A Behavioral Characterization of Plausible Priors

One of the last great novels of José Saramago, Death with Interruptions, begins with an epigraph taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields”. The aim of my paper is to ponder on what kind of a new language game the Portuguese writer is offering us in his book and how to interpret his investigations from the angle of another contemporary literary and philosophical thanatological discourses.One of the last great novels of José Saramago, Death with Interruptions, begins with an epigraph taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields”. The aim of my paper is to ponder on what kind of a new language game the Portuguese writer is offering us in his book and how to interpret his investigations from the angle of another contemporary literary and philosophical thanatological discourses

Encountering Finitude: On the Hermeneutic Radicalization of Experience

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific knowledge that is itself increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us

How do you make yourself a theatre without organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the concept of differential presence

This article provides an exposition of four key concepts emerging in the encounter between the philosophical man of the theatre, Antonin Artaud, and the theatrical philosopher, Gilles Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, the destratified voice and differential presence. The article proposes that Artaud's 1947 censored radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Drawing from various works by Deleuze, including Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus and ‘One Less Manifesto’, I conceive differential presence as an encounter with difference, or perpetual variation, as that which exceeds the representational consciousness of a subject, forcing thought through rupture rather than communicating meanings through sameness. Contra the dismissal of Artaud's project as paradoxical or impossible, the article suggests that his nonrepresentational theatre seeks to affirm a new kind of presence as difference, rather than aiming to transcend difference in order to reach the self-identical presence of Western metaphysics

Meeting \u27the Mother Who Takes Across\u27: Christian Encounters with the Fierce Goddesses of Hinduism

This essay revolves around a simple question: what does Hindu-Christian dialogue look like from the Christian side when the Hindu side is represented by Saktism? Or, how do Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, react and what do they learn when the Hindus they encounter worship a supreme female divinity who is both compassionate and wrathful, whose cult is often associated with blood sacrifice, whose philosophical underpinnings tend to be monistic, and some of whose devotees have been involved in esoteric, often sexual Tantric rites? Where are the cross-overs, the bridges to understanding

The rediscovery of Palmyra and its dissemination in Philosophical Transactions

This paper examines the first publicly documented western encounter with the ancient city of Palmyra as an archaeological site. This encounter was achieved in the late seventeenth century by a group of British merchants, who reached Palmyra and made drawings and reports of its ruins. The reports were then published in Philosophical Transactions in the mid 1690s. This paper points to the ways in which such accounts came into being, as well as how the city was described and publicly communicated for the first time in Philosophical Transactions. These articles had a great impact throughout the following centuries as a reference for the study of Palmyra. This paper therefore also stresses the pivotal role of Philosophical Transactions for the production and dissemination of Palmyra's archaeological legacy, as well as for the development of early modern archaeology within the early Royal Society

The Experience of Reading Philosophy

Reading is not a peripheral philosophical pastime; it constitutes most of what we do when we do philosophy. And the experience of reading philosophy is much more than just a series of interpretative acts: the philosopher-reader is subject to, among other things, sensations, passions, emendations, and transformations. In this essay, I argue that a full account of philosophical reading should outline some of the sociological structures that determine how different communities of philosophers (within and outside the academy) construct such experiences, as well as describe in detail the ways in which philosophers encounter (or fail to encounter) truths while reading. It should, that is, describe ways in which philosophy acts upon readers and the various effects that result

Précis of Brentano’s Philosophical System

Here is a rather difficult two-part question: How may we grasp (a) the nature of reality and (b) the nature of value? As I understand the man, answering this question was the principal, overarching aim of Franz Brentano’s philosophical work. More specifically, he wanted to provide an answer that respected a self-imposed theoretical constraint, namely, that our grasp of a thing’s status as real or as valuable be ultimately grounded in direct encounter with certain aspects of our conscious experience. The purpose of my book Brentano’s Philosophical System: Mind, Being, Value (henceforth, BPS) is to reconstruct Brentano’s attempt to answer his question, present a partial defense of the answer, offer some potential improvements on it, and also point to persistent difficulties it faces. Here I (a) speed-explain Brentano’s self-imposed constraint and its motivation, (b) reconstruct Brentano’s account of the real in light of it, and (c) reconstruct Brentano’s corresponding account of the valuable. These three tasks correspond roughly to BPS’s three parts: ‘Mind,’ ‘Being,’ and ‘Value.

Book Review: Conversational Philosophy in Practice

A review of [Arguments and Clarifications: A Philosophical Encounter between J. O. Chimakonam and M. I. Edet on the Ibuanyidandaness of Complementary Ontology], 2014. 3RD Logic Option: Calabar. Paperback. Pp147Authors: Mesembe I. Edet and Jonathan O. ChimakonamDiscipline: African philosophyCategory: Ibuanyidanda PhilosophyISBN:978-978-52850-2-4Available onlin

Avoiding philosophy as a trump-card in sociological writing. A study from the discourse of evidence-based healthcare

In this article I explore a situation where health sociologists encounter pure-philosophical reasoning in the fabric of social life. Accounts of the relationship between philosophy and sociology tend to be framed in abstract theory, so there is a need for practical ways to anchor philosophical reasoning in sociological writing. I consider the use of philosophies as strategic tools for socially grounded understanding, rather than rhetorical trump-cards which bypass socio-political questions. I present my understanding in two stages: first, I discuss my example topic of Evidence-Based Healthcare (EBHC), reviewing some philosophical contributions by writers in that discourse. These niche-writings I contextualise briefly in relation to other academic meetings between philosophy and sociology. Second, I offer three philosophical perspectives on the topic of EBHC, and outline their significance for understanding it sociologically. I conclude that to navigate the difficult ground where philosophy and sociology meet, sociologists can entrain pure-philosophical argumentation to the purpose of critical, socially situated understandings.PostprintPeer reviewe

Postgraduate boundary crossings?

This Special Issue: Crossing Philosophical, Cultural and Geographic Boundaries in Educational Scholarship?: Postgraduate Experiences arose out of an invited panel of postgraduate speakers at the 42nd Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Conference, held 7–10 December 2012 in Chiayi, Taiwan. The wider conference theme of “Crossing Boundaries” generated lively discussions about what such encounters and experiences might mean in the broader sphere of education; while the postgraduate speakers were invited to address their personal experience of boundaries during doctoral study. The central thrust of this invitation was to consider the extent to which such boundaries could (or should) be crossed through postgraduate experiences, and to gain a deeper appreciation of what this might mean for scholars who venture – physically and/or philosophically – outside of familiar terrain. The papers that comprise this issue provide associated cross-cultural, cross-country and cross-philosophical narratives, reflections and interrogations of their experiences in this regard. In doing so the authors provide a rich landscape through which to consider boundary crossing as an opportunity to expand on knowledge and/or to appreciate ones own position through encounters with ‘other’. Such crossings (or attempts to cross) presented significant challenges to these students, as they reveal in this issue. Their insights highlight the point that crossing philosophical, cultural and geographic boundaries is often a difficult relationship between all three, and, that there are costs involved. Such profoundly confronting experiences of crossing (or not crossing) are not necessarily bridges to be traversed as much as a means of confronting boundaries through which students might gain important insights – about themselves as persons of culture, scholars and members of a global society that is characterized by difference. This complex encounter – for all its pleasure and pain – is, evident through every paper in this issue, and sets the scene for important 21st century dialogues concerning diversity and difference in education