literature, we have focussed on two questions: (1) What sorts of things are said to be, respectively, causing and caused within the context of downward causation? And (2) What is the meaning of ‘causing’ in downward causation? We have concluded that the concept of ‘downward causation’ is muddled with regard to the meaning of causation and fuzzy with regard to the nature of the causes and the effects. Moreover, we have concluded that ‘causation’ in respect of ‘downward causation’ is usually understood in terms of explanation and determination rather than in terms of causation in the sense of ‘bringing about’. Thus, the term ‘downward causation’ is badly chosen.