20th Century Philosophy

Various recent publications on Brentano are focusing on the so-called 'Brentano-Puzzle: i.e., the question why Brentano, whose work was very influential, is discussed less among contemporary philosophers than might be expected'. In his recent book The Brentano Puzzle Roberto Poll describes this Puzzle in the following way:

Unser Alltag ist geprägt von moralischen Konflikten, d.h. von Auseinandersetzungen mit den Normen und Werten der überkommenen und von uns gelebten Alltagsmoral. Wir befinden uns, wenn nicht permanent, so doch regelmäßig in Situationen, in denen wir mit der Frage konfrontiert sind, welche der sich uns bietenden Handlungsoptionen die moralisch richtige oder wenigstens die moralisch am wenigsten verwerfliche ist. Ein (fast schon klassisches) Beispiel ist die Frage, ob wir verpflichtet sind, einem Familienmitglied aus einer Situation zu helfen, in die es sich selbst durch moralisch falsches Verhalten gebracht hat -und ob dies die Erlaubnis oder sogar die Pflicht einschließt, selbst moralisch falsch zu handeln, etwa zu lügen. Ein anders gelagertes Beispiel sind die zahlreichen Situationen, in denen wir uns mit anderen im Dissens darüber befinden, welche Normen wir alle gleichermaßen als moralisch richtig anerkennen sollen. Man darf von einer annehmbaren Moralphilosophie an dieser Stelle zweierlei erwarten: Erstens eine gehaltvolle Phänomenologie, wenigstens aber einen belastbaren Begriff moralischer Praxis, der uns erklärt, wie diese und andere Konflikte zustande kommen. Zweitens sollte sie uns Lösungen für die entsprechenden Konflikte aufzeigen. Diese Lösungen, die ja im Zweifelsfalle auf eine Reform unserer moralischen Praxis hinauslaufen, müssen allerdings realisierbar sein. Das bedeutet, dass die von der jeweiligen Moralphilosophie geforderte legitime moralische Praxis nur solche Anforderungen stellen darf, die von Lebewesen wie uns praktisch erfüllt werden können -und die nicht an der moralischen Leistungsfähigkeit von Engeln orientiert sind. Letzteres ist vor allem für diejenigen Moralphilosophien bedeutsam, die nur ein minimales Set an Rechten und Normen als Grundlage einer legitimen moralischen Praxis, also weniger eine Reform als vielmehr eine Revision unserer gegebenen moralischen Praxis fordern, wie dies vor allem bei dem moralischen Kontraktualismus der Fall ist. Verschärft wird das Problem in diesem Falle noch dadurch, dass sowohl Peter Stemmer (2000, 84-85, 104) als auch David Gauthier (1987, 163-164) als herausragende Vertreter dieses Ansatzes explizit Hobbes' Vorschlag zurückweisen, die gelungene Umsetzung der minimalen Moral durch die Errichtung einer politischen Ordnung, d.h. durch die Ersetzung der moralischen Praxis durch eine Rechtspraxis zu garantieren. 1 Damit aber müssen beide behaupten, dass sich eine moralische Praxis realisieren lässt, die den von ihnen formulierten normativen Ansprüchen gerecht wird. 2 Die Kernthese dieses Aufsatzes ist, dass der moralische Kontraktualismus diesem (zweiten) Anspruch an eine annehmbare Moralphilosophie (den Stemmer und Gauthier mit ihrer Abgrenzung von Hobbes m.E. anerkennen) letztlich nicht oder doch nur sehr ungenügend gerecht wird. Es ist vielmehr so, dass Hobbes' Modell der Ersetzung der moralischen Praxis durch eine Rechtspraxis die zwar ebenfalls nicht unproblematische, aber dennoch überzeugendere Alternative ist angesichts der vom Kontraktualismus geforderten minimalen Moral. Es geht mir also nicht um eine Kritik der interessebasierten Rechtfertigung moralischer Normen, der Tragfähigkeit des Vertragsmodells in moralphilosophischen Argumentationen o.ä. (siehe dazu beispielhaft die Beiträge in Leist 2003). 1 Das ist z.B.der Unterschied zu Mackie, der Hume folgend davon auszugehen scheint, jede moralische Praxis schließe Elemente positiven Rechts ein (dies legt zumindest sein affirmativer Rückgriff auf Hobbes nahe, siehe Mackie 1983, 144, 231-233, 235), ohne die Unterschiede zwischen moralischen und Rechtsnormen (siehe unten Abschnitt 5) zu thematisieren. 2 Allgemeiner formuliert müsste die Frage lauten: Wie minimal oder genauer: wie revisionär darf eine Moral sein, ohne den Anspruch auf Realisierbarkeit einzubüßen? (Ich möchte einem anonymen Gutachter für diese Hinweis danken.) Der moralische Kontraktualismus ist aufgrund seiner extrem begrenzten normativen Forderungen (siehe unten) hierfür allerdings das Paradebeispiel. Dass eine Moral, die praktisch nicht realisierbare Forderungen aufstellt, selbst als "Ideal" eher schädlich als nützlich ist, hat u.a. Mackie (1983, 166) betont: "Die Moral mit irgend etwas gleichzusetzen, dem man gewiß nicht folgt, ist die sicherste Art und Weise, sie in Verruf zu bringen -sie praktisch in Verruf zu bringen, denn damit kann eine theoretische Hochachtung sehr leicht einhergehen."

In this article, I explicate Husserl’s phenomenology of the person as found in Ideen II by examining the most important aspects of persons in this work. In the first section, I explicate the concept of the surrounding world (Umwelt) with special attention to the difference between the different attitudes (Einstellungen) that help determine the sense of constituted objects of experience. In the second section, I investigate Husserl’s description of the person as a founded, higher order, spiritual (geistig) objectivity. I consider this description of the person by examining the symmetry between the organization of Ideen II as a whole and the order of the constitution of the person. In the final section, I look at the relationship between the constitution of the person and the spiritual (geistig) world.

This article analyses José Ortega y Gasset’s ideas of the tasks of philosophy and the university and how they were related to his diagnosis of the crisis of modern European culture. The texts ’Misión de la universidad’, ’Qué es filosofía?’ and ’La rebelión de las masas’, all written around 1930, are interpreted in light of each other to expose this relationship. Instead of simply declaring tasks for philosophy and the university, Ortega turned these issues into objects of historico-philosophical analysis. The tasks of philosophy and the university were historicized, corresponding to their changing roles in society, and related to the demands of the new situation in the present. The character of the present was not simply determined by applying a ready-made understanding of society, but was itself made an object of historico-philosophical diagnosis. The tasks that Ortega formulated for philosophy (to formulate a new form of reason related to life; to analyse the fundamental structure of ’life’ in the present) and the university ¬(to transmit culture at the level of cultural development; to build a new cultural foundation as a vital system of ideas based on the current level of the disciplines; to act as a cultivating counter-balance to the power of the media) can be seen as part of the solution to the problems diagnosed in La rebelión de las masas: the loss of the former cultural foundation; violence and nihilistic lack of respect for basic norms of civilization; self-righteous presentism and narrow-minded specialization. The final part points to worrying parallels between Ortega’s diagnosis and our contemporary populist condition and raises the question of a future alternative: a philosophical condition with a philosophical democracy based on philosophical citizens. Whether this is possible or not, Ortega’s analysis demonstrates the need to relate the question of the tasks of philosophy and the university to a diagnosis of the present.

The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon returned to Jacob’s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed ‘biology’ in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly scholarly a work as La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1955), Canguilhem speaks oddly of “defending vitalist biology,” and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, “la vie déconcerte la logique”). Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of ‘mysterian’, magical vitalism? In order to answer this question we need to achieve some perspective on Canguilhem’s ‘vitalism’, notably with respect to its philosophical influences such as Kurt Goldstein.

Der Artikel stellt verschiedene Verbindungen zwischen Wittgenstein und der Literatur bzw. der Philosophie der Literatur dar und gibt im zweiten Teil eine Einleitung zu den Artikeln des Sammelbandes "Wittgenstein und die Literatur" (hrsg. von John Gibson und Wolfgang Huemer, Suhrkamp 2006)

In this paper, we will set out a defensible version of the hypothesis of extended cognition. To do so, we will draw together two separate streams of philosophical and psychological work from the 20th century: William James's radical empiricism and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body. The confluence of these two streams can be seen in J.J. Gibson's ecological approach to the perception.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentiethcentury. Born in Austria, he lived in England for several years, and taught philosophy at Cambridge University (1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945)(1946)(1947). He published only one book of philosophy during his lifetime: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), but left voluminous notes which were compiled and published posthumously in several volumes, the two most influential of which are: Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty. Wittgenstein's philosophy covers a great range of topics including logic, mathematics, religion, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, culture, perception; and in his treatment of these, he exposes and redefines our understanding of mind, language, meaning and action.

in: J. Gibson and W. Huemer (eds): 文人维特根斯坦, Shanghai: Sanghui Culture and Press, 2008, pp. 1–18. (Chinese Translation of: “Wittgenstein, Lnaguage, and Philosophy of Literature”, in: J. Gibson and W. Huemer: The Literary Wittgenstein, originally published London: Routledge, 2004.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes many radically anti-Cartesian statements, and even goes so far as to propose his own revisionary reinterpretation of Descartes’ famous Cogito that he calls both a “new Cogito” and “the true Cogito”. This paper attempts, first, to give an explicatory close reading of Merleau-Ponty’s text concerning this “true Cogito”, and second, to assess its philosophical significance in light of the presented understanding.

Have you ever felt the game in our minds of the metropolises that we are in or have had to be in from time to time in today's world? This game has become a phenomenon that does not only appear in the 21st century, but actually completes our mental process that has not left us for several centuries. In fact, in George Simmel's 1903 article Metropol and Spiritual Life, we will take the reader on a journey in the article in which the unconscious or in some cases conscious mental thinking style in the metropolis discusses the effect on social relations, material perspective, consumption with the metropolis, and moreover, on the character.

Lorsque la nausée fait l'objet de développements anticipés, la solitude n'est évoquée qu'au détour d'une réflexion sur la honte ressentie par l'homme seul avec lui-même envers son corps, en l'absence d'autrui pour justifier celle-ci et le laissant comme témoin de son impouvoir sur son propre être : Solitude, lieu de la honte de son propre corps. 2 Dans l'une de ses rares occurrences au cours des années 1930, la solitude est ainsi comprise comme un déterminant de l'accession à la conscience de la honte. Levinas s'empare également du phénomène de la maladie, lorsque seul et abandonné, je ne peux que me scandaliser d'être moi-même, dans l'humiliation qui m'est ainsi infligée. Dans la solitude, je suis placé au devant de moi-même et éprouve la honte d'être celui que je suis. En dépit du voisinage de thématiques apparentées, la solitude n'émerge ainsi pas encore en tant que cette notion d'importance qu'elle sera appelée à devenir, et ce sont encore les phénomènes de nausée et d'enfermement dans l'être qui captivent Levinas durant sa période strasbourgeoise. La place tenue par la littérature russe (Pouchkine au premier chef, puis Dostoïevski, Tourgueniev, Tolstoï, Lermontov) dans les lectures de jeunesse annonçait pourtant très tôt un intérêt marqué de la part de Levinas pour les interrogations relatives à l'existence et au sens de la vie dont de discrètes traces écrites attestent. Ainsi, dans une note des Carnets, Levinas rapporte la solitude à l'idée d'une perte de sens dont le champ d'application ne va pas de soi, concernant non pas seulement l'existence mais les choses dont l'étrangeté se réverbère sur l'existence et esseule le sujet : Fromage et champagne à 5 h du matin. Creuser cette idée de la « perte de sens » par les choses. Et la solitude qui en résulte. 3

O presente trabalho pretende inserir a História da Psicologia dentro de um debate mais alargado, em torno das Histórias da Filosofia e das Ciências. Para isso, o objeto de análise é a célebre frase de Ebbinghaus, 'A Psicologia tem um longo passado, mas uma curta história', e toda a tradição de livros e textbooks decorrente dela, muito popular nos séculos XX e XXI. O trabalho analisará o texto de Ebbinghaus e seus compromissos decorrentes. Então realizará uma crítica a essa tradição, em três frentes: primeiramente, trazendo à tona estudos mais recentes sobre Gustav Fechner, encarado como figura central na constituição da Psicologia como ciência, mas não obstante ignorado por seus compromissos 'especulativos'; em segundo lugar, confrontando tais questões com as perspectivas do século XX, especialmente a história epistemológica das ciências; finalmente, abrindo o 'longo passado' a uma história mais alargada, a partir de analistas mais contemporâneos que começaram a perscrutar o próprio termo 'Psicologia'. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ This paper intends to insert the History of Psychology in a wider debate along with the History of Philosophy and History of Science. In order to do that, the object of analysis is Hermann Ebbinghaus’s famous phrase, ‘Psychology has an old past, but a short history’, and all the tradition of books and textbooks due to it, very popular on the 20th and 21st centuries. The paper is going to analyse Ebbinghaus’s text and its historical commitments and consequences. Then will perform a critics of this tradition, in 3 fronts of arguments: firstly, bringing up some more recent studies on Gustav Fechner, seen as a central character on the making of Psychology as a science, but nevertheless ignored for its ‘speculative’ commitments. Secondly, the paper will confront such questions with the historical perspectives of 20th century, specially the epistemological history of science. Finally, the paper will open the argument of ‘old past’ to a more wide ‘history’, showing contemporary analysts who started to scan the historical meaning of the word ‘Psychology’

The goal of my paper is to consider how one chooses one’s own action. First, I will try to understand how both his past and his environment can condition someone's action. According to Sartre, we can act without being determined by our past which is always separated from us. It will be important to understand how such a process is possible. Is man completely free to act? Then I will raise the question of our reasons for acting in order to show that reasons do not pre-exist in the world. Motives are always motives for an agent who gives them meaning. They never condition the action completely. By his project, the agent reveals some reasons to act and these reasons have a value only in relation to the project adopted by the agent. Therefore, we can say that everyone is condemned to be free.

"Lezioni di metafisica" presenta tradotti per la prima volta in italiano due cicli di lezioni tenuti da Henri Bergson presso la classe di khâgne del Lycée Henri-IV, tra il 1893 e il 1894. Per la loro collocazione temporale, a cavallo tra gli anni del "Saggio sui dati immediati della coscienza" (1889) e "Materia e memoria" (1896), queste lezioni risultano di straordinario interesse per gli studi sul filosofo francese, che vi sviluppa un serrato confronto con la storia della metafisica moderna e della psicologia. Aristotele, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Spencer sono presentati e discussi da Bergson, che riflette – con loro e attraverso di loro – sui grandi temi dello spazio, del tempo, della materia, della memoria e dell’individualità. Tra i banchi dell’Henri-IV Bergson mette a punto un vero e proprio studio preparatorio per la sua originale critica al pensiero classico.

— Review: Dr. Giulio Piatti, in Lo Sguardo, 26 (2018, 1): 369-372.
— Review: Dr. Caterina Zanfi, in Rivista di Filosofia, 3/2018: 509 ff.
— Review: Il Sole 24 Ore, 10 June 2018
— Review: Avvenire, 22 May 2018

Wir befinden uns-so eine weit verbreitete, prominent von J. Habermas als alternativlos vertretene Diagnose-in einer ‚nachmetaphysischen' Konstellation. Doch-so kann man hiergegen einwendendie systematischen Ansprüche metaphysischer Spekulation, die über Jahrhunderte hinweg als prima philosophia die Königsdisziplin philosophischen Denkens bildete, lassen sich nicht einfach aus der Welt schaffen. Ihre Fragen und ihre Konzepte-zuhöchst diejenigen eines Absoluten-gehen als "Abschlußgedanken" (D. Henrich) in den Horizont nicht nur unseres vernünftigen Denkens, sondern auch unseres vernünftigen Handelns in der Welt als einem letztlich nur transempirisch, mithin spekulativ denkbaren Gesamtzusammenhang ein. Gleichzeitig sieht metaphysisches Denken in der Moderne sich damit konfrontiert, dass eine einfache Rückkehr zur Gestalt "vormaliger Metaphysik" (G.W.F. Hegel) nicht mehr möglich ist. Metaphysik wird damit vor die Aufgabe gestellt, sich gegenüber den Ansprüchen kritischer Reflexion-wie I. Kant sie maßgeblich geltend machte-, doch auch gegenüber irreversiblen einzelwissenschaftlichen Differenzierungen und einer zunehmenden Komplexität des sozialen und politischen Lebens eigens auszuweisen und zu bewähren. Ziel des Seminars ist es, anhand einschlägiger Texte aus dem 20. Jahrhundert die mögliche Aktualität und die Herausforderungen metaphysischer Konzeptionen-provoziert durch die Diagnose eines ‚nachmetaphysischen' Denkens-zu verstehen und kritisch zu diskutieren.

The philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari and Levinas are taken up in an effort to advance the ethical, political, and technological implications of how we interpret, inhabit, and territorialize the Earth. The difference between their views on the relation between immanence and transcendence and their respective analyses of the face and faciality are brought to bear in addressing the questions of ethics, politics, and values in relation to the constitution and liberation, or resingularization, of subjectivity. The contemporary world has produced to a historically unprecedented degree a tension between machinization and wildness-both of which are expressions of the inhuman. Somewhere in between this difference, transversing the borderlines between the human and inhuman, lies a possible way for rethinking the relation between subjectivity, identity, difference, and singularity.

Twentieth-century philosophy has often been pictured as divided into two camps, analytic and continental. This study challenges this depiction by examining encounters between some of the leading representatives of either side. Starting with Husserl and Frege's fin-de-siècle turn against psychologism, it turns to Carnap's 1931 attack on Heidegger's metaphysics (together with its background in the Cassirer-Heidegger dispute of 1929), moving on to Ayer's 1951 meeting with Bataille and Merleau-Ponty at a Parisian bar, followed by the 'dialogue of the deaf' between Oxford linguistic philosophers and phenomenologists at the 1951 Royaumont colloquium, leading up to the Derrida-Searle controversy. Careful study shows that it is implausible to assume the existence of a century-old 'gulf' between two sides of philosophy. Vrahimis argues that miscommunication and ignorance over the exact content of the above encounters must to a large extent be held accountable for any perceived gap.

From Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University:
"This singular book puts a number of leading figures in philosophy into conversation with each other -- and with the author himself, who manages skillfully to create a true theatricum philosophicum in which complex ideas come alive and enter into intense dialogue. . . . Altared Ground is an extended meditation on the ground of ethics and (by implication and sometimes expressly) politics" (from "The Ethics of the Face to Face Encounter: Schroeder, Levinas, and the Glance," The Pluralist [Spring 2006]: 73-97).


From Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University:
"Schroeder not only elaborates on the relationship between Levinas's thought and the writings of other philosophers, but also powerfully rereads the history of Western philosophy. Beautifully combining scholarship and creativity, Schroeder goes beyond Levinas's alternatives to traditional theories of the self to suggest a notion of subjectivity that is not grounded in violence. His analysis of intersubjective violence is sustained and intricate, and provides a significant contribution to Continental ethics."

Course Description: This class will survey the philosophical work of the twentieth-century Existentialist thinker Simone de Beauvoir. Best known as the author of the landmark second wave feminist book, The Second Sex, de Beauvoir wrote extensively on topics in ethics, politics, and phenomenology. She also published several novels, one of which (The Mandarins) won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Even so, the vast majority of de Beauvoir's work is rarely studied in either France or the United States. Our goal in this class will be to take de Beauvoir seriously as one of the most important philosophical thinkers of the twentieth century. We will aim to understand her intellectual program holistically, with emphasis on the way in which her Existentialist concerns informed her work in literature and feminism.

Recent philosophy of mind has seen an increase of interest in theories of intentionality in offering a functional account of mental states. The standard intentionalist view holds that mental states can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of their representational contents. An alternative view proposed by Tim Crane, called impure intentionalism, specifies mental states in terms of intentional content, mode, and object. This view is also suggested to hold for states of sensory awareness. This paper primarily develops an alternative to the impure intentionalist account of states of sensory awareness. On the basis of Husserl's phenomenological work, I argue that a focus on intentionality at the level of sensory awareness is phenomenologically implausible. The final part offers an alternative functional account of sensory awareness based on what Husserl called 'immanent association'.

François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2007), ISBN: 978-2707158727, translated as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), ISBN: 978-0231145602

In the last years of his life, the American poet Wallace Stevens expressed interest in the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Stevens was led to Heidegger by his prior interest in Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet who preoccu- pied Heidegger after the book Being and Time (1927). Although Stevens’s pursuit of Heidegger went nowhere, I like to think that he was right to wonder whether Heidegger might have something to offer him. Metaphysically speaking, both men belonged to the same epoch. Stevens, like Heidegger, was haunted by the question of how to respond to the moral and spiritual disorders of a world from which the gods had fled (or worse). Heidegger worried about technological “enframing,” in which beings appear as resources continually in the process of being optimised, enhanced and rendered ever more accessible to manipulation – an approach that is also applied to human beings and which obscures our true vocation as “shepherds of Being.” Stevens characterises the modern world in rather different terms – “the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic and poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence” – but he was at one with Heidegger when it came to the “pressure on the consciousness” of a disenchanted technological society that weakens the “power of contemplation.”

This dissertation presents a comparative reading of Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the intent of arguing that the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is a spurious one of no real benefit to the enterprise of philosophy as long as it remains so pronounced and important philosophers of either side are neglected in their opposite tradition. It shows that these two philosophers, undeniably held up as important and influential in their respective traditions, can not only be meaningfully compared but actually display similar motives, projects, arguments and methods, and when read together productively illuminate each other’s work. This I think can be done not just with these two philosopher’s bodies of work, but with many others either side of the divide. The divide then, does not mean very much, merely denoting a difference in focus and method. My main comparative point I will make in arguing this is that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein use a negative concept (nothing and nonsense, respectively) as part of a project of initiating an overcoming of metaphysics. Heidegger questions nothingness in order to get to the heart of what metaphysics is and having done so informs us that even questioning the nature of metaphysics questions beyond metaphysics. Metaphysics is engaged with and put on display as something to be overcome. Something similar, I argue, happens in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein engages with previous ways of doing philosophy (and thus metaphysics), putting them on display before informing us that they are in fact nonsense. What he actually sees as nonsense is engaged with, reproduced and declared as something to be overcome. Other points are made along the way, such as that Wittgenstein’s thought is more continuous than was originally supposed and that the early Wittgenstein can be just as meaningfully compared with Heidegger as the later Wittgenstein has been, but our main point of comparison will be on negative concepts used as parts of projects that engage with metaphysics in order that it can be overcome. This is more than a superficial similarity in method and project, so if the divide really does denote something significant, it does not seem to in this area.

ÖZET
17. Yüzyılla birlikte “ruh” kavramı yerine ekseriyetle “zihin” (mens) kavramının ikame edildiğini görmekteyiz. Klasik anlamda, farklı töz anlayışlarına rağmen, insan söz konusu olduğunda bedenin karşısına ya da yanına konulan ve insanın cisimsel olmayan yönünü ifade eden “ruh”, sahip olduğu tüm özellikleriyle (ontolojik, epistemolojik ve aksiyolojik) modern anlamda “zihin” olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Modern felsefenin kurucuları
arasında zikredilen Spinoza da insanın cisimsel olmayan yanını ifade etmek için, “ruh” yerine “zihin” kavramını genellikle tercih etmiş ve birkaç yerde de birini diğerinin yerine kullanmıştır. Spinoza’nın Tanrı merkezli felsefesinde, insan zihin ve bedenden oluşur. İnsan zihni, Tanrı’nın bilinen iki sıfatından biri olan “düşünce” (res-cogitans) sıfatının bir tezahürü ya da değişimi olurken, insan bedeni Tanrı’nın bilinen diğer sıfatı olan “yer kaplama”nın (res-extansa) bir tezahürüdür. Tanrı gerçek anlamda tek töz olduğu için ve bilinen iki sıfatı da bu tek tözü nitelediği için, bu iki sıfatın tezahürü olarak insanda yer alan zihin ve beden farklı tözler olmayıp aynı tözü farklı şekilde ifade eden paralel, bir ve aynı şeydir.
İnsan zihni, bir yandan bedenin dışarıdan aldığı etkileri (affectus), diğer yandan da bedenin kendi içsel yapısından aldığı etkileri alarak fikirler (ideas) oluşturur. Zihin fikirler oluştururken, daha önce edindiği deneyimlere, fikirler arasındaki bağlantılara, mantıksal çıkarımlara ve duygulara bağlı olarak yeniden eyleme geçme gücünü, sahip
olduğu “anlama yetisi”, “hayal yetisi” ve “hafıza yetisi” sayesinde gerçekleştirir. Zihin bir yandan bedenden aldığı etkilerle ve bu etkiler neticesinde meydana gelen duygularla kendi varlığını sürdürürken, diğer yandan tüm bu etkilerden doğan fikirleri, sahip olduğu yetilerin de yardımıyla yeniden düşünür. Zihin, daha önce edindiği fikirler üzerine tekrar düşündüğünde, düşüncesinin nesnesi artık bu ilk fikir olur ve zihin böylelikle “fikrin fikri”ne (ideas of
ideas) ulaşarak yeni bir fikir daha meydana getirir. Bu “fikrin fikri” olan ikincil fikirler, “bilinci” (conscious/ness)
meydana getirir. Spinoza’da bilinç, zihin-beden paralelinde meydana gelen etkiler ve bu etkilerin taşıyıcısı olan yetiler sayesinde zihnin ulaştığı fikirler üzerine bir tür reflexif düşüncesi demektir. Zihnin bilişsel yönünü ortaya koyan bu reflexif düşünce, öncelikli olarak zihin ve bedenin diğer zihin ve bedenlerle karşılıklı etki alış-verişinden kaynaklanır.
Biz bu çalışmada ontolojik doğasına referansla insanda zihin ve bedenin nasıl bir ortaklık inşa ettiğini, birinin diğerine paralel olmasının ne anlama geldiğini tartışacağız. Spinoza’nın düalizm eleştirisi üzerine yükselen monist töz anlayışı, onun ontoloji, epistemoloji ve değer ya da etik alanlarına dair görüşlerini tamamen şekillendirmiştir. Her şeyden önce Spinoza zihin ve bedeni aynı hakikati farklı şekillerde ifade eden bir ve aynı şey olarak görür. Biz burada zihin ve bedeni bir ve aynı olarak görebilmemizi sağlayan temel zeminin Spinoza tarafından nasıl inşa edildiğini ortaya koymaya çalışacağız. Bu temel zeminde, Spinozacı felsefenin pratik yönünü şimdilik erteleyerek meseleyi ontolojik çerçeveden ve ontoloji ile epistemolojinin bir arada olma zorunluluğu gereği epistemolojik çerçeveden inceleyeceğiz. İncelememizde, zihin ile beden arasındaki ilişkinin nasıl bir ilişki olduğu, zihnin bedeni bilme imkânın ne olduğu, bedende etkilerin, zihinde fikirlerin nasıl meydana geldiği, zihin ve bedenin tabi olduğu bir “varoluş süreleri”nin olup olmadığı gibi temel sorulara yanıtlar aranacaktır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Zihin, Beden, Paralelizm, Duygulanış/Etkileniş, Fikir, Zihnin Sonsuzluğu

Mind’s Body, Body’s Mind: The Ontology of Spinozist Parallelism

Abstract

With the 17th century, commonly, we see that the concept of "mind" has been replaced by the concept of "soul". In the classical sense, despite the different conceptions of substance, when it comes to human, the "soul", which is placed against or adjoined to the body and expresses the non-corporeal aspect of the human, appears as the "mind" in the modern sense with all its features and means (ontological, epistemological and axiological). Spinoza, who is mentioned among the founders of modern philosophy, generally preferred the concept of "mind" (mens) instead of "soul" (anima) to express the non-corporeal side of man and used one in place of the other in a few places. In Spinoza's God-centered philosophy, man consists of mind and body. The human mind is a manifestations or appearance of the "thought" (res-cogitans), one of the two known attributes of God, while the human body is a manifestation of the other known attribute of God, "extension" (res-extansa). Since God is literally a single substance, and since both known attributes qualify this single substance, the mind and body in man as the manifestation of these two attributes are not different substances, but are parallel, one and the same thing, expressing the same substance differently.
Human mind, on the one hand, constitute ideas by taking the effects of the body, which are receives from the outside and on the other hand, receives the effects of the body, from its own internal structure. While the mind constitute ideas, its realization of its power to act again, depending on the experiences, which it has acquired before, the connections between the ideas, logical inferences and emotions, thanks to its faculties, "intellect", "imagination" and "memory". While the mind preserve its being with the effects it receives from the body and the emotions that occur as a result of these effects, on the other hand, it rethinks the ideas arising from all these effects with the help of its faculties. When the mind rethinks on the ideas it has acquired before, the object of its thought becomes this first idea, and the mind thus creating a new idea, that is "ideas of idea". These "ideas of the idea", which is econdary ideas, form the "conscious-ness". In Spinozas thought, consciousness is a kind of reflexive thought on the ideas that the mind reaches thanks to the effects that occur in the mind-body parallel and the faculties that are the carrier of these effects. This reflexive thought, which reveals the cognitive aspect of the mind, primarily originates from the mutual ex-change of action of the mind and body with other mind and bodies.
In this study, we will discuss how human mind and body build a unity in humans, with reference to their ontological nature, and what it means to be one parallel another. Spinoza's monist conception of substance, rising on his critique of dualism, completely shaped his views on ontology, epistemology, and the fields of value or ethics. Become morething, Spinoza sees mind and body as one and the same thing expressing the same truth in different ways. Here we will try to study how the basic ground that enables us to see mind and body as one and the same thing was built by Spinoza. On this basis, we will postpone the practical aspect of Spinozian philosophy for the time being, and we will examine the issue within the ontological framework and the epistemological framework, that is due to the ontology and epistemology one bound to another. In our examination, answers will be sought to basic questions such as what kind of a relationship between the mind and body is; what is the possibility of the mind to know its body; how occur, the effects in the body, and the ideas in the mind; and whether there is a "duration existence" that the mind and body are subject to etc..
Keywords: Mind, Body, Parallelism, Affections, Ideas, Infinity of Mind

This practice-led research masters produced four musical compositions exploring concepts of Perspectivism, musical minimalist aesthetics and improvisation to create contrasting sonic environments in a site-specific performance space. The compositions, which combine live acoustic performance with live & pre-composed electronic performance, all adopt a particular spatial approach I call The Triadic Space Layout, in which the musicians and loudspeakers are ‘fractured’ between three rooms, creating distinct yet related sonic environments.

Through an iterative process of reflective practice, two broad compositional approaches were settled upon, termed Sonic Environmental Perspectivism and Improvisational Perspectivism. This exegesis describes four final compositions that represent the culmination of this process of reflective practice, and demonstrate these compositional approaches.

Compositions Lady Fanboy and Snorkel’s Dark Room sonically distinguish each room of The Triadic Space Layout through either harmonic or tonal registers of the pre-composed electronics. These compositions utilise graphic scores to guide the musicians’ performances. This approach is titled Sonic Environmental Perspectivism. SWEET SWEET and Dancing Squares utilise the musicians’ improvisations to sonically differentiate each room as they receive identical pre-composed electronic music. This compositional approach was titled Improvisational Perspectivism.

Dancing Squares and Lady Fanboy are ‘performative’ in the sense of requiring an electronics operator (laptop performer) to perform with the musicians, while SWEET SWEET and Snorkel's Dark Room use predetermined tempo-processes to guide their teleological movement and were influenced by process-based minimalist music.

I discovered that compositions exploring Sonic Environmental Perspectivism were best suited to structured improvisatory approaches, using graphic and traditionally notated scores to guide the musicians—an approach I refer to as Controlled Improvisation. Compositions that explored Improvisational Perspectivism were better suited to 'open’ improvisational approaches, in which musicians were given broad scope for improvisation. Open improvisational compositions did not use scores.

Nishitani Keiji, a 20th century Japanese Buddhist philosopher of the Kyoto School, made novel contributions to the history of philosophy with his cross-cultural theory of affect. Scholars to date have either generally rejected Nishitani's philosophy because of its support of state ideology during World War 2 or promoted it regardless of that period of support. This dissertation takes a path between these two sides by establishing a connection between Nishitani's famous notion of realization and his late theory of affect. This connection, based on Nishitani's stipulation that religion must be realized within one's contemporary embodied situation, explains how Nishitani's mature philosophy developed as a response to his own and others' failures to resist state ideology. The imbrication of Nishitani’s philosophy with his political context ought, then, to hold interest as an early incorporation of a critical socio-political standpoint within a more classical Mahāyāna Buddhist standpoint of emptiness.
The thesis methodically develops its argument by interpreting Nishitani's magnum opus, Religion and Nothingness, contextually, comparatively and normatively. To this end, it identifies in the text three forms of realization, viz., of Great Wisdom, Great Compassion and Emptiness in Affect. It interprets these forms of realization as each constituting a different kind of negative conversion. The first is exemplified in real doubt, Great Doubt and Great Death; the second, in despair, the awareness of one's own evil and Great Faith; the third, in nihility, detachment and the Great Matter. In detailing these realizations, the thesis shows how Nishitani is in each case contrasting his position with a counterpart in modern European philosophy, respectively, Cartesian doubt, Kantian evil and Feuerbachian sensibility. It is suggested, in conclusion, that Nishitani’s affect theory, when put into practice, provides a non-reductive response to contemporary socio-political movements that use mythical imagery to obfuscate historical conditions and intensify the ordinary tendency to prioritize one’s own suffering over that of others.
The thesis thus offers a novel interpretation of the import and significance of Nishitani’s philosophy. It demonstrates how Nishitani's notion of realization, when interpreted in affective terms as a negative conversion that is spontaneous, factical and co-projective, positions otherwise negatively valenced Buddhist notions, such as ignorance, karma and suffering, as critical moments within the more popular positive Buddhist ideals of wisdom, compassion and emptiness.

This essay addresses the question of whether is there a way out of nihilism’s destructive reactivity and anonymity. It argues that play and the liberating freedom of laughter lie at the very heart of the transition from an incapacitating nihilism to an “ecstatic” nihilism that frees the individual from the “spirit of heaviness.” Drawing on a trope that refers not only to a particular type of person or social group but also the name for radical exposure and a mood, a Stimmung, the “figure of Bloom” is the name given to the present condition of ordinary humanity. In the 1990s, an anonymous collective of French intellectuals naming themselves “Tiqqun” began writing to address the possibility of rethinking the notion of the communal—a radical communism—in an effort to stand against the onslaught of technologically driven, capitalist economico-politics and its ideology of what constitutes individualism and society. Rather than merely engaging in a post-Marxist analysis and agenda, Tiqqun extended its critique to include the outgrowths of existential, phenomenological, process, deconstructive, and poststructural thinking. This essay takes up that analysis in an effort to further the establishment of a healthy community contingent on the actualization of overcoming nihilism as self-overcoming.

How does silence relate to philosophy, nihilism, technology and oppression? Philosopher Brian Schroeder offers a series of reflections on silence distinguishing between the spectacular passivity in the face of the death of God and the openness that allows other voices to emerge.-Jacques Derrida " Concerning that about which one cannot speak, isn't it best to remain silent? I let you answer this question. It

Philosophy’s role is typically a reflective one. Yet this stance is in peril of being corrupted. Because it is being driven to specialized inquiries, the subdisciplines of which it is comprised may develop into separate fields, whose presence will then need to be justified in the same way the sciences are. This is impossible, however, given their diverging objectives. If this course of action persist, philosophy’s end in the sense of its ending is imminent, on account of its no longer having an end in the sense of its objective.

Deely's work, the Four Ages contains a brief explicit discussion of the issue of Christian philosophy, referencing the Middle Ages and the 1930s French debates. Closer attention to the debates reveals a plurality of positions rather than the agreement Deely depicts, indicating that the complex issues remained unresolved.  I contest Deely's interpretation of Maritain's position, provide exegesis of Maritian's position , argue that Deely's explicit position is closer to Neo-Scholastic opponents of Christian philosophy, and briefly discuss Gilson's and Blondel's criticisms of such positions.  I also indicate that Deely's approach bears some similarities with proponents of Christian philosophy, and suggest that Deely's semiotic approach could bear additional fruit for postmodern Crhistian philosophy's ongoing projects of self-understanding