Amor Mundi as Capability to Transcend: Hannah Arendt’s Conception of the Human

The paper aims at offering a phenomenological interpretation of the idea of ‘transcendence’ (as human capability) by reconceptualizing Hannah Arendt’s rather vague notion of amor mundi. Firstly, I show the paradoxical tension of amor mundi within her own writings. Then, I trace the origin of the problematic of love of the world from her doctoral dissertation (Arendt’s critic of Augustine’s ‘neighbor love’) by using Heidegger’s phenomenological method. Finally, I explicate a phenomenological approach toward amor mundi as human capability to transcend (regarding how ‘love’ and ‘world’ are presentable as ‘experience’ and ‘capability’) by further analyzing the distinction between ‘ontological’ claim and ‘political’ claim (regarding the human): the world which humans build and sustain together is to be shared, but that first-hand experience of the world is not particularly demonstrable or sharable.

Revisiting Moore’s Anti-Skeptical Argument in “Proof of an External World”

This paper argues that we should reject G. E. Moore’s anti-skeptical argument as it is presented in “Proof of an External World.” However, the reason I offer is different from traditional objections. A proper understanding of Moore’s “proof” requires paying attention to an important distinction between two forms of skepticism. I call these Ontological Skepticism and Epistemic Skepticism. The former is skepticism about the ontological status of fundamental reality, while the latter is skepticism about our empirical knowledge. Philosophers often assume that Moore’s response to “external world skepticism” deals exclusively with the former, not the latter. But this is a mistake. I shall argue that Moore’s anti-skeptical argument targets an ontological form of skepticism. Thus, the conclusion is an ontological claim about fundamental reality, while the premises are epistemic claims. If this is correct, then the conclusion outstrips the scope of its premises and proves too much.

Is Liturgy Ludic? Distinguishing between the Phenomena of Play and Ritual

What is the nature (or “Wesen”) of the liturgical phenomenon? It has become immensely popular to describe liturgical or ritual practice as a kind of “holy play,” whether as metaphor, as productive analogy for pragmatic or theological purposes, or even as making an ontological claim about what liturgy “is” in its essence. The present article seeks to complicate the association of the phenomena of liturgy and of play. The first part traces the origins of the notion of play and the development of its application to ritual in the most influential sources from Kant to Gadamer. The second part highlights its prevalence in the contemporary discussion and elucidates how it is being used. The third part provides a phenomenological analysis to demonstrate important differences between the two phenomena and to question the contention that liturgy is a form of play. The final part tries to ascertain the broader practical and theological aims being served by the association of the two phenomena and—via a return to the question of the nature of the liturgical phenomenon in a more theological mode—suggests that these aims might be accomplished more productively in ways that avoid the downsides of identifying ritual or liturgy with play.

Malabou’s Political Critique of Speculative Realism

A recent political critique of Speculative Realism by Catherine Malabou finds fault with this loosely arranged movement for its focus on reality in its own right, apart from the subject. Malabou responds with a radical ontological claim, holding effectively – if not always explicitly – that subject and object mutually generate one another amidst a primal void. After criticizing this idea, I point to some of the difficult political consequences of such a position, though Malabou defines it positively as an anarchic awakening that generates new collectivities unconstrained by any thing-in-itself. By contrast, I contend that nonhuman constraints and collaborators are an intimate part of the human political sphere. More generally, it is shown that there are consequences for which sorts of relations are taken to be the primary political relations.

Ist der Naturalismus eine Ideologie?

Naturalism is the current orthodoxy in analytic philosophy. Naturalism is the conjunction of the (ontological) claim that all that truly exists are the entities countenanced by the natural sciences and the (epistemological) claim that the only true knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge. Drawing on some recent work in Critical Theory, this article argues that naturalism qualifies as an ideology. This is the case because naturalism meets three key aspects shared by paradigmatic cases of ideology: (i) naturalism has practical consequences and implications of a specific kind, (ii) those endorsing naturalism fall prey to a dual deception: having false meta-level beliefs about naturalism as being without alternative, and (iii) naturalism has a tendency towards self-immunisation. The article ends by suggesting we pull naturalism out of our collective cognitive backgrounds onto the main stage of critical discourse, making it a proper topic for philosophical critique again.

Of what is “minimal cognition” the half-baked version?

“Minimal cognition” is used in certain sectors of the cognitive sciences to make a kind of ontological claim that may be unique in the biological sciences: that a function operating in organisms living today is not a fully fledged version of that function (the nature of which remains unspecified), but, rather, exhibits the minimal requirements for whatever it is, properly conceived. Evidence suggests that elsewhere in the life sciences, deployment of minimizing qualifiers relative to a biological function appears largely restricted to two scenarios: first, attenuated functioning and, second, evolution of the function, real or synthetic. The article argues that “minimal cognition” and “proto-cognitive” were introduced at the turn of this century by cognitive researchers seeking to learn directly from evolved behavior, ecology and physiology. A terminological straitjacket imposed on the central object of cognitive science at its beginning necessitated the move. An alternative terminology is proposed, based on a phyletically neutral definition of cognition as a biological function; a candidate mechanism is explored; and a bacterial example presented. On this story, cognition is like respiration: ubiquitously present, from unicellular life to blue whales and every form of life in between, and for similar reasons: staying alive requires it.

Healing Pattern: A Natural Kind in Nursing?

This article focuses on the philosophical notion of natural kind to explore healing pattern as a relevant and natural process in nursing science and practice. A goal in doing this is to facilitate continued empirical investigation of and evidence for nursing’s ontological claim about the existence of a healing pattern. I review various accounts of natural kind, with applications to nursing and the healing pattern. I conclude with directions for future inquiry to provide more definitive evidence and explanation of the healing pattern.

El espíritu de la materia

Resumen: Lejos de los discursos de sectas y religiones, se habla aquí del “espíritu” como una metáfora poética de lo que los hombres son o ansían ser dentro de un mundo material, un discurso para la vida y su sentido espiritual dentro del sinsentido nihilista implícito en el materialismo/naturalismo. ¿Cómo puede esta contradicción sostenerse? ¿Cómo puede el “espíritu” sostenerse en la “materia” si ambos términos se contraponen como el día y la noche? Sólo como juicio estético, fuera de cualquier pretensión ontológica, tiene sentido el término “espíritu”. Palabras clave: materia, espíritu, estética, vida, poesía Abstract. Aside from discourses of sects and religions, the term “spirit” is used here as a poetic meta­phor of what human beings are, or they strive to become within a material world. This is a discourse for life and its spiritual sense within the context of the nihilistic nonsense which is implicit in mate­rialism/naturalism. How can this contradiction be sustained? How can the “spirit” be sustained inside “matter” when both terms are as contradictory as day and night are? The term "spirit" has only sense as aesthetical assertion, away from any ontological claim. Keywords: matter, spirit, aesthetics, life, poetry Recibido: 29/10/2012 Aprobado: 18/04/2013

No Joint Ownership! Shared Emotions Are Social-relational Emotions

There are cases of emotion that we readily describe as 'sharing emotions with other people.' How should we understand such cases? Joel Krueger has proposed the Joint Ownership Thesis (JOT): the view that two or more people can literally share the same emotional episode. His view is partly inspired by his reading of Merleau-Ponty -- arguably Merleau-Ponty advocates a version of JOT in his "The child's relations with others." My critical analysis demonstrates that JOT is flawed in several respects: 1) It involves a vague account of joint subjects; 2) It relies on a confusion between phenomenological and ontological levels of analysis. When these are clearly distinguished, Krueger's phenomenological analysis contradicts JOT understood as an ontological claim; 3) It relies on a highly problematic coupling-constitution inference; 4) It relies on a shift from the claim that the child and the caregiver jointly realize an emotion, to the claim about joint ownership, which is a non sequitur. I argue that we can reach a better understanding of the phenomenon of shared emotions by bringing in another level of analysis: that of social relationships. I propose that shared emotions are a special case of social-relational emotions, typically arising within and/or giving rise to communal relationships.

Gold Dreams, Gold Nightmares: The Social Construction of Inflation as Delegitimation Discourse

Using archival data from the four most popular gold investment websites, this study is a content analysis of gold investment enthusiast (‘gold bug’) commentaries over a six-month time period, from November 2007 to April 2008. We examine gold bug discourse as a conspiracy narrative whose central tenet is the criticism of inflationary monetary policy. Gold bugs argue that the continual presence of inflation demonstrates the fundamental flaws of global capitalism and the illegitimacy of the administrative system that operates it. The invocation of inflation is the primary way in which gold bugs forecast economic conditions and the inevitable failure of those who control global monetary policy. Based upon the ontological claim that gold is the only ‘true’ store of value, gold bugs posit a sharp rebuke of monetary policy, predicting a drastic increase in the price of gold and a consequent collapse of the world's fiat currencies.