Afterword

The afterword, “Learning to Imagine What We Know” attempts to articulate a material poetics, rather than a metaphysics, of the mind in extremis, at the places where life, time, representation, and knowledge can go no further. Deleuze, in “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” contends that “the atom is that which must be thought, and that which can only be thought.” Angus Fletcher, in the chapter “Marlowe Invents the Deadline,” makes a stunningly similar claim: “Time, finally, can only be thought.”Impossible Desire recognizes the elusive hymen, too, as a conceptual morsel that fuses sexual and epistemological conquest. It demarcates, and arouses a desire to transcend, the limit point of human knowledge. But this erotically charged search for knowledge occurs, for the carpe diem poet, in the absence of teleology. He recognizes no promise of full revelation, and only a perpetually receding horizon of further things unknown. Despite this, he uses poetry to create unlikely but capacious domains for the unthinkable, an aspiration identified as an act of world-making. As George Steiner puts it, “deep inside every ‘art-act’ lies the dream of an absolute leap out of nothingness, of the invention of an enunciatory shape so new, so singular to its begetter, that it would, literally, leave the previous world behind.” The conclusion of Impossible Desire locates this ontological leap in carpe diem poetry’s attempt to expand the increments of existence within the interstices of poetry, ultimately the only mortal place wherein one can make “this one short Point of Time/… fill up half the Orb of Round Eternity.”

Robustness of full revelation in multisender cheap talk

This paper studies information transmission in a two‐sender, multidimensional cheap talk setting where there are exogenous constraints on the (convex) feasible set of policies for the receiver, and where the receiver is uncertain about both the directions and the magnitudes of the senders' bias vectors. With the supports of the biases represented by cones, we prove that whenever there exists an equilibrium that fully reveals the state, there exists a robust fully revealing equilibrium (FRE), i.e., one in which small deviations result in only small punishments. We provide a geometric condition—the local deterrence condition—that relates the cones of the biases to the frontier of the policy space, which is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a FRE. We also construct a specific policy rule for the receiver—the min rule—that supports a robust FRE whenever one exists.

When Will the Cessation of Speaking in Tongues and Revelatory Gifts Take Place?

This article discusses recent interpretations of 1 Corinthians 13:8–10, particularly those of biblical scholars Daniel B. Wallace and James W. Scott. Both scholars advocate for the cessation of speaking in tongues, and they avoid the classic argument that the “perfect” in this passage refers to the close of the biblical canon and full revelation of Scripture. Rather, Wallace argues from the middle voice in Greek for the early cessation of speaking in tongues, and Scott argues from the delayed Parousia for the cessation of tongues and revelatory gifts. This article responds to their arguments and reaffirms that Paul is claiming here that speaking in tongues and revelatory gifts will not cease until the Parousia takes place.

A Closed Book: Opacity of the Human Self in Mullā Ṣadrā

Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1636) subscribes to the Avicennian view according to which the human subject is always and fully aware of herself. At the same time, his eschatology hinges on the Qur’ānic motif of the soul as a closed book that is first opened on the Final Day, that is, on the idea that each soul’s share in the afterlife should be understood as the full revelation of the soul’s true nature to itself. The two ideas thus have seemingly contradictory entailments: the soul is fully aware of and transparent to itself, but at the same time it has aspects that can remain opaque to it, at least in this life. The task of this paper is to investigate whether Ṣadrā can coherently hold on to the two ideas, and what kind of revisions this requires him to make to the received concepts of self and self-awareness.

Deliberation with Evidence

In committee deliberation, requiring a unanimous vote intuitively provides the strongest incentives for actors to share fully their opinions and private information. It is also believed that full revelation of (decision-relevant) information occurs when personal biases are made clear before deliberation. However, recent literature suggests that both intuitions are flawed. Austen-Smith and Feddersen propose a model in which the unanimity rule performs worse than other rules in promoting fully revealing deliberation, and uncertainty about individuals' preferences promotes full sharing of information. We extend this work by incorporating the possibility that individuals may provide verifiable evidence for their private information. Under this circumstance, we demonstrate that Austen-Smith and Feddersen's results are reversed. First, a unanimous voting rule performs better than any other, as unanimity is the only rule that always promotes fully revealing deliberation. Second, under fairly general conditions, uncertainty about individuals' preferences prevents full sharing of information.

Origen’s theological and mystical approach to the Scriptures in the introduction to his commentary on John’s Gospel

This article explores Origen’s approach to interpreting John’s Gospel as can be seen in the introduction to his commentary. It deals with the points which were usually discussed in the introductions to Aristotle and Plato. It was this educational aim of the philosophical tradition that was Origen’s chief concern in commenting on the Scriptures; an aim which was not seen as merely becoming skilled or well-informed. Rather, it was about developing in virtue, in wisdom, in conversion to the Good (Plato); or as Origen understood it, development in love for God. Origen perceived the development of love for God in three basic steps: moral purification, by which the person is enabled to appreciate moral values; enlightenment, by which the person recognises God as the supreme and absolute value; and finally, union with God in love, which is never fully achieved in this life. The New Testament together with the Old Testament (understood in the light of the New Testament), reveals the power of the Gospel “in mirror darkly” while the “eternal gospel” will be the full revelation of it at the eschaton. John’s Gospel is the clearest expression of the divine Logos; but no one can understand the text fully as expression of the Logos unless one becomes like John – who was intimately related to the Logos, as the Logos is related to the Father (John 13:23, 25; 1:18).