Should Philosophers become Playwrights?

This note is in part a response to Alastair Hannay's review discussion, ‘A Kind of Philosopher: Comments in Connection with Some Recent Books on Kierkegaard’ (Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975], No. 3). In his review, Hannay states that Kierkegaard and philosophy appear to be on the road to a reconciliation, and asks What is behind this get‐together if it is one?’. I suggest that in some remarks touching on Kierkegaard's theory of Truth, Hannay has touched on the ground for that ‘get‐together’, a Pyrrhonian scepticism.     

Of words,tools, and actions

The author rejects Leon Galis's claim (Inquiry, Vol. II, No. 2) that in ‘Of Words and Tools’ (Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2) he attacks a form of the ‘use’ theory of meaning that no one has held. Galis's other claim, that the author criticizes a needlessly weak form of the theory, is found to be justified, but the author argues that his procedure was adequate, and parallel to that oi Galis's own reconstruction of the ‘use’ theory in terms of ‘goal‐directed action’. Difficulties in this reconstruction are pointed out, and some meta‐semantic issues about theories of meaning raised.     

I. Mathematical modeling of election predictions: Final reply to professor Aubert

Professor Aubert's ‘three‐stage rocket’ (Inquiry, Vol. 26 [1983], No. 1) has reached periodic orbit. His comments on my earlier reply to his critique of my election predictions paper simply repeat arguments I have already refuted. In this note, I limit myself largely to pointing out Professor Aubert's misconceptions of what my position actually is. I find no reasons for revising the views stated in my original election predictions paper, nor any reasons for thinking that paper violated norms of scientific method that prevail in the natural sciences.     

II. Intentions and conditions of satisfaction 1

This paper discusses a problem arising from the way in which John Searle marks the distinction between intentional and unintentional action (Inquiry, Vol. 22, pp. 253–80), namely, that of adequately distinguishing those events which we regard as unintentional actions on the part of an agent from those other events occasioned by or brought about as a result of his action which we (correctly) do not countenance as actions of any sort ‐ unintentional or otherwise. Searle's attempt to distinguish them in terms of the ‘proximity of the contents of intentions’ is examined and rejected, and an alternative account which exploits the anthropocentric character of our action vocabulary is proposed and defended. The discussion ends with a brief indication of some other difficulties engendered by Searle's analysis.     

I. Marx's two‐fold character of labour

Ulrich Steinvorth ('Marx's Analysis of Commodity Exchange’, Inquiry, Vol. 19 [1976]) and C. J. Arthur ('Labour: Marx's Concrete Universal’, Inquiry, Vol. 21 [1978]) rely on the two‐fold character of labour in arguing that the mysteries of money and profit have been correctly interpreted by Marx. However, Marx's own arguments for his distinction between abstract and concrete labour are faulty, as is his identification of labour and material products. They also claim that the exchange of commodities and distribution of resources in capitalist society validate Marx's theory that the determination of value by labour‐time is the ‘secret’ behind capitalist crises. These claims are insufficiently justified, and provide no additional reason for accepting the two‐fold character of labour.     

From Buddha's speech to Buddha's essence: philosophical discussions of Buddha‐vacana in India and China1

This is a comparative study of the discourses on the nature of sacred language found in Indian Abhidharma texts and those written by 7th century Chinese Buddhist scholars who, unlike the Indian Buddhists, questioned ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching'. This issue labeled fo‐chiao t'i lun, the theory of ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching', was one of the topics on which Chinese Yogācāra scholars have shown a keen interest and served as the inspiration for extensive intellectual dialogues in their texts. It is in Hsüan‐tsang's massive and organized translation works, begun in 648, that various previous translations of the term buddhavacana from Indian Abhidharma texts were given the unified translation of fo‐chiao. (Fo‐chiao literally means “the Buddha's teachings,” and is the term used in the modern period for “Buddhism.”) By combining fo‐chiao with the term t'i, meaning ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ throughout his translations, Hsüan‐tsang attempted to define ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching'. In Indian Abhidharma texts, the nature of the Buddha's word was either ‘sound’ (?abdha), the oral component of speech, or ‘name’ (nāma), the component of language that conveys meaning, or some combination of the two. From the time of Hsüan‐tsang's translation, however, discourse on the nature of sacred language was no longer relegated to the category of language or of epistemological investigation, but became grounded in the Chinese discussion investigating the ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ of the Buddha's teaching, and even of ‘Buddhism’ itself. As such, it sought to transcend the distinction between language and meaning. This gradual but explicit process of inquiry into the nature of ‘the Buddha’s word' was a necessary antecedent to the transition to a ‘Chinese’ Buddhism.     

A Confucian in Buddhist clothing? – Interpreting Nishida’s conception of the good as a realisation of the Mandate of Heaven

ABSTRACT

In this study, I examine the Confucian influence upon An Inquiry into the Good, the first publication of Nishida Kitarō. Nishida’s student Kōsaka Masaaki depicts his mentor’s conception of the good in terms of realising the 'Mandate of Heaven'. Taking this to be indicative of the importance of Confucianism for Nishida’s early thought, I compare his philosophy of pure experience and ethical project of ‘self-realisation’ with corresponding ideas found in the Confucian corpus. I especially focus on the Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean as interpreted by the Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-Ming. This study builds upon the pioneering work of Michel Dalissier, Dermott Walsh and David Williams on the Kyoto School and Confucianism. My portrayal of Confucianism is indebted to the ‘philosophical’ translations of Roger Ames, David Hall and Henry Rosemont, Jr., which bring into relief the tradition’s ‘relational ontology’ that Graham Parkes teaches is shared by the Kyoto School.     

Mourning the dead,mourning the disappeared: The enigma of the absent–presence

Freud's interest in the impact of death on the living goes back further than Mourning and Melancholia (1917e, [1915]). In Totem and Taboo (1912–13) Freud noted the ambivalence of the emotions we experience in relation to the dead. In this paper, I focus on Mourning and Melancholia as a landmark in the understanding of both the normal and psychopathological aspects of mourning and depressive processes in human beings. Mourning and Melancholia bridges Freud's first and second topographic theories of the psychic apparatus and constitutes for many authors the foundation of his theory of internal object relations. With this psychoanalytic understanding of mourning as a framework, I discuss ‘special mourning processes,’ such as the those confronted by psychoanalysts in Argentina when treating the relatives of thousands of people who were ‘disappeared’ by the military dictatorship in the 1970s; they are ‘special’ in the sense that the external reality [which] constitutes the starting point of the psychic mourning process, as described by Freud, is absent. I argue that the ‘absent–presence’ of the body as an enigmatic message initiates a special mourning process that bears certain characteristics of, and is isomorphic to, Laplanche's seduction theory.     

Ta‘a and modern legal reform: A rereading

Based largely on court records dating from the Ottoman and modern periods, and focusing on the issue of ta'a (a wife's obedience to her husband), this article argues that nineteenth/twentieth‐century law reform proved a mixed bag for Egyptian women. Egypt's contemporary personal status laws, while based on the Shari'a, differ significantly from gender laws, also based on the Shari'a, that were applied by courts before the reform of laws began in the 1880s. In other words, gender laws have always been legally based on the Shari'a, yet the laws and their application after legal reforms differ significantly from their application before. These differences are consequential enough to warrant calling the Shari'a practiced today ‘a new Sharia’ to differentiate it from what was practiced before.     

A Religiological Analysis of Nursi's View of Sufism Expressed in the ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-ı Tis'a) of the Risale-i Nur

While Nursi stated explicitly that he was not a Sufi, he nevertheless expressed many Sufi perspectives in his work. In particular, his focus in the section of the Risale-i Nur called ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-? Tis'a) was Sufism. This article uses a method of analysing religious perspectives called ‘religiology’, in order to coherently and systematically unpack Nursi's attitudes to Sufism. Organizing his Sufi perspectives in the categories of epistemology, ontology (including theology, cosmology, and eschatology), anthropology, psychology, teleology, and methodology, the article demonstrates that he agrees with certain aspects of Sufism and disagrees with others.     

Tafsir and Istifsar in the Qur'an

The more emphatic the authority of a sacred Scripture the more crucial the exegesis it receives. Yet no text is able to rise from the page and say: ‘I have been misread’. Hence the basic power of the interpreter. Tafsir or ‘interpretation’, has always been a vital task vis‐à‐vis the Qur'an. Urgent questions attend on it—who is qualified? By what skills? What range of questions will they admit? Are these circumscribed to, for example, grammar? Earlier margins? Are there excluded concerns? How far will contemporary ones be admissible? All these might be said to constitute istifsar or ‘Asking tafsir’ to be comprehensively pursued. After examining traditional techniques the article reviews ‘contextuality’, ‘abrogation’, metaphor, tadabbur (or ‘reflection') and finally, some profound implications of the Qur'an's own self‐division into Meccan and Medinan elements and how this might bear on a de‐politicization of Islamic religion in response to contemporary necessities, as faced by Islam in minority situations in many countries.     

The Art of Aidagara: Ethics,Aesthetics, and the Quest for an Ontology of Social Existence in Watsuji Tetsurō's Rinrigaku

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara (‘betweenness’) in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as ‘Critical Buddhism’. The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from ‘topical’ or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) ‘critical’ thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of ‘reason’ vs ‘intuition’ in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison of Watsuji's ‘ontological quest’ with that of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Watsuji's primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an ‘ontology of social existence’ undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the ‘return’ of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism.     

GARRETT ON THE THEOLOGICAL OBJECTION TO HUME'S COMPATIBILISM

Between 1927 and 1936, Martin Heidegger devoted almost one thousand pages of close textual commentary to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This article aims to shed new light on the relationship between Kant and Heidegger by providing a fresh analysis of two central texts: Heidegger's 1927/8 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and his 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I argue that to make sense of Heidegger's reading of Kant, one must resolve two questions. First, how does Heidegger's Kant understand the concept of the transcendental? Second, what role does the concept of a horizon play in Heidegger's reconstruction of the Critique? I answer the first question by drawing on Cassam's model of a self-directed transcendental argument (‘The role of the transcendental within Heidegger's Kant’), and the second by examining the relationship between Kant's doctrine that ‘pure, general logic’ abstracts from all semantic content and Hume's attack on metaphysics (‘The role of the horizon within Heidegger's Kant’). I close by sketching the implications of my results for Heidegger's own thought (‘From Heidegger's Kant to Sein und Zeit’). Ultimately, I conclude that Heidegger's commentary on the Critical system is defined, above all, by a single issue: the nature of the ‘form’ of intentionality.     

Two cheers for Tanhā

The central character in Sartre's 1938 novel La Nausée, Antoine Roquentin, has lost his sense of things, and now the world appears to him as utterly unstable. Roquentin suffers from what he calls ‘nausea,’ a condition caused by an ontological intuition that the self, as well as the world through which that ‘self’ moves, lacks a substantial nature. The novel portrays Sartre's own philosophical account of the self in La transcendence de l'égo. Here Sartre argues that Husserl's account of consciousness is not radical enough; the ‘I’ or ego is a pseudo-source of activity (and Sartre thus draws very close to a particularly Buddhist account of personal identity). My essay questions Roquentin's response to his ontological insight: why is this the occasion for ‘nausea’? Why doesn't Roquentin (as King Milinda famously does) celebrate and embrace his ‘non-self’? I argue that Sartre's depiction of Roquentin's ailment, and the unsatisfactory solution he provides, misunderstands both the aggregate nature of things as well as authentically rendered consciousness-only (vijñaptimātra).     

Deconstructing the Linearity of Grace: The Risk and Reflexive Paradox of Mary's Immaculate Fiat

Abstract: Beginning from Pope Pius IX's doctrinal definition in Ineffabilis Deus, this article explores the circular paradox of the Virgin Mary's immaculate fiat. Fully contingent on Christ's work of reconciliation (and ‘immaculate’ by virtue of it), Mary's fiat paradoxically precedes that work and consents to it. The article suggests that this circularity is integral to the intimate bond that unites Mary's fiat to the Son's kenosis on the cross. Her fiat thus points the way of redeemed creation into the reflexivity of God's own intra‐trinitarian communication. Mary is hereby read as ‘the way to prayer’, the ‘epiphany’ of the Holy Spirit (as Alexander Schmemann names her) who cries ‘Abba, Father’ on behalf of those who do not know how to pray.     

A note on ‘scepticism and absurdity’

In ‘Scepticism and Absurdity’ (Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 2) Ingemund Gullvag concludes that recent attempts to counter scepticism have failed. It is suggested that where the attempts Gullvåg investigates are complex theories of a sociological and linguistic‐psychological nature, we need only refer to a simple and inspectable fact of language to counter scepticism.     

A serious misunderstanding: synchronicity and the generation of meaning

Abstract: This paper points to the problem caused by the fact that numerous academic ‘Jung studies’ are conducted on the basis of the English translation of Jung's works without any knowledge of his original texts and illustrates it with the misconstrual that Jung's concept of synchronicity suffered in the studies of many recent authors, as exemplified by two articles in the September 2011 issue of the JAP. The translation of ‘sinngemäße Koinzidenz’ as ‘meaningful coincidence’ seduced those writers to take synchronistic ‘meaning’ as meaning the meaningfulness of life or even as ‘transcendent meaning’, which is incompatible with Jung's synchronicity concept, and to replace Jung's strictly intellectual project of establishing an explanatory principle for synchronistic events (in addition to the principle of causality for all other events) by the fundamentally different project of focusing on the impact that such events may have for the experiencing subjective mind, on ‘human meaning‐making’, and, with a decidedly anti‐intellectual bias, of hoping for ‘shifts into non‐rational states of mind’.