Philosophies, Volume 9, Issue 4 (August 2024) – 41 articles

This article examines a problematic of the ordinary as it emerges in the poetical theology of an early poem of John Milton. This poem, Lycidas, has captured the attention of every major critic from the 18th century to the present, who has minutely examined its odd formal and generic character, its peculiar mix of personal grief and political outrage, and its role in Milton’s own personal development at a particularly decisive moment in English history. Yet, despite this extensive interpretive history, ‘the ordinary’ has never become an extended object of critical analysis. This article accordingly seeks to uncover and examine the importance of a certain set of contemporaneous significations of the ordinary in Lycidas, which implicate the institutions of Church, state, and university in perhaps surprising ways. Full article

This essay begins with preliminary observations about the nature of agnosticism. Based on the term’s etymology, in this essay an agnostic about some proposition (e.g., God exists) is someone who does not know whether the proposition is true. Being an agnostic about the truth of a proposition is compatible with the proposition appearing to be true or the state of affairs obtains but incompatible with an agnostic knowing its truth or that the state of affairs obtains. (Reference to propositions and states of affairs is intended to be inclusive, rather than a controversial metaphysical distinction.) Based on apparent virtues and vices, reasons are offered about when agnosticism (or the profession of agnosticism) is virtuous or philosophically desirable and when either actual agnosticism or its profession seems to be a vice or undesirable. The essay concludes with challenging Anthony Kenny’s case for agnosticism about theism based on the virtue of humility. The central claims about apparent virtues and vices rest on the positive epistemic standing of appearances as defended by many so-called “common sense philosophers” Thomas Reid, Roderick Chisholm, and, more recently, Thomas Nagel’s thesis about the justified status of the appearance of values. Full article

Contemporary French philosopher Michel Serres has out-of-the-rut thoughts about many things, including media. This article focuses on his understanding of the genealogy of media, the notion of exo-Darwinism, and his forward-looking attitude toward new technologies. An alternative, counterintuitive take on human nature is revealed as the discussion proceeds. This article also touches upon what is irreplaceable about humans in an age when artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving. Full article

In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, “one should really only create philosophy poetically”. I discuss Wittgenstein’s ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this purpose I contrast “realism” in philosophy (i.e., metaphysical realism, particularly its modern scientific version) with “realism” in poetry. My theme is the capacity of poetry to provide a model for Wittgenstein’s resistance to the inhumanity unleashed in metaphysics—exemplified by two distinct forms of skepticism—which obliterates the ordinary world under the guise of discovering its true nature. The poem I shall use to illustrate the difficulty in maintaining our grip on reality, hence our grip on our humanity, is Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Realism”. Full article

In continental and analytical philosophy, which developed in parallel in the 20th century, there was a turn to language, which in particular was marked by the creation of a philosophy of dialogue in continental philosophy and dialogical logic in analytical. Despite their significant differences, these two directions have much in common and can significantly complement each other. The philosophy of dialogue considers reality as the subject of dialogue between persons—I, Thou, He/She, We. World, activity and culture are dialogic and interpersonal in nature. Languages and texts are the basis for understanding reality and activity. Dialogical logic describes reality as an object of a dialogical game. This allows us to consider rationality, activity and communication from a unified perspective. The article compares these two directions of dialogical thought with each other and examines the aspects in which they can complement each other. Full article

What is the riddle of Oedipus? This paper is an exploration of the philosophy involved in Sophocles’ famous play Oedipus Tyrannus. The play involves a riddler who becomes king, a man who is famously good at understanding what others find obscure, and yet is unable to see it when he is confronted by an obvious set of uncomfortable truths about himself. As well as for Oedipus, the play poses a number of different riddles for us: in particular it is a study of responsibility and shame, and of deliberation and choice. Like any work of art, the play does not tell us what conclusions we should reach; but it does show us some questions that need asking, and indeed some riddles that we face. Full article

There is a curious moment in the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Thinking she speaks in solitude, Juliet says, “Romeo, doff thy name, / And, for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself”. Emerging from the shadows, Romeo replies, “I take thee at thy word” (Act 2, Scene 1, 92). Suddenly, Juliet’s utterance has seemingly become binding: because they have been overheard by Romeo, her words have become her word. But is Juliet truly bound by her words given that she did not know they were being overheard, let alone intend for them to be binding? Using J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative, I consider the nature and status of Juliet’s utterance, its influence on the remainder of the scene, and what insight it might afford into the play as a whole. Full article

This essay assesses the relevance of Søren Kierkegaard’s non-pseudonymous, edifying writings for considering themes of desire, detachment, and humility within the religious context of Christian spiritual formation. Building on the argument of recent scholars who identify in Kierkegaard’s writings an account of a fundamental desire for God “implanted” in the human being, I explore the influence of this vision on Kierkegaard’s depiction of desire and detachment in his “Discourses on the Lilies and the Birds”. I then turn to how this relates to the perspective of humility that emerges from Kierkegaard’s reflections on the biblical story of “the widow’s mite”. In each case, these edifying writings aim to stir the reader into a process of interrogating faulty self-perceptions based on arbitrary measures of value. I read this mode of communication as able to initiate a “counter-experience”, provoking the reader to reorient her horizon of prior self-valuations so she might come to recognize the hidden significance of things and, ultimately, achieve a more accurate sense of oneself in relation to the authentic source of the self’s desire. Insofar as this reorientation of the self informs the practice of detachment or the development of humility, people might experience this same process in diverse ways. In this respect, the relevance of Kierkegaard’s edifying writings for reflecting on Christian spirituality is not that they provide a thoroughgoing account of detachment or humility that should replace the insights of various spiritual traditions. Rather, I argue that his discourses—when read alongside these traditions—offer a supplemental resource for reflecting on how our positionalities, dispositions, and proximate contexts will inform the divergent ways we might experience the practice of detachment or the manifestation of humility in each new life circumstance. Full article

The outputs of a Turing machine are not revealed for inputs on which the machine fails to halt. Why is an observer not allowed to see the generated output symbols as the machine operates? Building on the pioneering work of Mark Burgin, we introduce an extension of the Turing machine model with a visible output tape. As a subtle refinement to Burgin’s theory, we stipulate that the outputted symbols cannot be overwritten: at step i, the content of the output tape is a prefix of the content at step j, where $i<j$. Our Refined Burgin Machines (RBMs) compute more functions than Turing machines, but fewer than Burgin’s simple inductive Turing machines. We argue that RBMs more closely align with both human and electronic computers than Turing machines do. Consequently, RBMs challenge the dominance of Turing machines in computer science and beyond. Full article

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more’); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ begins with six lines from Dante’s Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning’s logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions. Full article

Ulrika Carlsson has argued that it its justified to harbor non-moral resentment towards a person with whom one is unrequitedly in love. Anca Gheaus has rejected this with convincing arguments. This text explores the question of whether Gheaus’ verdict changes if the person being loved has previously flirted with the loving person. For this, it is first relevant what flirting actually is and how it relates to falling in love and love. On this basis, it is argued here that in the case of flirting, the non-moral resentment of the loved person defended by Carlsson is appropriate. By flirting, he or she has contributed to the unrequited love, even if he or she cannot be held responsible for it in a moral sense. Full article

This article begins with critical discussion of why parochialism is so alluring, suggesting that we need to understand its tenacious seductions if we really aim to displace, uproot, or transcend it. Arguing that parochialism as a value is not primarily a question of ignorance, but an antipathetic orientation toward incompleteness, interdependency, and entanglement, it then turns briefly to explaining what is meant by creolizing theory. The article closes by offering creolizing’s central insights as a potential antidote to parochialism since they begin with the observation that for any lifeways to meaningfully continue, especially those to which we are most attached, they must be constantly resituated, refashioned, and made new. It ends with a brief meditation on ways to manage anxieties unleashed with radical uncertainty, affirming the depth of the challenges of turning from idolatry. Full article

In this paper I attempt to trace the semiotic path of meaning experience from “nothing” into “something”. Traditional communication studies are problematic in 1. focusing on the message to the effect of ignoring the communicators; 2. choosing to overlook how yet-to-be signs acquire meanings in the communicative moments; and 3. tending to assume a “natural science” attitude toward the studied phenomenon so that embodied consciousness is either sidetracked or psychologized. Taking communicology as both the theory and methodology, I first describe the semiotic network in which blank paper, a nonconventional sign, acquires its signness in a specified communicative event. Then, I look inward to the relation of consciousness and embodiment. Finally, I argue that communication is such a life-world moment wherein non-expression is collectively constituted as a form of expression. Full article

For many 20th century philosophers, the “death of God” became an opportunity to rethink the limits of the human, eliminating its claims to a transcendent foundation in order to start again, more modestly, “from below”. The new humanity, freed from the burdens of the old metaphysics, becomes able to reappropriate responsibility, rediscovering in the other an irreducible presence. The human and philosophical story of Sarah Kofman offers the possibility of following an original development in this sense, starting from the unspeakable event of the Shoah towards a new possibility for human kind. Full article

Christian universalism, or the theory of universal salvation, is increasingly popular among religious thinkers. A small group of scholars has put forward the contentious claim that Kierkegaard was a universalist, despite that he refers in places to the idea of eternal damnation as essential to Christianity. This paper examines the evidence both for and against the view that Kierkegaard was a universalist and concludes that despite Kierkegaard’s occasional references to the importance of the idea of eternal damnation to Christianity, there is reason to believe that Kierkegaard may have been a universalist, both in terms of the substance of his thought, including two unequivocal statements in his journals that he believed everyone would eventually be saved and in terms of his rhetorical style which prioritizes the effect his writings would have on the reader over the literal truth of the views they present. Full article

The relationship between science and philosophy is contentious. Quine saw philosophy as continuous with science (broadly understood), but many philosophers see a dichotomy between them. The present paper discusses cases where the relevance of certain scientific findings has been denied (related to Zeno’s Dichotomy paradox and to the appeal of skeptical arguments) or overlooked (one argument related to the frame problem of artificial intelligence and Nagel’s “bat” argument). The results caution against overly quick dismissal of the import of science on philosophical questions, whether the latter be of a more theoretical or practical nature. Full article

This article discusses the relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Rudolf Carnap’s philosophies of logic during the time of Wittgenstein’s interactions with the Vienna Circle and up to 1934 when the German edition of Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language was published. Whilst Section 1 focuses on the relationship between Carnap and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, including Wittgenstein’s accusation of plagiarism against Carnap in 1932, Section 2 discusses the relationship between Carnap’s principle of tolerance and Wittgenstein’s similar principle of the arbitrariness of grammar. I argue that, although Carnap’s claim in Logical Syntax to ‘go beyond’ Wittgenstein has certain justification in relation to the Tractatus, so does Wittgenstein’s priority claim. The relationship between Carnap’s philosophy of logic and the Tractatus is thus more complicated than is often recognized. If the reference point is Wittgenstein in the early 1930s, however, Carnap cannot be described as going beyond him, and by 1934, Wittgenstein had advanced further than Carnap would ever venture. Despite evidence that Carnap knew about Wittgenstein’s principle of the arbitrariness of syntax well before his first articulations of his principle of tolerance, the extent of the influence of Wittgenstein’s principle on Carnap remains unclear. What can be established with certainty is that Wittgenstein’s principle predates Carnap’s and that Carnap resisted acknowledging him despite being urged to do so. Arguably, Wittgenstein’s account of syntax as both arbitrary and non-arbitrary is also superior in clarity to Carnap’s misleading claim about a ‘complete freedom’ implied by the principle of tolerance, because such a freedom only exists for idle syntactical systems that are not put to work. In Section 3, I discuss the relationship between Carnap’s notion of expediency and Wittgenstein’s account of the correctness or truth of logical accounts. As my discussion of Wittgenstein’s account brings out, Carnap’s rejection of truth in logic for expediency as the goal of logical clarifications does not follow from the principle of tolerance and is not justified by it. It remains unclear what justifies Carnap’s rejection of truth as the goal of logical clarification. Again, Wittgenstein’s account seems preferable, given the vacuity of the claim that expediency constitutes the basis of choice between different logical languages and clarifications. Full article

Alain Badiou in his philosophy on ethics underscores four fields of truth procedures—love, politics, art, and science—that seek to break with the existing order or conventional flow of things. These four fields indicate both collective (politics, art, and science) as well as individual (love) instances of the subject’s relationships and actions. The individual realm of ‘love’, which is the central focus of this study, however, as a generic, complex category does not clearly explicate the significance of the associated concept, friendship. Akira Kurosawa’s filmography is illustrative as it opens up a possibility for disentangling the concept of friendship from love along with making significant contributions to the ethics of truth, particularly with respect to the “friendship event”. His films vividly capture some of the essential themes of Badiou’s philosophy of truth ethics, including “break”/“encounter”, referred to as ‘event’, “keep going”/“perseverance”, and “fidelity”. Even if the philosophers Badiou and Kurosawa do not make direct references to each other’s works, this research reveals significant parallels between cinephilosophy created through “cine-images” and the written philosophy. By analyzing Kurosawa’s films in the light of Badiou’s philosophy of truth ethics, and vice versa, this study embarks on exploring the complementarities between the works of the two. The study showcases how love and friendship as truth procedures are formed in particular contexts in Kurosawa’s filmography, and how they intersect with other truth events, particularly politics. Most importantly, this study does not view Badiou’s “truth events” such as love, friendship, and politics as mutually exclusive categories; rather, they are seen as complementary in practice. Full article

This article delves into the theme of the death of God in Giorgio Agamben’s work from a political perspective, seeking to interpret the notion of “God” in Agamben through the concepts of “government” and “transcendence”. Although Agamben does not extensively address the theme of the death of God, my hypothesis is that by continually dealing with the ethical and political legacy of Western theology, it is possible to conceive the death of God as an unconsummated political horizon, but that it is yet to come. In this sense, the first two sections of the text provide a review of the theme of governance of men and governance of oneself in Agamben’s work, engaging in dialogue with Schmitt, Peterson, Heidegger, Foucault, and Plato, as well as the concepts of transcendence oikonomia, technology, and care. The last two sections of the text explore Agamben’s response to this diagnosis. Agamben’s philosophical proposal is presented through a dialogue with Spinoza and Stoicism, with the central concept being the idea of use of oneself, which is linked to the notions of immanence, Ungovernable, and anarchy. Full article

In this paper, I approach Hegel’s philosophy under the banner of a “Keplerian Revolution”, the implicit reference being, of course, to Kant’s supposed Copernican philosophical revolution. Kepler had been an early supporter of the Copernican paradigm in astronomy, but went well beyond his predecessor, and so is invoked here in an attempt to capture some of the important ways in which Hegel attempted to go beyond the philosophy of Kant. To make these issues more determinate, however, Hegel’s Keplerian orientation will not be presented in its contrast to Kant’s “Copernicanism” as such, but as contrasted with that of another early follower of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and this Brunian orientation will be used to characterize Kant’s philosophy as seen from Hegel’s rival Keplerian point of view. Interpreting Hegel as a philosophical Keplerian will require that we broach those worrisome aspects of Kepler’s astronomy, namely his support for Plato’s cosmology and the tradition of the “music of the spheres”, but this will be shown to have connections to Hegel’s own approach to logic. This in turn will help shed light on the meaning of Hegel’s form of idealism and, in particular, on its usually unacknowledged Platonic dimensions. Full article

Recent discussions of logical pluralism trace its origins to Rudolf Carnap’s principle of tolerance; indeed, the principle is seen as one of Carnap’s lasting philosophical contributions. In this paper, I will argue that Carnap’s reasons for adopting this principle are not purely logical, but are rather founded in the Vienna Circle’s manifesto—a programmatic document that brings the Circle’s philosophical work together with a program of social change. Building on work by Uebel, Romizi, and others, I argue that we must understand the principle in light of Carnap’s role in writing the manifesto, and thus as integrated into the larger philosophical and political goals of the Circle. This history illuminates the often-ignored relationship between Carnap’s logical pluralism and his political views. Finally, I turn to the political situation of the post-World War 2 period in the United States. During this time, the Circle’s emigres in the USA transitioned their work from active efforts to reform society to the technical work that we recognize as the foundation of American analytic philosophy today. In this final section, I argue that the reasons that Carnap distanced himself from the political foundations of his view were due in large part to McCarthy-era persecution of left-wing academics. Full article

Conventional wisdom holds that human bodies do not and cannot persist through beaming: scanning and destruction of the body, followed by transmission of the scan information and replication of the body in another location. I argue that given the minimal time travel assumption that information can be sent into the past, it is logically possible for (duplicates of) human bodies to exist in object loops. If so, then conventional wisdom is wrong, and bodies can persist through beaming. The lesson generalizes to all composite material objects that can persist through intrinsic change. Full article

Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003) started his studies in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki in 1934. His teacher, Professor Eino Kaila (1890–1958), was an associate of the Vienna Circle who had changed the course of Finnish philosophy with his own version of logical empiricism. Under Kaila’s supervision, von Wright wrote his early studies on probability and defended his doctoral thesis The Logical Problem of Induction in 1941. Von Wright met Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1939 and 1947 and eventually became his successor there in 1948–1951. Later, von Wright characterized these two philosophers as his “father figures”: “Kaila had turned me into a logical positivist or empiricist. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thoroughly eradicated this personality of mine.” This article studies von Wright’s changing relation to logical empiricism. The main sources include his correspondence with Kaila in 1937–1958 and his books Den logiska empirismen (in Swedish in 1943; in Finnish in 1945) and Logik, filosofi och språk (in Swedish in 1957, in Finnish in 1958). In his “Intellectual Autobiography” (1989), von Wright described the former book as “a farewell to the philosophy of my student years”. Wittgenstein’s influence can be seen in von Wright’s denial of the unity of science and his cool cultural pessimism as expressed in his critical essays. But it is also evident that logic and exact thinking continued to be central tools and ingredients of his subsequent and highly appreciated work as an analytic philosopher. Full article

This article investigates reasons to participate in non-deterministic elections, where the outcomes incorporate elements of chance beyond mere tie-breaking. The background context situates this inquiry within democratic theory, specifically non-deterministic voting systems, which promise to re-evaluate fairness and power distribution among voting blocs. This study aims to explore the normative implications of such electoral systems and their impact on our moral duty to vote. We analyze instrumental reasons for voting, including prudential and act-consequentialist arguments, alongside non-instrumental reasons, assessing their validity in the context of non-deterministic systems. The results indicate that non-deterministic elections could strengthen the case for voting based on prudential and act-consequentialist grounds due to their proportional nature and the increased influence of each vote. We conclude that, while non-deterministic elections strengthen our duty to vote overall, they do not strengthen it for all the arguments in the literature. This paper contributes to the discourse on electoral systems by critically evaluating the moral obligation to vote in non-deterministic elections. Full article

The nature and practice of Christianity is a major, if not the primary, topic in Kierkegaard’s authorship. What it means to live a Christian life is a persistent topic in many of his major works, and yet, he spends most of his authorship criticizing traditional ways of practicing Christianity. While his critique of institutionalized Christianity and merciless unmasking of the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed Christians is rather clear, namely that they are not actually Christian, it is more difficult to get a clear idea of Kierkegaard’s alternative. What is a true and sincere Christian life for Kierkegaard? The argument of this article is that Kierkegaard’s famous existential approach to Christianity amounts to a secularization of Christianity and as such can be seen as a critical development of and not a rejection of the Enlightenment critique of religion. The article uses Kant as an advocate of the Enlightenment critique of religion that Kierkegaard inherits and develops critically, and after having examined Kierkegaard’s existential dialectics, an outline of Kant’s transcendental approach is, presented against which Kierkegaard’s existential alternative is examined in more detail. Kierkegaard’s existential approach is radical with its insistence on “that single individual” and on the existential challenges of human freedom that Kant banned from his analysis of both morality and faith. While Kant presents us with the transcendental possibility of faith, Kierkegaard is concerned with the existential reality of faith. It is argued that Kierkegaard’s existential analysis of faith helps us to find the connection between radical individual choice and the rational morality that is not always evident in Enlightenment—and especially Kantian—accounts of morality. Full article

This article considers the formal and critical consequences of organizing an aesthetic corpus around the philosophical concept of the fragment via a reading of Aryan Kaganof’s “Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers” (1994). This experimental video sets spoken accounts from the perspective of the likes of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson alongside grainy, ambiguous imagery. Instead of thematic meditations on violence, the monologues circle around quasi-nostalgic reflections on the past and the nature of identity. The film frustrates any language of formal analysis that would rely on accounting for what is present in the film, instead proposing a sympathy with poststructuralism’s efforts at displacing the metaphysics of appearance. Violence is not what resides ready-made within the work, nor is it reducible to the realm of the visible or the audible, but is an unstable process bound up with the act of reading itself. The fragment as a formal problem holds out the abstract, general notion of a break in ways that compel a rethinking of violence as something impersonal, rhythmic, and grammatical. Full article

Much of the debate about the mathematical refutation of Zeno’s paradoxes surrounds the logical possibility of completing supertasks—tasks made up of an infinite number of subtasks. Max Black and J.F. Thomson attempt to show that supertasks entail logical contradictions, but their arguments come up short. In this paper, I take a different approach to the mathematical refutations. I argue that even if supertasks are possible, we do not have a non-question-begging reason to think that Achilles’ supertask is possible. The justification for the possibility of Achilles’ supertask lies in the possibility of him completing other supertasks of the same kind, and the justification for the possibility of him completing these other supertasks lies in the possibility of him completing yet more supertasks ad infinitum. Full article

This paper explores the philosophical perspectives of Nietzsche and Heidegger, tracing their analyses of the death of God and its aftermath. My aim is to clarify the diagnosis of this nihilism and its underlying causes, as well as evaluate the proposed remedies put forth by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Ultimately, I argue that the seemingly ambiguous consequences of the death of God are not only hopeful, but necessary, if human beings are to rise above and transmute a meaningless, resentment-laced existence, however, not by jettisoning Judeo-Christianity and its values, but rather by reinterpreting them. Full article

This essay forwards an intensive model of mediation contrasted with the extensive model implicit in much of media theory, which conceives of communication media as an extension of human faculties. An intensive model, instead, conceives of mediation as a phenomenological process of splitting or folding affective capacities. An extensive model results in a dualistic, essentialist theory of communication media and unresolvable normative debates about the connecting or disconnecting consequences of media. An intensive model avoids these limitations by diagramming various modes of mediation and illustrating how their consequences stem from alterations to intensive properties, thereby helping constitute subjects and media objects alike rather than presuming a media bridge between pre-existing subjects and objects. The essay employs a number of examples to illustrate the extensive model, including telephone conversations, cinema, animation, and social media. The essay concludes with the division of families over QAnon conspiracies to illustrate the analytic gain from an intensive model. Full article