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Badiou and Agamben Beyond the Happiness Industry and its Critics Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Ype de Boer
Modern continental thought is skeptical toward happiness and no longer easily reconciles its pursuit with a desire for justice, the good, and truth. Critical theory has unmasked happiness as a commodity within an industry, an ideological tool for control, and a sedative to, justification of, and distraction from social injustice. This article argues that these diagnoses make it all the more important
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“We Understand Him Even Better Than He Understood Himself”: Kant and Plato on Sensibility, God, and the Good Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Marina Marren
Kant criticizes Plato for his interest in positing ideas that are entirely purified from any sensible elements, but which, nonetheless, exist in some supra-sensible reality. I argue that Kant’s criticism can be repositioned and even countered if, in our assessment of Plato, we assign a wider scope of significance and greater value to the senses. In order to lend focus to my article, I analyze Socrates’
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The Role and Value of Happiness in the Work of Paul Ricoeur Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-25 Anné Hendrik Verhoef
The role and value of happiness in the work of Paul Ricoeur remains an understudied theme. It is especially Ricoeur’s unique dialectical understanding of happiness, unhappiness, and chance which brings a crucial and much-needed insight and correction with regard to the understanding of happiness in our contemporary culture. For Ricoeur, happiness is always in relation to unhappiness, and it appreciates
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Bourdieu and Working-Class Neighbourhoods: What Place for Ordinary Aesthetics? Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Ulysse Rabaté
Today, an extensive body of research has been produced on the history of mobilisation by residents of working-class neighbourhoods in France and by those who identify with them. These analyses have changed our understanding of contemporary mobilisations, but the existing discourse should not prevent us from reflecting on the alternative modes of engagement that are emerging in these neighbourhoods
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Thinking Gestures. On How the Philosophical Conceptualization of Ordinary Life Can Be Shaped by Art Practices Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Barbara Formis
As a speculative and abstract discipline, philosophy is traditionally considered to be in dialectical tension with physical experience and daily practice. In contrast to this conventional and idealistic perspective, and in line with aesthetics as embodied knowledge, this article attempts to show that not only do we constantly think via gestures, movements, and physical experiences but also that there
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Overwhelming Complexities: Between Rome and Jerusalem Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-16 Manuel Duarte de Oliveira
In the search for an understanding of the complexities that could have led such a “banal” man as Adolf Eichmann, to stand trial in Jerusalem for crimes against Humanity – in the humanity of the Jewish People – one ought to go beneath the surface of contemporary events into the roots of an overwhelming hatred that enslaved Europe for far too long and with consequences beyond what imagination could have
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Derrida’s Donner – le temps Session 6: what this previously unpublished session teaches us about Given Time: I Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Lee Braver
Derrida’s Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money is one of his most celebrated works, though Volume II only came out in French in 2021. Volume I ends with Session Five of the seminar while Volume II opens with Seven, with Session Six only seeing the light of day in early 2024. My essay explains this missing session and goes into some detail examining the relationship of Derrida’s project to Kant, briefly
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Short-Story Writing as the Art of Ordinary Aesthetics Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Michel-Guy Gouverneur
Though ordinary aesthetics is self-evident as a principle, fruitful as a method, it remains partly undefined. It seems the major difficulty is to mark out its territory, so much so as, after Wittgenstein, it endorses the most part of what used to pertain to ethics. Our hypothesis is that starting from art forms may prove helpful in defining ordinary aesthetics; and the article suggests that short-story
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Facing Disaster: Ordinary Fictions, Resilience, and the Demand for Recognition in Eastern DR Congo Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Maëline Le Lay
In DR Congo, there is a proliferation of fictions and spoken word texts that addresses aspects of the on-going conflict. Fiction in Congo does not concern itself with the rules of literary orthodoxy (verisimilitude, linguistic correctness, references), nor does it rely on the existence of a literary and editorial system that is structured and operating to guarantee a predetermined readership. Its main
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Eternal Return Hermeneutics in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Lee Braver
Nietzsche’s Eternal Return (ER) is interpreted in many ways, including by him. I present it as a hermeneutic device, a way of reading texts, especially those whose influence threatens one’s authorial autonomy and/or are later difficult to take ownership of due to philosophical growth. It returns past texts with new interpretations, similar to the way ER leads one to embrace one’s past without changing
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Banal Evil – Radical Goodness. Reflection on the 60th Anniversary of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Veronica Cibotaru
The starting point of this article lies in the idea, defended by Hannah Arendt, according to which only goodness can be radical, while evil is merely banal. The idea of a banality of evil is present in Arendt’s work Eichmann in Jerusalem, although it is explicitly not presented as a general theory on evil as such – it is more particularly in her correspondence with Gershom Scholem that one can find
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Disassembling Descola: Phenomenological Intersections in Onto-Typological Anthropology Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Julián García-Labrador, Stéphane Vinolo
One of the effects of the so-called ontological turn has been to take the other so seriously that radical difference has been conceptualized ontologically. This stance has given rise, in some authors, as Descola, to a typological classification. However, we would suggest the possibility of a non-onto-typological anthropology based on Marion’s phenomenology of givenness. With the phenomenology of givenness
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Ordinary Situations and Artworld Declarations Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Otto Muller
Socially engaged art presents social situations to be understood, experienced, and evaluated as works of art while they simultaneously retain everyday non-art functionality. This article begins with an account of the definitional and evaluative concerns that socially engaged art engenders, outlining the debates around the relative importance of ethical and aesthetic values that result from this unsettled
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The Place of Action in the Landscape of Aesthetic Experience Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-28 David R. Charles
Advocates of ordinary aesthetics argue that aesthetic experiences found in everyday life can have an impact on our ethical being. This raises the question of how, specifically, action arises from aesthetic experience. Although this matter affects both Aesthetics and Ethics, the current literature provides few details on potential mechanisms. Using neurophysiological evidence, this article proposes
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Domestic Hybrids: Vitruvius’ Xenia, the Surrealist’s Minotaure, and Shrigley’s Octopus Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Simon Weir
The domestic spaces of the built environment are traditionally associated with residential architecture. But the domestic spaces can also extend out, metaphorically, into familiar public spaces in which one may feel at home, and also extend inwards into self-perception, insofar as you may say that you dwell within yourself. This article begins by recalling Vitruvius’ fundamental notion of architectural
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Society Bites: Phenomenological Aesthetics of the Ordinary and the Ordinary Cannibal Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Erika Natalia Molina Garcia
Drawing on phenomenological aesthetics and on the haptic aesthetics of eating as a form of everyday aesthetics, I examine the phenomenon of eating our own as meaningful in three dimensions: vital/natural, somatic/individual, and cross-cultural. Usually conceived as a concrete, rare, and foreign practice, I show how cannibalism is present in our daily lives, both symbolically and as a liminal possibility
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“Normal Is What We Make It, Right?” Ordinary Aesthetics and Uncanny Twists in Contemporary TV Series Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Jeroen Gerrits
Contemporary TV shows, characterized by their complex narrative form, are designed to reveal the simple. They enable characters and viewers alike to discover the ordinary by coupling the everyday to an underworld populated by criminals, demons, vampires, and other kinds of “lowlifes.” I will argue here that the structure of the Möbius strip, or Escher twist, draws a particular aesthetic appeal at the
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Jeremy Bentham on David Hume: “Having Enter’d into Metaphysics,” but “Having Lost His Way” Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Yanxiang Zhang
This article argues that Bentham’s metaphysics has until recently been unfairly belittled, and that it in fact built on and surpassed that of David Hume, of whom Bentham was both an attentive student and a fierce critic. Bentham’s logic is metaphysically based, multi-levelled, and comprehensive. First, taking Hume’s empiricism as a starting point, Bentham developed the additional mechanism of “reflection”
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Whither Rough Ground? On the “Ordinary” of Ordinary Aesthetics Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Edward Guetti
This article is a criticism of the narrative self-understanding offered by advocates of Ordinary Aesthetics. Even though the frustration with the philosophy of art (in contrast with philosophical aesthetics) is, in many ways, an overdetermined result, the sense of the ordinary as available through the withdrawal of this art-centred concern is misguided. This article argues that the reported death of
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Value, Virtue, and Vivienne Westwood: On the Philosophical Importance of Fashion Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Colette Olive
In the aforementioned quote, Vivienne Westwood sketches a role for fashion that elevates it from the prosaic to the status of art, as something important, life-enhancing, and worthy of pursuit. Here, a philosophical treatment of Westwood’s vision of fashion that does justice to the artistic and life-enhancing value that fashion can realise is offered, using an emergent theory in contemporary analytic
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“The Hum of the Conversing Audience”: Ordinary Criticism and Film Culture in American Early Film Theory Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Marthe Statius
This article seeks to explore the early stages of American film theory, where cinephilia became a site of aesthetic interest and criticism thanks to the theorization of cinema as a conversational medium. Following Stanley Cavell’s analysis of a distinct form of moviegoing in America, based on the casual conversation about movies, I argue that a reinterpretation of Emerson’s ordinary aesthetics has
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Qalandariyat: Marginality in the Negative Aesthetics of Sufi Poetry Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Zahra Rashid
A major part of Ordinary Aesthetics has been to include the traditionally marginalized aesthetic categories excluded when studying beauty, truth, and goodness. These “negative aesthetics” are implicated in the construction, presentation, and sustenance of marginalized identities. For the purposes of my article, I will be focusing on the effort to incorporate the aforementioned in the study of aesthetics
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Ordinary Aesthetics and Ethics in the Haiku Poetry of Matsuo Bashō: A Wittgensteinian Perspective Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Tomaso Pignocchi
This article explores how the notion of ordinary aesthetics can stem, as well as the one of ordinary ethics, from that revolution of the ordinary started by Wittgenstein and further developed by philosophers like Cavell and Diamond. The idea of ordinary ethics emphasizes the importance of everyday life and the particular details of our experiences. This concept can be extended to aesthetics, forming
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Experiencing Revulsion: Aesthetic Discomfort and Ordinary Life Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Radu-Cristian Andreescu
Drawing on recent theories and debates concerning the everydayness of non-artistic and even private aesthetic experiences, this article aims at differentiating new ways of dealing with revulsion at the intersection of negative and everyday aesthetics, as another manner of extending or transcending the scope of traditional art-oriented aesthetics. The paradigms that I will trace in the history of negative
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The Uncanniness of the Ordinary: Aesthetic Implications of Stanley Cavell’s Rethinking of Das Unheimliche Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Lorenzo Gineprini
Through the many reinterpretations of Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche (1919) within French Postmodernism, in recent decades, the uncanny has become a vague synonym for the methodology of deconstruction. The article aims to disambiguate the uncanny by reestablishing its characterizing nucleus and relocating it within the aesthetics through the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. The American philosopher claims
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What’s in a Bottle? Morandi’s Art and Ordinary Aesthetics Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Luis Monteiro
This article’s assumption is that ordinary aesthetics does not necessarily imply a distancing from art and artists; rather, it can benefit from the input of creators when they use everyday scenes or objects as their theme. This approach focuses on the practice of twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, who depicted compositions of common objects such as bottles, jars, and vases. Through
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Testimonial Kinds: The Source Factor Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Mohammed Tayssir Safi
In this article, I argue that the nature of testimony necessitates that we distinguish between testimonies that are based on the informant's sense perception, inference, or on a longer testimonial chain. I further argue that this distinction has epistemic significance, in that it helps us better understand how reliable certain classes of testimonies are and how reliable certain individuals are, based
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Walking Through Everyday Life: Tensions and Disruptions within the Ordinary Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Nélio Conceição
Bringing together a genealogy of authors, concepts, and aesthetic case studies, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on ordinary aesthetics by focusing on the tensions that are intrinsic to walking as a fundamental embodied action in everyday urban life. These tensions concern the movement of walking itself and its relation to one’s surroundings, but it also concerns a certain complementarity
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Supernormalising Nothing from the Hyperbolic Nihil to the Ordinary Supernothing Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-15 John Ó Maoilearca
This essay connects the mystical concept of “supernothing” with Bergson’s notion of the image of nothingness as a movement in the making. I do this also with respect to the film The Empty Man (David Prior, 2020) – which explicitly cites Gorgias’s four-part embargo on nothing (it exists, it cannot be known, communicated, or understood): nothingness is re-rendered as movement, in particular, the transmission
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The Poetry of Ordinary Language Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Patrick Verge
The general argument of this essay is that poetry is an everyday ambition and an everyday accomplishment. The evidence for this – a good bit of which I will amass enthusiastically in what follows – is everywhere in our language. I explore this according to three guiding intuitions: (i) people, at least some of the time, want to give their words a similar intensity or fullness and show the same skill
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Nihilism Lost and Found: Brassier, Jonas, and Nishitani on Embracing and/or Overcoming Nihilism Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Andrea Lehner, Felipe Cuervo Restrepo
This essay confronts Ray Brassier’s vindication of nihilism with other two important but frequently underexamined philosophical attempts to overcome nihilism: Hans Jonas’ and Keiji Nishitani’s. By putting these different takes on nihilism into dialogue, it explores some blind spots in Brassier’s position, as well as some of the practical consequences, for our current planetary situation, of undertaking
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Stanley Cavell on the “Disgusting Child”: Ordinary Aesthetics and the Mental Health Crisis in Schools Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Jeff Frank
This article explores Stanley Cavell’s ordinary aesthetics through a close reading of one passage in The Claim of Reason. This close reading leads to the suggestion that educating our aesthetic sense and responsiveness has ethical implications, especially as these relate to the mental health crisis in schools. The article draws implications for individuals in caring relationships with young people
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Managing the Vague: John Dewey’s Aesthetics and the Relation of Fine Art and Mathematics Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Raine Ruoppa
In philosophical discourse, vagueness is commonly regarded as an undesirable and problematic aspect of human experience. Such standpoints are not unfounded. However, in this article, I argue that vagueness may in certain instances also possess an instrumental role that supports specific modes of human aspiration, including the artistic and the mathematical. In particular, I investigate the ways in
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What End of Thought? On the True and the False Problem of Philosophy Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Mark Leegsma
The end of metaphysics problematizes philosophy, for it implies the end of thought “itself.” Though this raises the question how to think after the end of metaphysics, the question can only be asked on the condition that the “problem of philosophy” is posed, presupposing an answer to the question what the end of thought is. This article critically compares two ways of posing that problem. It argues
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Unclearing the Air: The Pneumatological Dalliances of Jacques Derrida Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Ryan McCormack
In the 1980s, Luce Irigaray accused Western philosophy of “forgetting” about the role that the materiality of air and the act of breathing played in pre-Socratic metaphysics. This essay explores how Jacques Derrida maintained a complicated but insightful relationship to the air throughout his career through the mediating influence of pneuma, a word with long and complicated connections to the air.
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Signifying Nothing: Nihilism, Information, and Signs Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Ashley Woodward
This article explores the theme of nihilism from the perspective of post-continental philosophy by focusing on semiotics and information theory and the question of “meaning” at stake between them. Nihilism is characterised here as an avatar of the counter-Enlightenment tradition. Post-continental philosophy is defined by a positive revaluation of reason, science, and technology, which were critiqued
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Between the Void and Emptiness: Ontological Paradox and Spectres of Nihilism in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and Graham Priest’s One Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Georgie Newson
In this study, I reconstruct and compare Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (2005) and Graham Priest’s One (2014), arguing that the ontologies pursued within the two texts are intriguingly analogous in a number of ways. Both Badiou and Priest are committed to thinking through classically ontological problems without denying the validity of the paradoxes they raise; both regard Plato’s Parmenides as an
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Being Truly Wrong: Enlightened Nihilism or Unbound Naturalism? Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Patrick Gamez
I present an account of nihilism, following Foucault and Nietzsche, as a sort of colonization of our thinking by a religious form of normativity, grounded in our submission to truth as correspondence, in the idea that the facts themselves could be binding upon us. I then present Brassier’s radicalization of nihilism and showed how it both remained subservient to this religious ideal of truth. I argue
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G. Deleuze’s Untimely [non-]: The Inverter of Platonic Nihilism to Ethics of Creation Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Konstantinos Nevrokoplis
In F. Nietzsche’s philosophical thought, there is a profound link between European Nihilism and the task of modern philosophy to produce new Platos. The current article demonstrates how G. Deleuze uses the Nietzschean term Unzeitgemäβ – (Untimely – Unfashionable) in his attempt to overturn nihilistic Platonism. Deleuze enriches the Stoic paradox of [non-] when seeking an image of thought without image
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Nihilism: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Now Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Peter Stewart-Kroeker
In this article, I discuss how Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism concerns the complicity between Christian morality and modern atheism. I unpack in what sense Schopenhauer’s ascetic denial of the will signifies a return to nothingness, what he calls the nihil negativum. I argue that Nietzsche’s formulation of nihilism specifically targets Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the culmination of the Western metaphysical
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Beyond Negative Freedom and the Working Class Subject: Another Kind of Madness Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Cynthia Cruz
Presented with the (non) choice of either assimilating into bourgeois society and, thus, annihilating themselves, or being annihilated by society, the working class subject may choose, neither, engaging, instead, in an act of negative freedom. By engaging in an act of negative freedom, the working class subject destroys all possibility of rehabilitation, thus, determining their fate. The act alone
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How does one Cosmotheoretically Respond to the Heat Death of the Universe? Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-21 Joel White
This article asks what an adequate philosophical response to the certainty of heat death would be: the moment in the timeline of the universe when all possible energy transformations have been actualized and life, thought, and action cease to be possible. Through a reading of Hans Jonas’s existential work on Gnosticism, the article begins by defining what is meant by the notions cosmotheoretical and
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An Ontologically Nihilist Critique of Graham Harman’s Ontological Liberalism Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Adam Lovasz
In Graham Harman’s realist philosophy, which I call “ontological liberalism,” all objects are considered equal, there being no unbridgeable gap between various modes of being. Every object is a unique individual, endowed with a positive being. Any privileging of a certain class of objects over other classes of objects is invalidated. An object is composed of its relations, summarized under the heading
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Iqbal, Nietzsche, and Nihilism: Reconstruction of Sufi Cosmology and Revaluation of Sufi Values in Asrar-i-Khudî Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Feyzullah Yılmaz
While the problem of nihilism is derived from a particular historical and intellectual context in Western philosophy, i.e., the pantheism controversy in modern German philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, non-Western thinkers also engaged with it and developed responses to it. In this article, I am interested in analyzing Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938), a leading Muslim thinker (a Sufi) from India,
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Anti-Work Architecture: Domestic Labour, Speculative Design, and Automated Plenty Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-01-30 Helen Hester
This article presents a partial history of visions of technodomesticity in the global north, concentrating on dwellings which seek to problematize, challenge, or reorganize unpaid household labour. It is structured around three case studies, primarily drawn from the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: the single-family suburban dream house, the bachelor pad, and the fully automated future home. While
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Semantic Anti-Realism in Kant’s Antinomy Chapter Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Kristoffer Willert
By considering the semantic footings of the so-called antinomies of pure reason, this article contributes to the debate about whether Kant was committed to semantic realism or anti-realism. That is, whether verification-transcendent judgements are truth-apt (realism) or not (anti-realism). Against the (empiricist) semantic principle that Strawson, and others, have ascribed to Kant as the “principle
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The “Slicing Problem” for Computational Theories of Consciousness Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, Chris Percy
The “Slicing Problem” is a thought experiment that raises questions for substrate-neutral computational theories of consciousness, including those that specify a certain causal structure for the computation like Integrated Information Theory. The thought experiment uses water-based logic gates to construct a computer in a way that permits cleanly slicing each gate and connection in half, creating two
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Meillassoux’s Reinterpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Kristian Schäferling
This article attempts to read the Transcendental Dialectic through Meillassoux’s model of the absolute contingency of being in order to rethink some of its central difficulties. Specifically, this concerns better understanding the role played by the categories of relation and modality in the empirical use of the ideas of reason, which underlies their regulative use that is directed at an absolute unity
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Adversarial Democracy and the Flattening of Choice: A Marcusian Analysis of Sen’s Capability Theory’s Reliance Upon Universal Democracy as a Means for Overcoming Inequality Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Danelle Fourie, Justin Sands
This article critically examines the competitive, adversarial nature of the Western neoliberal style of democracy. Specifically, this article focuses on Amartya Sen’s notion of a “universal democracy” as a means of addressing socio-economic inequalities through Sen’s capability approach. Sen’s capability theory has become an acclaimed and widely used theory to evaluate and understand development and
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Reason, Its Real Use, and the Status of Its Ideas and Principles: Response to Caimi, Gava, and Lewin Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Marcus Willaschek
In this contribution, I respond to articles published in a Topical Issue of Open Philosophy on Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic by Mario Caimi, Gabriele Gava, and Michael Lewin, who criticize some of the views I put forward in my book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In particular, I discuss the “real use” of reason (in response to
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Rivalry and Philosophy after Deleuze’s Reversal of Platonic Participation Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-08 Steph Butera
Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism shifted the traditional emphasis on thinking that which participates in a concept to that in which a claim to participation occurs. The first part of this article presents a reading of this reversal that highlights the implications of Deleuze’s ontology for his non-ontological account of participation, highlighting how this ontology (1) builds on aspects of Plato’s philosophy
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A Bite of the Forbidden Fruit: The Abject of Food and Affirmative Environmental Ethics Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Anne Sauka
Abstract This article explores the negative framing of environmental concern in the context of food procurement and consumption, through the lens of the myth of Eden considering the ontological and genealogical aspects of the experienced exile from nature. The article first considers the theoretical context of the negative framing of food ethics. Demonstrating the consequences of the experience of
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The Bureau and the Realism of Spy Fiction Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Pauline Blistène
Abstract This article addresses the issue of realism in relationship to contemporary serial fiction. Drawing on The Bureau (Canal+, 2015–2020), it argues that spy TV series are “realistic” not because they correspond to reality but because of their impact on reality. It begins by giving an overview of the many ways in which “realism,” in the ordinary sense of a resemblance with reality, served as the
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A Phenomenological Look at the Orgasm Gap Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Rita Niineste
Abstract The orgasm gap is the marked difference in the frequency of orgasm between cisgender men and women in heterosexual intercourse that has been documented in research for decades. However, orgasm as a state of intense sexual excitement and gratification is physiologically uncomplicated and readily available for most people regardless of gender. This article undertakes a philosophical study of
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Determining and Grounding: The Twofold Function of the Transcendental Dialectic Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Martin Bunte
Abstract For a long time, the transcendental dialectic was not at the center of Kant scholarship but was often treated simply as Kant’s reckoning with contemporary metaphysics. Accordingly, the main interest was in the transcendental analytic, especially the transcendental deduction. It is all the more gratifying that in recent times a rethinking seems to be taking place on this issue. In the following
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Rethinking Dionysus and Apollo: Redrawing Today’s Philosophical Chessboard Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Carlos A. Segovia
Abstract This essay pursues Gilbert Durand’s plea for a new anthropological spirit that would overcome the bureaucracy-or-madness dichotomy which has since Nietzsche left its imprint upon contemporary thought, forcing it to choose between an “Apollonian” ontology established upon some kind of first principle and a “Dionysian” ontology consisting in the erasure of any founding norm. It does so by reclaiming
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Divergences and Convergences of Perspective: Amerindian Perspectivism, Phenomenology, and Speculative Realism Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Ignas Šatkauskas
Abstract According to Viveiros de Castro, comparison as ontology defines the ontological turn in anthropology. It presents a necessity for philosophy to approach the matter with comparative strategy. Morten Pedersen claims that ontological turn should be interpreted as a fulfillment of an anthropological version of Husserl’s method. Thus, phenomenology enters the field of interest along with its critique
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Between Old and New Teleology. Kant on Maupertuis’ Principle of Least Action Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Rudolf Meer
Abstract In the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant formulates teleological principles, or rather ideas, and explicates them referring to concrete examples of natural science such as chemistry, astronomy, biology, empirical psychology, and physical geography. Despite the increasing interest in the systematic relevance of the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and its importance for
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Socratic and Cartesian Personae: Undismembering and Liquidation Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Richard Polt
Abstract The essay investigates two personae: Socrates as depicted by Plato and Descartes as narrator of the Discourse on Method and Meditations. Socrates is aware of his ignorance and insists on remembering to care for the self; Descartes claims to have overcome ignorance through a method that breaks problems into simple and certain elements, establishing a self-certain yet impersonal subject that
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Attentional Structure and Phenomenal Unity Open Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Wanja Wiese
Abstract Some authors argue that phenomenal unity can be grounded in the attentional structure of consciousness, which endows conscious states with at least a foreground and a background. Accordingly, the phenomenal character of part of a conscious state comprises a content aspect (e.g., hearing music) and a structural aspect (e.g., being in the background). This view presents the concern that such