Another Look at the Modal Collapse Argument

On one classical conception of God, God has no parts, not even metaphysical parts. God is not composed of form and matter, act and potency, and he is not composed of existence and essence. God is absolutely simple. This is the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity (ADS). It is claimed that ADS implies a modal collapse, i.e. that God’s creation is absolutely necessary. I argue that a proper way of understanding the modal collapse argument naturally leads the proponent of ADS to reject a particular premise of the argument: namely, “the same identical cause brings about the same effect.” However, I argue that the rejection of that premise leads to a deeper problem for ADS. It leads to an explanatory gap: how can we explain the relevant type of indeterminism in an absolutely simple God?

The one, the true, the good… or not: Badiou, Agamben, and atheistic transcendentality

This article offers a reading of the “transcendental” character of Alain Badiou’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ontologies. While neither Badiou nor Agamben are “transcendental” philosophers in the Kantian sense, this article argues that their respective projects of ontology both recover aspects of the “classical” conception of the transcendentals. Not unlike how pre-modern philosophers conceived of oneness, truth and goodness as transcendental properties of all things, both Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies present various structures which can be universally predicated of all being. However, as opposed to the essentialist or even theological tendencies of traditional metaphysics, Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies are committedly “inessential” and atheistic at their very core. By replacing the divine names of the one, the true and the good in traditional metaphysics with a new yet quasi-classical transcendental notion of “the void” as a universal predicate of all beings, Badiou’s and Agamben’s works may be regarded as projects that go beyond both the pre-Kantian “theological” and the post-Kantian “subjective” conceptions of transcendental philosophy, thereby marking a new development in the history of western metaphysics.

Frequentist Probability

Frequentist probability is historically presented as an attempt both to overcome the limitations of classical conception and to take into account the impressive development of experimental sciences and statistics. It is precisely because of this close link with the statistical sciences that it finds a significant place in teaching. It is also an area in which the use of IT tools is crucial. This approach also makes it possible to calculate the probability of events and from it we derive the same rules examined in the classical definition, since it is sufficient to replace the ratio between the number of favorable cases and the number of possible cases with the limit of the ratio when the repeated tests tend to infinity. One of the fundamental concepts appears in the chapter, that of a random variable capable of describing events and their distribution.

Freedom of Conscience and Civic Peace

Positioning himself within a series of early-modern debates, Spinoza argues that civil sovereigns must have control over religion, and that—in matters of religion as in everything else—subjects must obey the civil law. He defends this view by appealing to two antecedents: a conception of the original Jewish commonwealth as a theocracy in which there was no distinction between civil and religious law; and a classical conception of piety that encompasses devotion to one’s country as well as to God. Drawing on these resources, Spinoza contends that obedience to the law trumps the promptings of individual conscience, so that living under law may carry significant individual costs. Despite the fact that Spinoza is often heralded as an early defender of religious toleration, his view of freedom of conscience is at odds with modern liberal orthodoxy.

L’idée de religion universelle des origines au XIXe siècle : entre philologie et herméneutique

The aim of the article is to show the relationship between the classical conception of philology, the origins of hermeneutics and the evolution of the idea of universal religion from Antiquity to the 19th century. Just like in the context of the beginnings of Christianity philology contributed to create the Catholic understanding of this idea, in modern times, the development of philological methods contributed to the fragmentation of the idea in various fields: philosophical, esoteric, naturalistic or humanitarian. Hence, philology appears to be inseparable from hermeneutics and the history of religious ideas, and the latter, as inseparable from philology. In this context, the myth of the Babel Tower and its “confusion of tongues” may gain a new meaning.

Human Wisdom

Human wisdom is approached by way of a plain commonsensical account of how wisdom is generally understood. This account is developed further by contrasting it with the classical conception of wisdom, introducing some reasons for and against the two conceptions, and describing some of the problems with each of the two conceptions. It stresses the central importance of our personal attitude formed of our beliefs, emotions, desires, experiences, and evaluations that jointly make wisdom personal, important, and essential to our sense of identity. The critical evaluation of one’s personal attitude is one of the central tasks of human wisdom.

Introduction

This is an introductory account of the personal attitude that makes the humanistic conception of wisdom what it is. It briefly explains its pluralistic, evaluative, fallible, and personal components by contrasting them with the classical conception of wisdom that is absolutist, aims at an impersonal and universal ideal of The Good that is the same for everyone, always, everywhere, and claims that reason and morality require everyone to aim at it. It introduces and gives a brief account of three necessary components that jointly form human wisdom: basic assumptions, reflective understanding, and depth.

Animal d’archive: On the Tracks of Derrida’s Writing

The article seeks to outline the relationship between Geschlecht III and Jacques Derrida’s published texts devoted to the mark “Geschlecht,” in order to detect the general strategy followed by Derrida in the construction of his archive during his lifetime. Indeed, we suppose that his archive has to be built in accordance with his deconstructive statements about the classical conception of the archive: a totalizing closure of a textual production able to trace it back to the unity of an ideal identity (Archive Fever). In particular, the article aims to focus on a passage at the end of Jacques Derrida’s Geschlecht III, where the question of the animal in Heidegger comes into the foreground and in a way that is slightly different from what we already know through Derrida’s published works and that could require a re-reading of his “entire” work.

Face and Screen: Toward a Genealogy of the Media Façade

Craig Buckley questions the tendency to see the multi-media façade as paradigmatic of recent developments in illumination and display technologies by reconsidering a longer history of the conflicting urban roles in which façades, as media have been cast. Over the course of the nineteenth century, façades underwent an optical redefinition parallel to that which defined the transformation of the screen. Buildings that sought to do away with a classical conception of the façade also emerged as key sites of experimentation with illuminated screening technologies. Long before the advent of the technical systems animating contemporary media envelopes, the façades of storefronts, cinemas, newspaper offices, union headquarters, and information centres were conceived as media surfaces whose ability to operate on and intervene in their surroundings became more important than the duty to express the building’s interior.

On Populists and Demagogues

The article seeks to understand what is specifically modern about populists, why we have difficulty in agreeing on who and what they are, and—importantly—how we can address the formidable challenge they present to contemporary democratic politics. It does so by detailing the classical conception of the demagogue and by showing how modernity, in its liberal and counter-liberal aspects, sought to solve conclusively the problem of the demagogue. It argues that modern populists face significant obstacles to their ambitions in the form of modern constitutionalism, yet are also armed with new weapons, including new concepts or “ideologies” for manipulation (such as “the people,” nation, race and class) and new rhetorical techniques (such as propaganda that exploits modern technology and mass media).