‘The Egg of Columbus’?How Fourier's social theory exerted a significant (and problematic) influence on the formation of Marx's anthropology and social critique

In scholarship on the history of philosophy, it is widely assumed that Charles Fourier was a utopian socialist who could not have exerted a significant influence on the development of Karl Marx's thought. Indeed, both Marx and Engels seem to have advanced this view. In contrast, I argue that in 1844 when Marx was developing his anthropology and social critique, he relied upon Fourier's thought to supply a key assumption. After establishing this connection, I explain why Marx's tacit reliance on Fourier creates a problematic undercurrent in his thought.     

Enfleshing semiotics: The indexical and symbolic sign-functions

This essay engages the work of Robert Yelle in his text Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History. The author examines in particular his theorizing of the indexical sign function and its capacity to ‘enflesh’ the symbol. In the Peircean and Saussurean frames the symbol is an abstraction, a concept, and removed from the experiential. However, with the deployment of the indexical sign, as Yelle argues, the symbol is enfleshed and made experiential. Yelle's development of Peircean semiotics should prove to be very productive in the study of systems of belief and practice.     

The Darwin–Gray Exchange

After the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the controversy over the issues of design, teleology and divine intervention in nature were renewed. This paper looks at Darwin's correspondence with Harvard botanist Asa Gray from 1860–1863 and investigates how Darwin rejected notions of design due to his immersion in William Paley's categories. Gray, in contrast, was able to move past Paley's influence and find consistency in affirming both evolutionary theory and natural theology.     

God,Truth and Mathematics in Nineteenth-century England

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke created a special epistemological category for mathematical and religious knowing. This category of knowledge was quickly brushed to the side in the French Enlightenment, but the English preserved it well into the nineteenth century. This article considers the ways that the neo-Lockian joining of mathematics and theology fundamentally affected both mathematical and theological thinking in the first half of the English nineteenth century. It argues that these developments set the stage for the post-Darwinian conflicts between science—including mathematics—and religion.     

On Generalization： Pragmatists＇ Contributions to Constructivism

Constructivism has been an important program in contemporary philosophy, but cannot itself cannot provide sufficient context for grasping its key points. To fully understand its power and potential we must borrow tools from other programs： specifically, Charles Peirce and John Dewey＇s pragmatism. By exploring these two pragmatists＇ articulations of ＂generalization,＂ which I hold is the most crucial question in constructivism, their prospective contributions to constructivism can be brought to light. If, as I argue, constructivism can incorporate the lessons of pragmatism, then it can still be considered a highly workable interpretation of reality and of human endeavors.     

THE VARIETY OF PANENTHEISMS

Abstract. In this article I review the efforts of eighteen scientists and theologians, recorded in this book, to describe the relation of God to the universe during a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation at Windsor Castle in 2001. Theologians from several branches of Christian faith articulate their understanding of panentheism, revealing a considerable diversity. I deal with each author in relation to six issues: the way God acts, how God's intimate relation to the world is to be described, the relation of God to spacetime, whether God is dependent upon the world, what type of language is used, and the problem of dipolar panentheism. I identify significant differences between these authors, suggest where fruitful dialogue is possible, and distinguish between intelligibility and plausibility in comparing dipolar panentheism with other types.     

IS ALTRUISM GOOD? EVOLUTION,ETHICS, AND THE HUNGER FOR THEOLOGY

This essay pushes the discussion of biology and altruism in radical directions by highlighting the moral ambiguity of biology itself. The extent to which we draw positive moral implications from animal behavior, and even the extent to which we see positive traits in animals, is shaped by the preconceptions and the purposes one brings to the study. These preconceptions, when examined, involve worldview issues that are all related in one way or another to either a theological position or some nontheistic substitute for an account of ultimate reality. It is arguable that Darwin's own perceptions of nature were colored by the theological and social‐ethical context in which he worked. William Paley's natural theology, together with Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, led many theologians of Darwin's day to conclude that struggle, inequality, suffering, and death are basic features of the natural world and are the result of divine providence. No wonder, then, that Darwin was able to see competition as the major key to natural selection. The moral ambiguity of biology can be pressed further by contrasting contemporary attempts to find altruism in animal behavior with the conclusions reached by Friedrich Nietzsche, partly in response to his reading of Darwin. Nietzsche concluded that the standard, more or less Christian, morality of his day is best labeled “slave morality.” It is created by the weak in order to coerce the strong to provide for them. In this essay I contend that competing views of morality can be adjudicated only by turning to an account of ultimate reality. Whether Nietzsche is right in arguing against the morality of altruism depends on whether God is indeed dead.     

Recovering enchantment: addiction,spirituality, and Charles Taylor’s malaise of modernity

This article illuminates the nature of ‘spirituality’ as it relates to addiction in modernity. It does so by using philosopher Charles Taylor’s conception of the malaise of modernity and the meta-narrative he presents in A Secular Age as theoretical starting points. It then draws from qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Canadian millennials who self-identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’. The young people’s experiences of addiction provide insight into the trappings of free-market capitalist modernity and its inability to provide an overarching source of meaning to their lives. Addiction becomes the means by which these individuals experience the malaise of modernity, which in turn leads them to seek an alternative understanding of the good life—a process they equate with ‘spirituality’. Therefore, an interest in ‘spirituality’ ought to be understood as a personalized attempt to re-enchant what is experienced as a disenchanted world.     

RACE, IDEOLOGY, AND IDEAL THEORY

Abstract: Philosophers who have addressed the problems of enduring racial injustice have been suspicious of the role played by ideal theory in ethics and political philosophy generally, and in contemporary liberal political philosophy in particular. The theoretical marginalization of race in the work of Rawls has led some to charge that ideal theory is at the very least unhelpful in understanding one of the most significant forms of contemporary injustice, and is at worst ideological in the pejorative sense. To explore these concerns, I formulate five related criticisms of ideal theory and examine each as it would be applied to Rawls's political philosophy. My thesis is that the strongest criticisms—namely, that ideal theory is essentially ideological and cannot provide adequate grounds for justifying race-conscious, equality-securing measures—ultimately miss the mark. But other criticisms of ideal theory are more plausible, and most plausibly directed to an area of Rawls's thought often ignored in discussions of liberalism and race, namely, his account of citizenship and public reasoning.     

THE MAGICIAN IN THE WORLD: BECOMING, CREATIVITY, AND TRANSVERSAL COMMUNICATION

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible.