Philosophy

A cursory attempt to look at the sociolinguistic behaviorism and its well entrenched connections to the logical positivist approach to social knowledge. The paper, while critical of the largely coterminous positivist camps, seeks to briefly combine a number of ideas also linked to Davidson's radical concept of triangulation in attempting a find more fertile ground for the social philosophy of the mind and the epistemic connections therein.

With the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France over the past decade, scholarship in Foucauldian governmentality has reemerged as a critical area of contemporary political and philosophical discourse. These lectures have had an even more pronounced effect in their treatment of neoliberalism and the development of postneoliberal research in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. One of the most versatile neoliberal scholars and postneoliberal critics to come about is Simon Springer, who recently has taken to offering dynamic accounts of neoliberalism and its potential ends via a Foucauldian method. While Springer’s research is certainly novel, compelling, and useful for furthering research into neoliberal govermentality; I believe it to fall short of a rigorous Foucauldian account of neoliberalism and its future.

Deliberative mechanisms surrounding climate change politics in advanced democracies have, for a long time, been at the mercy of ideological and political economic commitments. One need only to look at the banning of protests and marches during the 2015 COP21 international climate talks in Paris, or the historical risk assessments of violent international conflict linked to climate concerns by Germany and the US to see that political institutionalization of climate change is pervasive. On the other hand, the discursive demarcation by opponents of climate politics has consistently takes two forms: (a) a view that political discourse on climate variability should rest on climatological models and the research of climate experts, and (b) that the climatological data itself serves as the impartial intermediary through which we can adduce a refutation of ideological buzzwords and economic influences on climate change politics.
    In these cases the agreed upon deliberative divide in advanced democracies has circumscribed climate change into two institutional categories: (1) the political and (2) the scientific. The primary parties of the discourse are political actors with respective ideological and economic interests, and climatologists who represent a monolithic knowledge dominated by academics. Yet this two fold approach leaves out the most critical players in democratic deliberation: the majority of democratic subjects who fall into neither category. The emphasis on the subject is a consistent blind spot in deliberation theory of climate discourse, as most writers tend to focus on the development of a discursive bridge between the political economic elites of climate politics and the academic elites of climate science. I argue that this two-party categorical approach to climate discourse undermines the very subjects of democratic deliberation – who in the process of discursive division and bridging – are not invited to the discussion table.

This paper analyses the symbols of European identity through the historical lenses of mythology and etymology by assessing the Greek myth of Europa and the precursory term 'ereb', respectively. By treating these two histories as practices in semiotics – of signs and symbols – I argue that we can begin the process of articulating broader symbolic deficits that play a direct role in the modern construction of European identity. This endeavour might also serve to locate additional investigatory spaces for future historical explorations into the constitutive elements of European symbolism. To better understand the role of symbols and the symbolic deficit, this paper shall utilize the work of Michael Bruter and his significant contribution to the field of European identity and symbolism. By assessing these three elements (myth, etymology, and the symbolic deficit) this paper aims to contribute to the numerous and varied attempts of evaluating a historical antecedent for shared symbols within European identity.

This paper offers an interpretation of Aristotle’s treatment of the homoeomerous, or like-parted, bodies. I argue that they are liable to be far more complexly structured than is commonly supposed. While Aristotelian homoeomers have no intrinsic macrostructural properties, they are, in an important class of cases, essentially marked by the presence and absence of microstructural ones. As I show, these microstructural properties allow Aristotle to neatly demarcate the non-elemental homoeomers from the elements. That demarcation, in turn, helps to clarify Aristotle’s conceptions of both homoeomery and what it is to be a bodily element. On Aristotle’s account, I argue, a homoeomerous body, as such, is divisible into at least one part that is the same specific kind as the whole. Elemental bodies are the limiting case. For Aristotle, an elemental body is only divisible into parts that are of the same specific kind as the whole.

The Theaetetus’ ‘secret doctrine’ and the Sophist’s ‘battle between gods and giants’ have long fascinated Plato scholars. I show that the passages systematically parallel one another. Each presents two substantive positions that are advanced on behalf of two separate parties, related to one another by their comparative sophistication or refinement. Further, those parties and their respective positions are characterized in substantially similar terms. On the basis of these sustained parallels, I argue that the two passages should be read together, with each informing and constraining an interpretation of the other.

Plato’s demiurge makes a series of questionable decisions in creating the world. Most notoriously, he endeavors to replicate, to the extent possible, some of the features that his model possesses just insofar as it is a Form. This has provoked the colorful complaint that the demiurge is as raving mad as a general contractor who constructs a house of vellum to better realize the architect’s vellum plans (Keyt 1971). The present paper considers the sanity of the demiurge’s reasoning in light of Timaeus 32c5-33b1, where he invokes considerations of wholeness, completeness, uniqueness, and eternality in deciding to build the body of the world from all of each of the simple bodies. Since the passage makes no appeal to the demiurge’s intelligible model, one can mine it for indications of the value that the demiurge takes those features to have independent of mimetic goals. I argue that, for Plato, those features are intrinsically good-making and, thus, that it is not only appropriate for them to characterize Forms qua Forms but also that it is appropriate for the demiurge to aim at replicating them, to the extent possible, in his creation. In particular, I argue that the demiurge’s success in instilling a circumscribed version of each feature in his creation helps to qualify it as a genuine being despite the fact that it comes to be.

For Aristotle, the shape of a physical body is perceptible per se (DA II.6, 418a8-9). As I read his position, shape is thus a causal power, as a physical body can affect our sense organs simply in virtue of possessing it. But this invites a challenge. If shape is an intrinsically powerful property, and indeed an intrinsically perceptible one, then why are the objects of geometrical reasoning, as such, inert and imperceptible? I here address Aristotle’s answer to that problem, focusing on the version of it that he presents in De caelo III.8. I argue that if we grant that Aristotle conceived of the shape of a sensible body as some kind of causal power, then the satisfactory resolution of that challenge pushes us to interpret him as having conceived of it as being, more specifically, an impure power—that is, as a property that is not only intrinsically powerful but also, in some way, intrinsically non-powerful as well. This is a notable result not only insofar as it illuminates Aristotle’s conception of shape but also insofar as it contributes to our knowledge of Aristotle’s theory of dunameis and his ontology more broadly.