Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in the light of Kant’s Third <Emphasis Type="Italic">Critique</Emphasis> and Schelling’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Real</Emphasis>-<Emphasis Type="Italic">Idealismus</Emphasis>

In this paper I offer a selective, systematic rather than historical account of Merleau-Ponty’s highly complex relation to classical German philosophy, focussing on issues which bear on the question of his relation to transcendentalism and naturalism. I argue that the concerns which define his project in Phenomenology of Perception are fundamentally those of transcendental philosophy, and that Merleau-Ponty’s disagreements with Kant, and the position he arrives at in The Visible and the Invisible, are helpfully viewed in light of (1) issues which Merleau-Ponty identifies as raised by Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, and (2) Schelling’s conversion of Kantian idealism into a Real-Idealismus. Finally I address the question of whether, and on what basis, Merleau-Ponty’s claim to have surpassed systematic philosophy can be defended.     

Mel Gibson’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Passion</Emphasis> and the Many Uses of Christ’s Suffering

Many Christians resonated with Mel Gibsons film, The Passion of the Christ. The films sympathetic portrayal of Pontius Pilate reinforces the sense of victimization Americans have experienced since 9/11, however, and obscures the real meaning of Christs suffering.Marian Ronan is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Theology and Religion at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, a member seminary of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.     

Cronbach’s α, Revelle’s β, and Mcdonald’s ω<Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">H</Emphasis></Subscript>: their relations with each other and two alternative conceptualizations of reliability

We make theoretical comparisons among five coefficients—Cronbach’s α, Revelle’s β, McDonald’s ω_h, and two alternative conceptualizations of reliability. Though many end users and psychometricians alike may not distinguish among these five coefficients, we demonstrate formally their nonequivalence. Specifically, whereas there are conditions under which α, β, and ω_h are equivalent to each other and to one of the two conceptualizations of reliability considered here, we show that equality with this conceptualization of reliability and between α and ω_h holds only under a highly restrictive set of conditions and that the conditions under which β equals ω_h are only somewhat more general. The nonequivalence of α, β, and ω_h suggests that important information about the psychometric properties of a scale may be missing when scale developers and users only report α as is almost always the casePreparation of this article was supported by the Patricia M Nielsen Research Chair of the Family Institute at Northwestern UniversityWe thank Lewis R. Goldberg, Win Hill, Dan McAdams, Tony Z. Tang and especially Roderick P. McDonald for their comments on earlier drafts of portions of this articleThis revised article was published online in August 2005 with the PDF paginated correctly.     

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Normativity</Emphasis>

Response-dependence theses are usually formulated in terms of a priori true biconditionals of roughly the form ‘something, x, falls under the concept ‘F’ ↔ x would elicit response R from subjects S under conditions C’. Such formulations are vulnerable to conditional fallacy problems; counterexamples threaten whenever the C-conditions’ coming to obtain might alter the object with respect to F. Crispin Wright has suggested that such problems can be avoided by placing the C-conditions in a proviso. This ensures that any changes triggered by the C-conditions’ coming to obtain will be irrelevant to the truth of the biconditional. I argue that this move leaves the equations vulnerable to counterexamples of a slightly different kind: Cases where the change is triggered, not by the C-conditions’ coming to obtain, but by the response. I consider two ways to resist these counterexamples, and argue that both are insufficient. The upshot is a challenge that must be met if provisoed biconditionals are to serve their purpose.     

At the interface of ‘<Emphasis Type="Italic">Dharma</Emphasis>’ and ‘<Emphasis Type="Italic">Karma</Emphasis>’: Interpreting moral discourse in India

The paper examines the Hindu, Indian concepts of karma and dharma as interpreted in the contemporary, urban Indian context. Using in depth interviews, the study was conducted with 30 respondents from Vadodara city belonging to different socio-economic and professional statuses. Results indicate that both the concepts were infl uenced by an individual’s life stage, gender and socio-economic status. Like karma, the concept of dharma also mainly comprised fulfi lling role-related responsibilities and duties. Integrating both the concepts, it can be said that dharma is the larger framework within the peripheries of which individual karma operates. The concepts of karma and dharma seem to provide a background template for deciphering right and wrong human behavior/conduct in the Indian context.     

The Real-Constitution in Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Realontologie</Emphasis>

In this work we try to distinguish five levels of the constitution of reality in Conrad Martius’ Realontologie (1923) (Real Ontology). The difference between “existential autonomy” and “existential relativity” seems to be the first one. The second level of the constitution of reality concerns the problem of “whatness” (Washeit) and the substantial reality (Realität). We can find the third level in the materiality from the eidetical point of view. The fourth level of the constitution of reality concerns the material formation as presupposition of a personal essence. Finally we can distinguish a fifth level of the constitution of the reality in the essential stratification.     

Leśniewski’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">characteristica universalis</Emphasis>

Leśniewski’s systems deviate greatly from standard logic in some basic features. The deviant aspects are rather well known, and often cited among the reasons why Leśniewski’s work enjoys little recognition. This paper is an attempt to explain why those aspects should be there at all. Leśniewski built his systems inspired by a dream close to Leibniz’s characteristica universalis: a perfect system of deductive theories encoding our knowledge of the world, based on a perfect language. My main claim is that Leśniewski built his characteristica universalis following the conditions of de Jong and Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2008) to an astounding degree. While showing this I give an overview of the architecture of Leśniewski’s systems and of their fundamental characteristics. I suggest among others that the aesthetic constraints Leśniewski put on axioms and primitive terms have epistemological relevance.     

On Lenin’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Materialism and empiriocriticism</Emphasis>

In May 1909, Lenin published Materialism and empiriocriticism, a polemical assault on forms of positivistic empiricism popular among members of the Bolshevik intelligentsia, especially his political rival Alexander Bogdanov. After expounding the core claims on both sides of the debate, this essay considers the relation of the philosophical issues at stake to the political stances of their proponents. I maintain that Lenin’s use of philosophical argument was not purely opportunistic, and I contest the view that his defence of realism was designed as a philosophical rationale for revolutionary vanguardism, arguing instead that Lenin primarily saw himself as defending the world-view of ordinary rank-and-file Marxists against varieties of philosophical obscurantism. Although of marginal influence at the time of its first publication, Materialism and empiriocriticism was later celebrated as a model of philosophical excellence, as the cult of Lenin was fashioned by Stalin. As a result of the text’s subsequent prominence, Lenin’s manner of philosophizing, with its vitriol and abuse, had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of Soviet philosophical culture.     

Amending Frege’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Grundgesetze der Arithmetik</Emphasis>

Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent. This system is, except for minor differences, second-order logic together with an abstraction operator governed by Frege’s Axiom V. A few years ago, Richard Heck showed that the ramified predicative second-order fragment of the Grundgesetze is consistent. In this paper, we show that the above fragment augmented with the axiom of reducibility for concepts true of only finitely many individuals is still consistent, and that elementary Peano arithmetic (and more) is interpretable in this extended system.     

THE <Emphasis Type="Italic">DEAD-LIVING-MOTHER</Emphasis>: MARIE BONAPARTE’S INTERPRETATION OF EDGAR ALLAN POE’S SHORT STORIES

Princess Marie Bonaparte is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis, remembered for her crucial role in arranging Freud’s escape to safety in London from Nazi Vienna, in 1938. This paper connects us to Bonaparte’s work on Poe’s short stories. Founded on concepts of Freudian theory and an exhaustive review of the biographical facts, Marie Bonaparte concluded that the works of Edgar Allan Poe drew their most powerful inspirational force from the psychological consequences of the early death of the poet’s mother. In Bonaparte’s approach, which was powerfully influenced by her recognition of the impact of the death of her own mother when she was born—an understanding she gained in her analysis with Freud—the thesis of the dead-living-mother achieved the status of a paradigmatic key to analyze and understand Poe’s literary legacy. This paper explores the background and support of this hypothesis and reviews Bonaparte’s interpretation of Poe’s most notable short stories, in which extraordinary female figures feature in the narrative.     

Efficient estimation of Weber’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">W</Emphasis>

Many studies rely on estimation of Weber ratios (W) in order to quantify the acuity an individual’s approximate number system. This paper discusses several problems encountered in estimating W using the standard methods, most notably low power and inefficiency. Through simulation, this work shows that W can best be estimated in a Bayesian framework that uses an inverse (1/W) prior. This beneficially balances a bias/variance trade-off and, when used with MAP estimation is extremely simple to implement. Use of this scheme substantially improves statistical power in examining correlates of W.     

What Things <Emphasis Type="Italic">Still</Emphasis> Don’t Do

This paper praises and criticizes Peter-Paul Verbeek’s What Things Do (2006). The four things that Verbeek does well are: (1) remind us of the importance of technological things; (2) bring Karl Jaspers into the conversation on technology; (3) explain how technology “co-shapes” experience by reading Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory in light of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology; (4) develop a material aesthetics of design. The three things that Verbeek does not do well are: (1) analyze the material conditions in which things are produced; (2) criticize the social-political design and use context of things; and (3) appreciate how liberal moral-political theory contributes to our evaluation of technology.     

Camus’s Algerian in Paris: A Prose Poetic Reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">L’Étranger</Emphasis>

This paper demonstrates that L'étranger, Camus's famous novel about an outsider, had by as early as 1946 become just as much of an 'insider' in terms of its affiliation to the Parisian literary tradition. More than an insider simply by virtue of its contemporary place in the French canon, then, the novel is also intertextually bound to a tradition of oxymoronic poetics dating back to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen (Les Petits poèmes en prose). I shall examine the way in which L'étranger performs its prose poetics, thereby establishing it as exemplary of a Parisian model of modernity. Additionally, the famous scene on the beach will be considered as a liminal space and as a literary translation of Paris into the desert, which, once a joke for Paris's relationship to provincial France, became after the Second World War a new allegory for the capital's self-alterity.     

Depicting and seeing-in. The <Emphasis Type="Italic">‘Sujet’</Emphasis> in Husserl’s phenomenology of images

In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the consciousness of the depicted subject (Sujet or Bildsujet), which Husserl calls the Sujetintention, e.g. the awareness of the sitter of a portrait. Husserl claims that when a consciousness regards a figurative image, it is absorbed in the awareness of the depicted subject and yet this subject some how withholds its presence in the midst of its appearance in the image-object (Bildobjekt). Image-consciousness is an intuitive (anschaulich) consciousness that intends a being that is both ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the image: the depicted subject haunts the image. Borrowing Richard Wollheim’s language, the aim of this study is to determine what it means for a consciousness to see a depicted-subject in an image-depiction, which happens on the basis of seeing an image-object in a material image-thing, like paint, canvas, ink, paper etc. Restricting myself to figurative images, I will argue against the view that the relation to the depicted subject is symbolic or signitive. I argue that the consciousness of the Sujet is quasi-perceptual, which allows for a better account of the depicted subject’s sense of absence. I develop this view on the basis of Husserl’s claims that the depicted subject is the bearer of norms inherent to intuitive appearances, which concern how the profiles and movements of an object ought to unfold, though they fail to do so for image-consciousness. This failure is not a mere privation for the image as a perceptual appearance but is inherent to its status as a mediated and artificial presence.     

Madness Decolonized?: Madness as Transnational Identity in Gail Hornstein’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Agnes’s Jacket</Emphasis>

The US psychologist Gail Hornstein’s monograph, Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009), is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an “anti-colonial” struggle to reclaim the experiential world “colonized” by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals makes recourse to the inner world and (corresponding) cultural world of the mad as well as to the ethno-symbolic cultural materials of dormant nationhood. This rhetoric is augmented by a model in which the mad comprise a diaspora without an origin, coalescing into a single transnational community. The mad are also depicted as persons displaced from their metaphorical homeland, the “inner” world “colonized” by the psychiatric regime. There are a number of difficulties with Hornstein’s rhetoric, however. Her “ethnicity-and-rights” response to the oppression of the mad is symptomatic of Western parochialism, while her proposed transmutation of putative psychopathology from limit upon identity to parameter of successful identity is open to contestation. Moreover, unless one accepts Hornstein’s porous vision of mad identity, her self-ascribed insider status in relation to the mad community may present a problematic “re-colonization” of mad experience.     

Dennett’s Rhetorical Strategies in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Consciousness Explained</Emphasis>

Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) is an inspiring but also a highly frustrating book. The line of the argument seems to be clear, but then at second sight it fades away. It turns out that Dennett uses six of the seven strategies which I discuss in my “The Seven Strategies of the Sophisticated Pseudo-Scientist: A Look into Freud’s Rhetorical Tool Box” (J. Gen. Phil. Sci., 2001) Discussing important examples of these strategies I show why Consciousness Explained is such a frustrating book. As the examples used do not reflect minor problems but go to the heart of the matter and concern the book’s main areas of contention, it turns out that, in spite of the valuable and insightful details, Dennett’s materialistic view of consciousness is supported mainly by rhetorical sleights of hand.     

New life for Carnap’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Aufbau</Emphasis>?

This is a personal, incomplete, and very informal take on the role of logic in general philosophy of science, which is aimed at a broader audience. We defend and advertise the application of logical methods in philosophy of science, starting with the beginnings in the Vienna Circle and ending with some more recent logical developments.     

Comments on Sydney Shoemaker’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Physical Realization</Emphasis>

This paper interprets and criticizes some of the views presented in Sydney Shoemaker’s book, Physical Realization (Oxford University Press, 2007), on the topic of how mental properties are realized by physical properties, given that, on his view, human persons are not even token-identical with human bodies.     

What’s the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Matter</Emphasis> with cognition? A ‘Vygotskian’ perspective on material engagement theory

The cross-disciplinary framework of Material Engagement Theory (MET) has emerged as a novel research program that flexibly spans archeology, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science. True to its slogan to ‘take material culture seriously’, “MET wants to change our understanding of what minds are and what they are made of by changing what we know about what things are and what they do for the mind” (Malafouris 2013, 141). By tracing out more clearly the conceptual contours of ‘material engagement,’ and firming up its ontological commitments, the main goal of this article is to help refine Malafouris’ fertile approach. In particular, we argue for a rapprochement between MET and the tradition of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, based on the ‘Vygotskian’ hypothesis of scaffolded and/or distributed cognition.