The “concept of time” and the “being of the clock”: Bergson, Einstein, Heidegger, and the interrogation of the temporality of modernism

The topic to be addressed in this paper, that is, the distinction between the “concept” of time and the being of the clock, divides into two parts: first, in the debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, one discovers the ground for the diverging concepts of time characterized by physics in its opposing itself to philosophy. Bergson’s durée or “duration” in opposition to Einstein’s ‘physicist’s time’ as ‘public time,’ one can argue, sets the terms for Martin Heidegger’s extending, his ontological analysis of Da-sein, as human being-in-the-world. Second, in this the ‘concept of time’ gives way to the analysis of the ‘being of the clock.’ What is this being of the clock that makes evident the fundamental temporality of Da-sein? This question is rehearsed in Division Two of Being and Time. My claim is that the fundamental insight into the nature of time revealed by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is that time extemporizes itself. Temporality “is” not a being but a process that temporalizes itself, precisely because it “is not.”     

The long arm of the state? Transnationalism,Islam, and nation-building: the case of Turkey and Morocco

From the moment the first Turkish and Moroccan workers migrated to Europe in the early 1960s, the Turkish and Moroccan states have been concerned with how to bind emigrated citizens to their country of origin. In this article, we focus on Islam as a multi-dimensional binding mechanism. Religion is a broad register that links emotion, affect, and senses of belonging and binds individuals to political and cultural projects of collective actors and states. As we will demonstrate, it is a field in which both states and migrants have developed a variety of activities and initiatives, but it is difficult to single out what pertains to the state and what not. We argue that although state involvement in these two cases differs markedly, there are some intriguing parallels when we concentrate on religion. In both cases, religious affiliation is a very complex source of binding and of fission. State-monitored transnational networks have been tools of binding, but the same networks have engendered processes of disengagement from the state.     

Children's and Adults’ Judgments of the Certainty of Deductive Inferences,Inductive Inferences,and Guesses

Children and adults rated their own certainty following inductive inferences, deductive inferences, and guesses. Beginning in kindergarten, participants rated deductions as more certain than weak inductions or guesses. Deductions were rated as more certain than strong inductions beginning in Grade 3, and fourth-grade children and adults differentiated strong inductions, weak inductions, and informed guesses from pure guesses. By Grade 3, participants also gave different types of explanations for their deductions and inductions. These results are discussed in relation to children's concepts of cognitive processes, logical reasoning, and epistemological development.     

Bogen and Woodward’s data-phenomena distinction,forms of theory-ladenness,and the reliability of data

Some twenty years ago, Bogen and Woodward challenged one of the fundamental assumptions of the received view, namely the theory-observation dichotomy and argued for the introduction of the further category of scientific phenomena. The latter, Bogen and Woodward stressed, are usually unobservable and inferred from what is indeed observable, namely scientific data. Crucially, Bogen and Woodward claimed that theories predict and explain phenomena, but not data. But then, of course, the thesis of theory-ladenness, which has it that our observations are influenced by the theories we hold, cannot apply. On the basis of two case studies, I want to show that this consequence of Bogen and Woodward’s account is rather unrealistic. More importantly, I also object against Bogen and Woodward’s view that the reliability of data, which constitutes the precondition for data-to-phenomena inferences, can be secured without the theory one seeks to test. The case studies I revisit have figured heavily in the publications of Bogen and Woodward and others: the discovery of weak neutral currents and the discovery of the zebra pattern of magnetic anomalies. I show that, in the latter case, data can be ignored if they appear to be irrelevant from a particular theoretical perspective (TLI) and that, in the former case, the tested theory can be critical for the assessment of the reliability of the data (TLA). I argue that both TLI and TLA are much stronger senses of theory-ladenness than the classical thesis and that neither TLI nor TLA can be accommodated within Bogen and Woodward’s account.     

Art history, the problem of style, and Arnold Hauser’s contribution to the history and sociology of knowledge

Much of Arnold Hauser??s work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser??s project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge??where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser??s personal and intellectual background, as well as of the shifting political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser??s central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser??s conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser??s work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer????on Hauser??s behalf??, as it were??to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in.     

A postcolonial Pannenberg? Mimicry,the law,and the cross of love

This paper employs the postcolonial concepts of mimicry and hybridity to interpret Wolfhart Pannenberg's understanding of the violence done to Jesus on the cross and the subversive reconciliatory love that it engenders. According to Pannenberg, although the man Jesus was crucified as blasphemer of the Jewish law, the resurrection vindicated Jesus so that the ones accusing Jesus were retroactively deemed to be the actual blasphemers. As a result, Jesus ended up dying not for his own alleged breaking of the law, but as an inclusive substitute for all blasphemers of God (through amour propre) deserving death. Thus, the resurrection confirmed Jesus’ divine identity and his earthly teaching that love supersedes and transforms the law. Applying the concept of mimicry to Pannenberg, on the cross the symbolic and semiotic are held together in tension for in mimicry the “not-quite sameness” menaces the colonizer. The cross, ostensibly a symbolic sign of abjection, is mimicked by the suffering of Jesus and subverted through a practice of inclusive semiotic love which recapitulates sinful human life toward a life of transformed autonomy. Pannenberg displays a pseudo postcolonial understanding of subverting oppressive law into love. However, on account of his futurist ontology, the eschatological totality is underscored relative to formative experiences, leaving him vulnerable to postcolonial critiques of essentialism, which can reinscribe colonialism. I contend that Pannenberg employs a strategy of “strategic particularism” in which concepts such as mimicry and hybridity are helpful as hermeneutical tools but ultimately provisional and temporary relative to the whole.     

Philosophy, the “unknown knowns,” and the public use of reason

There are not only true or false solutions, there are also false questions. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution. This holds especially for today’s public debates on ecological threats, on lack of faith, on democracy and the “war on terror”, in which the “unknown knowns”, the silent presuppositions we are not aware of, determine our acts.     

A new member of the family? The continuum of being,artificial intelligence,and the image of God

Abstract

Are the scientific and religious definitions of life irreconcilable or do they overlap in significant areas? What is life? Religion seems to imply that there is a qualitative distinction between human beings and the rest of creation; however, there is a strong tradition in Christianity and in Eastern thought that suggests that the natural world also has a relationship with God. Human dominion over other parts of creation exists, but does not obviate this connection, nor give humans a circle unto themselves. The concept of humans being created in the image of God can be used to explain why we might believe humans are in a circle unto themselves, yet we can expand this concept to include artificially intelligent computers, a new potential member of the cognitive family. Our quest for artificial intelligence tells us both what we value in our humanity, and how we might extend that valuation to the rest of creation.     

Well-Being, Quality of Life, and the Naïve Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness is a long-enshrined tradition that has recently become the cornerstone of the American Positive Psychology movement. However, “happiness” is an over-worked and ambiguous word, which, it is argued, should be restricted and only used as the label for a brief emotional state that typically lasts a few seconds or minutes. The corollary proposal for positive psychology is that optimism is a preferable stance over pessimism or realism. Examples are presented both from psychology and economics that illustrate the dangers of optimism, and in which better outcomes can occur with a pessimistic stance. A more sophisticated approach is then presented in which, in relation to well-being and quality of life, neither optimism nor pessimism is seen as inherently better than the other, but, rather, in which psychological flexibility may contribute optimally to health and well-being.     

Lévinas,Derrida and the Ethics and Politics of Reproduction

This essay outlines a Lévinas- and Derrida-inspired politics of reproduction, via opening the ethics of reproduction, something previous work on the topic has omitted. It does so via a reassessment of two notable publications on Lévinas and feminism, Stella Sandford’s essay in the Cambridge Companion to Lévinas (2002) and Lisa Guenther’s volume The Gift of the Other: Lévinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2006).¹1 Stella Sandford, ‘Lévinas, Feminism and the Feminine’. I particularly focus on this essay as its negative presentation of Lévinas’ potential for feminism in one of the main introductory texts on his work is an apparently definite dismissal. There is no space to undertake a full analysis of what Sandford has to say in The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas. There is no doubting her familiarity with Lévinas’ texts, but the way in which she reads them is highly questionable. Her basic assumption is that texts can be treated systematically and she openly rejects Derrida’s suggestion that we can find a number of different “voices” at work in Lévinas. She thus prosecutes a reading which constantly attempts to restrain the radical potential of Lévinas’ text. Indeed, when she cannot find a suitably negative reading she puts words in his mouth by finding supposed parallels with writers such as Bloy, Rav Abbahu or Ebreo, on which basis he is accordingly condemned. The stunning radicality of Lévinas’ conception of subjectivity as fecundity is overlooked. Rather than being a celebration of masculine power, it is the discovery of the powerlessness at the heart of masculinity or any other subjectivity, a dissolution of virility. Sandford wrongly states that fraternity is for Lévinas a simple universality and her treatment of it is underelaborated compared to Howard Caygill’s account of the same term in Lévinas and the Political. Sandford comes very close to recognizing that the fecundity of Totality and Infinity and the maternity of Otherwise than Being are very much two sides of the same coin. Yet again, rather than commend this move, she rejects the way of thinking at work, what I will call “metaphorical thought”, as a debiologizing. The phrase which will be so important for Guenther, “becoming like a maternal body”, is not even mentioned.View all notes Both of these are 10 or more years old years, yet have received little or no extended discussion despite a number of significant problems in their readings of Lévinas. In particular, I challenge Sandford’s insistence on a systematic rather than plurivocal reading of Lévinas on questions of gender and sexual difference. I further stress the importance of a certain thought of metaphor as a way of thinking beyond existing relations. In Guenther’s work I observe a tension between a desire to explore the potential of the metaphoric expression “like a maternal body” and a commitment to phenomenologize the act of giving birth. Arising out of the latter, I note the problematic characterization of maternity as a gift and a very Lévinasian effacement of violence from the maternal relation. The latter tendency, together with an unwillingness to question accepted doxa on the topic, is partly responsible for Guenther’s failure to proceed to the ethics of reproduction which should, in a Lévinas-inspired work, inform and be informed by any politics of reproduction.     

The theory‐ladenness of observations,the role of scientific instruments,and the Kantian a priori

During the last decades it has become widely accepted that scientific observations are ‘theory‐laden’. Scientists ‘see’ the world with their theories or theoretical presuppositions. In the present paper it is argued that they ‘see’ with their scientific instruments as well, as the uses of scientific instruments is an important characteristic of modern natural science. It is further argued that Euclidean geometry is intimately linked to technology, and hence that it plays a fundamental part in the construction and operation of scientific instruments. Finally, Euclidean geometry is compared to fractal geometry, and the question of its a priori status is raised. Although the position that Euclidean geometry is a priori in the original Kantian sense is untenable, the paper concludes that in some restricted sense Euclidean geometry may be said to be a priori.     

Enrique Dussel,The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of“the Other”and the Myth of Modernity

Continental Philosophy Review -     

“I am the Author and Must Take Full Responsibility”: Abraham Verghese,Physicians as the Storytellers of the Body,and the Renewal of Medicine

Abraham Verghese proposes to renew medicine by training physicians to read the right texts—literary fiction and patients' bodies—with skilled attention. Analyzing Verghese's proposal with reference to Foucault's idea of the "clinical gaze," I find that Verghese conceives of patients as texts that only physicians can read, meaning that physicians become the storytellers of the bodies, lives, and deaths of the people they meet as patients. I conclude that Verghese's project is unsustainable and alternatively propose thinking analogically of physicians as ship captains who maintain therapeutic distance to reopen interpretative spaces for communities outside of medicine.     

Psychometric Examination,Adaptation, and Evaluation of the Hebrew Translation of the MMPI–2–RF VRIN-r and TRIN-r Validity Scales

In this study we examined the utility of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2–Restructured Form (MMPI–2–RF; Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008/2011; Tellegen & Ben-Porath, 2008/2011) Variable Response Inconsistency–Revised (VRIN-r) and True Response Inconsistency–Revised (TRIN-r) scales, including alternative versions of the scales, in the Hebrew translation of the test. First, we examined the applicability of the U.S. VRIN-r and TRIN-r scales in an Israeli Hebrew-speaking mixed clinical sample, and replaced original item pairs that did not meet the development criteria with substitution item pairs that did. Then, using the Israeli normative sample and a pure clinical sample, we compared the psychometric functioning of the adapted Hebrew-language VRIN-r and TRIN-r scales with that of the original versions of these scales under various conditions of simulated non-content-based (random and fixed) responding. Overall, results showed that the adapted versions of the scales did not improve on the original ones. We therefore recommend using the U.S. VRIN-r and TRIN-r versions, which could also facilitate cross-cultural comparisons.     

Teachers’ Identity, Self and the Process of Learning

In this paper we try, by drawing on some insights from practical knowledge, to bridge a gap between common conceptions of teaching on the one hand, and of learning on the other. In Western traditions of educational thought and discourse, practical knowledge—i.e. the dynamics of thinking, speaking, acting, and personal writing—is frequently separated from disciplinary knowledge: i.e. the knowledge of academic disciplines. But this separation often fails to recognize an inherent dialectic in teaching and learning. Through fresh explorations of human capacities to act and think, to speak and write, we try to illuminate different aspects of a teacher’s identity, including the teacher’s individuality and the teacher as an agent of an educational institution. The teacher has to present and represent knowledge in education, both as an agent of an institution and as a person. By examining the disclosure and transformation of the self in light of understandings of identity as sameness (i.e. that which doesn’t change with time), or as selfhood (i.e. that which is confronted by successive challenges), we hope to draw some productive conclusions about the teacher’s self-understanding as the source for personal learning in education. We aim to explore the importance of transformation of the teachers’ self for the quality of learning relationships between the teacher and the always Other student.     

Gödel,Kant, and the Path of a Science

Gödel's philosophical views were to a significant extent influenced by the study not only of Leibniz and Husserl, but also of Kant. Both Gödel and Kant aimed at the secure foundation of philosophy, the certainty of knowledge and the solvability of all meaningful problems in philosophy. In this paper, parallels between the foundational crisis of metaphysics in Kant's view and the foundational crisis of mathematics in Gödel's view are elaborated, especially regarding the problem of finding the “secure path of a science” for both mathematics and philosophy. Gödel's temporal subjectivism and metaphysical conceptual objectivism are presented as positively or negatively motivated by Kant's viewpoints. A remark on Gödel's collapse of modalities (in accordance with the collapse of objective time) is added.     

Aging,source memory,and the experience of “remembering”

In a previous study, we found source memory for perceptual features to differentiate between younger but not older adults’ reports of recollective (“remember”; R) and “know” (K) experiences. In two experiments with younger (17–30 years) and older (64–81 years) participants, we examined whether memory for meaningful speaker sources would accompany older adults’ recollective experience. Indeed, memory for male and female speakers (but not partial memory for gender; Experiment 1) as well as bound memory for speakers and their facial expressions (Experiment 2) distinguished between both younger and older adults’ RK reports. Thus, memory for some sources forms a common basis for younger and older adults’ retrieval experience. Nonetheless, older adults still showed lower objective source memory and lower subjective source-attribution confidence than younger adults when reporting recollective experiences, suggesting that source memory is less relevant to their retrieval experience than for younger adults.     

Christ’s faith,doubt, and the cry of dereliction

According to accounts of the Passion, Christ cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The cry, I argue, manifests that Christ lacks a belief that God is with him. Given the standard view of faith—belief that p is required for faith that p—it would follow that Christ lost his faith that God is with him just before he died. In this paper, I challenge the standard view by looking at the cognitive requirement of faith. Although faith that p requires some positive cognitive orientation toward p, that orientation need not be belief. I show that reliance is an alternative stance that fulfills the cognitive requirement of faith. Reliance aims at providing sensible guidance for action that is in accord with one’s values/ends. Thinking of the cognitive component of Christ’s faith in terms of reliance makes sense of the doubt manifested in his cry.