Real Deletion, Time, and Possibility

Abstract: Does anything ever really “go away,” completely? This paper is a search for “real deletion,” and the metaphysics that must accompany real deletion. Why is that important? In artificial intelligence studies, researchers have offered a moving target for when artificial intelligence has been achieved. It began with the Turing test and has evolved through a thousand arguments (e.g., Dreyfuss’ What Computers Can’t Do, through Kurzweil’s “singularity” and into a hundred other criteria and thousands of discussions about what intelligence is and what it would mean to simulate or, as I favor, emulate it). This whole discussion is still just sorting through analogies to human intelligence, not approaching the thing itself, but good analogies must approach much more than analogous function: they must approach real indiscernibility. My arguments here will therefore be largely in the field of metaphysics and ontology, which is how I understand the word “real” in the phrase “real deletion.” I do not think that current researchers have rightly understood time and how it bears upon the criterion or. criteria of artificial intelligence. Hence, I offer “real deletion,” in the sense to be described, as the criterion. The AI argument has implications for all of metaphysics as it relates to the fundamental character of time

Budoucnost humanitních studií a institucí s nimi spjatých

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Eco, Peirce, and the Pragmatic Theory of Signs

This paper aims to consider Peirce and Eco’s approach to signs and semiotics in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. I show that the responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe

Historia i zasady amerykańskiego personalizmu: porównanie szkół personalizmu na Uniwersytecie Harvarda i na Uniwersytecie w Bostonie

The author of this article outlines the background of American personalist philosophy and theology, and then he traces these German roots through to the two primary schools of American personalist thought: the Boston University and the Harvard schools of personalism. Along the way he points to the major points on influence and divergence of the development of American personalism. He summarizes the principles of both schools as well as the views rejected, both philosophical and religious, by personalists.Autor przedstawia tło amerykańskiej filozofii i teologii personalistycznej, a następnie śledzi niemieckie ich korzenie zwłaszcza w dwóch głównych szkołach amerykańskiej myśli personalistycznej — na Boston University i na Harvard University. Po drodze wskazuje główne punkty dotyczące wpływów i rozbieżności w rozwoju personalizmu amerykańskiego. Podsumowuje zasady obu szkół oraz poglądy zarówno filozoficzne, jak i religijne odrzucane przez personalistów

The Real Fourth Political Theory

Aleksandr Dugin is sometimes called “Putin’s brain,” and there can be no question that Putin’s global strategy for expanding Russian power has followed quite precisely a strategic plan created, published, and advocated by Dugin beginning in 1996. This aggressive plan of political destabilization, economic hostage-taking, and ultimately militaristic invasions has been defended with a philosophical patchwork called “the Fourth Political Theory.” Dugin claims his “National Bolshevism” can stand alongside communism, fascism, and liberalism as a genuine contender in ontology, the philosophy of history, and political philosophy; and that it is the only theory that stands in genuine opposition to neo-liberalism and corporate capitalism. I show that this view, built from a distortion of Heidegger’s idea of “human-being” as Dasein, is not a coherent philosophy or worldview. I contrast it with personalism, which has always opposed the very aspects of communism, fascism, and liberalism that Dugin opposes, and does so quite effectively and without militarism, expansionism, or the need to take the nation state as some final end of human political development

Cassirer: The Coming of a New Humanism

The various efforts to put the idea of humanity on a secure ethical, political, and social base have not succeeded. The various post-humanist and transhumanist programs are inadequate. Our deep-seated suspicion of our deepest selves and motives is understandable in light of the barbarity of the twentieth century, but humanism is not to blame. The thought of Ernst Cassirer holds a framework for a new humanism, once it is rid of certain colonialist, triumphalist, and Eurocentric ideas that distorted Cassirer’s understanding of the European role in creating the problems of civilization, especially its mistake of thinking that science was a progressive symbolic form of culture. I set out the basis of a new humanism based upon not the problem of knowledge, but the problem of genuine self-situating socialty, a personalist point of view

Scheler and the Very Existence of the Impersonal

Usually philosophers worry about the existence of mind, or consciousness, or persons, or other difficult-to-explain phenomena. Having posited matter or nature, or fields, they wonder where can person or consciousness originate? This kind of thinking is backward. Only persons ask such questions. Persons exist. I turn the tables on the traditional problem of person by asking whether anything impersonal really exists. I argue that the impersonal almost exists, using the theory of feeling of Max Scheler and supplementing it with insights from Alfred North Whitehead and Josiah Royce. Even though feeling almost succeeds in divesting itself of the pre-supposed act of the person, but its concrete actuality blocks such complete self-abstraction

The Future of the Humanistic Study and Its Associated Institutions

Preview: In the United States Higher Education is undergoing a rapid change. Some aspects of this change are welcome, some are simply the inevitable march of progress, and some changes are troubling. The keepers of the humanities in every generation must consider all three sorts of change and adjust to them as required for the flourishing (or at least the maintenance) of humanistic thought as a presence and an active factor in civilization. The very rapidity of the current changes makes that duty a difficult one in the present. The concomitant result may fairly be called an emerging crisis in education in the US, and the situation is likely to spread to Europe and to the rest of the world where educational institutions are obliged to exist alongside of corporate-dominated capitalism. The tendency toward the welfare state in many nations will slow and perhaps counteract these problematic developments, but it is fair to say that the more powerful corporate capitalism becomes, and the more it absorbs the political machinery of the nation state to its ends, the more difficulty the educational establishment will encounter in maintaining the kind of education that is more than mere training of persons for service to the corporate machinery. Obviously, the humanities, as they have existed historically, do not seem to be necessary to the coming corporatized university

The Life of the Image

Preview: Bergson noted that the cinematographic image does not really move. It is, then as now, a series of still photographs. The real motion in such images is produced by machinery, which imparts a kinesis, an energy of movement, to the succession of fixed images. Our perception then endows such images with their “life,” insofar as they can be said to possess life. It is an illusion, it is “virtual” both as space and time. The real duration, as generated by the machinery or as lived by the perceiver is part of a broader system of images that includes those still photographs and their succession. Images of images of images, by the time they are processed by our bodies and appear to our mind’s eye as inhibited acts we have not enacted

To Serve Man? Rod Serling and Effective Destining

Popular culture is a vital part of the philosophy of culture. Immersion in the world of popular culture provides an immanent understanding, and after all, some of what is merely popular culture today will be the high culture of tomorrow. The genre of science fiction is one of the more important and durable forms of cultural and social (and even religious) criticism. Science fiction narratives guide our imaginations into the relation between the might-be and the might-have-been. The central idea of this paper is that possibilities have an existence that is intelligible to us, independent of and indifferent to actualities, and involving a distinction between “constellated possibilities” which form a pattern dependent upon one’s perspective in some actual standpoint, and “clustered” possibilities, which actually exist entangled and inseparable from one another, as possibilities. Science fiction writers intuitively know that if one introduces a variation into the present in order to trace a plausible alternative storyline from that standpoint, certain other variations will have to accompany the chosen variation in order to maintain the unity of the plot. I use Rod Serling, the creator of the legendary series The Twilight Zone, as an example in this paper. Hence, science fiction writers do work with clusters as well as constellations of possibilities (things that merely might happen and things that almost assuredly will eventually happen), and they experience the clusters with a stronger feeling of necessity. I call that feeling Wirkungsschicksal, of “effective destining.” I will develop this distinction and that stronger feeling of necessity into a method for the philosophy of culture